Most great things in life are silent and intangible. In many ways, the backend support for communities like the Firefox Community can be so subtle; so easy to miss unless something is going wrong. After a long day, the server group of the Mozilla community showed why it is so important. I developed an appreciation for how much people seemed to care about and recognize the importance of the release of Firefox 1.0.

I saw server admins up past midnight working on getting things prepared for the onslaught. Communication and teamwork are what held things together. It was great to see such unity in a time where many of us stand divided and in search of our sense of brotherhood.

I saw Scott doing everything he could to help, setting up boxes left and right. I saw Dave and Myk working all night babysitting the servers. I saw myself staying up until 3am working on version 2.0 of a mirror managing tool I wasn’t sure anyone would use. And no, I didn’t need caffeine – I had motivation from everyone else who was doing the same damn thing.

Around 2pm things were looking bleak. Load was increasing, memory was disappearing and the pressure was on. Scott and I had worked so hard on the mirror management app — it was ready to go. It was made for this very reason. We had a great box to run it, load-tested code, and finally — the need.

It took off — Plan B was in effect. And there it was — our app — handling hundreds of thousands of requests — redirecting users to Firefox to rediscover the web. Between 2pm and 5pm it handled nearly 200,000 download requests.

It was awesome to see that we actually made a big difference. The app helped the main mirrors stabilize by dividing load evenly across the other 18 mirrors that were still up. Eventually things stabilized and requests kept coming in. DMO handled it nicely. It felt so good just to help out.

And sure — the system isn’t perfect. The servers, they might need work. Maybe the infrastructure needs a little tweaking. But we have good people, good minds and hearts. We try to do what is right. We think. We adjust. We admit mistakes. We learn. We step forward. We fail. We get up. We struggle more. We still stand tall. We grow.

You know – Firefox 1.0 is just a program. It lets people see into their world, and from that world they learn about themselves; they find answers. In a way, helping the project, helping the foundation, it let me see into myself, into the people I worked with, into that same world.

What did I see? Well, I saw something that looked unfamiliar in today’s red-blue age.

I saw hope. That was my motivation.

November 9th marks the release of Firefox 1.0. When the product is released Mozilla will experience server demands never before seen. Everybody will be trying to get 1.0 at the same time, and dividing the load between as many mirrors as possible becomes much more important at times like this.

I have been working on a project for the past month or so to help with this. Using PHP, Apache, MySQL and Perl me and a couple of developers have created a mirror management application to allow for management and logging of mirror usage depending on load and bandwidth capabilities. The app redirects user requests based on a fairly simple mirror weighting system. Using a simple admin interface, mirrors can be re-weighted, disabled or added. It also provides for management of products and file locations. An accompanying “sentry.pl” pings all mirrors for the availability of data and updates the database accordingly.

It’s been fun – there will be more coming regarding statistics, the addition of versioning and reporting features using jpgraph. We’ll see how it goes. Remember, don’t forget to grab Firefox!

This weekend I went to a tailgater and bought way too many chocolate bars for s’mores. That was funny. What the hell am I going to do with 4 pounds of Hershey’s? Damn you Costco why are you so awesome?

After the BBQ, my buddy and I rediscovered the ancient sport of beer pong. Beer pong is played using a ping pong table and two cups. Each cup shoudl be filled 3/4 of the way with high-quality Pabst Blue Ribbon. You score points by hitting the cups, after which your opponent is penalized 1 drink. If you get the ping pong ball into your opponent’s cup, he has to finish all his beer. We played for a while, and it was so fun my face hurt from laughing. For some reason I don’t remember who won.

Beer pong rules.