The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 34/2008 (August 18 - 24, 2008):

• Build System Work:
  Now that we have our own build system in comm-central, I worked on keeping up with build system changes.
  It's easy to lose track of the files we're packaging into our installers, zips and tarballs, so I added a package-compare build target that does a diff of files listed in the package manifest and the dist/bin directory. I also did a first set of packaging fixes based on the findings of those diffs.
• Build/Test Machines:
  I added the setting to correct tinderbox parsing of unit test logs, tried to get leak thresholds to work for the mochitests and added a build step to builders to report the package diffs.
• xpfe Cleanup:
  The huge patch for cleaning up xpfe/ could land, all but one file of xpfe/global and xpfe/communicator are gone from from mozilla-central. I have one more patch to complete what can be cleaned up there now and filed bugs for killing both MOZILLA_LOCALE_VERSION and MOZ_XUL_APP - the former is old and now unneeded, the latter is the default with nothing else supported any more, so we can remove all code only used when it's unset and then remove the flag itself.
• L10n:
  Even though we don't have localized builds for trunk yet, I added lt and pt-BR to all-locales. They'll get included once we get L10n builds from comm-central.
• Various Discussions:
  client.py improvements, compare-locales, comm-central build system ownership, shell service UI, release schedules, more bmo reorg, etc.

The bugzilla.mozilla.org reorganization has been done during the Mozilla Summit, we now have a "SeaMonkey" product there, and I posted about new queries for SeaMonkey bug triage - please help us to get those sorted out, especially the UNCONFIRMED bugs and the ones in the "General" component need immediate work, in the longer term it would be nice to also clean out the huge list of really old bugs.
Every bugs the gets resorted to the right component or resolved counts, as it makes the real issues easier to find for the developers - thanks for your help on that work!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 33/2008 (August 11 - 17, 2008):

• Vacation Catch-Up:
  I spent a huge amount of time this week catching up on things that happened during my vacation and partly the Mozilla Summit, am done with all my digging through bugmail, newsgroups, planet, pushlogs and most of the normal email and started some real work again.
• Mercurial Move Followup:
  Catching up my the pushlog feeds on the mozilla buildsystem files we've copied in modified ways to comm-central, I ported recent fixes to our versions already, with more under review.
  Additionally, --disable-compile-environment should work now (used in some L10n docs).
• Build/Test Machines:
  I've made a patch that should allow us to have our unit test boxes go green even though we have known leaks. We'll set thresholds to allow the current amounts of leaks without failure so we at least reliably catch when leaks increase. We'll adapt those thresholds values as possible when leaks get fixed, so that we'll hopefully only go down but not up with what we allow.
  We're also working on getting Justin Wood (Callek on IRC) access to our build machines, so that he can act as a backup when I'm not around (like recently, when they broke while I was on vacation).
• Bugzilla's SeaMonkey Product:
  Now that the big bugzilla.mozilla.org reorganization has been done and we have a product named "SeaMonkey", we still need to see that component info gets updated and missing components are created.
  Also, we have new bug triage targets and would like people to participate in killing off and/or improving our bug reports!
• xpfe Cleanup:
  With the new situation of only toolkit applications being based on trunk, I started work on cleaning up xpfe/ again, the first patch removes all but one file of xpfe/global and xpfe/communicator from mozilla-central.
• German L10n:
  I worked on resyching the German hg repo with hg trunk code together with my de team colleagues, along with fixing linebreak error made obvious by the new MozillaTranslator version and a typo.
  Also, I could verify that the existing Makefile targets produce working German langpacks and tarballs for SeaMonkey - I hope we'll have the buildbot infrastructure soon to do automated localized SeaMonkey builds again.
• Various Discussions:
  Message view pane, separate DOM inspector repo in hg, planning of upcoming milestones and releases, SeaMonkey Status Meeting, etc.

As a fun side project, I have started work on a new version of my old "Mandelbrot" application I did for my final paper in school, back then in Visual Basic. The application renders images of the Mandelbrot set fractal, the original application had nice zoom functionality and could even render the very similarly calculated family of Julia set fractals.
The difference this time is that this is a XULRunner application, rendering images into a <canvas> HTML element.
After getting rid of a number of early bugs in my code, this is (a thumbnail of) the first image I rendered with the color palette I ported from my old code:

The application is still quite primitive and unfortunately the JavaScript/canvas combination isn't the fastest way to do the math and paint the picture - the default 300x300 overview picture currently takes ~90 seconds of one of my Conroe cores being busy until it displays. When I get farther down the road with what I want from this app, I probably will open-source the code under the tri-license. This is mainly an educational project for me to learn how to do such a XULRunner app. Don't expect a finished app and/or something to try out yourself too soon though, this is just a fun side project - my main focus is of course on SeaMonkey!

Here's a very very late summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 30/2008 (July 21 - 27, 2008):

• SeaMonkey & Thunderbird on Mercurial:
  The switch to Mercurial was the big story of that week, including the new comm-central build system. Everything has worked fine, SeaMonkey's build machines were updated smoothly, unit test machines are a bit bumpier and still see test failures due to new code in 1.9.1 that we didn't have on cvs trunk before.
  I also reviewed a couple of followups on client.py and did a few related changes after the switch myself.
• SeaMonkey on Maemo:
  This was just a fun thing to try out and is not a project we have plans to follow up with, but I've done a Maemo build an could actually run SeaMonkey on my N810! Even if there are some slight problems around there, I find SeaMonkey's ChatZilla more usable on it than the Pidgin IRC client adapted for that platform.
• L10n:
  As mentioned before, lost L10n builds on SeaMonkey trunk for the time being with the switch to Mercurial. We're planning to reinstate them as soon as the new processes for 1.9.1 are in place and we can adopt them.
• Various Discussions:
  Mozilla Summit, Mercurial move, etc.

Sorry for this arriving that late, but I didn't get around to doing it when I was preparing for or at the Mozilla Summit, and of course not in vacation.
The Summit itself was a very successful event, mainly of connecting with people and meeting people face-to-face that I only knew the names of or had email/IRC/bugzilla contact before. The sessions were also interesting, though there were too many things I would have wanted to be at in parallel. Oh, and we had a very fruitful, long and late breakout session about release automation on Mercurial, the processes that will be set up will be made in a way that they can work with Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Sunbird from the beginning. Thanks to the MoCo build & release team for including us there and making this possible.
I'm still digging through lots of backlog from those two weeks, so expect it to take some time still until I'm back to normal reaction times on whatever issues are out there.
And yes, the first alpha is definitely nearing, target is early to mid September now, nearly in sync with Thunderbird 3 beta 1.