The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2011 (January 24 - 30, 2011):

• Build Infrastructure:
  Worked with Callek some more on buildbot migration fallout resolution while he got 2.0.12 builds done.
  I also helped investigating and discussing some omni.jar switch fallout.
• Jökulsárlón Download Manager:
  I did some more work on Jökulsárlón Download Manager, putting in some suggested fixes, and making list loading more stable and more usable. This culminated in version 0.3 now being available on AMO.
• Data Manager:
  I discovered a slight bug with international domain names (IDN) in the Data Manager search, and created a patch for that, which meanwhile has landed in SeaMonkey trunk.
  In addition, I started investigating the largest open work item I have on my plate for this feature: adding a web storage panel. Die to the still rare usage, all of application cache, DOM Storage (global/localStorage), and indexDB will be listed in that panel, and some of those have clumsy mechanics to get what I need there, so it's not as easy as I hoped so far, and I made less progress than I hoped, but I hope I can get to something useful soon.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I went through the pending sign-offs for the next beta on the L10n dashboard, accepted or rejected them as possible or necessary, and in the process wrote up a sign-off check list for documentation on what I'm looking at there.
• FOSDEM:
  In preparation for the FOSDEM conference coming up this weekend, I prepared a first version of the slides for my talk about In-tab UI in the Mozilla DevRoom.
  This topic as well as my whole presence on this conference will not be SeaMonkey-centered, but I hope to meet some fellow SeaMonkey community members as well as a whole lot of Mozillians and people from other projects there.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Ongoing graphics driver instabilities, more Fennec testing on the N900, fighting wiki spam, getting SeaMonkey future going, thinking about my own future plans, FOSDEM, Firefox Betas, getting the JS engine fixed for SeaMonkey browser-chrome tests, Firefox 4 UI, etc.

Jens has made his "InvisibleSmiley" quite visible when he landed built-in Sync support in SeaMonkey trunk in the last days of the week, which now makes exchange of all browser data like bookmarks, history, form data, tabs, etc. easy between different installations of SeaMonkey, Firefox, and even mobile Firefox - and you can even access your browser data on an iPhone with the "Firefox Home" app (just see "Firefox" and "SeaMonkey" as more or less synonyms when it comes to Sync, the service is operated and written by Mozilla primarily for Firefox, but SeaMonkey is just using exactly the same code)!
With this and having some testing of the nightlies that followed this landing, we should be ready for doing a SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 2 very soon now and probably will get it going this week still, with a large number of improvements since the first beta.
I'm also looking forward to meet as many Mozillians and people from other communities as possible at FOSDEM in Brussels!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2011 (January 17 - 23, 2011):

• Build Infrastructure:
  The omnijar patch got reviews and could land, so SeaMonkey is now using that packaging format, which should make startup faster. I reviewed a fix for Windows builds as I did use a suboptimal way of deleting a directory.
  We saw L10n repack failures after this landing, I tracked them down to a missed part of the patch and ported that as well.
  I also fixed a slight glitch on our Linux64 buildslave by removing an old version of buildbot from it.
  Callek started the release run for our upcoming 2.0.12 update, we expected some fallout from the recent buildbot 0.8 switch and promptly saw some, I helped him detect and solve problems.
  I also filed a bug on shipping built-in extensions in a better way, but nobody has picked that one up yet.
• Places, Zoom:
  The patch for making the fast bookmark button async could land together with the earlier fix for bookmark roots which I had ported, as well as the one on contentprefs caching for zoom.
• Mandelbrot:
  The new version of my Mandelbrot add-on was submitted to AMO and got reviews now, so it's available for everyone's pleasure.
• Themes:
  I did some more routine update work on my EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes, but there's more to do there.
• German Localization:
  Once again updated the suite L10n to current trunk, and also fixed a few typos, including one that sounded suspiciously like Austrian dialect. One time, it would still be fun to create a dialect Firefox...
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Ongoing graphics driver instabilities, more Fennec testing on the N900, expanding wiki articles on my ideas, getting SeaMonkey future going, thinking about my own future plans, FOSDEM, Firefox Betas, getting the JS engine fixed for SeaMonkey browser-chrome tests, Firefox testing infrastructure, etc.

This was a busy week, with the omnijar landing being an important step to keep SeaMonkey in line with what Firefox and Thunderbird are doing on trunk to have reasonable startup speed. There might still be some smaller fallout from it, so please continue to test esp. updates from builds before January 19th to builds after that date, we might have a few things we still need to fix there.
Other that that, SeaMonkey 2.1 is coming together nicely, and we should be ready to cut the second beta soon, as the Sync UI is coming close to being ready to land. Once that has happened and nightlies with it look fine, we'll build beta 2, which will come very close to final in terms of the feature set.

This Tuesday, I landed "omnijar" being used for SeaMonkey, which greatly reduces the number of files installed on users' machines by putting a large amount of all the UI and other things the application needs into a single zipped-up file called "omni.jar" (Firefox and Thunderbird also have switched to that recently). As most of those contents need to be read on every launch of the application, and opening files is costly in the operating systems, this step should improve startup time of SeaMonkey starting with today's nightlies and the upcoming SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 2.
We're also shipping all built-in extensions as XPI files inside the extensions folder of the application now, which more or less is the equivalent to the omni.jar method but for add-ons.

If you're building your own versions of SeaMonkey, note that this is switched on by default and you need to clobber your objdir to make builds work correctly after this switch. You should be able to turn this off with the --enable-chrome-format=jar (or any other chrome format you used before) option, which might make things easier for developing but gives you a different and probably slower build than what we ship to testers and users from now on.

Please make us aware of any problem you're seeing, e.g. with updates, which we tried to make work fine, but could not test before landing this switch.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2011 (January 10 - 16, 2011):

• Build Infrastructure:
  I finally landed two patches for the general Mozilla buildbot system which had been running locally on the SeaMonkey infrastructure, so that I could update that one to plain trunk of the buildbotcustom repo, which in turn applied a fix to a smaller glitch we saw.
• Data Manager:
  The patch to improve workflow when showing only one data type got reviews and could land on SeaMonkey trunk.
• Places, Zoom:
  I updated the patch for making the fast bookmark button async so it could get reviewed.
  Also, I ported a small patch on contentprefs caching for zoom and got reviews on that as well.
• Mandelbrot:
  On the weekend, I put a good amount of work into updating my Mandelbrot add-on to work better in Firefox 4 Mobile and switched it to in-content UI and using a panel instead of its own window for image settings. A new add-on release should be up for review on AMO soon, but I first need to test in older versions of Firefox and SeaMonkey.
• Themes:
  My EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes received a few more updates again as well due to glitches and tester feedback.
• German Localization:
  Another update for suite and DOMi localizations went in, but for the former, there seems to be some more work open again.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Ongoing graphics driver instabilities, Fennec testing on the N900, thoughts on my next experimental projects, making the future move forward for myself and SeaMonkey, FOSDEM, omnijar reviews, OSM/SotM-EU, Firefox Betas, etc.

As I found it problematic to have all kinds of ideas floating around in my head or sometimes on loose sheets of paper, I finally decided to get my own wiki going to keep all kinds of ideas, concepts, and other notes in a consistent place. And there are already some there that would seek implementations and might make up nice projects for someone to pick up (I definitely have too many ideas to implement them all, but it would be nice to play some part of the projects on a concept level).

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2011 (January 3 - 9, 2011):

• Themes:
  I worked on updating my EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes for where Mozilla 2.0 and SeaMonkey 2.1 work is right now, and started on porting the latter one to current Firefox 4 as well, I hope I'll find time to finish that one up reasonably (though it's hard for me to test a few things, esp. all the stuff that's supposed to paint in the title bar, as we only do that on Vista and Win7, and I don't have access to either of those OSes).
• Various Discussions:
  Ongoing graphics driver instabilities, playing around with the N900, including Firefox 4 Mobile and MeeGo 1.1.80, thoughts on my next experimental projects, Firefox 4 Beta driving discussions, missing nightly updates on 1.9.1 branch, future options for myself and SeaMonkey, new bookmarks system of SM 2.1, form history management, Firefox Qt builds, etc.

I spent most of this week following what's going on, taking part in some discussions, celebrating my dad's birthday, as well as spending some time having fun and relaxing with my parents. With that, I should have "filled up my batteries" enough now to go energized into this new year and take on the challenges that wait for me there. I intend to master the transition of myself as well as the SeaMonkey project into settings that will carry us forward into the at least near, possibly even far future.
And I'm eager to see Firefox 4 Desktop, Firefox 4 Mobile, and SeaMonkey 2.1 hit the markets in the next weeks to months!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 52/2010 (December 27, 2010 - January 2, 2011):

• Build Infrastructure:
  Our 64bit graph posting failures are fixed now after IT fixed production entries this week, so all purple on our boxes is gone.
• Various Discussions:
  Ongoing graphics driver instabilities, fixed mobile problems by getting an N900, thoughts on my next experimental projects, Thunderbird prefs, etc.

This was another very quiet week for me work-wise, still spending a significant amount of time at home with my parents, celebrating the arrival of 2011 - and last not least playing around a real lot with the really nice N900 device I just acquired. The current week will also be one of being offline a lot, I'll only get back into full work next week.

I have mentioned in recent weeks that the touchscreen on my N810 stopped working (I could track it down to a problem with the ribbon coming out of the screen, right adjacent to its plug to the main ribbon, but that's nothing I can really fix) and so I have been looking for getting some kind of replacement for the usual tasks I performed on that device - mainly using ssh to get into other machines, do GPS tracking/mapping and accessing the web.

Now, I value the openness of the Maemo OS2008 system on the N810, as it's a full Linux that easily lets you have root access and install whatever you want on the device - even alternate operating systems if you wish to do so. Compared to that, even Android is a closed system (not to mention iOS or WinMobile). The Nokia N900 already came out in 2009 with the next version of the OS, Maemo 5, but that was some time ago, and meanwhile MeeGo had been announced as Maemo's successor (with the same level of openness) and new devices with that were originally expected for late 2010, so I had been waiting for those to jump to the new generation immediately, being eager to test MeeGo and Firefox 4 Mobile (which isn't available for the N810 any more).

Well, with the N810 problems and the delays in getting MeeGo handset versions ready and therefore the delay in the new devices becoming available, I finally settled for trying to get a used N900 from eBay - and I finally did win an auction for one at just 177 Euros. Not fully trusting private-to-private remote transactions, I didn't really want to believe it though until I finally had it in my hands a few days ago.

At first, I was a bit weary to do too much on Maemo 5 (and even more to use it as a phone), as I'd really like to go testing MeeGo, which has images for N900 available, but I figured I first should see how well the device itself works with the system it comes with. I updated the system to its latest release (which made it go into some strange start-install-and-reboot loop and had me actually flash it with the new version) and look for the application I liked to install, Mappero and Firefox being among them. And I even tried to get over the data from both the N810 and my Symbian phone, which worked fairly well (though getting SMS messages over required some fiddling with community-provided tools).

Once I tried and put the SIM card from my phone over into the N900, I realized I really can use the new device for that purpose as well - even though a few smaller improvements of the contact app would be helpful. Still, it works better than I expected. Even Firefox 4 Mobile (beta) works well - it's not very fast at startup but I expected it to be worse, and it performs reasonably well even with multiple "tabs" for being a full browser with all web-facing features that desktop Firefox 4 has.

All in all, for being more than a year old technology, this device still holds up better in comparison to the current generation that I would have expected, and it completely grew on me even in the just two days since I put it into full use. OK, it has some slightly rough edges, but I'm both used to doing beta testing (which this doesn't feel like, actually) and using very open Linux-based systems.

Oh, and I figured that while playing (Open!) Dune II is not that comfortable with a touch screen (but fun on a mobile device) it's absolutely awesome to play tuxrace with the accelerometer controls!