fidzu : Mozilla

Greetings!

Please join us this coming Friday (7/25) for a Community Test Day, where we will focus on exercising Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 builds.

One really cool feature you will want to explore is "ctrl-tab", and you'll have a chance to see some improvements to the Awesome bar.

What: Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 (build1)
When: Friday (7/25), 7am - 5pm PDT
Where: IRC on irc.mozilla.org, channel #testday

How you can help:
1. Install the build - ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.1a1-candidates/b...

read more

23 Jul 2008 6:53pm GMT

At next week's Firefox Summit, Alix, David, Jay, Mary, Tara and I will be leading a session about Mozilla's approach to marketing. So, if you're going to be there and are at all interested in our marketing processes, I'd encourage you to stop by the Callaghan Room at 4:45 next Wednesday.

Here's a quick description:
A non-traditional software company needs a non-traditional approach to marketing. So, how do you you market your product in an open source environment? And what makes a marketing project sufficiently "Mozilla"?

Alix, David, Jay, John, Mary and Tara from the MoCo marketing team will discuss Mozilla's approach to spreading the word about Firefox. We'll talk about the tools and framework we use for projects like Download Day, and will lead a discussion about what we should do next.

If you won't be at the Summit but are still interested in learning more, we'll be sure to post the slides afterwards, so keep an eye out for details about that.

In other Summit news, the robot is back! I worked with Nobox to create a new poster celebrating the occasion…to shake things up a bit, we did this in a more heavily graphic style than previous iterations, and tried to incorporate some elements of the local Whistler geography. I really like the way it turned out:

23 Jul 2008 6:43pm GMT

Yesterday morning i arrived after a great Flight (thanks to a wonderful Lufthansa Crew) in Portland to attend the OSCON Confernence.

If you are in Portland, join us for the QA Session, the BOF or FOSSCOACH at OSCON.

- Tomcat

23 Jul 2008 5:21pm GMT

Today from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00) Asa Dotzler hosts Air Mozilla Live. Join us at http://air.mozilla.com.

Asa's guests this week will be Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman. Here's how Mitchell introduced Mark on her blog:

I'm thrilled to report that we've identified the person we believe should lead the Mozilla Foundation into a new stage of activity. That person is Mark Surman, the role is Mozilla Foundation Executive Director. "We" in this case is the Executive Director Search Committee, the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors, Mozilla Foundation staff, plus a set of other Mozilla contributors who have spoken with Mark.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman.
When: Wednesday, July 23, from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com and on IRC server irc.mozilla.org, channel #airmozilla.

23 Jul 2008 5:13pm GMT

Two weeks ago, while working on a project yet to be revealed (unless you happen to stalk me on Bugzilla - I'll write about it soon, I promise), I happened to make Minefield seg fault. I was talking to Shawn Wilsher about what I was working on, so he had some familiarity with the code, and told me it shouldn't be crashing. But it was. Shawn told me to file a bug, create a test case, and get a stack trace with GDB. I was a bit annoyed because it took time away from what I was working on. But I did all that, filed the bug, and went along my way.

The other day, I got to work and found a few Bugzilla emails waiting. Apparently somebody had written a patch for the bug, and it had been r+ed and checked in. I figured somebody was looking at it, but a lot happened at once. So I took a look at the commit log and it turns out that the test case I had written had been included! That makes perfect sense - we want to keep the test around to make sure we don't regress in the future - but it still surprised me. I never came to Mozilla expecting to touch such a random place in the code base. And while I wasn't fixing the C++ code, I was still contributing. It felt good.

I think that is part of the power of open source.

23 Jul 2008 4:36pm GMT

A few days passed since my first post about issues relating image quality and memory consumption in X. I gathered a few people here at Révolution Linux to do some QA on my builds integrating my Mozilla framework modifications. Unfortunately, it seemed like intensive browsing and image viewing of scaled images led to some issues with my previous patches. One of these was caused by interlaced images which wouldn't completely render. This was actually a bug in a Thebes function which would tell me that an image had done being uncompressed while that wasn't the case. To support interlaced images, a new flag was added to indicate that an image had not completed it's several decompression passes.

Next, there was a very light glitch when scrolling in upscaled images. This was cause by how I implemented scaling and memory usage reduction. I was creating subimages first and then scaling these to fit their destination rectangle. I now proceed with scaling before selecting subimages.

As my update section was explaining, I give users more flexibility of when to manipulate images and use GDK's bilinear interpolation to increase image quality or when to limit memory usage by a single preference variable.

Finally, this new patch should be considered the final version for bug 395260. It also could be considered a first step toward 372462 resolution. Joe is currently refactoring the whole nsThebesImage code for the Gecko 1.9.1 release and I would expect him to port my GDK manipulations to it's future code.

Thin client users, enjoy a more stable Mozilla environment. Here's a precompiled version of my patch. Feel free to try it and please report any weird behavior with image rendering.

Download my patched Firefox 3.0.1 build
Download the patch only (or cvs diff)

23 Jul 2008 2:57pm GMT

In my last couple of posts I've described why I believe Mozilla must pay attention to data in order to help individual people deal with data about them.

There's a lot of data about people being created. I've listed below some of the basic kinds of this data that I think we need to be able to distinguish in order to speak meaningfully the effects. I'm calling all of these categories "Associated Data" for the reasons described at the end of the post.

Is there a type of data about people that's of interest or concern to you? If so, take a look and see if it fits into one of the sections below.

1. "Personal and potential personal data." These terms are already in reasonably wide usage to mean specific information that identifies an individual, such as name, address, email address, credit card number, government-issued identification number, etc. In some cases it's used to include other information that can be combined to create personal information, such as an IP (Internet Protocol) address.
2. "Intentional Content." Data intentionally created by people to be seen by people. When we post to social networking pages, blogs, photo sites, product review sites, create wishlists, send gifts and other online markers we intentionally create content about ourselves or associated with us. Sometimes this information is in big chunks, like a blog post or photostream; other times the information is in small bits like a recommendations, "pokes," etc. Sometimes we want this data to be public and sometimes we may not.
3. "Harvested Data." Information gathered or created about an individual through the logging, tracking, aggregating and correlating of his or her online activities. It's possible today to record just many of the actions someone takes online (the "clickstream") and then to harvest patterns and other useful facts from that data. For example, an e-commerce website you visit regularly will know a great deal about your shopping patterns, what kinds of items and what price ranges you look, how many times you look before you buy, the average purchase amount, the average time between purchases, etc. They'll know which ads you respond to and which you ignore.
4. Relationship Data. Our relationships with other people, such as our "friends" or followers at various sites. This can be either Intentional Content or Harvested Information. I call this out specifically because a relationship always involves at least two people. And so the treatment of this information - is it public or private, how is it used - always affects at least two people. I'm not yet positive this is a useful topic, but (obviously) I think it likely enough to include it here.

"Associated Data." It will be helpful to have a term that describes all these types of data. In a vacuum "Personal" would seem the best because this is all information that somehow identifies, is related to or associated with a specific person. But I think "personal" is understood as item 1 already. I'm using the term "associated data" to mean all of the types of data listed above.

Are there other broad categories of information about people that would help us think clearly? Are there different categories altogether that would be more helpful? And are there examples of this kind of data you'd like to make sure we think about? If so, note them in the comments or somewhere where we can find them.

23 Jul 2008 2:07pm GMT

After a good (and quick) bit of work by KaiRo yesterday the code for SeaMonkey and Thunderbird is now in comm-central. As far as I know the code is now working for building SeaMonkey and Thunderbird with comm-central.

I think the main thing to note is that:

• The object directory for a build must be different to the source directory.

Source directory builds (as they are frequently known) have been on the not-recommended list for the Mozilla code base for a while. The move to comm-central, and the structures have to use mean that we can no longer support them.

If you're getting problems, drop by #maildev on irc.mozilla.org and we'll try and help you out.

Whilst I remember, there's a good FAQ for Mercurial on devmo, including how to push changes.

Tinderboxes

As you'll see from the wiki page, we are still working on these, and hence the comm-central tree is still CLOSED.

SeaMonkey has build (inc nightlies) and unit test boxes up and running, Thunderbird has its unit test boxes running, but the build/nightlies are still being set up.

One of the obvious problems you may notice when looking at the tinderbox trees is that whenever mozilla-central makes a change, our buildbots detect it, start a build and break, I expect this just needs a tweak of a configuration file somewhere - just waiting on our build guys to wake up.

With unit tests, we are seeing some problems that are a mixture of picking up the 1.9.1 gecko code base, and problems with the new build system. I have already checked in a couple of changes for some of these, we are currently awaiting the results.

Keep an eye on the wiki page if you want to track status, we'll keep that updated as we progress, but we'll do an announcement in the normal places once we've got everything running cleanly again.

23 Jul 2008 10:53am GMT

In 2006, Mike Beltzner filed a bug saying that Firefox's about:config should have a warning. Chris Thomas wrote a patch adding a warning page, and it was checked in with a playful title suggested by the same Mike Beltzner: "Be careful, this gun is loaded!".

Some people thought the reference to guns made Firefox too violent. After much discussion, Beltzner changed the title to "This might void your warranty!", which was a suggestion from Phil Ringnalda.

Today, Christopher Aillon of Red Hat filed a bug about the "warranty" string. He says it has caused several users to contact legal departments or IT departments with questions that should have been unnecessary.

My suggestion is "Caution: Firefox internals may be hot". As a bonus, it fails to make sense in Iceweasel-branded versions.

Additional suggestions may be hidden in the Firefox source tree. When Beltzner made the change from "gun" to "warranty", he also added a note to localizers, suggesting that the title need not be a direct translation from English but "should be attention grabbing and playful". At least three localizers substituted their own phrases. I'm curious what the strings say when translated back into English.

23 Jul 2008 9:34am GMT

The recent Firefox tablet post over at TechCrunch has caused quite some stir in the blogosphere. Truth is I have with me several "Firefox computers". I'll skip the obvious: my laptop (a MacBook Pro) is a Firefox computer! Firefox is the most important app for me and many of my friends. But there are many other computers that qualify as "Firefox computers", but with a different form factor than the usual laptop. Here is a short list:

N810, Linutop 2, eeePC, MacBook

Nokia Internet Tablet

The closest to what TechCrunch describes is the Nokia N810, here running Fennec. This is a very early stage version of what will be Firefox Mobile, but the Nokia 810 stock version already ships with a Mozilla-based browser called MicroB.

Fennec in French running on a Nokia N810

eeePC and its competitors

A whole new range of low-cost laptops have been made possible by not running Windows. The eeePC is leading the movement. Here in France, it's sold with a 3G US+B key that enables it to get connected from pretty much everywhere. A aount of mine, which definitely does nto fall in the nerd category, has one, and she loves the ability to use Firefox and Thunderbird from her apartment in Paris and her house on the seaside without having to pay two DSL subscriptions. In this case, my aunt is a Linux user, without even knowing it!

Linutop: the always-on desktop

Linutop 2, now with Firefox 3

Another approach to the Firefox computer is to attach it to your TV to use it as a computer screen. The recently released Linutop 2.2 (press release, PDF format). One of the cool things about the Linutop is its very low power consumption (8W only) and lack of fan, which makes it totally quiet. The CPU of the Linutop 2 is an AMD Geode (x86) with 512MB of RAM, making it run Firefox 3 quite decently.

In a similar way, I already use a Mac Mini attached to my TV, and it rocks! I mostly run FrontRow (Media Center user interface) and Firefox on it, but it's not silent, uses a lot more energy, and because it has moving parts, is probably less reliable on the long term...

N810, eeePC, Linutop 2, MacBook, all running Mozilla-based browsers

23 Jul 2008 8:01am GMT

Events Triage Call, July 23, 2008 10 a.m. PDT
Please join us for our bi-weekly events triage call today at 10 a.m. PDT, 7pm EST and 6pm GMT.

Dial-in is +1 650-903-0800, ext 91, id 248.

Here is the agenda:
* OSCON:
o Booth
o QA BoF
o Community Party
* Black Hat:
o Milk & Cookies Party
o T-Shirt
*EU Update
*Mozilla Camp EU
*latinoWare

23 Jul 2008 7:48am GMT

Check out this tool from Pike. He calls it the l10n dashboard. It's a great snapshot into the state of Mozilla l10n community. I'd say it's a work in progress with a way to go, but so far, it's very well put together.

As our team tries to improve efficiency and outreach/service to localizers in our l10n process, this tool will greatly help in how we focus on and respond to community needs related to localization.

My best suggestion is to click through and start playing with it, asking questions along the way on this blog. We can help explain what might be unclear.

But, here's a brief set of some of the things you can do to get you started.

Main Page

The landing page is all 65 localizations that are presently a part of Mozilla's build process. This does not mean we ship 65 localizations…it means that they are in CVS and can be built nightly and tested. Nota bene, this does not include language packs.

Top navigation of the table

Each column header is sortable. (Do we need to make that more clear? Not sure if it's clear to me at first glance that you can play with this chart.) The first column is the language code and it is sorted alphabetically, with af (Afrikaans) first.

The second column is titled "Tree" and two values: "trunk" and "incubator". Trunk means the builds are on the Firefox 3.0 trunk in CVS. Incubator means that we need to migrate the locales over to 3.0. When I saw this, I immediately began to ask, "What have we done to reach out directly to those locales in the incubator to see what we can to do to get them onto the trunk?" We're working on it…

The next column is a "percentage complete/changed". You might ask, how could anything ship with anything less that 100% complete? Or, what does "complete/changed" actually mean? Let me give an example. Someone in the es-AR localization may not have a translation for a country name of an island located in the Pacific ocean. That string will not be changed. But, it doesn't mean that es-AR cannot ship a near-perfect version of Firefox for its users. Does that make sense? There are lots of entities in our code that just are not going to have a translation in some locales.

The "missing" columns shows you all the locales that will not build because they have missing pieces that need translation. If you sort on missing to show all the builds that have missing values, you'll see that it is the same number as the "failure" link, which is just under "success". This means that those localizations teams are working very hard to get their builds ready to ship in 3.0.2 (or later)…or that they have yet to be migrated over to Firefox 3 and still haven't finished localizing Firefox 2.

Other stuff

On the right side, you'll see a bunch of boxes. Click around with those and you'll start to see how we are trying to manage our own capacity and work flow. Sadly, we are not automatons (Ken Kovash is the only robot at Mozilla), so we need to figure out where we can help our localizers.

Click "reset all filters" at the top. Then, in the bottom box on the right hand side called "Shipped in…", click on "Missing this field…" You'll see 17 localizations that have not shipped in Firefox 3. Bingo! This is the focal point. How do we get these 17 into Firefox 3?? We've reached out directly to a lot of these in the past four weeks, making time for personal IRC meetings, emails, IMs, etc. Check out bug 442935. After these meetings, we landed 8 new languages with this bug to the build process. In total, ten new localizations have been added in the recent past. We're making progress and have a lot to do like working with communities to get the localizations ready to ship. If you're in the dashboard's "list of 17″ and haven't heard from us, we'll probably ping you soon. But, don't hesitate to contact us because we want to hear from you.

Pike, Mic, Pascalc, Chofmann, and I talk almost daily on how we can improve this dashboard. It's really a great tool and much, muCH, MUCH thanks to Pike and Pascalc for putting this together. If you have ideas, I'd really encourage you to participate. This is a perfect chance to get involved and make your ideas a part of the future of Mozilla l10n.

23 Jul 2008 6:53am GMT

23 Jul 2008 4:11am GMT

Thunderbird Enthusiasts! *Join us this and every Thursday for great bug triage*

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2008-07-24 has
suggested starting points. Focus this week is on unconfirmed
Thunderbird v2 and trunk (Thunderbird 3) bugs.

Experienced staffers are available to help you in #bugday. See http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Bugdays for schedule (spread
throughout the day) and simple steps to participate.

Bring your enthusiasm. See you in #bugday!

wsmwk

23 Jul 2008 4:11am GMT

23 Jul 2008 3:01am GMT

23 Jul 2008 3:00am GMT