The roads I take...

As I just came home from another planning meeting for it, I realize I should actually blog about this event as well.



Vienna, Austria, is hosting the first ever State Of The Map Europe conference ("SotM-EU") this July (15th-17th)!

This event will be a gathering point for a significant part of mainly (but not only) the European OpenStreetMap (OSM) community - at least of a number of "hard core" contributors who are willing to travel to and even pay for coming together in this way. We will have 2 main tracks with ~50 talks going on in three days, headed by keynotes coming from Steve Coast, the founder of OSM, and Muki Haklay, a London researcher.

If you're an OpenStreetMap contributor or heavily interested in the project and its dynamics and you have been looking for a good excuse to visit Vienna for a long time, here's your chance - Registration is open!
(Sorry, we need to charge a moderate registration fee as we're a non-profit and don't have nearly enough sponsoring to not make money a problem - hint: if you know a good sponsor, we could always need a few more.)

For now, I think I'm the only Mozillian on the attendees list - I'd hope that will change before the event actually takes place, given the common interest of our projects in open and innovative data on the Internet!

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 16/2011 (April 17 - 24, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Only some rough looks into crash analysis this week, and my experimental explosive crash analysis started to choke in some ways, all cause by instrumentation. From all I've seen, things stay pretty calm, though.
  Some catch-up on things I had left lying around in the last weeks (not too much work-related was in that stage, though).
  Met with CrashKill and Socorro team members to walk through our Q2 priority requests and see what they can meet.
• SeaMonkey Administrative Stuff:
  Worked some TODOs I had lying around and posted to a few people to forward some items to the team.
  Also filed bugs on improving the "Mozilla Trademark list" web page for SeaMonkey.
• SeaMonkey Search:
  Created a patch on linking Engine Manager in sidebar and prefs and put it up for review. Might need a bit more work, but shouldn't be too hard to still get onto the rolling 2.1 train.
• German L10n:
  I unfortunately had missed out on updating the German SeaMonkey website for 2.1 Beta 3 while I was in the US, so made that happen now.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Aurora, user notification project, SeaMonkey on 64bit Macs, unprompted updates for users of EOLed Firefox releases, extensions and performance, Firefox version numbers getting obsolete, MeeGo N900 DE Alpha, etc.

Most of this week was getting back home, catching up with backlogs from things I left behind when being in the US and then dealing with a cold that hit me in the latter part of the week. Thankfully, it was also a rather quiet week at Mozilla, probably because it was shortly after all-hands and Easter week as well, which some people seem to have user for getting off work for a bit. It's nice to see though that the recent week were also pretty calm in terms of crashes and Firefox 4.0.1 seems to be even a good improvement from 4.0 in that point as well, so I'm looking forward to many happy people on this really stable update. This would be even nicer if we didn't have malware and "security" software both crashing us in strange ways at times, but we're working with vendors of the latter at least to improve the situation (it's harder to work on the malware situation, though, and I keep thinking about it).

All in all, I seem to have mostly recovered from both my backlogs and the cold now, though, so I'm eager to get to more work!

That said, a talk of mine at the "Linuxwochen Wien" FLOSS conference in Vienna has been approved, on Saturday, May 7th, at 5pm, I will give a presentation on "What Happens When Firefox Crashes?" (Actually "Was passiert, wenn Firefox abstürzt?" as it will be in German) in their main track, just before the closing event. I hope I'll be able to give the audience some insights into how their crash report submissions get treated and analyzed by us and how they enable us to make their browser more stable.

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 15/2011 (April 11 - 17, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Did some analysis and even bug-filing of crashes that came up or started rising during all-hands or that week after it. Nothing too bad there, though, been a relatively quiet week in that area overall.
  Had some talks with people in the MV offices about possibly finding a way to communicate back to users who reported crashes when we are actually working on this, have fixed their specific crash pattern, or know a good workaround. A similar mechanism could be used for telling users about malware we have found loaded into the Firefox process.
  Filed a pair of bugs on making channel info available in crash reports, so we can filter on those where needed.
  Had a few talks with people working on Socorro on how we want certain things implemented, and even accidentally came to overhear and take part on some discussion on implementing a bug I filed (on comments in plugin/content crash reports). The beauty of sitting in the same office space with other coworkers showed itself nicely that week.
  Had some talks with other CrashKill team members and finalized our Q2 priority request list for the Socorro team so I could forward that.
• Build System:
  Did some reviews for that and the website, but nothing too large.
• Themes:
  Did some more work for LCARStrek on Firefox 4, but this one still needs even more work to be done.
• German L10n:
  Again did an updates of the localization to catch the added ChatZilla strings. With that, we should be complete for the 2.1 release.
  I also checked in a large help update from Michael to make us look even better for the upcoming 2.1 release.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  New release process ramping up with first Aurora merge, shadow landings, lots of marketing/background topics, SeaMonkey planning, MeeGo N900 DE discussions, etc.

Hey, I promise, I'll get better again on those! Seriously, this one is 6 days late, but I hope I'll have the one for this one tomorrow as it should be.

For the week this report is on, I spent Monday through Thursday of that week in Mozilla's offices in Mountain View, and I really saw how helpful it is to have coworkers directly around you, getting into talks and idea exchanges, clearing up some proposals and views in person so implementations can go forward more efficiently, doing meetings face to face to get to resolutions more effectively, and similar things. Unfortunately, after spending Friday and Saturday with some shopping and sightseeing, I needed to catch a plane back home to go back to the solitude of working from home. As nice as some aspects of working from your own apartment are, as a quite social, open, and - yes - talkative person, I have done it long enough now that I'd really prefer feeling "part of the family" by having other people around in a common office. Oh, and the fact that I love the USA of course helps a lot in feeling comfortable there in California - I mean, I can switch on normal TV and hear all about how the Spurs are doing and if NFL players and owners might find an agreement, and in the end, I find even the political discussions more interesting than those in Austria - but maybe I just have heard too much of ours already and you get equally tried of the US ones after a few years.

That said, Callek pushed out SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 3 late in the week before, make sure you check it out, as it's feature-complete, only needing some polish before it goes final. And if you're a localizer, note that it's now even in a string freeze, so this is a stable base to do your work to have your locale included in the final SeaMonkey 2.1 release, which should come very soon now!

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 12-14/2011 (March 21 - April 10, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Talked through some crash analysis workflows in a CrashKill team meeting to be able to explain those to the Socorro team on the all-hands.
  Refined my thoughts on prioritizing work somewhat.
  Regularly generated "explosiveness" reports locally and uploaded them, looked at signatures it brought up, filed bugs where needed, commented on others, tried to point some to the right people to get them fixed.
  Attended the Mozilla all-hands and discussed a lot of status and planning with a number of people in the CrashKill and Socorro teams as well as other Mozilla employees.
  Created wiki pages and filed bugs for some outcomes from all-hands discussions.
• Releases:
  Helped the SeaMonkey 2.0.13 release by getting the announcements out the door.
  Got the new 2.1b3 and 2.1pre versions up on crash-stats.
• Build System:
  I landed the patch for installing built-in extensions into the profile to make the update story for ChatZilla, venkman and DOM Inspector a clean story for end users. 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.
  SeaMonkey build and release infrastructure needed some more reviews, which I did, but knowledge about some of the newer stuff is quickly slipping out of my head - which is a good sign as it tells that I'm not really needed in the loop there any more.
  Got the train rolling again on new build machines for SeaMonkey.
  Had some discussions at the all-hands with Standard8, khuey, ted and others on how to go forward on the comm-central build system.
• Themes:
  Did some more updates to EarlyBlue and LCARStrek for SeaMonkey 2.1 and, for the latter, some more work to get it to run on Firefox 4.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Cared that L10n dashboard works for both the 2.1-targeted "branch" and the development trunk going forward.
  Signed off locales for the SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 3 release.
• German L10n:
  Did a number of updates of the localization to catch up with all the changes leading up to the L10n freeze for SeaMonkey 2.1, and completed those in time for the Beta 3 release.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Firefox 4 desktop and Firefox 4 mobile releases, future release process, SeaMonkey planning, getting for my new bleeding-edge hardware to work (or not), MeeGo N900 DE team, etc.

The last weeks leading up to and including the Mozilla all-hands were quite busy, sorry that I didn't get around to actually post those updates really weekly. It was just great to be here as a Mozilla contractor with so many people around and so many interesting sessions, demos and conversations going on. This is the kind of people I love working with and I hope this will continue in an even more intense working relationship in the future.

It's also really good to see that the SeaMonkey team could release 2.1 Beta 3 with practically no help from myself except for L10n sign-off and adding versions to Mozilla's web services. This shows how great the team is and that there's a lot of life in the project, no matter how deeply I'm involved or not.

For SeaMonkey testers, this is the time to try out 2.1 - all features are there, no more will be allowed, and we have a really cool product matching Firefox 4's web capabilities and bringing a really modern version of the suite to everyone. Please make sure bugs are filed or all problems you find - the team will look into fixing them, but is even happier, of course, if you are able to create a patch for those yourself!

And for localizers, this is the perfect time to get your locale in shape for SeaMonkey 2.1, as all strings are really hard-frozen, no changes any more until final release, which should come around in very few weeks!