July 31st, 2008
Disasters at Whistler raining on Mozilla's summer parade
A rock slide, power outage and loss of a top engineer of Firefox 3 have some attendees of Mozilla’s 2008 summer summit wondering if the ghosts in Redmond aren’t raining on their parade.
The Firefox summit is behing held at, ahem, Whistler, the code name of Microsoft’s Windows XP.
First, a giant rock slide on Wednesday closed the road from Vancouver to Whistler, trapping many at the summit in and any latercomers out. Since the road will be closed for five days, attendees will have to take an alternative route to the airport — turning a three hour ride into an eight-hour odyssey.
Then the hotel hosting the summit lost power this morning after a truck hit the transformer.
That’s on top of the loss of a significant Firefox exec. Earlier this week, Mozilla v.p. of engineering, Mike Schroeper, a top developer of Firefox 3, announced he is resigning from the open source project to go to Facebook.
Did we mention that the weather at Whistler has been gloomy all week?
Here’s one report from an attendee.
“To add insult to injury here at the Mozilla Summit, we now have no power. I am told that a laundry truck hit the transformer for the hotel around 6:00 AM … We’re on battery power, which is good for ten hours or so. Luckily, they estimate that the power will be fixed in five hours but I’m not sure what that is in metric,” wrote one developer on Planet Mozilla. It was not seen if the driver of the truck was a Microsoft employee or a bear. I’m afraid to get on the gondola to go to the mountaintop for the big dinner tonight though.”
Another attendee pointed the finger at Canada.
Still another said that despite the “fear and loathing” at Whistler, the summit has been a smashing success the content and backup power generator.
Still, we hope organizers aren’t planning to revisit next year to neighboring Blackcomb mountain. “Blackcomb” is the code name of the next iteration of Windows, once code named Vienna and now known as Windows 7.
Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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