Weekly Status Report, W33/2011

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 33/2011 (August 15 - 21, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Did the probably last per-build crash rate calculations for recent betas and compared them to the numbers that Socorro now generates directly.
  Worked with the Socorro team on some fixes to their recent release and filed some bugs and possible enhancements I came across.
  Blogged about new split crash-stats reports.
  As always, ran experimental reports on "explosive"/rising crashes and investigated interesting ones popping up in those.
• SeaMonkey Build/Admin:
  We ran into an interesting certificate problem with SeaMonkey updates - who would have thought that clamping the possibilities of issuers to one of the largest ones would cause a problem when that wouldn't issue any certificates any more? We'll need a very fast 2.3.1 release to get enough users of 2.1 and higher updated to a version that still will accept any updates in the future. Callek is working on that.
• Websites:
  I did an experimental implementation of a BrowserID login on my website system, still need to do more testing and some additional features like creating website accounts with it as well, but this looks promising.
  I also updated SeaMonkey Bug Radars for the rapid release cycle and they are mostly correct now, but apparently one more bug is left for the tracking ones.
  And on the SeaMonkey Development website as well, I added support for 2.6 and 2.7 version to ADU and downloads graphs in the metrics section.
• Themes:
  I updated EarlyBlue and LCARStrek for changes in the last two SeaMonkey and Firefox releases locally, but I still need to do some testing before I can release those.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Firefox version display and rapid release cycle, review lags, Web APIs, MPL2 RC, Upcoming phonebook, Mozilla website merge, more on MeeGo and Fennec, big mobile market news (Motorola, HP), etc.

I continue to be humbled by what awesome people work at Mozilla. Not just that we hired a lot of really great people (and we have a ton of additional career offerings but also about the quality of work that interns at Mozilla are doing. I always felt that it was great that we were having interns work on real-world projects that "normal" employees would work on as well, but I was completely blown away when I saw and heard some intern "show & tell" presentations about them implementing new language features for Rust, like object self-reference and inheritance. I mean, how cool is that for an internship work? They are creating stuff where I can hardly grasp their usage, let alone how an implementation could be done at all. I know, I have always seen people implementing programming languages as über-gurus, but people like that young man and young woman who presented doing that as a summer internship for Mozilla? I don't have a word for that - though, maybe, as it makes me actually stare in awe and wonder, there might be one matching the definition: purely "awesome".