The roads I take...

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 08/2012 (February 20 - 26, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Monitored the Flash hang volumes following the hang timeout revert.
  Made some improvements to my Stability Dashboard - more is to come, esp. explanation of the shown data (and probably some additional data to be as well).
  Watched and tested Socorro 2.4.3 landing.
  Pushed on getting some fixes (mostly skiplist stuff) into 2.4.4 that lands this Wednesday.
  As usual, continued watching new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• Firefox cleanup:
  Landed the last engine manager cleanup patch after it did get review.
  I also landed those search bar cleanup patches that have review and pass tests, and started investigation of the a11y test failures of the fields test, surkov also jumped in to help there.
• SeaMonkey:
  Reviewed moving mozconfigs into the tree.
  Investigated a Data Manager test failure and created a possible patch for it.
• Themes:
  Finished up and uploaded new versions of my EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes that match current SeaMonkey 2.7.x and Firefox 10.x releases.
• German L10n:
  Finally updated SeaMonkey and core for the Mozilla 12 Aurora cycle, and also synched them with what happened on Mozilla 13 trunk so far. Also included fixes for bug 669150, bug 725642, bug 723901, and bug 716945.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Fennec XUL builds and tablet releases, ongoing UA discussions, SeaMonkey build machines, Mozilla employees and the wider community, versions again, BMO component watching and QA contacts, third-party add-on installs, the "Mozilla Persona" brand, etc.

A lot of interesting stuff is going on this week, around Mobile World Congress, but even outside of that as well. The churn includes Boot to Gecko and Open Web Device, Mozilla Marketplace, Collusion, and more, some of it still coming.
Next to that, my work on making Firefox more stable sounds small, but I'm really happy to work for Mozilla in such an exciting time!

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in weeks 06-07/2012 (February 6 - 19, 2012):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  As we're delivering ESR versions now, I filed a bug to support ESR on Socorro, and after that, had some discussions with the team on how we'll go for that.
  We've reverted the plugin crash/hang UI on the development channels as well, and so should get enough reports again.
  Also, we tracked the plugin hang regression in 11 to changing the hang timeout and revert that as well.
  My first Socorro patch, forcing correlation reports for in-development versions, has landed in production.
  Watched and tested Socorro 2.4.2 landing, including Java stack traces in crash reports and per-OS topcrash reports.
  We're also getting read to access the Socorro DB from scripts, but need PostgreSQL support on our analysis machine first.
  Worked with the Socorro team on proposed fixes for CrashKill priorities.
  As usual, continued watching new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Fixed metrics pages to correctly list new versions and simplified code for it.
  Fixed the build system porting tracker to work with the new Mercurial deployed on Mozilla servers.
  Reviewed SeaMonkey binary restructuring.
• Themes:
  I worked on getting my themes up to date for the current SeaMonkey and Firefox releases, currently testing them.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Fennec XUL builds and tablet releases, Fennec UA, Gecko token of Mozilla UAs, build ID in about:support, B2G/Gaia and L20n, SeaMonkey build machines, etc.

I didn't get around to building this list last week, so I'm doing this report for both weeks at once. A lot of things is going on at Mozilla right now, and it looks a lot to me like we are shooting for a media big bang at Mobile World Congress. To not stir up too much, there seems to be nothing in there that isn't known in the community, it just looks like we are going to market a lot of things to the press and the mobile world at large there. Teams have been working on demos, e.g. for B2G, we're trying to get the new Firefox for Android in shape, the new brand for identity initiatives up until that date, etc. Should become an interesting event, let's hope we make some impact for open technology and standards on the web there!

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2012 (January 30 - February 5, 2012):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  Once we backed out the new plugin crash UI to get back missing plugin crash/hang reports in Firefox 10, we found a plugin hang regression in 11, which I filed.
  I kept track of Socorro 2.4.1 landing on production and filed a bug on reprocessing Java crashes.
  Did my first Socorro patch to force correlation reports for in-development versions! This also gave me a good chance to try how the GitHub process works.
  Investigated adapter data on graphics crashes.
  I stayed in contact with Laura on showing Java stack traces in crash reports.
  Continued watching new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• FOSDEM:
  I spent this weekend in Brussels for FOSDEM 2012, including a talk I held in the Mozilla Devroom on CSI:Mozilla - Crash Scene Investigations. It was a lot of fun, interesting conversations and presentations, about Mozilla and other FLOSS projects. Also, on Friday, I could sit with a few fellow Mozillians in a meeting area at the hotel, and I enjoyed every minute of that - it was great to for a change not sit alone when doing Mozilla stuff.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Settling the Fennec UA and changing the Gecko token of the Firefox UA, ESR, B2G/Gaia and L20n, etc.

As a long-time localizer, it did hurt me quite a lot that the plugin crash UI backout needed to be done on trees where it affected the string freezes. I wrote down the story of that in a comment on flod's blog. It's quite interesting how things look when you are standing on the other side of this. And we are only starting to get used to the finer details of rapid release, like for example those backouts of code that might cause string freeze breaches. We hope it's a rare thing that we need to do this, and I really hope we'll find stuff like this earlier in the future. Still, sometimes we probably need to do something like this, and we learned a few things from this experience. Let's hope we'll never get too used to this, though.

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2012 (January 23 - 29, 2012):

• Mozilla work / crash-stats:
  I stayed in touch with what we were doing about missing plugin crash/hang reports in Firefox 10, and we went backing out the responsible change for 11 on Aurora but due to L10n impact we couldn't do that on 10 any more.
  Getting more reports on 11 again brought to light again that we have a problem resolving browser-side hang reports on 11+ which we need to investigate.
  I followed the work on properly reporting Java crashes closely to ensure we'd solve that ASAP.
  I did some work on a first prototype of a Stability Dashboard, which for now is a pure web app.
  Followed and tested a Android XUL build topcrash using my tablet - and verified the fix there as well.
  Also, I helped the Socorro team with any questions they had for our side on what was still to land in 2.4.1 and some things in upcoming releases.
  As usual, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Followed some good news on SeaMonkey build VMs and other ongoing work on infrastructure.
  Took part in a quite important internal meeting affecting the future of the project - details on what's going on will probably come soon in an announcement from the project.
• Themes:
  I did some (way too late) work on getting my themes ready for SeaMonkey 2.7 and Firefox 10, but unfortunately more work is needed there. I hope I'll be able to finish this some time soon.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Fennec UA, 3.6 nightly builds, B2G/Gaia and L20n, etc.

I'm a bit late again with this summary this week, but between a new release and a big source uplift happening yesterday, and a Socorro release today, I'm preparing for a talk in the Mozilla DevRoom at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels this upcoming weekend, so a lot of stuff to do overall. That said, I hope to meet many Mozillians there in person and see both "old" and new faces around!