The roads I take...

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2012 (January 16 - 22, 2012):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  The investigations of the Flash hang drop in Firefox 10 came out differently than what we liked - it looks like a UI change caused either people submitting fewer reports or sending of reports failing - in any case, we didn't improve code, but made us get less data to work with.
  After the last Socorro release and merging erroneous Java crash signatures into one, we finally got traction on the issue of properly reporting Java crashes and we'll have better signatures for them in the future.
  My custom reports for startup and per-device crashes are now working nicely (including weekly reports for devices) and listed on our CrashKill Reports page.
  Alerted people that the Banco do Brazil crash is back.
  Tried to get something moving on blocking Flash 10.0 but without success so far.
  Noticed that the growing amount of "ntdll.dll" crashes must be because of a symbol issue and pushed for getting that resolved.
  Alerted the Socorro team on timezone-related regressions and pushed for getting them resolved for the next update.
  And I helped the team with directions on what we'd like to see for a URL list for signatures.
  As usual, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• Firefox cleanup:
  After a long time, I now don't just have reviews on some cleanup patches for search bar and engine manager, but also some time to actually work on getting them pushed. After some try runs, I saw that the former parts cause some problem with accessibility tests, so I only pushed the latter. Even though engine manager might get obsoleted soon, this should improve the code for 12 at least - and I still have one patch open to improve and hopefully also get in. And I need to investigate the test failures of the search bar stuff some more, but there's at least some progress.
• Web apps:
  I fixed a dumb bug in Lantea Maps and it now works fine with touch events.
• German L10n:
  I finally did the rest of the needed L10n for the Mozilla 11 core and SeaMonkey 2.8, uplifted it to l10n-aurora and then did some more trunk L10n.
  While at that, I also did run the script to split Fennec L10n for Android and XUL on both -aurora and -central trees.
  On the translation of the "Mozilla Spaces" page, I chimed in with a few comments.
  And I tried to help with another community member stepping in to localize the next version of Firefox.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  GC scheduling fixes, SeaMonkey build infrastructure, B2G browser, Fennec UA, binary components, BrowserID and L10n, my tablet being fixed and testing Fennec (XUL for now) on it again, etc.

One thing I noticed this week again wasn't just that I was able to quite productive in the end, but also that people from the community hired by Mozilla (as employees or contractors) often don't work in the same roles as they did before and therefore may end up having less time to still have that community stuff working as well as it should. Also, there's some question on how much you can engage with the community or try out other stuff in Mozilla when you work full-time on one part - and are passionate enough to also get some stuff done in what should be your free time, at times. Some localizations, add-ons, and similar projects have been feeling this in recent years and have a hard(er) time surviving due to it. After all, some people claim that "real life" isn't a myth but does exist somewhere out there and it might be an interesting quest to find out about that as well.
I think, with the kind of organization Mozilla is, we might want to think about maybe giving our staff some possibility even in their paid time to engage in the community in roles that are not strictly their work area. Of course, this can be a hairy topic, so all I'm saying is that we might want to think about that - it's far from sure that there is a good solution to be had there, but maybe there is. In the end, the community with its many aspects is what makes Mozilla great and enables us to create products like Firefox that make the life of millions of people better (yes, Firefox started as a fun side project as well, IIRC).

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2012 (January 9 - 15, 2012):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Filed a bug on investigating why Flash hangs less in Firefox 10. It's awesome that we improved, but we would be happier knowing why we did.
  Filed another bug on some libxul addresses never being resolved as prefixlisting libxul can only be a wallpaper, the real bug lies deeper.
  Chimed in on another skiplist request that has different causes.
  Worked on new custom reports for startup crashes and per-device crash lists, which basically work now.
  In that work, found a configuration change that threatened our custom reports and dealt with it (I'm now setting umask in my reports directly, not in the crontab).
  Followed the Socorro 2.4 release work and deployment, which caused a dip in crash numbers on Friday, but it's better to have that now than somewhere near to a release where we need reliable stats every day.
  As usual, watching new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Followed our Parallels host going down unexpectedly and doing it again, this might be once again related to this virtualization solution not working well with overcommitting.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Fennec UA, "image-suck", testing OpenGL layers again and still seeing problems, my tablet being repaired and on its way to me again, etc.

I've seen that my previous work style created a lot of personal stress so I'm now trying a variation to try and deal with it somewhat (fitting with my post on change) and try to do fixed work times every day to see if that reduces the stress potential. For now, I'll try to work from noon to 9pm every work day (with an hour in between for a meal and grocery shopping), though I'll probably be somewhat flexible about that, so I can make some evening appointments at some days or be able to have some late meetings sometimes. Still, it centers around fixed times and I'm setting an alarm to get up everyday. I hope this more regular schedule helps me somewhat. We'll see.

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in weeks 51/2011-01/2012 (December 19, 2011 - January 8, 2012):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Adapted all my custom reports scripts for the new versions coming up with the channel uplift on Dec 20.
  More discussions on topcrashers tracking.
  Took part in discussions on shipping a 9.0.1 version to all users already having 9.0 and monitored the release discussions over the holidays on slowly ramping up updates to 9 while we have been understaffed due to holiday season.
  Watched the Socorro team deploy changes to support a separate product for Android Fennec.
  Updated and finalized Q1 priorities the CrashKill team has for Socorro.
  Some discussions on possible skiplist additions and some stack frame addresses not being resolved as they should be.
  Discussed fixing timezones on Socorro (this ended up getting its own release this week).
  Took part in discussions on what Socorro has done in the last quarter and what the plans for the next quarters are.
  More watching of new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• Web Apps:
  Updated Mandelbrot and especially Lantea Maps web apps with some additional ideas and fixes, the latter now has the basic functionality, but is still somewhat buggy. If anyone's interested on working to make the Lantea Maps app a really good mapping and tracking app, please contact me, help would be appreciated!
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Factor prefixes for byte unit, MPL 2.0 release and applying it to Mozilla, Firefox ESR plans, to require or not to require SSE2, warnings as errors, WebAPIs, B2G UI proposals, native Android builds still getting development on Aurora but apparently getting close to being usable, trying to get my tablet problems resolved, etc.

This report is both covering 3 weeks and running late despite that, but it's not due to laziness on my side, it's most due to the holidays, as I took two weeks mostly off and then had a number of backlog stuff to work on this week. I followed bugmail and most planet and newsgroup traffic I'm interesting in even while I was at home with my parents, but I didn't go too deep into anything during that time, and it was good to not strain myself too much for some time. Also, I'm happy I found the time to write about all the change going on in my life but also all around here at Mozilla. This week I'm back to work with full power, and a lot of stuff is happening as a lot of exciting goals have been set at various levels in multiple Mozilla project for this first quarter of 2012. And I have a couple of interesting milestones and events to look forward to myself in this new year!