The roads I take...

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 11/2012 (March 12 - 18, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Improved readability of the Stability Dashboard.
  Updated versions reported on the dashboard and my custom reports to take into account the Firefox source uplifts / releases done this week.
  Fixed a long-going detection bug of "Firefox 4+" in my custom Flash reports.
  Discussed about and then filed a bug on Camino's way forward with Socorro.
  Reviewed some Socorro design/implementation work, e.g. on indicating startup crashes or url lists.
  Discussed formulae for explosiveness detection, will need to convert mine to something the team can work with.
  Investigated a spiking topcrash, finding out it's probably related to downloads in some way.
  Discussed remaining priorities for Q1 with the Socorro team and created a first draft of a Q2 priorities list.
  As every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Landed the fix to my fix for the Data Manager test failure in time for the aurora merge, and landed a merged patch on beta.
  Reviewed Neil's patch for Data Manager content blocker permissions and found it to almost be there.
  Discussed Neil's patch for finalizing the Download Manager query and determined that the add-on needs an equivalent.
• German L10n:
  Posted a call for help on German product L10n, discussed with the current community and possible volunteers about it and posted again about useful resources for those future German localizers.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Planet Mozilla / Code of Conduct, SecureEmail, H.264 and Mozilla, permission/security model proposals for B2G, proposed download manager API changes, ARMv6 work, pwn2own and the Firefox release, new module requests, etc.

I spent a lot of time in the last few days getting my new HP laptop set up, and am pretty satisfied so far, esp. when it comes to running Linux on it, but I had a couple of WTFs with Windows. First, this machine has a 128 GB SSD as its only internal disk, and in the default setup it came with, Windows 7 took slightly over 40 of those, 20 more taken by a recovery and a HP tools partition, so roughly half of the drive space was not available for use in that default configuration! I couldn't find good clues on how I could shrink down the existing Windows installation (all the tools and software installed were not really that big after all), and given that HP had sent a 32bit and a 64bit Windows system DVD with the package, I wiped the SSD completely and did set up (openSUSE) Linux first, which worked like a charm and could run all the hardware out of the box - and everything is incredibly fast, compared to my previous, roughly 4-year-old machine. When I installed Win7 64bit from the DVD, it again took more space than expected, with somewhat over 20 GB for the system alone and that when it didn't even find drivers for the vast majority of the hardware, including Ethernet and WiFi, (Iron Lake) graphics, or the USB 3 ports. It took me lots of searching, using a USB stick to get network drivers onto the machine, and more searching for stuff like disabling hibernation and page files to get that secondary system to work reasonably and use a somewhat acceptable amount of disk space. While a full-fledged (64-bit) Linux with all kinds of applications takes a bit over 5 GB of space now, I could get Windows 7 Professional 64-bit down to slightly under 20 GB only with a real lot of searching around. Well, at least it works now for the occasional Firefox testing or even playing Age of Empires II (after again searching around how to get its colors fixed, which requires strange workarounds like killing Windows Explorer).
I remember when it was hard to get Linux to work decently and Windows was fine and problem-less (well, it was never small, though), esp. with new hardware it was sometimes hard to get Linux to work decently at all while it was easy to get stuff up on Windows. I must admit that the times have visibly changed. So, when did they say the year of the Linux desktop was coming?