The roads I take...

I finally managed to get my photos from last October's trip to California sorted out to a smaller "best of" collection that I also find useful for putting up in a public web gallery.



And as I was traveling with a DSLR and a zoom lens for the first time, I finally could take some shots I couldn't with just the pocket camera in previous vacations.



Not enough with that, though: I got invited to Mozilla's all-hands event taking place in the first week of April in Mountain View!



This means I'll be back to California quite soon, flying off next Saturday, April 2. For everyone who wants to meet up with me, I'll stay the week after the all-hands for some chance for additional work (meetings) but also some fun, so contact me if you want to meet up then!



And else, have fun taking a look at the pics!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 11/2011 (March 14 - 20, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Worked with the CrashKill team through the bugs for new reports I have filtered out and assigned some priorities for those in the group, so we can go over those with the Socorro team on the all-hands.
  Replied to and summarized feedback I got on what users want from Socorro, put all that onto a wiki page and started writing up some of my thoughts on prioritizing work.
  Regularly generated "explosiveness" reports locally and uploaded them, looking at some signatures it brought up leaded to some bugs reports and catching one or the other item that might have slipped our view usually.
  I also filed a bug on improving correlation reports as those currently externally generated reports have a few weaknesses that could be mitigated when fully integrating them into the actual system.
• Build System:
  I created a patch to make removed-files L10n-aware so we don't leave over locale files on updates.
  Another issue I had been thinking about for some time is installing built-in extensions into the profile, which will finally make the update story for ChatZilla, venkman and DOM Inspector a clean story. If a newer version is shipped in SeaMonkey, it will overwrite the version in the profile, if AMO offers a newer version (and the user doesn't have updates disabled), we'll update to that one.
  In addition, I did some reviews for patches from Callek on SeaMonkey build infrastructure.
  Oh, and I landed Edmund's patch for the removed-files updates we found after extensively testing updates to SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 2 earlier - thanks for working on this one!
• Search Bar and OpenSearch Engine Manager:
  I created a bug and patch for backporting searchbar/enginemanager fixes to Firefox, so both sides profit from this work.
• Data Manager:
  Invested some time into integrating the forget function for web storage panel in Data Manager (so far untested) and also did some work on reacting to live changes, but that item is not so easy due to different data types in this one panel.
• Themes:
  Did some testing of LCARStrek for Firefox 4 in my new virtualbox Win7 installation, so that I can see how it behaves with the "Firefox button". Clearly needs some more work, as I thought.
• German L10n:
  One more update for trunk SeaMonkey changes, including my own searchbar and OpenSearch engine manager additions.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Firefox 4 RC respin, future release system for Firefox, SeaMonkey planning and build hardware, drivers for my new bleeding-edge hardware, Firefox 4 Mobile going for RC, MeeGo N900 DE team forming, potentially merging mobile-browser with mozilla-central, etc.

It's exciting times: Firefox 4 is being released tomorrow! This doesn't only mean the Mozilla project shipping a lot of the work that has been going on in the last year and more to the majority of users out there, it also means (due to a decision made today) that crash-stats will probably be processing more crash reports than ever before on a single day while this release actually should be more stable than its predecessors - and it also means that the platform SeaMonkey 2.1 builds upon is now officially regarded "stable" and "everything" for the project left to do is finishing up the work on the last SeaMonkey-specific pieces, ship Beta 3 and soon thereafter the release candidate that hopefully will just be converted to the actual final release!

Hmm, I'm almost out of breath after this last sentence (actually, just kidding) and still shivering of excitement. Let's cheer for tomorrow and for another great step in the Mozilla project!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 10/2011 (March 7 - 13, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  I did take a look into reports currently done by other people externally and filed bugs to get them into Socorro itself, as well as some others we talked about in a CrashKill team meeting.
  In addition, I moved most of the wiki content I produced over to a CrashKill Plan page on the Mozilla wiki, where it has a better place than on my own property.
  To get wider input, I posted my blog entry on "What Should crash-stats Do For You?" on the newsgroups and mailing lists as well and got some good replies, which I still need to take a deeper look at.
  Again, part of my time went into work on "explosiveness" reports, which I can now automatically generate on my local machine and experimentally publish on my test website.
  Next to this, I spent some time talking about and understanding what's going on with crashes we are tracking for different releases, so that I get more familiar with the work going on in this team.
• Search Bar and OpenSearch Engine Manager:
  I'm very happy I could land my probably last major SeaMonkey patch on adding optional search bar patch as well as an engine manager for OpenSearch.
• Themes:
  I once again worked a bit on keeping EarlyBlue and LCARStrek in line with trunk development and making the latter fit for Firefox 4 at some point.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Firefox 4 RC, future release system for Firefox, RC1 crashes, SeaMonkey planning, drivers for my new bleeding-edge hardware, Discovery coming home for good, etc.

My favorite real-world "space ship", the Discovery, landed this week for the last time from a successful major mission. I bow my head in the light of this incredible machine flying 39 times to Earth orbit and not only bringing up a huge quantity of items and people but also bringing back more cargo and astronauts than any other vessel has and will for a very long time.
Still, I had my own "last major" milestone this week, in this case for SeaMonkey, landing the optional search bar and the OpenSearch engine manager ion the tree. There's one large difference here, though: While the Space Shuttle program is ending and the future of human spaceflight programs (in- and outside NASA) is unclear at best, the SeaMonkey project is going on fine, on the way to a major step with the 2.1 release, and it will also go on well and thrive in the future. I'm still helping to ensure this will be the case, and I see myself as just having laid foundation for a few things so other people can build great things upon them!

When I added OpenSearch support for SeaMonkey 2.1 a few months ago, there was one thing I knew wasn't complete: We had no management UI for removing OpenSearch engines again, or even setting search keywords. Also, there was this request that had come up rarely, but still repeatedly, that a "search bar" in Firefox style should be available to add to the toolbar - even if not present there by default.

And after porting all the OpenSearch integration code, this was not incredibly hard any more, it was mostly copying over the Firefox search bar and engine manager code (the latter is available from the former, so they're slightly tied together) and then fitting it into SeaMonkey (and even cleaning them up a little, which I will backport to Firefox again).

And this is how it looks in my test build (and nightlies starting tomorrow) with the search bar customized in:



Of course, as stated before, this additional box is hidden by default, but a right click on any free area in the toolbars and selecting "Customize..." will allow you to drag it into the active set.

Today, for the official sixth anniversary of the SeaMonkey project (see last year's anniversary article), it fits well that this patch did land on the comm-central tree and very probably marks the last major work I land for SeaMonkey as I'm transitioning to new challenges.

I'd like to thank everyone who has patiently reviewed all those large porting patches I did, trying to get some of the heavy lifting done to bring the SeaMonkey suite into the 21st century - which I think the upcoming 2.1 release and its currently available betas do and will demonstrate beautifully.

It's been a pleasure and I'm happy I could contribute a number of important pieces of work to this still thriving and now even reasonably modern Internet suite with bleeding edge support of web innovations like a lot of HTML5 and CSS3. Who would have thought 6 years ago that this project would come to where it is today?

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 09/2011 (February 28 - March 6, 2011):

• Build system:
  Went through reviews for the l10n.mk patch from Callek - apparently he's fully getting into living his new position in charge of build and release operations at SeaMonkey.
  I slightly assisted in getting 2.0.12 out the door, but didn't have much actual time left to spend on it.
• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  I blogged for getting input on what crash-stats users want so that I can help getting those issues into focus.
  A lot of my time went into work on getting a measure for "explosiveness" of crashes so we can spot those that are significantly on the rise even faster in the future. I now have an algorithm I think looks good, we need to do more testing on real data, though.
  I've also looked into a few other areas and had some planning talks with other "crashkill" people, and I personally think we as the Mozilla/Firefox community need to take a very close look on what's happening with malware these days, as more and more crash reports sound related to such issues.
• Search Bar and OpenSearch Engine Manager:
  Addressed the review comments on the optional search bar patch and improved it significantly, but it looks like we're not all done yet. Not sure when I can look into more things to be done there.
• German L10n:
  One more time, I synched up the German localization with SeaMonkey trunk.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  More good Mozilla people seeking new challenges, SeaMonkey planning, Firefox getting an RC ready, assembling my new desktop system and trying to deal with drivers not being yet up to speed with this bleeding edge hardware, etc.

The list might not look that big, but I have been through a number of quite intense work sessions this week, esp. on the "explosiveness" and searchbar items, and I hope a lot of good will come out of both!

I have blogged recently about my contract to help in the area of crash reporting. Specifically, I am trying to help the Socorro team (which works on the crash-stats system) by gathering and presenting the engineering needs and use cases for reports and features that help us analyze trends and find and diagnose problems quickly. I'm not on the Socorro team myself but on the CrashKill team, which makes sure that the most important stability problems in Firefox actually get addressed. I will work closely with the Socorro team to ensure that they have what they need to implement some of these features and understand their priorities so they can find the right place on their roadmap. Understanding what crash-stats users need helps ensure we ship as stable as possible Firefox releases.

In this context, if you are using the crash-stats system, I would like your input; What are some of the use cases you run into most often? I'd be interested in hearing from developers, QA, release manager, etc. What questions are you trying to answer from crash-stats?

I will be going through many of the items currently in bugzilla and helping to prioritize them as well as put together detailed specs. Helping determine the criteria for detecting explosive crashes is one issue I am currently working on. If you think of additional reports that would be useful, please make sure there are bugs filed (under Webtools/Socorro) and CC me so I can understand the requests and help to get them in the development pipeline.

Thank you!