22 Aug 2017
Planet Mozilla
Joshua Cranmer: A review of the solar eclipse
On Monday, I, along with several million other people, decided to view the Great American Eclipse. Since I presently live in Urbana, IL, that meant getting in my car and driving down I-57 towards Carbondale. This route is also what people from Chicago or Milwaukee would have taken, which means traffic was heavy. I ended up leaving around 5:45 AM, which puts me around the last clutch of people leaving.
Our original destination was Goreville, IL (specifically, Ferne Clyffe State Park), but some people who arrived earlier got dissatisfied with the predicted cloudy forecast, so we moved the destination out to Cerulean, KY, which meant I ended up arriving around 11:00 AM, not much time before the partial eclipse started.
Partial eclipses are neat, but they're very much a see-them-once affair. When the moon first entered the sun, you get a flurry of activity as everyone puts on the glasses, sees it, and then retreats back into the shade (it was 90°F, not at all comfortable in the sun). Then the temperature starts to drop-is that the eclipse, or this breeze that started up? As more and more gets covered, then it starts to dim: I had the impression that a cloud had just passed in front of the sun, and I wanted to turn and look at that non-existent cloud. And as the sun really gets covered, then trees start acting as pinhole cameras and the shadows take on a distinctive scalloped pattern.
A total eclipse though? Completely different. The immediate reaction of everyone in the group was to start planning to see the 2024 eclipse. For those of us who spent 10, 15, 20 hours trying to see 2-3 minutes of glory, the sentiment was not only that it was time well spent, but that it was worth doing again. If you missed the 2017 eclipse and are able to see the 2024 eclipse, I urge you to do so. Words and pictures simply do not do it justice.
What is the eclipse like? In the last seconds of partiality, everyone has their eyes, eclipse glasses on of course, staring at the sun. The thin crescent looks first like a side picture of an eyeball. As the time ticks by, the tendrils of orange slowly diminish until nothing can be seen-totality. Cries come out that it's safe to take the glasses off, but everyone is ripping them off anyways. Out come the camera phones, trying to capture that captivating image. That not-quite-perfect disk of black, floating in a sea of bright white wisps of the corona, not so much a circle as a stretched oval. For those who were quick enough, the Baily's beads can be seen. The photos, of course, are crap: the corona is still bright enough to blot out the dark disk of the moon.
Then, our attention is drawn away from the sun. It's cold. It's suddenly cold; the last moment of totality makes a huge difference. Probably something like 20°F off the normal high in that moment? Of course, it's dark. Not midnight, all-you-see-are-stars dark; it's more like a dusk dark. But unlike normal dusk, you can see the fringes of daylight in all directions. You can see some stars (or maybe that's just Venus; astronomy is not my strong suit), and of course a few planes are in the sky. One of them is just a moving, blinking light in the distance; another (chasing the eclipse?) is clearly visible with its contrail. And the silence. You don't notice the usual cacophony of sounds most of the time, but when everyone shushes for a moment, you hear the deafening silence of insects, of birds, of everything.
Naturally, we all point back to the total eclipse and stare at it for most of the short time. Everything else is just a distraction, after all. How long do we have? A minute. Still more time for staring. A running commentary on everything I've mentioned, all while that neck is craned skyward and away from the people you're talking to. When is it no longer safe to keep looking? Is it still safe-no orange in the eclipse glasses, should still be fine. How long do we need to look at the sun to damage our eyes? Have we done that already? Are the glasses themselves safe? As the moon moves off the sun, hold that stare until that last possible moment, catch the return of the Baily's beads. A bright spark of sun, the photosphere is made visible again, and then clamp the eyes shut as hard as possible while you fumble the glasses back on to confirm that orange is once again visible.
Finally, the rush out of town. There's a reason why everyone leaves after totality is over. Partial eclipses really aren't worth seeing twice, and we just saw one not five minutes ago. It's just the same thing in reverse. (And it's nice to get back in the car before the temperature gets warm again; my dark grey car was quite cool to the touch despite sitting in the sun for 2½ hours). Forget trying to beat the traffic; you've got a 5-hour drive ahead of you anyways, and the traffic is going to keep pouring onto the roads over the next several hours anyways (10 hours later, as I write this, the traffic is still bad on the eclipse exit routes). If you want to avoid it, you have to plan your route away from it instead.
I ended up using this route to get back, taking 5 hours 41 minutes and 51 seconds including a refueling stop and a bathroom break. So I don't know how bad I-57 was (I did hear there was a crash on I-57 pretty much just before I got on the road, but I didn't know that at the time), although I did see that I-69 was completely stopped when I crossed it. There were small slowdowns on the major Illinois state roads every time there was a stop sign that could have been mitigated by sitting police cars at those intersections and effectively temporarily signalizing them, but other than that, my trip home was free-flowing at speed limit the entire route.
Some things I've learned:
- It's useful to have a GPS that doesn't require cellphone coverage to figure out your route.
- It's useful to have paper maps to help plan a trip that's taking you well off the beaten path.
- It's even more useful to have paper maps of the states you're in when doing that.
- The Ohio River is much prettier near Cairo, IL than it is near Wheeling, WV.
- The Tennessee River dam is also pretty.
- Driving directions need to make the "I'm trying to avoid anything that smells like a freeway because it's going to be completely packed and impassable" mode easier to access.
- Passing a car by crossing the broken yellow median will never not be scary.
- Being passed by a car crossing the broken yellow median is still scary.
- Driving on obscure Kentucky state roads while you're playing music is oddly peaceful and relaxing.
- The best test for road hypnosis is seeing how you can drive a long, straight, flat, featureless road. You have not seen a long, straight, flat, featureless road until you've driven something like an obscure Illinois county road where the "long, straight" bit means "20 miles without even a hint of a curve" and the "featureless" means "you don't even see a house, shed, barn, or grain elevator to break up corn and soy fields." Interstates break up the straight bit a lot, and state highways tend to have lots of houses and small settlements on them that break up endless farm fields.
- Police direction may not permit you to make your intended route work.
22 Aug 2017 4:59am GMT
21 Aug 2017
Planet Mozilla
Emma Humphries: Firefox Triage Report 2017-08-21
It's the weekly report on the state of triage in Firefox-related components. I apologize for missing last week's report. I was travelling and did not have a chance to sit down and focus on this.
Hotspots
The components with the most untriaged bugs remain the JavaScript Engine and Build Config.
I discussed the JavaScript bugs with Naveed. What will happen is that the JavaScript bugs which have not been marked as a priority for Quantum Flow (the '\[qf:p[1:3]\]' whiteboard tags) or existing work (the '\[js:p[1:3]\]' whiteboard tags) will be moved to the backlog (P3) for review after the Firefox 57 release. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1392436.
**Rank** **Component** **2017-08-07** **This Week**
---------- ------------------------------ ---------------- ---------------
1 Core: JavaScript Engine 449 471
2 Core: Build Config 429 450
3 Firefox for Android: General 411 406
4 Firefox: General 242 246
5 Core: General 234 235
6 Core: XPCOM 176 178
7 Core: JavaScript: GC - 168
8 Core: Networking - 161
All Components 8,373 8,703
Please make sure you've made it clear what, if anything will happen with these bugs.
Not sure how to triage? Read https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugmasters/Process/Triage.
Next Release
**Version** 56 56 56 56 57 57 57
----------------------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ----- ------ -------
**Date** 7/10 7/17 7/24 7/31 8/7 8/14 8/14
**Untriaged this Cycle** 4,525 4,451 4,317 4,479 479 835 1,196
**Unassigned Untriaged this Cycle** 3,742 3,682 3,517 3,674 356 634 968
**Affected this Upcoming Release (56)** 111 126 139 125 123 119
**Enhancements** 102 107 91 103 3 5 11
**Orphaned P1s** 199 193 183 192 196 191 183
**Stalled P1s** 195 173 159 179 157 152 155
What should we do with these bugs? Bulk close them? Make them into P3s? Bugs without decisions add noise to our system, cause despair in those trying to triage bugs, and leaves the community wondering if we listen to them.
Methods and Definitions
In this report I talk about bugs in Core, Firefox, Firefox for Android, Firefox for IOs, and Toolkit which are unresolved, not filed from treeherder using the intermittent-bug-filer account*, and have no pending needinfos.
By triaged, I mean a bug has been marked as P1 (work on now), P2 (work on next), P3 (backlog), or P5 (will not work on but will accept a patch).
A triage decision is not the same as a release decision (status and tracking flags.)
https://mozilla.github.io/triage-report/#report
Age of Untriaged Bugs
The average age of a bug filed since June 1st of 2016 which has gone without triage.
https://mozilla.github.io/triage-report/#date-report
Untriaged Bugs in Current Cycle
Bugs filed since the start of the Firefox 55 release cycle (March 6th, 2017) which do not have a triage decision.
Recommendation: review bugs you are responsible for (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=triage_owners.html) and make triage decision, or RESOLVE.
Untriaged Bugs in Current Cycle Affecting Next Release
Bugs marked status_firefox56 = affected and untriaged.
Enhancements in Release Cycle
Bugs filed in the release cycle which are enhancement requests, severity = enhancement, and untriaged.
Recommendation: product managers should review and mark as P3, P5, or RESOLVE as WONTFIX.
High Priority Bugs without Owners
Bugs with a priority of P1, which do not have an assignee, have not been modified in the past two weeks, and do not have pending needinfos.
Recommendation: review priorities and assign bugs, re-prioritize to P2, P3, P5, or RESOLVE.
Stalled High Priority Bugs
There 159 bugs with a priority of P1, which have an assignee, but have not been modified in the past two weeks.
Recommendation: review assignments, determine if the priority should be changed to P2, P3, P5 or RESOLVE.
* New intermittents are filed as P5s, and we are still cleaning up bugs after this change, See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1381587, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1381960, and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383923
If you have questions or enhancements you want to see in this report, please reply to me here, on IRC, or Slack and thank you for reading.
comments
21 Aug 2017 11:09pm GMT
Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting, 21 Aug 2017
The Monday Project Meeting
21 Aug 2017 6:00pm GMT