Weekly Status Report, W49/2011

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in weeks 49/2011 (December 5 - 11, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Communicated with Daniel from metrics because of missing ADU data for my experimental reports.
  Together with other people, tried to keep crash analysis together while Mozilla servers had problems.
  Followed up with the Socorro team on the plan for Android Fennec as a separate product.
  Triaged topcrash bugs with Sheila.
  More watching of new/rising crashes, filing bugs where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Created linux64 update snippets for SeaMonkey 2.5.
• Firefox code:
  I did split up my search UI cleanup patches into logical parts, and put the engine manager cleanup in its own bug, also split apart into smaller patches.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Tested OpenGL layers and reported its problems, data stores for "native" Fennec, B2G and crashes, Windows update service, my tablet problems, etc.

This week, I was pretty happy not to be in Mozilla IT - they said what they've seen was more or less a "perfect storm" of different problems that made multiple services unavailable for some time and caused a lot of us quite some trouble in work. But still, I don't want to complain, this can happen as we have quite complex systems, hardware problems played into that, and AFAIK we are scaling up some capacities which can lead to bottlenecks and strange problems. The Mozilla IT team did manage to get things under control in a very organized and good manner, and I'm sure some of them didn't sleep well in those days. They put up a monster job and are probably working on making sure such things will not happen again. Their job is somewhat unthankful usually, as you only see when things go wrong, but usually not when things work perfectly, which is how they do most of the time.
We should thank those people at chance we get, as without the infrastructure and services they are managing, our project could not exist and work as well as it does. They are the spine that keeps Mozilla upright and stable on our way into the future of the web. We should be grateful for that.