Weekly Status Report, W15/2011

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 15/2011 (April 11 - 17, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Did some analysis and even bug-filing of crashes that came up or started rising during all-hands or that week after it. Nothing too bad there, though, been a relatively quiet week in that area overall.
  Had some talks with people in the MV offices about possibly finding a way to communicate back to users who reported crashes when we are actually working on this, have fixed their specific crash pattern, or know a good workaround. A similar mechanism could be used for telling users about malware we have found loaded into the Firefox process.
  Filed a pair of bugs on making channel info available in crash reports, so we can filter on those where needed.
  Had a few talks with people working on Socorro on how we want certain things implemented, and even accidentally came to overhear and take part on some discussion on implementing a bug I filed (on comments in plugin/content crash reports). The beauty of sitting in the same office space with other coworkers showed itself nicely that week.
  Had some talks with other CrashKill team members and finalized our Q2 priority request list for the Socorro team so I could forward that.
• Build System:
  Did some reviews for that and the website, but nothing too large.
• Themes:
  Did some more work for LCARStrek on Firefox 4, but this one still needs even more work to be done.
• German L10n:
  Again did an updates of the localization to catch the added ChatZilla strings. With that, we should be complete for the 2.1 release.
  I also checked in a large help update from Michael to make us look even better for the upcoming 2.1 release.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  New release process ramping up with first Aurora merge, shadow landings, lots of marketing/background topics, SeaMonkey planning, MeeGo N900 DE discussions, etc.

Hey, I promise, I'll get better again on those! Seriously, this one is 6 days late, but I hope I'll have the one for this one tomorrow as it should be.

For the week this report is on, I spent Monday through Thursday of that week in Mozilla's offices in Mountain View, and I really saw how helpful it is to have coworkers directly around you, getting into talks and idea exchanges, clearing up some proposals and views in person so implementations can go forward more efficiently, doing meetings face to face to get to resolutions more effectively, and similar things. Unfortunately, after spending Friday and Saturday with some shopping and sightseeing, I needed to catch a plane back home to go back to the solitude of working from home. As nice as some aspects of working from your own apartment are, as a quite social, open, and - yes - talkative person, I have done it long enough now that I'd really prefer feeling "part of the family" by having other people around in a common office. Oh, and the fact that I love the USA of course helps a lot in feeling comfortable there in California - I mean, I can switch on normal TV and hear all about how the Spurs are doing and if NFL players and owners might find an agreement, and in the end, I find even the political discussions more interesting than those in Austria - but maybe I just have heard too much of ours already and you get equally tried of the US ones after a few years.

That said, Callek pushed out SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 3 late in the week before, make sure you check it out, as it's feature-complete, only needing some polish before it goes final. And if you're a localizer, note that it's now even in a string freeze, so this is a stable base to do your work to have your locale included in the final SeaMonkey 2.1 release, which should come very soon now!