The roads I take...

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 17/2012 (April 23 - 29, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Due to a metrics datacenter move and probably a network problem, we had a couple of problems with data on Socorro this week, and needed matview backfills. I filed bugs for those and tracked them until they were fixed.
  I did some work to pull some of the arewestableyet.com data directly from the DB, and found a small problem in a view I'm using there.
  An upcoming blog post of mine, which I finished a draft version for and which should go public today or tomorrow, tries linking a generic URL for topcrash reports and I found a small problem with that as well.
  Firefox 13 entered Beta, so I kept a close eye on it - the huge topcrasher I saw immediately needed us to stop updates and probably do the next beta very soon.
  Pushed on correcting ESR throttle.
  Just like every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• Themes:
  Posted 2.9 versions of EarlyBlue and LCARStrek to AMO, waiting for reviews.
• German L10n:
  More reviews for FF/TB 13 "train" work done by Archeopteryx as well as Thunderbird and Fennec 14 patches. He's doing a lot of work!
  Next to that, I did the central/aurora uplift on the de L10n repos for the Mozilla 14 "train", and synched core and suite (incl. chatzilla/venkman) to current trunk, incorporating review comments for mobile a11y strings.
• Data Manager:
  Reviewed patches for click-to-play permissions and a password copying bug for SeaMonkey Data Manager.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Verifying POP3 message destruction as fixed, verified fixed builds for Fennec XUL touch event breakage, Datacenter moves, WebAPI security discussions, new identity block in Firefox (return of the padlock - removal of favicon), Fennec L10n and Beta, HTML L10n, etc.

Another release and uplift week is behind us, and while the release of Firefox 12 went smoothly, getting 13 to beta showed us a grave crasher (which we are happy to catch that early and not have in release, but which causes discomfort for beta testers) - and getting the new Firefox 14 for Android to Aurora is a bit delayed as well in terms of opening the flood gates for automatic updates, but we're near. Once we have it up there, and even more when we go to beta with it (way earlier than the normal 14 beta train), we'll want a lot of people testing this on their Android phones and giving us feedback. If you have such a device with an ARMv7 processor (ARMv6 support is in the works but not complete yet), I hope you'll be among those testers!

And, as usual, please send crash reports from all your installations, we look at them and try to fix the problems, esp. if multiple people are sending reports for them!

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

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Filed a bug on missing CSV data due to a weekend Socorro outage, and dealt with the fallout from that for my custom reports.
  Created another patch for updating correlation report versions to be ready for the upcoming source code uplift.
  Continued reviewing explosiveness math work for integration into Socorro.
  More dealings with Flash reprocessing.
  Some crash bug triage and pushing on getting fixes for some issues (e.g. a trunk topcrasher).
  Just like every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed - that is, as much as I could with missing ADU numbers for the latter half of the week, which made some reports go AWOL.
• Themes:
  Some more work on 2.9 versions of my themes - the 2.8 versions of EarlyBlue and LCARStrek now received reviews.
• German L10n:
  Some reviews for FF/TB 13 "train" work done by Archeopteryx.
  Also did another L10n sync with trunk for core and suite, including mobile a11y strings.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Error message humor and fun in the project, new L10n dashboard, Firefox 12 endgame, approvals on trunk for mobile 14, issues with security suite interactions, Datacenter moves, WebAPI security discussions, mailbox corruption fixes, etc.

Over the last two weeks, I invested quite a bit of my "free" time into getting my website system integrated with BrowserID, the new sign-in protocol that is now part of the Mozilla Persona initiative to provide user-centric web identities with minimum to no tracking across sites.
Interestingly, implementing the actual interaction with the protocol/servers was the by far easiest part of it all and very straight-forward. A lot of the time went into changed workflows due to emails already being verified when my wesites receive them from BrowserID and not needing to do the verification after the user provides data, and into a lot of details for supporting both conventional password logins and BrowserID in the same system. In the end, I was successful and quite happy to switch a couple of my sites to using BrowserID and even removing my user passwords for them from the system.
I also saw that for someone creating a new site and not needing to worry about legacy logins, this system is pretty nice and easy to implement, and given the one doesn't have to worry about password security on the own website any more, probably all in all just as easy if not easier then the conventional methods.

In the end, I don't think there's anything better than a system that improves user privacy, minimzes security risks due from password re-use, reduces trackability of centralized login methods, and is easier to implement for web developers at the same time!

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

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Fixed some interesting errors due to charsets in my device report.
  Pushed for some Flash symbol issues to be resolved.
  Worked with the Socorro team to get Flash versions detection fixed, doing some of the code and the pull requests myself.
  Brought ongoing brokenness of Android nightly build reports to the attention of the team.
  Continued to help Josh with getting explosiveness math right.
  Just like every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• Themes:
  Mostly finished work on the 2.9 versions of my themes, while the 2.8 versions of EarlyBlue and LCARStrek still are waiting for AMO review.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Inclusion and diversity statement, Kilimanjaro, GitHub, Datacenter moves, WebAPI security discussions, mailbox corruption fixes, etc.

I had been fighting for some time with a mailbox corruption issue involving local/POP3 filters and possibly folder compaction, but I have been using nightly builds with fixes for some problems for a week now and I'm cautiously optimistic that it works fine again, I had no problems so far. If that holds true, SeaMonkey 2.9 and Thunderbird 12 releases should be good as well as the fixes landed in time for those as well (and are in current beats of both). Thanks for everyone who investigated and worked on those problems!

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 14/2012 (April 2 - 8, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Made sure the machine actually running arewestableyet.com (and my custom reports) can access the PostgreSQL DB of Socorro so we can fetch data from there directly in the future.
  Found out that Flash versions are not detected correctly for new releases and started working on a fix.
  Pushed to get symbols for new Flash releases uploaded.
  Continued to help Josh with the explosiveness implementation.
  Contacted the B2G team about their crash reporting story, will continue to work with them on that.
  As every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Reviewed Neil's updated patch for content blocker permissions in Data Manager.
  Also reviewed ewong's patch for copying passwords from Data Manager.
• Fennec XUL:
  Poked people about broken touch events on Fennec XUL and did some regression testing for this.
• Themes:
  Submitted 2.8 versions of EarlyBlue and LCARStrek and did some improvements based on previous review comments, also worked a bit more on 2.9 versions.
• German L10n:
  Reviewed a number of German L10n patches.
  Also did the central->aurora merge for Mozilla 13 and localized suite and core strings up to current trunk.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Potential Mozilla CoC, Kilimanjaro, bug severities, background tabs, Clock API, etc.

Next to the interesting stuff I am involved in and can push at work, I found quite some time this weekend to reduce my TODO list in non-work areas, and it's visible in this update, as multiple areas moved forward nicely and significantly, which I always like.

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 13/2012 (March 26 - April 1, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Some slight updates for arewestableyet.com.
  Laid out the explosiveness algorithm in math form for actual implementation.
  Investigated a possible regression range for a Naomi Internet Filter crash.
  Discussed Fennec crash reporter UI.
  Stayed in the loop on a couple of crash regressions on desktop and mobile trunk, fortunately a ton of good work going on there!
  Fleshed out CrashKill's Q2 priorities for Socorro some more.
  As every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
• SeaMonkey:
  Worked on ad-related changes on seamonkey.at in relation to some for-now-not-public internal project going on.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Potential Mozilla CoC, Kilimanjaro, FF 3.6 EOL and updates to newer versions, background tabs, Android XUL builds, permission/security model proposals for B2G, WebAPIs, WebRTC, Firefox download size, etc.

If you're not convinced yet that HTML5 apps and games can be absolutely great, then check out BrowserQuest, a retro-style real-time multi-player game built on <canvas> and WebSockets among other technologies - which Mozilla has announced recently. This is mainly a demo to show what can be done and it's intentionally made to be hackable, there's even public descriptions of how to mod it directly in the browser with Firefox Scratchpad floating around already.