The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 13/2008 (March 24 - 30, 2008):

• SeaMonkey 1.1.9 Release:
  We did a quite smooth 1.1.9 release this week, keeping the stable 1.1.x series in sync with security updates to the Gecko and platform core.
  Contributed builds were added throughout the week, and more are still coming along.
• Preference Panels Work:
  The patch for prefs regarding website icons for bookmarks should be near to being ready for checkin.
  The advanced pref panel still lacks a decision regarding keeping or dropping the OJI JVM selection code.
• Jemalloc for Windows:
  I did some work to enable jemalloc on Windows nightlies, which should now be resolved. This makes us use memory more efficiently - and we even saw startup times in the tinderbox tests decrease by about 13% (~830ms to ~720ms), so I'd expect current trunk nightlies on Windows to be quite performant!
• German L10n:
  Some updates to ongoing work, mostly in mailnews.
• Various Discussions:
  California traveling, help viewer, GTK "dropmarker" arrows, account manager accesskeys, Add-on manager charset problems, more pref migration, bug triage, etc.

This is the last full-week report for a bit - even that week was shortened by taking some time off for my mum's 50th birthday, week 14 has my flying to California on Saturday, taking preparation into consideration I don't expect this to be a hard working week. Of course, the following two weeks won't see me a lot in front of my computer as well, I'm not even sure yet if writing up such status updates for those makes sense. In about three weeks I should be working my backlog and slowly returning to normal work - hopefully with recharged energy reserves.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 12/2008 (March 17 - 23, 2008):

• Preference Panels Work:
  The patch for prefs regarding website icons for bookmarks is still waiting for reviews.
  The help changes for my pref panel changes still need a bit more work, apparently.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.9 Release:
  I continued the release process of the upcoming 1.1.9 release, all preparations should be done to release the current 1.1.9 candidates as final on Tuesday, but please continue testing so we can make sure it's a good one!
• Small Things:
  Checked in a fix to the build issue due to suboptimal gcc version check we had after a recent build optimization patch.
  And I fixed the problem that disabled buttons disappeared from SeaMonkey help viewer on Linux with a CSS one-liner.
• German L10n:
  Prepared files for German 1.1.9 release.
• Various Discussions:
  California traveling, help viewer for in-product help and FF changes, GTK "dropmarker" arrows, 1.9 and Thunderbird/MailNews planning, Mozilla network problems, etc.

The SeaMonkey project has inherited not only a huge codebase, but also a huge bug database, and the small team of developers is overwhelmed with digging through the large amount of entries to find what bugs are important or even valid for current (trunk) development work.
So I started an effort to triage old unconfirmed bugs as a first step to reduce the amount of possibly invalid information and making it more visible what's still valid.
I encourage everyone to help there, all you need to help is a current SeaMonkey build (preferably a trunk nightly) and a Bugzilla account, so practically everybody can help us!

As mentioned here before, I'll visit California in April. As I'll be there with a good friend of mine who is a first-time-visitor to the USA, we'll do a round trip, but I'll have a few days in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Mountain View, where I'll surely visit Mozilla headquarters and would love to meet as many people as possible.

We didn't set our plans in stone so that we can be flexible when being already over there, but current plans for our schedule are roughly as follows:

• Arrival: about noon Apr 05 at SFO airport
• Apr 05-07: San Francisco / Bay Area (7th: Mountain View / Mozilla)
• Apr 08-10: travel San Francisco - Yosemite - Sequoia - Las Vegas
• Apr 11-12: Las Vegas, travel to Los Angeles either 12th or 13th
• Apr 13-14: Los Angeles area (maybe until 15th)
• Apr 15-16: travel Los Angeles - San Francisco area
• Apr 17-19: San Francisco / Bay Area (18th: Mountain View / Mozilla)
• Departure: evening of Apr 19 from SFO airport

If you want to meet me in the SF Bay Area or somewhere on my way, I'd be happy to meet many Mozillians over there, just contact me either via a comment here, via IRC or via email, and we can surely arrange something!

Yes, it's been half a year already since my "amazing live Sea-Monkeys" hatched as small dots in the aquarium - and they're still alive!



The now fully grown up SeaMonkeys are about 1 centimeter in length and love to swim around in their aquarium, often keeping either at the top where they find most of the light during the day (and fresh food every few days), or at the bottom, where algae accumulate that they like to eat and they fan those up their bodies with their gill/legs structures so they reach their "mouth".
Sometimes I can watch them mating (a male and female stick together quite a long time), and females are easy to recognize due to the huge egg sac they're carrying.

They quite funny little animals and don't require too much of work, just feeding them once a week and airing the water every few weeks by pouring the water, including the Sea-Monkeys themselves out of the tank and back into it a few times. Oh, and refilling water that evaporates. But that's about all, so even something I can manage to do

So, happy 6-month-birthday to my Sea-Monkeys, I hope you'll survive even longer!

And now, back to SeaMonkey software work...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 11/2008 (March 10 - 16, 2008):

• Preference Panels Work:
  I could check in the reworked and ported appearance prefs main panel, which now includes the again-working UI language switching option, removed the old language switching panel and updated help for those changes and the content preference panel.
  For this panel, I created an additional patch for the option to load website icons for bookmarks.
  "Appearance" is now the first section (other than the debug options) of preferences that has completely been ported to the new prefwindow.
  Additionally, I did work on porting the advanced preferences main panel to the new prefwindow.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.9 Release:
  Another security release is schedule for the 1.1.x branch later this month, so I started the release process by generating candidates after Bruno "Aqualon" Escherl helped us to fix the one remaining blocker we had on the SeaMonkey-specific side. There are nearly 70 fixed bugs for this release, most of them fixing security/stability issues, so I hope we'll get good testing of 1.1.9 candidates to be sure we have no regressions in the final release.
• Source L10n:
  I could check in the fix for generating automatic updates for Mac L10n builds, so we should get localized (full) updates on all platforms now.
• German L10n:
  Mainly typo fixes this week in German L10n, but I also kept up with string changes and additions in SeaMonkey (for example from my own appearance panel work).
• Various Discussions:
  build issue due to suboptimal gcc version check, California traveling, GTK "dropmarker" arrows, 1.9 and Thunderbird/MailNews planning, etc.

At this place I want to officially congratulate our SeaMonkey Council member Mark Banner (Standard8 on IRC) to his new job at Mozilla Messaging. He'll still be active in the SeaMonkey community, his main work area will probably stay centered around the address book, which is shared between Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, and he'll probably be the best bridge bewteen the SeaMonkey and Thunderbird teams we can have - especially when it comes to the organizational side of things, where he'll probably hear about what's going on in both projects.
In the light of my view of SeaMonkey and Mozilla Messaging, I'm convinced this is an additional step for improving cooperation between the projects, and wish Mark the best for his exciting new job!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 10/2008 (March 3 - 9, 2008):

• Preference Panels Work:
  My application panel patch got final reviews and could be checked in, Modern is fixed as well, the default theme still needs some fixup (difficult due to platform differences), and help needs to be updated.
  In the appearance prefs area, I could land the new "Content" subpanel, the main panel has a new patch, but review is still pending on that. I also started to work on getting help updated for those changes.
  Meanwhile, I started to look into advanced preferences.
• German L10n:
  Kept up with application prefs and other checkins, as well as core changes during the pre-FF3b5 checkin rush.
• Various Discussions:
  California traveling, password/login manager, "Save Link As...", feed support, lots and lots 1.9 management - and even moz2, Thunderbird/MailNews conference scheduling, Thunderbird 3 planning, etc.

Thanks for all replies I got about my recent post, I'm picking those pieces of advice that seem to fit me best and try to survive the next ~25 days until this trip with a good time of being somewhere else and doing something else comes up and should help a lot, I hope.

That said, Google is doing another Summer of Code this year, and Mozilla is once again applying as a mentoring organization. There's a good chance that some SeaMonkey project will again have a chance to be taken into that program, please add brainstorming ideas for projects on the wiki or even better think of applying as a student doing such a project yourself!

Note: This entry is getting a bit personal - but there aren't only technical aspects of my Mozilla and SeaMonkey work, there's a flipside of the coin... somewhere.

Lately, I'm feeling more grumpy than usually, annoyed about every comment that makes m work more difficult or that causes me additional work - even more, if someone plainly suggests that I should do something. On the other hand, I feel like way too little is moving forward and questioning if all the efforts are worth it at all, especially as I fail to get much joy out of small achieved steps nowadays.
I sometimes have a hard time concentrating on work, and every little bit of "music" bass coming from other rooms in this house or trampling around of the girl living in the room above mine drives me crazy.
Instead of seeing ongoing changes in Mozilla as challenges for our project and looking for ways to master them, I get the impression of big problems coming up, roadblocks being (intentionally?) placed in our way and start doubting if this project and me trying to drive it is a good idea at all.
Frustration is a constant companion instead of a sporadic visitor in my life.

This could be attributed to my apparent failure in relationships, and it's right that in the short times where I have such relationships the symptoms seem to fade a bit, but then, I refuse to go that easy way to blame everything in life on that. I had my times where I tried that, and those resulted in realizing that this couldn't be the whole truth and tends to solve nothing at all.

The only way to deal with that part is to hope for the best - and I drilled myself for never ever giving up hope and always believing in the good and positive things in life, no matter how bad things look at times. I convinced myself that the future will always be better so there's always a reason to move on.

Still, this lately looks more like a desperate effort of keeping control of this mess I call a life than like a shining star to follow - even if I wouldn't ever lose that core belief even for a second.

The more I think about it, the more this all looks to me like some form of (starting?) burnout, and my average of 50-60 working hours a week (up to 80 at times), practical absence of a personal life as well as the complete lack of physical exercise seems to support that argument, after all, being stressed and strained is nothing unknown to me.

Still, the problem is what to do against this. Taking some time off sounds like a good idea, but there's not so much I want to do other than work on this project. And then, we badly need progress, someone (me) being absent for a while would be missing. Sure, handing off some work to others might be good, if I only knew where all those others that have too little to do are.
Maybe seeing the SeaMonkey 2 Alpha forming and actually getting ready to ship would enjoy me enough to fill up my energy reserves.
I feel I probably need to continue to walk the line between doing as much work as I'd like and breaking down with a burnout for a while, and I currently don't actually see clearly how to get away from the constantly being on edge that comes with that.

Perhaps those two weeks in California that I'm counting down to can ease that situation a bit. I surely hope for that.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 09/2008 (February 25 - March 2, 2008):

• Sanitize:
  The patch for sanitize ("Clear Private Data") got review and I could check it in. Shortly afterwards, some people discovered it's not working correctly in nightlies yet, which is due to a packaging issue that should be fixed for tomorrow's nightlies.
• Other Preferences Work:
  My application panel patch now has partial review, and should be nearing completion (hopefully) soon.
  I updated the appearance prefs patch when it worked with trunk code for some time when a loadOverlay fix was in - unfortunately that caused regressions and had to be backed out. The content panel should get ready to go, though.
• (Automated) Tests & Components.* Shorthands:
  With the "sanitize" patch (see above), I also ported some tests to SeaMonkey, which we could even run automatically when the test frameworks would work flawlessly in SeaMonkey and we had test machines.
  The latter probably needs some more poking from my side, but the former is not as hard as one would believe: the sanitize tests were in the browser mochitest suite, and it only needed a fairly easy change to get that running with SeaMonkey. Of the currently available tests in that framework, all run fine except 2 tests that require FUEL and 8 that need the toolkit download manager (which we plan to get in alpha).
  When fixing those tests ran into a problem with Cc/Ci definitions, I started a small IRC discussion about those Components.* shorthands and discovered that this is not only something we stumble over in SeaMonkey work, but a Mozilla-global mess, and filed a bug on fixing that.
• Source L10n:
  We added Spanish (es-ES) localizations for ChatZilla and venkman.
• German L10n:
  After DOM inspector was killed from the Firefox default build, I took the chance of easier review/approval requirements and updated the de L10n for it to trunk.
  Additionally, I fixed a few typos that were filed as bugs with FF3b3 and added sanitize strings right after the main checkin.
• Various Discussions:
  California traveling, password/login manager, "Save Link As...", feed support, 1.9 management, Thunderbird/MailNews conference scheduling, etc.

It looks like the long hours I put into a few pref panels in the last weeks, spending more time on code than usual, slowly has an effect on the nightly builds, which is good to see. There's a lot more of stuff to do though, and we really need to pick up those tasks and get to a stage we can call "alpha" as soon as reasonably doable. We have not been releasing a major final or a alpha/beta for more than a year now, and we keep touting out to people how beautiful the world of SeaMonkey 2 will be, so we should put some credibility behind that and give them a build that can be tested by a larger audience than our nightlies.
I hope we can pick up the remaining tasks soon enough to not lose people to competitors because they think the old (Mozilla/SeaMonkey 1.x) suite is dead meat.
We know after all that the new (SeaMonkey 2) suite is more alive than ever before!