Mozilla & F/LOSS

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to build out your software development skillset with a focused contribution to an open source project? Do you want to work with a small team where you can have a big impact? We’re once again looking for someone committed to learning the deepest, darkest secrets of release management when ...

I’m trying to bring the second pilot of the Ascend Project http://ascendproject.org to New Orleans in February and am looking for a space to hold the program. We have a small budget to rent space but would prefer to find a partnership and/or sponsor if possible to help keep costs low. The program takes 20 ...

Part 1: Start In Person Ascend had very few ‘rules’ but there was one which was non-negotiable: it’s an in-person program. We didn’t do distance learning, online coursework, or video-based classes. We did bring in a couple of speakers virtually to speak to the room of 20 participants but the opposite was never ...

Release Management Tooling: Past, Present, and Future As I was interviewing a potential intern for the summer of 2015 I realized I had outlined all our major tools and what the next enhancement for each could be but that this wasn’t well documented anywhere else yet. By coming to Release Management from my beginnings as a Release ...

I believe it was a few years ago, possibly more, when someone (was it Josh Matthews? David Eaves) added a feature to Bugzilla that indicated when a person was “New to Bugzilla”. It was a visual cue next to their username and its purpose was to help others remember that not everyone in the Bugzilla ...

Tomorrow morning the first ever Ascend Project kicks off in Portland, OR.  I just completed a month-long vacation where we drove from San Francisco out to the Georgian Bay, Ontario (with a few stops along the way including playing hockey in the Cleveland Gay Games) and back again through the top of the US until ...

This just in: Google, who recently announced their very disappointing statistics for diversity within their company are trying to remedy that with a $50 million dollar initiative targeting the usual suspects:  Girls. This is not just me pointing fingers at Google.  I am actively working to create a program that targets adults and supports them getting deeply ...

Today, post PyCon conference, I spent the entire day immersed in an incredibly dynamic and educational workshop by Software Carpentry “Learn to Teach Programming“.  I’m going to do a mix of dumping my notes in a play-by-play fashion with possible sidebars for commenting on what I experienced personally so that I have a record of ...

Last year I approached Debbie Cohen, our C-level People person, and made a proposal.  With all these Hacker School/Dev Boot Camp/Hackbright accelerator programs popping up, I had an idea to create an open source version and specifically target participants who come from underemployed, LGBTQ, Latin@, and African American populations – aka: people who are terribly ...

I’m going to say something that might be controversial, or hard to understand for some folks but it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to stay away from the office more than I’d like to so here goes: The snacks. The never-ending supply that I would *never* eat otherwise. That I would not go to ...

In March of 2011 we shipped Firefox 4 and moved to a rapid release with 6 weeks on each of Nightly, Aurora, and Beta channels prior to shipping a new major version of Firefox Desktop and Mobile to our users. Both Nightly and Aurora channels were getting builds & updates nightly (breakage notwithstanding) while Beta ...

I’ve been in Release Management for 1.8 years now and in that time we’ve grown from one overworked Release Manager to a team of 4 where we can start to split out responsibilities, cover more ground on a particular channel, and also…breathe a bit. With some of the team moving focus over to Firefox OS, ...

Hello fellow Mozillians (and curious onlookers)! In a couple of days you will, en-masse, get your first peek at the high level agenda of the 3 day MegaMozillaFest you’ll be cannon-balling into this coming October. As someone who feels very fortunate to have been part of the planning processes (more multiple threads than you can shake ...

I’ve created an event for the first meeting of Women Hacking Glass in SF at the Mozilla public space. Since I posted in G+ a few weeks ago things got busy and I didn’t have time to lean on Google like I’d planned to ask for hardware but then a pair of Glass practically fell in ...

This is the second in a series of blog posts that will summarize my experience and takeaways from the Mozilla Summit 2013 Planning Assembly that took place in our Paris, France office on June 14-17, 2013. ✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈ Stereotype:  something that may be true about some members of a group, but not all, and yet is applied to ...

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will summarize my experience and takeaways from the Mozilla Summit 2013 Planning Assembly that took place in our Paris, France office on June 14-17, 2013. ✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈✈ We are a group of very smart people. Don’t ever doubt that for a second. We are a hit-the-ground-running bunch ...

We’ve got 2 projects right now for GNOME Outreach Project for Women to apply to: https://wiki.mozilla.org/GNOME_Outreach_Summer2013 thanks to Liz Henry and Selena Deckelmann If anyone else at Mozilla has a project that can be done in 3 months time (or at least give the contributor a sense of accomplishment and get them very engaged as a ...

Dare 2B Digital is an annual South Bay conference that brings 300 young women ages 12-16 together to encourage them to consider STEM fields in college by coming together for a full day of inspiring talks and workshops showcasing women’s work and relevance in technology.  For the past three conferences I have signed Mozilla up ...

Thanks to the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, we’ve got ourselves an awesome January intern who will be doing her first Open Source contributions all the way from Australia. Lianne Lee stood out as the strongest of several applicants to the Release Metrics Dashboard, which was one of the two Mozilla projects that Selena Deckelmann and ...

Michael Chabon, in “Manhood for Amateurs”, writes an essay telling the story of being at the supermarket with his child, feeling quite run-down and barely hanging on, with his toddler in tow on a Sunday morning so as to give his wife a chance to sleep in. As he’s in line to ...

Fundraising is almost as hard for me as self-promotion.  In fact, it’s easier for me to do the broadcasting I did around the Ada fundraising than I imagine it would be for me to do my own seed round for an idea I felt excited about.  I express with regularity how grateful I am for ...

This question comes up enough that I figured a quick blog post/status update would be helpful. What does Autoland do? Poll individual Bugzilla bugs for an autoland token (currently using whiteboard tags, future Autoland has an extension & webservice that makes polling the entirety of bugzilla no longer needed). When an autoland request is found, the serviced ...

This past weekend I led another soft circuits 101 workshop as a Mozilla Rep at a women’s music festival near SF called Fabulosa. I had one hour to teach people really basic electricity, circuits, and how to ‘hack’ their clothes/sculptures/lives with a 3V battery and some LEDs. The reason I love to do this workshop is ...

Woot!  Our recently release re-vamp of Firefox for Android is climbing the Top Free chart over on the Google Play Store (as it should, it’s frickin’ awesome).  We’ve gone from #96 to #81 in the past 3 days and I have no doubt we will continue to climb as we gain users and get a ...

Not too long ago I first heard of Tomahawk at one of our Mozilla Monday meetings – they’ve been working with our WebFWD initiative which supports open web projects that are moving the web forward.  Tomahawk definitely fits the bill for what the future of the web should be: music just plays.  Social, distributed, easy ...

Hello and welcome to my continued documentation off my learning curve in Release Management, something I’ve now been working at for 6 weeks.  Last time I was reeling from the new-to-me meeting/email/bugmail firehose.  Now I’ve got that more under control, having created many more filters and folders in Thunderbird as well as having a chance ...

Three weeks and four days ago a request was floated out to me. Would I consider helping the release management team for a little bit? You see, we’ve had this unfortunate ‘trend’ in Release Management at Mozilla. Whenever a new hire is brought in to join in the fun of release management, the former team ...

We’re ready for a soft release of the first step in our very experimental autolanding system. Experimental meaning: we reserve the right to pull the plug, take it down for tweaks, and some information may be lost when bugs arise.  You can check the if the autoland system is up and running by going to ...

Last Wednesday David Eaves presented the results of the multi-tiered contributor lifecycle audit (watch the video).  A few points really grabbed my attention and as someone with a background in arts & education non-profits I feel the need to share my experiences alongside my reactions to this talk. David pointed out that as we are ...

Last Thursday night about 8 women arrived at Noisebridge to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia.  Several things led to this gathering: An article in the New York Times back in October drew attention to the lack of women contributors to the Wikipedia knowledge base and that got me thinking. Having organized other spontaneous “women get together ...

Short version: If you love women, or even like them just a bit, go right now and donate to the Ada Initiative to show the women in your life that you value their contributions past, present, and future to the wonderful world of Open Source. I’m going to make a donation in my grandmother’s name ...

On November 18th, 2011 I jumped into the deep end of the Bay Area startup culture I have been lurking on the periphery of for the past two years of living here. After going to my first Geek Girl Dinner at Microsoft a month ago, and preparing to talk about women in open source at ...

Do you shy away from IRC because it seems daunting, complicated, or completely foreign to you? A pretty large chunk of the Mozilla online community lives and breathes in IRC so I encourage you to come give it a(nother) try. I recently updated https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC#Getting_Started to help get you started. Hit me up with any questions ...

Did you know that we don’t build a fresh nightly on a branch unless there’s fresh code?  Well, now you do!  In the interest of saving even _more_ resources and network bandwidth so that we can accommodate even  _more_ project branches we have added this little bit of logic to our nightly build scheduler.  It ...

In a timely confluence with Mozilla’s new Steward initiative, I’m preparing to get some community contributors engaged with some of the projects we work on in Release Engineering.  A fair amount of our production infrastructure has to be locked behind VPN and sekrit passwords (we have 400+ million users to protect) but there are more ...

Ok, I’m a little biased – full disclosure: I work for Mozilla.  But even if I didn’t I suspect I’d be impressed with the amount of amazing innovation and hustle that Mozilla’s community puts out towards making the open web more accessible to everyone.  Recent projects like Popcorn and Butter are changing the way we ...

The TrySyntax helper and TryChooser wiki docs have both been updated to reflect the new option when pushing to try where you can now ask to have your complete summary of results (and a link to the tbpl page for your revision) posted as a comment to the bug on completion.  Here’s a live example ...

This morning I read that Google+ is going to make your name and “gender” required to be public if you want to participate.  This bothers me for several reasons: Web sites and forms notoriously say “gender” when they mean “sex” and only put M/F or Male/Female as options. When this type of choice is required but ...

Trees will be closed for downtime so that we can land the following: 1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662396 — Fix time on dm-wwwbuild01 2. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600980 — Set journal_mode = WAL for dirty places profiles — This mean new performance numbers will start on Thursday morning ...

As I write this I am working from Paris and our team timezone spread looks like this:  Rangoria, New Zealand: UTC (+12)  Bucharest, Romania: UTC (+3)  Istanbul, Turkey: UTC (+3)  Paris, France: UTC (+2)

Two updates to Try are about to go into effect which enforce asking for what you want using the try syntax and configuring how much email you want to get with your results.  Read more below. Bug 661409 – Now that this has landed, a push to try only generates email about a particular try builder’s ...

Almost a week since the post introducing the design attempt for auto/assisted branch landings via Bugzilla and Try and guess what? We re-wrote everything! The details are in the wiki, bugs have been filed, code is being written.  We are working on making this system use a message queue and also see if we can work ...

Ehsan’s blog post wishing for assisted landings on mozilla-central started a lot of people talking about this being a very desirable and useful tool for developers, where they could set a flag in Bugzilla and then be free to do other work until the results of their push were posted back to the bug. As ...

The first Bay Area PyStar event has come and gone. I’m finally getting a moment to regroup and ponder all the trial and error of being the organizer of this event as well as having time to look at some of the statistics we gathered. Just from an organizing perspective here are a few items ...

Alternate title ideas: “It’s not all s/Tryserver/Try”  or “What I should have done, and didn’t” I bet you get the point by now. Today I caused a fairly lengthy, unnecessary downtime on Try.  Now that I’m writing this, things are under control again and there’s a few small niggly bits left but nothing that will keep ...

Dear BBC, Today on the front page of your technology section you said that downloads for Firefox 4 have been lower than they were for Firefox 3 and that: The lower figure may be explained by the widespread availability of pre-release versions of Firefox 4 in the months ahead of its launch. First of all, you forgot ...

Last night was the first meeting of The Factory and Mozilla. The partnership if a result of work between Mozilla Drumbeat and Web Made Movies. Ben Moskowitz and Brett Gaylor invited myself and Atul Varma to what is to be the first of three sessions helping teens learn about the budding open web technologies that ...

I’m hoping if you’re reading this that you might be interested in volunteering this coming Saturday to help 12-16 year old girls at the upcoming Dare 2B Digital conference learn about HTML5 and open video.  There’s more information and background on what’s happening on this wiki page. Two kinds of volunteers needed: 1.  Someone who is ...

Lately I’ve been working on a a script which can check your try syntax for a bug number and a setting asking for –post-to-bugzilla.  If you’ve provided both, your try server results can be posted directly to the bug.  This is just part of a larger project to have patches submitted on a bug get ...

The other day this post by Google with slides detailing their Chrome release cycle speed up was going around and it mentioned how try and CI were key to their success. It got me thinking that it’s time for another update about the upcoming improvements our try server automation. Most of my Q1 work will ...

Recently there were some improvements to the trychooser and the landing of those changes led to a couple of bugs being discovered and quickly fixed.  It is thanks to those who are regularly using the trychooser that we are able to find bugs quickly and also continue to improve the tryserver. ...

On Monday November 29th there will be a bug fix landed on the TryChooser that will change how you use it: Removed: -m,–mobile argument for requesting mobile platforms.ALL ...

After Dave’s blog post put out the call for 50 visualizations using the new Audio API in Firefox 4 I decided it was time to stop thinking about learning processing and its .js version and time to start doing things with it.  So I took a few hours on Saturday to poke at the code ...

Our fabulous intern Anamaria Stoica has been working hard the past few months helping to pull data from buildbot’s scheduler DB that allows us to learn all sorts of new information about how the release infrastructure is being used, and how it could be optimized. Among other things, she’s generated an end-to-end report so we ...

Last week bug 473184 saw some progress when we landed the try_parser which allows devs to put in their hg commit comments what try builds they would like on a particular push. This is a first step towards a two-part goal: 1) giving devs more self-serve tools for try and 2) lowering try wait-times. Now you ...

This week is all about getting custom selection for tryserver submissions (bug 473184) ready for public consumption. The plan is to have a custom scheduler that calls a function which parses a commit comment (and later, the option of an .info file instead) and then only schedules the builders which have been requested. ...

Hey Firefox Developers – Want a place that’s kind of like Tryserver but all yours for a short period of time?  Release Engineering now has 3 ‘disposable’ branches set up in our build automation that you can use for testing a mozilla-central clone or a clone of your own m-c-based repo.  I call them Twigs ...

I really thought the try server as a branch was ready to roll out when I did it.  Seriously.  It took a couple of months to get it to the point where I felt it was ready for the public.  So I pushed it live last week – detail here. Immediately a few issues came up ...

This morning the quietly running in the background try-as-branch became the new try server and the try you’ve known for a few years now is about to be turned off. You will now be getting opt and debug builds, as well as packaged unit tests for all current try platforms (64 bit are on the way). ...

Two days ago, my Facebook page threw me a very large popup explaining that now all my interests (music, books, etc) were to become links to Pages and that I could either accept turning all my interests into links to their respective pages or go and customize. I took a second to customize because ...

Several times in the past few weeks I’ve been up on the third floor of our Mozilla office here in Mountain View and folks have asked me questions along the lines of “How long are you in town for?” or “You’re moving here soon, right?”. Well, here’s the thing – I’ve been living in ...

The rules: Copy/paste these rules and questions into a blog post, answer the questions, then tag some other people (however many you like) and encourage them to do the same. Include a link to the original post. You don’t have to be tagged to take part — if you see this post and want ...

Deb Richardson wrote an inspiring post recently about how to get the most out of the weekly 1:1s we have with our managers here at Mozilla. I’ve been very appreciative of the 1:1 time I get with my manager John O’Duinn because it’s often the time when big issues can get some forward momentum.  We ...

In my last post I was exercising my search engine choice for kicks.  Choosing a search engine is easy,  you type in the URL and get directed to the home page of your favourite search engine’s site.  If you prefer one and want it to be your default search engine,  Firefox has a handy pull ...

While helping a friend with a wordpress site, I googled for image gallery plugins and was met with: I’ve never seen this before so of course I started to search for the site in other search engines: Interesting, kind of suggests that this site also uses Yahoo.  That’s impossible. Now how about Alta Vista, Dogpile, Lycos, and ...

Just reading over Microsoft’s “What to Expect” post about the upcoming browser choice ballot. I tried to imagine I was a windows user seeing this for the first time. Two things about this screen bother me right away. One is that the “Ok” is just a link, not the usual, and obvious call-to-action ...

Click to Play A quick ‘n dirty vlog featuring some of the women attending this year’s FOSDEM conference. I was really glad to see so many women attendees, a much higher ratio than any FLOSS events I’ve been to so far. It was challenging for me to get over my ...

This was my first time attending FOSDEM and my first time in Europe as an adult. Being able to attend this conference was very exciting because I got a whole new perspective on the Mozilla project’s community outside of North America and I met many folks in the l10n community which helps remind me ...

This quarter Alice and I have focused on trimming the list of pending test suites and where several new ones (419776, 524089, 515540, 506772) have been turned on in production. The process for getting a new suite in has becoming a lot clearer, so we gave a presentation at the recent all-hands to help the ...

This quarter I’m going to be joining Alice in trying to improve the system for adding new suites to Talos.  The current system involves a lot of hackery on our side and slows down the ability for us to get Talos suites up and running as quickly as might be desired. So with John‘s help to ...

Yesterday I dropped off posters at the Parkdale Library for our Mozilla Service Week event which will take place on Monday September 14th from 2 – 6pm. The Parkdale Library is a really lively branch, with about 10 computer stations that the neighbourhood folks use constantly. Parkdale is the oldest Toronto neighbourhood and ...

Just put in my patches on bug 473184 which will allow folks who submit patches through the try server web interface to select if they want a build or unittest run and what platforms it should be run on. Looks like this: I’ve tested it successfully in the staging environment and I hope to get this ...

Now, a week or so later – we are setting up a new project branch. Here’s the break down: 2009-06-26 11:55 PDT Bug requesting the branch was created 2009/07/09 11:13:41 PDT Created a tinderbox page for the branch to report to 2009-07-14 17:44:27 PDT Patches to add Electrolysis branch to buildbot are ...

A brief rundown of what was involved setting up the Places project branch. This is based on the time since the branch request was given the go-ahead, not when the bug was filed since that happened quite a bit earlier. 2009-04-29 17:17:43 PDT Bug requesting the branch was re-opened 2009-05-18 16:31:46 PDT Created a tinderbox ...

A month or so ago when the Firefox 3.5 was close to launching I got in touch with some artist friends of mine who have a small jewellery making business to create some custom accessories for me in celebration. They have been making these awesome belt buckles, cuff links, magnets and many other items ...

Mozilla just announced Mozilla Service Week which will be held September 14 – 21, 2009. This week is a push to connect people who can help make the web work better for someone in the community with people and organization who need that help. Coming from the non-profit arts sector prior to my job at ...

Breaking my extended blog silence (I’ve been busy, you know, starting my full time job at Mozilla!) to tell you about the quagmire I went into when I tried to set up tethering on my iPhone. So here’s the story – with links that will help you avoid what happened to me. I purchased and ADC membership ...

Bug 445611 is now resolved fixed, you can see the unittest results on all three platforms here: MozillaTry. There are hopefully more machines coming that will be allotted to tryserver, with the likelihood that more developers will now use the tryserver. I’m also hoping to start working on setting up the web interface to allow ...

This is the tentative title for my upcoming white paper, which is the major deliverable for the btr820 course on Research Methodologies and Writing. I’m excited to be doing this paper because a) I love writing and b) I’m looking forward to learning more about my topic which is essentially looking at solutions for the ...

So I’m in a MacOS and iPhone development class this term. It’s my last term in the Bachelor of Software Development degree program at Seneca College. I’ve now done some major project implementation, interface design, web programming, business plans and marketing exercises – a bunch of useful skills have been developed to be ...

So today we deployed a unittest builder for the Linux platform on Try Server. You can see on the waterfall that there is now a column for Linux unittest results. The builds resulting from that builder will not be uploaded anywhere. The Mac unittest builder is close and I hope it will be ready ...

Just finished my Lab 1 for Peter’s Mac class and I want to keep track of the little bumps along the way. Things I learned: If you want the keyboard to hide after you are finished inputting text into a field – basically once the field loses focus you need to do this:;thanks to iCodeBlog ...

Taking this from Dolske: 1. Open this link, select-all and copy it.2. Open up the Error Console.3. Paste into the Code field at the top, and click Evaluate. 10 random Wikipedia URLs out of 85… Polaroid Mötley Crüe Letterpress printing Morphology (linguistics) Eicar test file Settlers of Catan The Wire (TV series) Transport Layer Explorers (film) Jeremy Hammond

This morning was the culmination of months of work from RelEng. We have finally turned on unittests as well as a11y tests on the production Buildbot master which was already doing the nightlies and l10n builds. Mostly this change is to make our lives easier. Now we have one instance of Buildbot to pay ...

Two things on my mind these days: Item One: I will be attending the Education Without Borders conference as a delegate from Seneca College. Five students were chosen to represent Seneca from several fields. My goal was to try and get a spot presenting about Mozilla’s partnership with the Open Source curriculum that we have ...

So Armen and I were interviewed a while back for the school paper – The Senecan – about our work with Mozilla through Seneca’s open source courses. The article just came out, Download PDF

This is an awesome video made with OpenGL by the guys who just did a PK on myttc.ca – an amazing visual of the transit system in Toronto throughout the day: http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1865789&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1TTC Weekday Service (HD) from Kieran Huggins on Vimeo.

Sitting in the workshop “ohai! art!” at FSOSS early on a Thursday morning.  I’m downloading pure data (extended) to participate.  Very curious to see what we’ll do in this time. Last night was the kick-off party at Mozilla for FSOSS speakers and also a time to do a dry run of the PK presentation that I’ll ...

Wednesday September 24th at 6:00 PDT I’ll be connecting the new slaves to Tinderbox:Firefox and taking down the old ones. Fingers crossed that it really happens this time.

As you may already know, there is some major outage (power out at the San Jose colo) this morning – now dubbed “Black Tuesday” by me. So the switch is postponed again. New time and date forthcoming when the network is up and stable again.

Hopefully things will still look good tomorrow morning because the new time of the move is now: This will take place on Tuesday September 23th, at 7am PDT The new production buildbot will already be up and running smoothly(currently reports to the UnitTest tinderbox tree) so there shouldhopefully be very little impact when this switch over happens. Basically, ...

Due to some glitches in the buildslaves, the move of the mozilla-central unittest build master has been postponed for now. I will post again soon with a new time and date for the switch. http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/post

So the last task in the move from QA network to Build network is moving the production mozilla-central unittest boxes.This will take place on Friday September 19th, at 7am PDT The new production buildbot is already up and running smoothly (currently reports to the UnitTest tinderbox tree) so there should hopefully be very little impact when ...

When we left off, there was a check error happening across all Linux slaves and a reftest failure on the Win32 ones. Update #1: A bug (450637) has been filed on that win32 failure, and also I brought the physical boxes back from sleep to be up on the new 1.9 master alongside their ...

In order to streamline the buildslave pool, the names of the following unittest 1.9 slaves were changed when we switched networks yesterday. All of these machines now run Buildbot 0.7.7 and the latest Twisted & Python. The Linux machines had their names changed and user changed – they are the same VMs as before: qm-centos5-01 ...

Today was a big day for the Firefox 3.0 unittest set up. Since QA and Build have become separated, I have been working towards lining up all out unittest masters on the Build network. What used to be 10+ master addresses will be narrowed to 2 – you’re either on staging-master or production ...

Tomorrow there will be a ~2hr downtime starting at 8:00 am PDT as the 1.9 unittest master is moved over to the build network. At the same time there will be a short interruption on the Mozilla2 production master. If any issues arise, please comment in bug 450119.

So I’m still plugging away at figuring out how to interpret the massive amounts of error log output that our unittest builds create. As the test suites are being run, there is a steady stream of stdio being generated and logged. From this stdio, I gather up all the lines of output that contain “TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL” ...

Been working on a couple of little utility scripts that I think are ready for public viewing. I’m interested in any tips on writing better code, or other ways to do what I’m doing that are more efficient. The first one is cleanup.py which we need to be able to quickly get rid of old ...

Some general thoughts on the discussion of data, inspired by Mitchell’s blog post. When I first started using the internet with some regularity, about 13 years ago, I was suspicious about entering any personal information whatsoever. This was before identity theft was a common occurrence, before I had any money to worry about losing, I ...

I was stuck in trying to access one of our xserve machines that just got moved from the QA network to the Build network. I could connect via ssh, and Justin could ping it but attempting to connect with VNC wasn’t working. It wouldn’t accept the usual passwords. Justin seemed to think ...

I was so thrilled to discover Splunk that I installed it on one of the buildbot masters – qm-rhel02 – without realizing that in fact, Splunk starts to quickly eat up disk space and hogs memory usage. Yesterday afternoon some Talos boxes started to go down because of this, and once I stopped the ...

Getting ready to assemble the Firefox 3 CD and came upon the glitch that Mac OS X doesn’t provide sha1sum tools. Quick Google search turned up a great comment on this blog post which suggests using openssl and by putting alias sha1sum="openssl dgst -sha1" in my .profile I can now do sha1sum $app_name.iso to ...

So, you know that script I was working on to parse error logs? Well, it turns out that there is already an amazing, free, graphical program that does the work for me. Excellent. It’s called Splunk, John O’Duinn mentioned it in passing last night and today I got it running on the unittest-staging build ...

Just in time for Download Day, a little video produced and directed by Marcia Knous and edited by me. I’m posting it on several sites youTube, Flickr and blip.tv – please link to it, digg it, favourite it, whathaveyou – just pass it along. http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=49235

Interning at Mozilla has so far provided me with many opportunities to learn (and re-learn) some of the finer points of the command line interface. Today I have spent most of my time working on some scripts (both shell and python) that will assist in parsing error logs from the unittest builbot masters. Here’s how I ...

A quick (< 4 minutes) overview of some of the new features in the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3. Check it out, then head over to http://www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord/ and sign up to be notified when the new version comes out! read more | digg story

The other day two of our Moz2 unittest buildbots – one Linux and one Windows – were both failing tests intermittently. We have all these logs but no way to parse the data to look for patterns and try to figure out what is going on. In an attempt to scratch the surface ...

Armen doesn’t think that Canada will make it over the 100,000 mark – I would like to see him proven wrong, so please Canada – get on with the pledging! This map is fascinating to watch and there’s so many tangents you can follow with it. How amazing is it to see 14 pledges in ...

Want to help Mozilla set a World Record? Join in Download Day and pledge to grab a copy of Firefox 3 in the first 24hours of its release. By pledging, you’ll get to see the number of pledgers in your country go up by one, and also you’ll get a friendly reminder email ...

In our first year of Mozilla development at Seneca – we learned how to file basic bugs, how to upload patches and we followed a module owner or the like so we could see just how much bugmail a person can handle. Now that I’m a Build intern I am learning to use bugzilla ...

If you’ve been banging your head trying to build Firefox on Vista with the newest Visual Studio 2008 express edition (VC9) – know that it is possible now, and with minimal bruising of your forehead. Two things you need to remember: 1. You have to run start-msvc9 in mozilla-build as administrator (if you do not your ...

Sadly, in my excitement to get a Mac buildbot slave up and running yesterday, I have overwritten my profile with a lot of file:/// addresses in the awesomebar and little else. The fabulous part of searching in the awesomebar is so much less when you have NO history. This is because the master.cfg is set ...

Okay, it’s time for another update as to my activities in MV. By the time Robcee left last Friday to go back to the picturesque province of New Brunswick, I had come pretty close to having Buildbot installed and ready to be deployed on my CentOS VM. Today in between wrestling with trying to build on Vista ...

Today was supposed to be “learn all about unit tests” day and instead it was “configure CentOS until you drop” day. Here’s what I was working with:Ref Platform VM (CentOS-5.0)Ref Platform set up instructionsInstall scripts that are supposed to help make it all much easier So the day looked a little like this: * Wrestling with Python for ...

First day of the internship, and things are going well. As my first build on the MBP is running in the background, let me lay out my set up so far. It will be familiar to many of you but I want a list for my own records. Upon opening up the MBP with ...

I’ve just finished attempt #3 to re-pack and prune what I’m bringing out west on Saturday. My bike is packed up in a box, I’ve booked an airport limo for 4:30 am and there are two 70lb bags of dog food in the basement to keep the hound in chow while I’m gone. It’s ...

Click to Play This is the demonstration I showed today for the final wrap-up of my DPS911 class – “Open Source Project”.

Okay. As I download VS Express so that I can test it in that environment, I’ve uploaded two patches in the continuing saga that is Source Server. Here’s what we’ve learned since my last post: * cvs.exe that comes with mozilla-build has issues so it’s necessary to point your path to a standalone version* the tinderbox cvs_root uses ...

So in order to get the current version of nightly builds to work for me, I had to add a srcsrv.ini file in the same place as the srcsrv.dll and devenv.exe – on my computer this is C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDE In that srcsrv.ini the only lines needed are: MYSERVER=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot The reason for this is that anything ...

So the fix worked and now the Mac/Linux |make buildsymbols| functionality is working again. As well, the nightly debug build from last night had source server indexing. I downloaded the windows nightly to test it – in both WinDBG and Visual Studio 2005. All looks good on VStudio – the symbols download and then when I ...

So my patch was backed out because it broke make buildsymbols on the Mac and Linux platforms. From looking closer at the error message and the patch, I deduce that it’s GetVCSFilename containing the offending line – a return file where a tuple (two return values in python) should be returning, so I change ...

Continuing along with the education of future Build and Release engineers, Armen and I were introduced to automation with Robert Helmer. Rob’s leaving Mozilla in a couple of weeks and it’s too bad we won’t get to work with him this summer. He’s really got this all figured out and most of his ...

Armen and I are in California attending Build and Release team meetings this week. Over the next two days we’ll be introduced to the many facets of the Build and Release workflow. Todays first session was about Talos with Alice. Here is the diagram of Talos (copied from the diagram Alice drew – yes ...

Things to remember:1. When you post your patch you select review ? and not review + (I had been confused about why I couldn’t put my reviewer’s email address in next to the +) 2. When your previously working code stops working suddenly and print statements galore are not helping, and you ...

I’m still learning how to get the most out of my system set-up. Since I’ve recently become an Editor for AMO, I’ve started a list of add-ons that are of interest or could be useful to me. Here’s the list so far, in no particular order: GTDinbox (gmail functionality booster) GButts (google services buttons – ...

On the edge of my seat as I wait to see if my patch to tinder-config.pl will be checked in and a source indexed build will come down the pipe. I just tweaked the one line addition with double \ in the file path. Small things hold up big things… Soon I will be ...

So I am still waiting for the install of Windbg. The timing is kind of terrible because everyone’s all a flutter with Firefox 3 and I’m twiddling my thumbs a bit. As I can’t test the source server from the user end yet, I must turn my attention to documentation and also to ...

Things have calmed down significantly since the big check-in a couple of weeks ago. Time flies when you’re waiting for someone to install on the ref platform for you. This is the part of Open Source development that I’m not so good at: patience. What have I done? Well, I filed a bug ...

Here’s reason 1,000,001 why I love the internet: The VMware Fusion Windows XP vm is pretty important to daily life for me and today it decided to hang. Halfway through a “Restoring Virtual Machine State”, the progress bar just stopped moving and I had to force quite Fusion. After many restarts, and other experimenting, ...

Today at 6pm I have finished the necessary changes to my Source Server patch so that it is ready to be checked in. This will be my first check in to the Mozilla code and I’m pretty psyched that after about 6 months of working on this, this particular chapter is about to close. ...

Went to the Toronto Mozilla office today. Spent the afternoon reviewing add-ons and I also got to put some faces to names. Since last Friday when we got training from Alex Polvi to be editors for AMO, I’ve reviewed 14 extensions and I’m learning a lot about the process. Ted said he’d be reviewing ...

Well as reading week approaches and I wait (again) for feedback on my patch, I am trying to keep busy in Mozilla activities. One of my recent activities is helping out with Live Chat user support. It’s amazing! A very small team of dedicated people are helping individuals in real time with their wide ...

Although my goal was to have the symbolstore.py patch approved for committal by week’s end, I am very close. Today I spent about 5 hours tweaking the patch as per the most recent comments. What was done: * Makefile now checks for the environment variable of PDBSTR_PATH to be set before assigning the flag to source ...

Today as I was setting up a mysql GUI I saw this: It made me very happy to see that part about Ejecting and ridding yourself of the installer because a lot of folks still might not know that. I’ve definitely met some people who drag firefox to their dock from the installer instead of ...

This is mostly a reminder for me, but if anyone is interested in seeing how the Source Server is working/coming along, my demos are scheduled for: Thursday March 13th at 1:30pm in ORI Thursday April 3rd at 1:30pm in ORI The first demo should involve the symbolstore.py patch having been committed, there should be a debug build that ...

Using StraceNT I was able to get this output. Here’s a snippet: IntellectualHeaven (R) System Call Tracer for NT, 2K, XP, 2K3.Copyright (C) Pankaj Garg. All rights reserved. Tracing command: EnterCriticalSection(77c61b18, 2c7778, ...

As I wait to find out what else I can do to get the symbolstore.py patch commit-worthy, I thought I would start to look into reading and writing to pdbs as described here. I downloaded Paws.exe which is a hex editor program and also installed Borland’s C++ compiler so I could try to dump the contents ...

This morning I tried to explain to my Deaf-Blind student the usefulness of Bookmarks. What he and my friend’s mom who I was helping with a website the other day have in common is that they both save web pages to their desktops. For the mom, this results in an mhtml file on ...

I was on my morning commute to school, reading my ethics textbook, happily processing information about intellectual property and copyright law (my favourite things!) when I read this: “Anybody who has studied software engineering knows that programmers do not actually spend most of their time originating software. They spend most of their time on service updates ...

So I feel like I am close to having closed up most of the original issues with the patch. After the conversation with Ted I was feeling good about how to wrap the source indexing so that it’s only applied to a Win32 platform. The newest patch is here and basically the outstanding issue ...

Recently I had a conversation with Ted on IRC about how to take steps to make the patch work properly for Win32 platforms. Here’s the gist of what I’ll be working on for 0.6:ted: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/Makefile.in#174ted: that's where symbolstore.py actually gets runted: you see how it uses $(MAKE_SYM_STORE_ARGS) ?ted: up above that line we define those per-platformted: ...

Click to Play This is a video demo of the status of my current bugfixing on the bug I filed regarding the adding of Source Server to windows debugging of mozilla code.

Well, on this my 50th post, I am excited to announce that I have been offered a summer internship with Mozilla. I’m just waiting for the actual paperwork to set the wheels in motion. This is going to be one heck of a ride. I’m kind of hoping that once I get this Windows ...

That’s me, cleaning up the symbolstore.py patch one little scrap of python at a time. Today’s lesson was a brief introduction to String Interpolation. In the bug, Ted had mentioned using string interpolation as one of the ways I could shrink down how many times I was writing to file. There are a couple of ways ...

Well, I’ve broken the ice that formed on my project over the holidays. There’s something that really intimidated me about going back to that code, that work flow. I don’t know how to explain it except that I felt afraid of my own code and lack of experience, felt like I wasn’t going ...

This release is primarily research. After talking with Ted (ted), I have some documentation about pdb file formats and pdb “exploding” tools to play with. Also I am currently trying to make my laptop more friendly to the kind of development this project requires. In the last term I started using a MacBook mid-semester and ...

And, we’re back for another semester of poking and prodding the Microsoft Source Server for use with the Mozilla debug symbols. First order of business is to clean up as much of the symbolstore.py patch as possible and then the next step would be to start writing a pdbstr.exe replacement that can be distributed. Also, ...

Thanks to http://yichao.zhang.googlepages.com/blogsync-with-gui.tar.gz – I have now crossed over to blogger. I already had several blogs because of videoblogging and probably should have just started here in the first place, I like that I can customize my blog a little more. Anyway, hopefully I can get back on the planet now.

Today was the first class of my BTP600 Design Patterns class. The teacher talked about how there are 3 ways to go about learning to write larger, non-trivial programs. Try + Fail + Fix Read the code of other (superstar) coders to see how they did it well Design Patterns I like this class. ...

Something that I have come to appreciate about Mozilla is that its chat channels on IRC are incredibly positive, helpful and relevant. As there are so many areas in developing and using Mozilla projects, several channels exist that allow you to join a channel when it is specific to your area of discussion. Recently I ...

Today was the first day back in the hallowed halls of S@Y. I managed to clear up the conflict signing up for DPS911 and am now officially registered. I’ve gotten some great feedback on the bug I filed for the source server so there’s lots to get started on. First rewriting the patch better ...

Well, the big ball ‘O duct tape that is my hacks on symbolstore.py are complete for now – here is the patch. This project will be carried on in the next term at which point I hope to address some of the current issues, namely – manipulating the directory structure, cleaning up the python ...

After many nights of tweaking this space, that path, this logic – the symbolstore.py script is now playing nice with pdbstr and the pdb files are getting indexed. So begins the second battle – how to get Visual Studio to pull the code out of CVS and locate that code on the local drive. ...

I’m not sure where things are going wrong right now so I am hoping that you – faithful readers – will be able to help me out. I have run the “make buildsymbols” and checked with srctool.exe to confirm that the pdb files are source indexed. So following that I made an installer ...

Here is the code I have so far in symbolstore.pyhttp://pastebin.mozilla.org/254868 My portion is specifically lines 36 – 71 where I am now gathering up a string of source files along with the revision number, and generating a (almost) properly formatted stream file in the pdb’s directory. Here are the barriers: 1. I would prefer to have a ...

Huge changes since last night’s post. I can insert a .stream file (see previous post for what a .stream file data block contains) into an unindexed .pdb file via pdbstr -w as long as it has certain variables. I still need to test what the minimum info needed is, right now I just copied ...

Working on 0.3 release of source server is all about getting the pdb files gathered up when symbolstore.py is made and then feeding them to pdbstr.exe. I’ve copied the binary into the mozilla/toolkit/crashreporter/tools folder where symbolstore.py is called and I’ve spent the last 4 hours or so playing around with python. So far I have ...

Okay, this is take 2 because my first post was unceremoniously ‘disappeared’. My BTS team is getting geared up for writing Unit Tests in JUnit. We’re using Eclipse with subclipse for SVN. Two teammates are Windows, one Linux and me on the Mac. Mac’s version of Java is Apple’s not Sun’s so my JRE ...

So for my 0.3 release of sourceServer, I am tasked with altering the code in symbolstore.py so that it will track the source files and then call pdbstr.exe on them. To do this, I need to understand what PDBSTR.EXE does. This is what I have to go on: Once the code has looked at ...

Just a quick post to share my SourceServer Presentation if anyone’s interested in an overview of what my project this term in DPS909 has entailed.

Well there was an initial kerfuffle trying to get the extension “firstxpcomchrome” working in my Minefield build. Turns out that when I was attempting to connect it up via a text file in the profiles/myprofile/extensions folder, I had put the path as a c:/…. path which, in Unix (ie Mac), is not correct. ...

Well, it turns out that my 0.2 release was a little buggy but Ted (luser) was able to hack his srcsrv.ini file to overwrite the URL I had indexed into the pdb files so that he was able to pull code from my server. Instead of hacking the 0.2 and fixing that though, I ...

Thanks to Armen’s post and all the sub helpers that led to his post, I did successfully install the Extension Developer add-on and I managed to get my firstxpcom extension working in the JavaScript shell:

Well, I greatly enjoyed Benjamin Smedberg’s talk – power outage and all – and much was learned about Xpcom. Not enough however, to enable me to complete the Xpcom lab that was assigned to us last week. Last week I pounced on the lab, raring to go with my existing build of firefox and ran ...

Here are the goals for my 0.2 release release build of ff with debugger-info enabled to create pdbs without being a full debug build using lib xul – make an installer for people to download take the symbols and index them and distribute the source set up the symbol server but ...

I have a perl script called cv2http.pl that is called upon by cv2http.cmd Both are in c:Program FilesDebugging Tools for Windowssdksrcsrv directory, which is where I am making this command line call from. I am trying to do this: walk.cmd c:symbols*.pdb cv2http.cmd HTTP_ALIAS http://avnerd.tv/source What this will do is swap out the cvs information and replace it with a ...

Well today I got to run Full Functional Tests on Firefox 3 beta 1 and then this evening as I procrastinated from dealing with my Hamiltonian circuit assignment, I ran tests on Miro’s 1.0rc release. The two testing systems are very different even though they both use Litmus-based testing. Miro’s tests are fewer, some are ...

Filing a bug First I had to create a bug over on landfill – explaining the issue The gist is that anything that has characters@…Someothercharacters turns into a mailto: link in Thunderbird and this was annoying Dave so the whole class jumped to fix it. Fixing the problem Dowloaded and built a copy of Thunderbird’s trunk on my MacBook ...

Some of the newest Santa Rosa chipset MacBooks have been deployed without Boot Camp Assistant in the Utilities folder. I’m sure this will be fixed soon. Here’s the quick fix if anyone else needs it: Put the Install Disc 1 in, then in Finder, to to Go -> Go To Folder… and type: /Volumes/Mac OS X ...

For my 5 hours between classes on Friday. Hopped into Litmus and joined in on Test Day. Managed to do 58 tests and filed my first bugs: 402219, 402228, and 402238. I feel very accomplished. It’s fun to find a bug, and I had an especially great crash that I was able to ...

Since FSOSS my brain has been churning with many thoughts about my place in open source. According to Dave in this week’s class we are all more elite than we may think and we all have potential to do great things in open source. It’s hard to think that I can be in ...

Well, it’s the end of a long day. Starting out on my bike at 7:15 am and ending now, at 12:45 am (but I probably won’t actually sleep until 1). I went to several talks, took lots of pictures and just wrapped up the rough draft of my FSOSS Report. Had a great chat ...

Here’s what we’re looking at. I built a version of ff that was checked out from mozilla’s cvs. From this version I called “make buildsymbols” and created the folder 2007092823 which contained all the pdb and symbol files for that build. For information on how to use the symbol server – check out Benjamin ...

Today’s class was a presentation with Mark Finkle from Mozilla Corp. These are my notes. Started off in proprietary softwareHas only been with Mozilla for a yearThe joy of extensions – Primary way to get involved is through add-ons (extensions) – Plug-ins killed the web (according to some) and are kind of discouraged – Any ...

Yesterday’s Club Moz meeting was quite productive as we tackled doing QA tests with Litmus. I encourage more folks to come to Club Moz next meeting: Tuesday October 30th at 4:30 in SEQ2119 (next to ACS). Every Tuesday is a test day for Mozilla@Seneca and this is a great way of getting your feet wet ...

What did I do? Today, the indexing worked. See the command here: cvsindex -server=cvs -source=c:ffmozilla -symbols=c:symbolServer2007092823 -debug > output.txt And the output.txt. See how now it is indexing the files?! Cool. So what did I do differently than last time? Last Time: ssindex.cmd : ...

I don’t know how many times I can read the 3 main sources of information about this source server business. Everytime I read them it’s like being in a house of mirrors. Tonight I found a new site that refers to a source server. Once again I hear how amazing this source ...

Is done. First attempt lead to error messages about the malformed or non-existent install.rdf file. Well, I knew it existed because I brought it into existence. So I looked around the other mozilla documents and made a replacement install.rdf – no error. After this point though, I hit a wall because I could install ...

Well I’m a little late in reporting on my experience of watching someone on Bugzilla. This is partly because I didn’t read the “to-dos” closely enough and then it was because it took a few hours to find out how to watch someone. Well, asking on IRC, I was informed that you go ...

My Experience at Ontario Linux Fest 2007 – At the Toronto Congress Center. Woke up at 6 am to get the dog walked and eat some breakfast before heading out to get Cesar. Thanks Cesar for being awake and ready to go! We had to go up to Seneca first and grab the display material from ...

To get the information that I need to make this Source Server work. So in the srcsrv.doc file that comes with the debugging package it says: Anyone interested in using Source Server with CVS should send email to windbgfb@microsoft.com. So I did. Here’s the response I just got: Good things come to those that wait – and you ...

Well. I am jazzed up while I sit in BTB right now because I MADE A PATCH! Yessir. The lab for today’s class asked us to try and modify our browsers so that opening a new tab makes it appear to the right of the current tab, instead of the way it currently opens ...

Included with WinDBG’s debugging tools is an sdk that has some scripts to use for making a Source Server. From what I have gathered so far, I needed to configure the srcsrv.ini file to point to my CVS repository – check, i pointed it to MYSERVER=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot Then I ran ssindex.cmd –server=cvs –source=c:source –symbols=c:outputdir with the appropriate locations. First ...

Oh boy, what have I taken on? Going deeper and deeper into any documentation I can find about how one goes about source indexing. I have no idea what I’ve signed up for. In my C:Program FilesDebugging Tools for Windowssdksrcsrv directory there is an excellent source server document that walks through the steps and ...

Well, thanks to Peter McIntyre (Resident Windows Genius) at Seneca College, I have now managed to set up my local symbol server. Peter actually sent me a link to information about configuring IIS 6.0 but it turned out I had 5.1 – no problem he had given me enough so that a quick Google ...

After today’s IRC chat with luser, I now have a list of things to do in order to acheive 0.1: set up a localhost server make buildsymbols from my own build load those symbols onto the local server connect them up to my debugger to make sure it all works get the microsoft scripts to ...

So, I’m trying to hook up the Mozilla Symbol Server in order to better see how my attempts at knitting a source server to it will work. First – I need to know what version of Firefox I should be doing this with. Currently I have 3 options: ff2, nightly build and my own build ...

Today has been a blow-out day of looking at other people’s code. First in class we explored mxr and tried to follow simple browser functions back to their origins. In looking up where the code for the “Clear Private Data” option was, I discovered that I can choose between being asked to confirm ...

In IRC chat the other day I asked how often Ted (aka luser) did builds and he said not that often – pointing me instead to the nightly builds saying that he used these instead since they were updated automatically every day. So I downloaded one and installed it. Now, my favourite extension is the foxmarks ...

Learning from today’s class with Ted Mielczarek: – lots of successful builds, so things are getting easier– the error that we are getting about directory names with spaces is an advancement over the past when it just failed for an unknown reason– there’s a bug right now with building on Vista, there’s a work-around right now– ...

Today we get to hear Ted Mielczarek speak on the Mozilla Build system. According to Dave, I will be communicating with Ted about the project I signed up for, the Mozilla Source and Symbol Server. Let me say first of all that I chose this project because I know nothing about it. Let me ...

Okay, as per this week’s “To Do List” I followed the instructions and created a basic makefile for the nled editor. I haven’t used nled since first year, what a flashback. Anyway, it was pretty simple. Not sure if I “cheated” by commenting out a tiny statement in the qkdisp.c file in the qb_beep ...