The roads I take...

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 21/2011 (May 23 - 29, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  I filed a couple of bugs on plugins info in detailed crash reports and display what plugin crashed - I hope those will lead to helping us some day.
  As always, I continued to look into rising crashes with my experimental stats.
  Along with that, I had some planning talks with my team and manager, and I/we looked into the crash stats for the new Firefox beta channel builds. I hope they'll come around to be less crashy than Firefox 4 in the end when they get released.
  To fill the gap of not having stats for the different Beta builds specifically, I wrote up some scripts of my own to provide some preliminary analysis.
• Firefox cleanup patches:
  My places library cleanup as well as search code and sidebar cleanup patches landed on mozilla-central after the uplift to Aurora, but they're at least in the Nightly builds now.
• Data Manager:
  A small patch for resizing the window came along, which I promptly reviewed - thanks for the help there!
• SeaMonkey Build & Release:
  I filed a bug to get featured search engines to work for SeaMonkey 2.1, and also looked into the bugs to get that category beefed up a bit and personas added on AMO for the 2.1 release.
  For the new release channels on the L10n dashboard, I did a small fix across central, aurora and beta so that could be set up correctly - and I reviewed the patch for getting buildbot run the new channels, Callek is doing good work there.
  On the 2.1 release, I helped a bit in investigating a problem we saw with build 1 for RC2, I hope we can sort those problems out soon (mostly with L10n repacks and updates messing up optional extensions on Windows). In addition, I gathered some more data for potential b2->final updates for languages that didn't ship in b3.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I continued to look into sign-offs for 2.1 as long as RC2 isn't shipped, so we can ship the newest work localizers have there.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  JS PGO and crashes, 5.0b2 data, SeaMonkey preparing for jump onto moving trains, JS debugger future, nightly->aurora uplift, build/test turnaround speeds, go/no-go-decisions, web application runtimes and memory usage, MeeGo N900 DE becoming somewhat usable, etc.

Builds are coming along nicely, even though SeaMonkey 2.1 hit a snag with those update and repack problems we caught in release verifications. As Callek's time is short and mine even shorter, we couldn't fully address the issues yet, but he has potential patches for most of the problems and should spin further builds soon, hopefully 2.1 will actually happen then.
Meanwhile, builds against aurora and beta branches are being generated for SeaMonkey as well, though no daily or beta builds from those are available yet. Those will come once 2.1 has been dealt with.
For Firefox, while new Aurora builds haven't been in the wild this week yet and we'll only see crash stats for them the just-started week, we had some interesting analysis of the first real Beta channel builds already, and their crash rate isn't yet where we want it, but we got some interesting analysis out of them to work on improvements. I hope those will work out and we'll see Firefox 5 beat the stability of 4 in the end.

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 19/2011 (May 9 - 15, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  This was the first week of working full-time for Mozilla - and I now have secured kairo -at- mozilla.com as an email alias for me.
  I filed a bug for getting the new channel and duplicate info available in the CSVs that e.g. my experimental "explosiveness" reports are based on.
  Of course, I continued to look into crashes that those reports turned up, making sure those are reported and looked into if possible.
  Discussed the topic of topcrashers per build (and not just per version), possibly more things we need with the new beta setup.
• SeaMonkey Build System:
  Some more review and coordination work going along with Callek producing 2.1 final (as RC1 for now).
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  More looking into sign-offs for 2.1 and problematic locales for 2.1, while Callek went to do a build2.
• German L10n:
  Updated website for SeaMonkey 2.1 RC 1, including relnotes, and sent announcements for it.
• Themes:
  Even more work on getting LCARStrek to work with Firefox 4.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Socorro throttling by channel, hyphenation dictionaries and download sizes, 5.0b1 data, L10n and jumping onto moving trains, mozilla-random/-stagig, Firefox 3.5 EOL plan, go/no-go-decisions, web application runtimes and memory usage, MeeGo N900 DE testing, etc.

We're surely in exciting times, things around me at least are moving fast nowadays - from devoting my full work time to one of the most amazing (or awesome?) organizations in this world via my friends at SeaMonkey shipping the release candidate for the final 2.1 version (and hoping it can be converted to the final release straight away once it's tested enough) to the new fast release process really taking off with the next "train" about to leave and the "beta" channel starting to get populated with post-4.0 builds. And great stuff landing on the trees for those next versions as well! I'm in the middle of progress and innovation for the Open Web - and I love it!

And dear reader, don't forget to support all that by testing Aurora and/or SeaMonkey 2.1 (current in RC)!

Roughly three months ago, I blogged about contracting for Mozilla, and that 3-month half-time contract has actually ended last week. But my work for Mozilla has just started, as that contract has been extended by 6 months of full time!

I've now also gained a real @mozilla.com account and can regard myself as a real part of the Mozilla workforce now. I'm looking forward on more analysis of crashes on one hand, of areas where we need better crash stats on the other hand, along with finding out specs of what exactly we need there and trying to drive and accompany those to completion. That basically means I'm continuing what I did in the last months, but with even more intensity.

As the internal phonebook has a freeform field for a job description, I've been thinking a lot recently what I should put in there (left it blank for the moment) and as I've putting most of my work into investigating surrounding of crashes and the scenes of crash analysis, I'm more and more leaning toward "Crash Scene Investigator - CSI:Mozilla", what do you think?

Whatever exact wording I put in there, I think I found an interesting corner in this project to work on, with a lot of interaction with other people int he project, just as I like it, and I'm proud of helping to improve the stability of Firefox and reduce frustration for hopefully a lot of people out there!

Update: The @mozilla.com account mentioned above is now reachable with "kairo" before the "@"!

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 18/2011 (May 2 - 8, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  More looking into fast-rising crashes - nicely, one high-ranking post-FF4 crash has been fixed on Nightly and Aurora now.
  Creating a presentation on "CSI:Mozilla" for the Linuxwochen Wien conference - I more and more tend to making "Crash Scene Investigator - CSI:Mozilla" my job title.
  Got my MoCo LDAP account running, still working on getting up to speed on everything.
• SeaMonkey Build System:
  Did some reviews on the way to 2.1 final.
• SeaMonkey Search:
  Landed my patch for linking Engine Manager in sidebar and prefs in time for 2.1 final, split off the hairy edge case as a separate bug.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Looked through the sign-offs for 2.1 and accepted those that were ready, worked with Callek to sort out the problematic ones.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Socorro throttling by channel, hyphenation landing and dictionaries, user notification project, 5.0b1, L10n for non-Firefox-desktop apps going onto the train model, Linux gcc 4.5 + PGO problems or not, MeeGo N900 DE testing, etc.

A lot of time this week went into me being at the largest annual local conference on Free and Open Source Software, Linuxwochen Wien. I talked to a lot of people about Mozilla and Firefox, our plans, my work, etc. - and did a presentation that included feature overviews of Firefox 4, 5 and 6 (as far as we know things right now), large projects in work for 7 and later, the new release process, and what we're doing in crash investigation. I hope I could do a bit to improve publicity for us there.

In other news, Callek has been working hard to finish up SeaMonkey 2.1 and get it to build, watch out for an announcement of a Release Candidate very soon!

Here's a short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 17/2011 (April 25 - May 1, 2011):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Looked into a bit of crash analysis, and mostly fixed my experimental explosive crash analysis, but not too much new was going on. The crashes on Trunk and Aurora had been mostly covered, but Aurora still has way too few users to be really useful.
  As the new Socorro version finally landed, we got some insight into its new features and I filed a bug on duplicates that Marcia observed.
• SeaMonkey Administrative Stuff:
  Tried to get more things moving forward to move my remaining responsibilities over to other people.
• SeaMonkey Search:
  Followed some review comments on my patch for linking Engine Manager in sidebar and prefs and should be able to get the main thing into 2.1 by avoiding the one hairy case.
• Data Manager:
  Reviewed a test patch after an addition of permissions to the default set made them fail.
• German L10n:
  I updated the German SeaMonkey website for 2.0.14 shipping and sent out announcements to German newsgroups.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  User notification project, 5.0b1, unprompted updates for users of EOLed Firefox releases, installer fix for optional extensions, comm-2.0 and mailnews, the (in)significance of version numbers in the new Firefox process, Linux gcc 4.5 + PGO landing, MeeGo N900 DE, etc.

Still recovering from a cold, I kept that week pretty light, but good things are happening nonetheless - for example, SeaMonkey is getting really close to cutting 2.1 builds, which will be "release candidate" for the moment, of course, but we hope those can just be converted to the actual final release as-is!
Also, it more and more looks as if SeaMonkey will chime in with the rapid release process and produce small but fast updates in the future, which also should get exciting. That may mean that 2.2 could have almost no visible changes to 2.1, but it will contain all web-facing changes that come with Firefox 5, and we'll be able to ship it just like a normal update to 2.1, so that the vast majority of people will "just get it" automatically.