Planet Mozilla Interns

Adrian Kalla: Koala - Release Schedule

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:45:58 +0000

It has been a while since we announced the Koala - Komodo Advanced Localization Assistant - Project. While we work on the project on a nearly daily basis, we are just three students that need to do other work (like preparing for the upcoming examinations...), and because of that, the progress isn't as fast as it could be, if Koala would be our only project, but: we have a target for the final release: August, 23rd - September, 15th - and we plan not to miss it.

Our project schedule is of course more detailed - it consists of four big stages: preparation, implementation, integration and stabilization. That's the process of software development we did learn at our university, and our goal is to develop Koala that way.

During the first project stage, preparation, we've investigated as much as possible how Koala should work and look like, and as a result, we have written the Software Requirements Specification and Software Architecture documents.

In the Software Requirements Specification, we've listed the must-have features and have split them into modules with similar or dependent functionalities. In the now ongoing implementation stage, we are working on that modules separately. What does this mean? We code e.g. the "compare-locales" access module, make a few tests to be able to test it if it works as expected - and leave it there. So it's a single module, not (yet) connected with other modules.
As a result of this software development model, it's not possible to have something you "could touch" now - there won't be anything really usable until the next phase of development.

During the integration stage, we will make an working extension out of the many standalone modules. We will connect the modules through the, in the preparation stage specified, API's, one by one. It may look easier than it'll be, because this stage never comes as expected.
That will be also the time where we will start releasing pre-release versions of Koala: alpha and beta releases. They are to be expected late July.

After getting rid of the biggest blockers, we will enter the stabilization phase, where we will just fix known bugs and look for yet undiscovered bugs, by: testing, testing and testing. Because of that, in the middle of August you can expect an release candidate (hopefully just one).

The final release target is August, 23rd with a margin up to September, 15th.

If you'd like to help us in any way with this project, please drop a line in the comments.

Short update: between writing this posting and publishing it, we already entered the integration stage - but because of our examination session, the integration will start at full speed not earlier than in about three weeks.

Aaron Train: A Week of Milestones

Aaron — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:30:06 +0000

In the spirit of an exciting successful week, I would like to congratulate our friends at SourceForge who have delivered their 4,000,000,000th open source download. That’s one of a few major open source milestones this week. That’s a lot of downloads.

Jeff Zeller: Firefox 3.5 is here!

jeffzeller — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:28:14 +0000

There is a lot of excitement around the office today regarding the release of Firefox 3.5…it has been cool to see the worldwide support for our product, and the positive feedback that we have been getting from members of the international community. Congrats to the whole Firefox team, especially the people who have been here from the beginning to see this process through. Go check it out! http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

Jeff Zeller: Shiretoko Shock!

jeffzeller — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:42:20 +0000

My coworker William Reynolds has spent a lot of time creating a really cool way for people to spread the word about Firefox 3.5. The version, also named Shiretoko, will be released on Tuesday. The idea behind the Shock campaign is to get people to tweet/update their Facebook status at a specific time in their time zone. It will resemble a “wave” effect around the globe, and will culminate with a final post from Mozilla users around the world at 11:50am Pacific time on Wendnesday, July 1. Our goal is to make the “trending topics” page on the front page of Twitter. Check out the image that I helped William create to advertise the campaign!

Jeff Zeller: My Tumblr blog

jeffzeller — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:37:22 +0000

Along with creating this blog, I also created one on Tumblr, just to see what it was all about, and whether Mozilla could benefit from it…

Check it out! http://jzmozilla.tumblr.com/

Jeff Zeller: Social Media Brainstorming

jeffzeller — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:35:39 +0000

The next project I worked on last week was an analysis of our current social media channels. I took a look at our Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages, and worked with Tara on how we can improve them. We believe that all three channels can use some key updates that will make them even better. With that being said, I found that our Facebook page is actually one of the better corporate pages out there. I think that there are some serious updates that can be made to our YouTube channel; I am waiting for Alix to return in order to start working on this project. Tara and I then tackled the Twitter pages, and worked with a graphic designer to come up with some better backgrounds for both the Firefox and Creative Collective Twitter pages. We leveraged some of the work done already by the Infectious Design contest, and also brainstormed a couple other designs. Check back soon for some of the images!

Jeff Zeller: Introduction to the Creative Collective

jeffzeller — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:30:56 +0000

My first project was to begin work on the Mozilla Creative Collective. We are looking to create a community of graphic artists that would like to share their work with the world (work that is inspired by Mozilla). Our vision is that the best way to create a social community of creative, inspired artists is to seek out participation from students. The benefits for these students include artwork exposure and the ability to form connections with other artists. My first task was to begin compiling a list of the top design and art institutions around the world. I was also responsible for finding a contact at each school, so that we can get these schools involved in the project in the future. Stay tuned for future updates regarding the creative collective!

Aaron Train: Mozilla and the Future of the Internet

Aaron — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:00:59 +0000

Having just watched Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s hymn for the planet, titled HOME – an ode to the planet’s beauty and its delicate harmony, it triggered some thinking on what’s going on in the world.

HOME is more than a documentary with a message, it is a magnificent movie in its own right and has an impact on anyone who sees it. It awakens in us the awareness that is needed to change the way we see the world. It embraces the major ecological issues that confront us and shows how everything on our planet is interconnected. Everything is interconnected.

How can we take this means of awakening, interconnection and global consanguinity to bring everyone together on the web? Can we accelerate an integrated worldview towards critical mass by opening a medium where people can see what happens when they are empowered by each other?

We all want to live in a better world, and many among us are working to make that world a possibility. Improvement is achieved through ideation, innovation, cultivation and application of solutions to problems. However, due to the blindingly complex nature of the problems we currently face, equally sophisticated solutions are required. These solutions are beyond the realm of any one person or small group of people. It is the globe that faces these problems and thus it is the global mind that must develop matching solutions.

There are now more links, websites, documents and files on the internet than there are synapses in a single human brain. Having reached into every attribute of human life, it is now steering the course of history.

It is estimated that over 1.5 billion individuals have access to the internet with user growth ever increasing in the developing world. Classified as the most capable and sophisticated tool ever developed by mankind, the internet represents the pinnacle of thousands of years of technological development.

Accelerating at rapid growth at blazing speeds in development, it affirms rather than conflicts with human identify. In essence, it connects us in real and personal ways to other human beings. With higher potential beginning to reveal itself, an opportunity is presented to forge a network which interconnects those who improve our world. We now have the means and the wisdom to implement a system that fosters world-changing collaboration amongst the people of this planet.

We are, without question, living in the most exciting time in human history. Human potential is expanding as technology continues to bring awareness to the great realm of our knowledge and understanding, the populace of our planet are beginning to awaken, en masse, to our true inner nature and our integrated relationship with the world around us.

As the world wakens to its indissoluble oneness, we still see an escalating disarray. Fears of governmental paranoia and terrorism run amok, global economic collapse looms, and of course the earth herself is exhibiting the symptoms of feeble health.

We are now at a crossroads. Despite all the incalculable knowledge available at our fingertips, we are unable to predict the days forthcoming. There comes a point when every new and competing idea is put to a test. If that idea is to be successful it must reach a critical mass.

How can Mozilla and the internet of tomorrow work to accelerate an integrated worldview towards critical mass by opening a medium where people can see what happens when they are empowered by each other?

- AaronMT

Anant Narayanan: Labs Night: Openness and Competition

Anant — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:50:27 +0000

Last night, Joseph Smarr from Plaxo was our guest speaker and he talked about how the “web is going social”, and how the “social web is going open”. We discussed all the elements that make up the social web today: identity providers, social web providers and content aggregators, and how each of them are leveraging open standards and protocols such as OpenID and OAuth to create better experiences for their users. Check out his slides here.

This talk was a nice prelude to some interesting discussion about the role that the browser can play in handling the user’s data and identity on their behalf. Very relevant to this was also the recent experimentation by Weave on identity in the browser, and Myk gave us a demo of the auto-sign-in features.

Labs Night is also a chance for everybody to talk about cool stuff they’ve been working on, so Brandon gave us an update on what’s new in Ubiquity 0.5. There’s some really neat stuff in there: Ubiquity is possibly one of the first pieces of software that perform truly internationalized natural language parsing (0.5 rolls out with support for Japanese and Danish). Do check out this blog post for a detailed discussion of the features in 0.5.

I followed with an update on some of the work I’ve been doing with Jetpack – namely providing the capability for “jetpacks” to record audio. The code to enable this is checked into the repository, but you’ll have to wait until a release later this month if you’re not feeling brave enough to build the extension from source to play around with it. I was especially interested to know the kinds of applications that might be possible with this capability, so you if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. Myk also gave us a demo of the new streamlined way of subscribing to feeds using Snowl, check out this release announcement for more details on what’s new with the message reader you know you want to use!

Paul Tarjan from the Searchmonkey team at Yahoo! gave us some really cool demos demonstrating Searchmonkey Objects and YQL. I’m especially excited about YQL because it can make some of the back-end ubiquity code really simple and efficient. Incidentally, the Bing team was here at Mozilla just a couple of days ago and they also demoed some features similar to Searchmonkey Objects, albeit restricted to video and snippets of data for now.

Search is starting to feel exciting again, a sentiment similar to one we feel in the browser space today. There’s a lot of innovation in the area outside of the big daddy, and it is indeed heartening to see that major players in the web are beginning to recognize the importance of openness and competition

Labs Nights are monthly events, so we look forward to seeing you sometime in July to discuss more cool stuff that everyone’s been working on!

Anant Narayanan: Back for more Labs action

Anant — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:18:07 +0000

It’s been 3 weeks since I started my (second) summer internship at Mozilla Labs, and needless to say it’s been a blast! I’m continuing my work on Weave, besides helping out with the gamut of experiments that are currently running at the Labs. Weave is going to see some major strides forward in the near future, as we now have our very own Product Manager (Welcome, Ragavan!) in addition to the awesome Mike Connor joining the team

Within the first week of my arrival here, Mozilla made the move to the new office, which is possibly the sweetest workplace I’ve ever seen in my life. Check out selected pictures here.

There’s been the usual slew of intern activities, including, but not limited to: Canoeing, Movie nights, Birthday celebrations, Music discovery, and even a few dungeon runs on WoW

Look for more posts on labsy stuff in the near future. Peace!

Jeff Zeller: Formatting

jeffzeller — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:16:21 +0000

I will be doing some work on formatting the blog, but check back soon to see all of the cool things I am working on!

David Anderson: TraceMonkey at PLDI = Success

dvander — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:55:11 +0000

Andreas Gal gave the TraceMonkey talk last Thursday at PLDI, in Dublin. This talk was a bit different than normal as it focused on type specialization, rather than control flow. The crux of TraceMonkey, after all, is that it generates statically typed code that operates on native values. There is no need to unbox/box data on trace as the type is known. The “tracing” aspect can be considered as a means to this end.

We thought the talk was well received. Interest in optimizing dynamic languages is sure spreading.

I defer to Dave Mandelin’s blog for a real follow-up of PLDI 2009.

David Tran: Hello Mozilla!

dtran320 — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:01:28 +0000

Hey everyone, I’m David, an IT/Ops Tools intern at Mozilla this summer. I will be entering my senior year (wow, those first three went by fast) at Stanford University in the fall and am looking forward to RA-ing in Gavilan (woo)!

Anyway, I am finishing up my second week here and having an amazing time so far! I have been working on the Mozilla Status Dashboard. Think something similar to Google’s Apps Status Dashboard and Amazon’s Web Services Dashboard.

I think services, especially web services, are increasingly putting an emphasis on transparency – when something’s wrong, they want their users to know what’s going on. In this day and age, nothing should be a black box anymore – making information available and easily accessible to users both makes IT’s job easier as well as acknowledges that users are intelligent and web-savvy. In that vein, Mozilla is really in a special situation with its relationship to the community and open source developers that allows us to share things that most corporations would not.

With that in mind, I present the initial mockup for the Mozilla Status Dashboard 0.0.0.0.1, which temporarily lives at http://mozdash.doesntexist.com/. Just to be clear, it’s currently hooked up to DUMMY DATA and does not represent the actual current status of these services, with the exception of the response time charts for http://addons.mozilla.org and http://www.mozilla.com. In the spirit of being open, I warmly welcome any feedback that anyone has for this project – what status information about Mozilla services would you like to see? What would be useful to as part of the Mozilla community? When we’re constantly being inundated with information from Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds, at what point does too much of a good thing (information) become a burden? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

John Ford: Fennec Desktop Localization

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:47:08 +0000

My second project this summer was to generate Fennec desktop builds and l10n repacks. The purpose of doing desktop builds and repacks of the mobile browser is to help people localize Fennec without having to load a build on to the device manually. The output of these builds is in the latest-mobile-l10n directory on our ftp server.
This is a screen capture of the browser showing the Chinese version of Google along with Larry showing us something. This is really neat to see Fennec in a totally different language and character set.Another screen capture showing the localized Fennec bookmark manager. I am a little curious as to why there appears to be Spanish text in the Chinese localization.

Currently, only Linux builds occur but the factories that were written should work for Windows and Mac OS X just fine. I found that this project went very smoothly with a couple small-ish exceptions. While writing the factory which does desktop fennec builds I came across an issue with the l10n repacks failing with no explanation. I asked Aki for some help and he informed me of a .ini file that needed to be modified for the repacks to work. Once this was done repacks started working.

While still in testing, we noticed that all the repacks that work for real Maemo builds are working on desktop builds. Another issue with my patch was that I had missed some lines when duplicating my patch for our production environment (mozilla2-staging vs mozilla2) which caused Aki some hassle during the landing.

Once in production there was another issue with some of the repacks failing on one specific slave. The failure was while checking out the en_US source (mozilla-central). It turns out that there was a DNS issue with hg.mozilla.org during the night I was doing testing. Some slaves did do the repacks successfully which makes me think that we have DNS caching on our slaves and a couple of the slaves just happened to have hg.m.o in their cache. This would explain things nicely, and as they are now fully working.

Lukas Blakk: Mozilla Service Week - making a difference in your community

noreply@blogger.com (Lukas Blakk) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:12:28 +0000

Mozilla just announced Mozilla Service Week which will be held September 14 - 21, 2009. This week is a push to connect people who can help make the web work better for someone in the community with people and organization who need that help.

Coming from the non-profit arts sector prior to my job at Mozilla, I will be spreading the word with many arts organizations in Toronto who would be wise to sign up for help from such a talented pool of volunteers. Of course I will also donate my time that week even though it's the kind of work I do all the time already. I can't even count the amount of time I've spent setting up routers and networks for less technical folks in my life, or helping them set up their new computers and teaching them basic skills (all teaching sessions include installing and setting up the latest Firefox of course).

The best part of this week, in my opinion, is that it's an opportunity to get hands-on with local users in the community. The library is a great place to start. It wasn't that long ago (around 2003) when I was using the library computers as my primary access to the internet. I'd love to go in now and make sure that their computers are up to date, and write up how-to manuals and helpful hints for beginners. Even better, get some folks to translate those manuals or tip sheets. At my local library I'm certain that there are many folks who would appreciate localized information sheets.

Two areas that are of particular interest to me with regards to the organizations I know in Toronto:

Bring their websites over to an open-source CMS like Drupal. Many of the sites are hand-coded php (or god forbid Dreamweaver-created sites) with no administrative back-end and keeping the site's information up to date is a difficult/dangerous task for non-technical staff.

Take their FileMaker Pro databases over to MySQL or PostgreSQL so that they are no longer locked in to expensive, proprietary database software that requires additional hosting costs. Three organizations I have worked with are on three different versions of FMP and none of them the latest. Upgrading is painful for them and their hosting costs are ridiculous (especially the ones who are on older versions).

If you're technically inclined, go to the site and sign up. If you've got an organization in mind, tell them to sign up. Let's make this event a success so it will inspire more weeks like this in the future.

Aaron Train: The Open Web with HTML5 Video & Firefox 3.5

Aaron — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:20:08 +0000

Each day, it is becoming more and more evident that the Open Web and the technology of tomorrow is expanding and blossoming into beautifully crafted future Internet.

As Firefox 3.5 is rounding the track towards the finish line, I can’t help but put my personal focus on that of HTML5 video. Firefox’s implementation of the HTML5 video API accompanied with royalty-free codecs, fundamentally progress the movement towards bringing an open video to the web.

HTML5 video truly is fascinating stuff, as Mike Beltzner explains, gone are the days of static videos played on static pages. With HTML5 video, we can treat video’s like web pages – which makes sense in a dynamic web.

These past few weeks, I have been progressively focused – eye-to-eye with trying to dig deep and unveil any remaining issues and it has been fun.

It’s been a real treat observing the progression from design to implementation of this feature and can’t wait to see it ship with Firefox 3.5 and how it will grow in the near future.

Tomorrow is a MoCo company wide internal test of Firefox 3.5 Preview Release, let’s work together to iron out any hidden creases in HTML5 video, and across the entire board in order to bring forth the next iteration of the browser by the people for the people, they deserve it!

Cheers,

Aaron Train (AaronMT)

Bobby Holley: All Hail QCMS!

bholley — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:44:39 +0000

Sometime in early 2009, it became clear that lcms as a module wasn’t really working out for us, and we needed to write our own color management implementation (mostly) from scratch. Since I was a full-time student at the time, I didn’t have it in me to lead the effort and get things done in time for 3.5. Thankfully, Jeff Muizelaar stepped in and took up the task, resulting in qcms. I’d encourage everyone to go check out his post.

Also, worry not – most of the work I did on lcms (mainly the performance optimizations) are still there in qcms, so things should be as fast as ever, or faster.

Lukas Blakk: iPhone tethering - how to restore after updating to 3.0b5 and iTunes8.2b10(13)

noreply@blogger.com (Lukas Blakk) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:15:17 +0000

Breaking my extended blog silence (I've been busy, you know, starting my full time job at Mozilla!) to tell you about the quagmire I went into when I tried to set up tethering on my iPhone.

So here's the story - with links that will help you avoid what happened to me.

I purchased and ADC membership so I could download and install the iPhone 3.0 SDK and OS. When Beta 5 came out I eagerly updated since my phone had been crashing regularly and went into restore mode. As soon as the 3.0b5 update went live on my phone, iTunes said it needed 8.2 to work so I downloaded the most recent version from ADC. This turned out to be 8.2b10(13) which disables the ability to change carrier settings and thus, to enable tethering if you didn't already do it before the update.

So - after many (failed!) attempts to go back to 3.0b3 and 3.0b4 so that I could use iTunes 8.1 - I did eventually (10 hours and many blog tips later) work out my tethering issues with this extremely simple set of steps:

Simple Steps to restoring tethering:
Download: http://www.adammcnamara.com/CanadianCarriersTetheringPatch.zip
Download: iTunes 8.2b7(10) http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4874487/

* Delete iTunes 8.2b10(13) from your computer, install the older version - as the torrent description points out, it says that it installs as an 8.1.1 but it is in fact 8.2.

* When you connect your phone in iTunes, Option-click the “Check for Updates” and pick the.ipcc file for your carrier (from the carriers patch you downloaded). It will update the carrier settings.

* Reboot (NOT RESPRING) the phone. You can now tether over USB or BlueTooth (unless you have a new Mac Unibody Mac where apparently the Bluetooth stack is broken and so you're relegated to only sharing via USB).

To activate tethering, go to “Settings->General->Network->Internet Tethering”. The first time you do so it may say “Contact Rogers to enable this feature”, but a few second later it should allow you to enable it. If not, restart the phone again.

Thanks to many blogs out there but more specifically to Adam Mcnamara where the bulk of the steps are from.

Brian Krausz: On Spriting and Website Build Processes

Brian — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:11:06 +0000

Ryan, my mentor from when I was at MoCo, wrote an excellent article on spriting a few days ago. Man, I miss all the good conversations…that’s what I get for not subscribing to the webdev feed. That’s all changed now.

I have an interesting history with spriting. For both of my internships (Mozilla and Yahoo), one of my first projects was to sprite sites (AMO & Yahoo! Real Estate, respectively). AMO is still using my work (for now), and YRE long ago gave up on rounded corners, and have few icons now, so spriting is more or less useless for them now.

I guess that qualifies me to weigh in a bit. I’m not going to talk about the memory usage or anything on the client-side past delivery for two reasons. First: size in RAM has a tiny impact on page-loads compared to downloading for most users. Second: I’m horrible unqualified to talk about how web browsers load and store images in ram. Not my field.

There are some issues (many fixable) with spriting:

In both instances of spriting I got an email a few months after I left the company asking me where my source sprite file was located. Once it was due to me not putting the file in the right place, but the fact still remains that a source sprite file is one more thing to lose, and losing it is pretty annoying.
Not everyone knows how to compress images properly. If you do it wrong, you’ll end up with a huge PNG file that is worse than a bunch of small files.
Spriting removes any connection between CSS styles and the images they are associated with. If I want to know what a class with a background image looks like, I have to either find a reference to it on the site, or figure out where the hell -123px -72px is. It’s more or less obfuscating your CSS.
repeat-x or repeat-y images need to span the whole width/height of the sprite…they should have their own sprite files (if you have enough of them)
Like Ryan said, images that are supposed to be near the left of an element (i.e. they need an arbitrary amount of space to the right of them) should be at the right side of the sprite. This makes an internationalized site that supports right-to-left text (an insanely difficult thing to achieve, and something which many MoCo sites do impressively well) much more difficult. It’s very frustrating to discover halfway through that your sprites show up wrong in RTL. Not many sites need to worry about this, but it’s annoying if you do.

With that being said, spriting can be useful when done properly. A very good example is how Yahoo Mail sprites. They group similarly-size things in a file. They have an icon file, a rounded corners file, etc. This makes things easier to manage, but still suffers from some of the above issues.

I don’t know how Yahoo’s build process works, but to make sprites worth it I would propose some kind of CSS build step. Ideally all the developer would have to do is specify which images are displayed which ways (whether there needs to be whitespace to the left, right, top, or bottom), and the system will build the sprite and generate a complied CSS file that is minimized and concatenated.

AMO’s build process got halfway there. It was originally a shell script written by yours truly, converted to python by FWenzel. The shell script is described here (the python script is essentially the same). It concatenates a bunch of files, compresses them with YUI Compressor, and creates a PHP file with the current revision numbers (to append to the URL for long expires headers). Pretty standard web build system.

I’d really love to see a system that also parses out background*: rows with comments at the end (identifying what type of spriting should be done), places them, replaces the URL, and adds a background-position. That, combined with AMO’s build process, would allow an algorithm to determine what’s best for download times vs. memory usage.

The best part: an automated system would easily allow bucket tests on load times based on different sprite files. Now wouldn’t that be useful?

James Boston: Mapping EdMo (again)

James — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:55:53 +0000

I've received some feedback on my last attempt at creating a straw man info architecture for the Mozilla Education site.

Some of the criticism:

Mixes up high level and low level pages at the same depth in the hierarchy.
Separating high level paths for teachers and students doesn't make sense. For instance, teachers are more likely to identify with students who share their area of study than with teachers in other fields.
Serves only one constituency. Computer science students.
Works for the Seneca College model of teaching Mozilla, but maybe not other schools. Universities, for instance, may be looking for more info about research projects.

For the revision, there needs to be three things on the front page:

an overview that explains what Mozilla Education is
a path for people to contact us or get involved
links to orientation pages for various disciplines

Hence this top level view (click for larger view):

At the moment, I don't have a clear idea of how non-coders will be served, but the Design Challenge is an example of something that would be linked to.

As far as coders go, their section would expand out as follows:

In the above example, I follow one path to it's terminus, "Using XPCOM interfaces", but all the topics listed would similarly expand.

In addition to this, there is one more diagram about collaboration. This would be common to all all disciplines and would attach to the overview page for each.

Rob Arnold: hg qimport my-bugzilla-patch redux

Rob Arnold — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:00:07 +0000

Some of you may remember my previous post about a little script that will import patches from Bugzilla into your local queue. I haven’t worked on it much since October. Yesterday I took a look into converting it into an extension and you can now see the results. Usage is simpler than before: hg qimportbz 418454 should be all you need to type in most cases.

Most of the command line options have been removed and some have been replaced with Mercurial configuration options. Two still remain for the command line: -r and -n (dry run and patch name) and there is a new one -p (preview) which lets you edit the patch before it gets put on your queue. This lets you fix the commit message and author if need be and ensure that everything looks right before hg sees it.

Installation is simple. Clone the repository to somewhere in your file system. Then edit an hgrc to reference the extension; you can find/create an hgrc in your Mercurial install directory, in your home directory and in a repository’s .hg directory. Under [extensions], you’ll need to add something along the lines of
qimportbz = C:\Users\Rob\qimportbz and now you’ve installed the extension. I found that relative paths did not work; Mercurial would only load the extension with an absolute path. You can run hg help qimportbz to see all the options.

There are some optional hgrc configuration options for the extension. Create a [qimportbz] section. The default values are:bugzilla = $BUGZILLA if set else bugzilla.mozilla.org patch_format = bug-%%(bugnum)s msg_format = Bug %%(bugnum)s - "%%(title)s" [%%(flags)s]
The formats for patch_format and msg_format are the usual python formatting string format when a dictionary is used to supply the data; you will need to escape any % characters though since Python’s configuration parser tries to be smart and interpret them on its own. There are 5 pieces of patch metadata available for use:

“bugnum” : the bug number
“id” : the patch id (internal bugzilla number)
“title” : the bug title
“desc” : the patch description
“flags” : all the flags

Hopefully everything will work…I’ve only tested this on Windows with Mercurial 1.0.1 (which shipped with the MozillaBuild 1.3 environment). All patches are converted to utf-8 which should hopefully alleviate past woes when importing patches with non-ascii characters.

Feedback is welcome! Please let me know if there’s a feature you would like to me to add or if I removed a feature you really liked.

Edit: Thanks to Jason Orendorff for solving the format string issue.

John Ford: Try Server Mobile Builds!

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:02:51 +0000

Today the final patch to enable TryServer to do mobile builds (Fennec for WinCE and Maemo) landed. This is needed because changes to mainline Mozilla code are breaking the mobile browser. When this happens it ends up wasting a lot of the mobile team's time and effort. Building Fennec is different from the usual Firefox build because it is cross-compiled for both platforms and requires two mercurial repositories (mozilla-central and mobile-browser).

WinCE try builds override the standard WinCE build factory with different checkout, mozconfig and upload steps and adds some try related processing and patching. Maemo, however, uses a very different build environment. To do builds for Maemo, Nokia has developed something called scratchbox. Scratchbox is basically a chroot environment which has all the required binaries and libraries to do a full fennec build. The Maemo build factory had to be modified with special regard for where the actual build took place. Normally, there is a directory under the buildbot slave's main directory where a build happens(e.g./builds/slave/sendchange-wince-hg).

For maemo, the build had to take place under the scratchbox root because the standard folder wouldn't be visible to scratchbox in the chroot. Maemo uses /scratchbox/users/cltbld/home/cltbld/build instead. Each command that needs to be run to build software is prefixed with scratchbox -p -d followed by a path to the working directory and the command to run. This will start up the scratchbox environment, execute the command then exit.

Because of the way try server is designed it is not possible without some redesigning to have two repositories with their own patches. The mobile-browser repository is inside the mozilla central directory. Because of this, it should be possible to get one patch to encompass changes to both repositories. To do this I have a hypothesis which involves mangling a mobile-browser patch with
sed 's/^--- a\//--- a\/mobile\//; s/^+++ b\//+++ b\/mobile\//'
You would also need to merge your mozilla-central and mobile-browser patches together, something I am not entirely sure how to do. I have tested this command and it applied cleanly with patch -p1 in the mozilla-central checkout directory, but I also didn't want to waste build farm time by submitting this patch. If it works for you please let me know and I can take a look at making this a part of the sendchange interface. This is possible because the patching process uses patch instead of hg import.

There are two small issues with mobile try builds right now. The first is that there is no mail notifications on the completion of a try build and the second is that mobile try builds are in a different directory than the Windows, Linux and Mac OS builds. Patches are written and waiting for review over at Bug 465039. The rest of this post will be about how I wrote the patch and what I learned. Feel free to stop reading ;)
I started with a patch that Aki had written for WinCE try builds. There were a couple issues which had prevented this patch from being accepted and used. My first task was to understand how the try server system worked. I was already somewhat familiar with buildbot but I had never seen a configuration quite so large. It was really interesting to figure out how the configurations had been constructed. Eventually I figured my way around after a couple false starts. I am used to being able to have a completely self-hosted instance of whatever I am working on. During this project I learned a ton of valuable lessons.

I learned that it is critical to think everything through completely before writing it. One of the biggest sources of trouble I had was writing code without completely understanding what was going on. Part of this was because I wasn't familar with the Mozilla configurations and part was because I was writing a patch without being able to test on a live system. This has taught me to be less 'selfish' with my coding style. I need to spend more time when writing the patch so I can spend less time in the testing environment.

Actually putting the patch into production involved one semi-major hiccup. Because I had made changes to the regular Wince and Maemo build factories I had broken when they get their configuration step. I didn't spot this in staging because it only showed up on a clobber build. After a writing a patch very quickly the problem was solved and the builds are now working in production again.

Brian Krausz: Why YouTube Can’t Cost $1.65M a Day

Brian — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:38:42 +0000

I know I’m a little late on the bandwagon, but I’m sick of seeing articles claiming Google is losing so much money from YouTube. They’re based on estimates that I find a little absurd.

Let’s take just one example - http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&doc_id=175123&:

Disclaimer: I’m going to use low-ball estimates to guess where Google stands. I am by no means a professional when it comes to estimating this, or even educated in such things, but I feel like Google has so many tricks up their sleeves that I have only slightly less credibility than Credit Suisse or Bear Stearns. I repeat: I am making up numbers

Bandwidth

Maybe I’m not understanding something here, but from what I know a mutually beneficial peering agreement doesn’t require paying for anything other than labor or hardware. ISPs don’t want to provide users with fast internet without having it bounce around too many places, as does Google. Assuming Google has a datacenter close enough to every major ISP to just peer to them (not unreasonable), their only potential non-labor cost is communication between their datacenters. But wait! Hasn’t Google been buying up dark fiber left and right? That means their costs are adding additional capacity and redundancy, plus network maintenance (hardware and labor). Like I said, I’m not a hardware guy, but knowing people who owned datacenters, this is how I understood it. Please call me stupid if I’m wrong, but I’m going to cut this down to $10,000 (~$3.5M/year).

Revenue Share

This one’s just BS…they’re counting “making less money” as an expense. Sure, it’s less money, but that’s a little misrepresenting, no? Plus, I assume the estimating companies already took this into account. $0

Content Acquisition

Google isn’t dump…I doubt they’re putting themselves in the red solely on content costs. Media companies also get a huge amount of exposure from being on YouTube that they can’t get anywhere else (Excluding TV shows and Hulu, but YouTube mostly deals in music videos anyway). So let’s cut this in half and say $360,000 (~$131/year, a lot of clams, and generous in my opinion!).

Hardware

“Given market estimates of about $2 per gigabyte”. Really? Google is famous for using off-the-shelf hardware. I can buy a 1TB HDD for $100, and I’m not buying a million of them. I’m not saying this quote isn’t accurate when you account for electricity, cooling, redundancy, etc, but Google is far above the average for all of these, so I feel like using a market estimate is unfair. I’m gonna cut this in half, so $18,000 (~$6.5M/year).

New Results

Let’s calculate Google’s break-even point for YouTube:

Bandwidth	$10,000
Content Acquisition	$360,000
Revenue Share	$0
Hardware	$18,000
Subtotal	$388,000
Administrative Costs	38.4%
Math!	x*(1-.384)-388000=0
Break-even Revenue	x=$629,870

Now I’m not saying that Google is definitely making money off of YouTube, but $630K/day is less than Credit Suisse estimates Google’s daily revenue at, so it’s entirely possible they’re in the black.

James Boston: Mozilla Education diagram unveiled

James — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:45:09 +0000

In a previous post I wrote that :

One of the goals of EdMo should be lowering the barrier for contributing back to Mozilla. The material we are producing is something that teachers and students can take and use anyway they find useful. But how can we make it easier for them to feed back into the project?

One way is for EdMo to be a place like the Ubuntu Community Documentation that invites contribution.

Some people liked that idea. However, developers have made it clear to me that more places for documentation are not wanted by them. I agree. There must be no duplication of MDC and anything that properly belongs on MDC should go there.

So what does belong on EdMo?

Big picture narratives
Because of it's scale, MDC doesn't necessarily work well as an introductory text. For instance, if you go to Participating in the Mozilla project page the list of tools is a bit confusing for the beginner. The Tinderbox link goes straight to Tinderbox, and the link to an MDC page underneath leads to a mostly empty cupboard. Newcomers need to know why they would care about Tinderbox.

Learning modules
Think of teachable units revolving around a task that needs to be completed rather than something purely reference oriented. In some (most?) cases, this will be a curated way of getting into MDC or other documentation.

...

I've put together a long chart trying to describe how Mozilla Education will be organized. Every box maps to a page. However, some pages near the bottom of the hierarchy could be joined or split. What's more important is their connections.

I'm sure that I've forgotten XYZ topic, and I'm glad to hear suggestions. But I'm more interested to hear if the the overall structure makes sense, if you would know intuitively where a new topic should be plugged in.

The landing page leads into six major tasks:

Teaching using Mozilla
Connecting the various schools involved
Connecting the students from different schools
Learning how to hack Mozilla code
Learning how to get help from the Mozilla community (and give back)
Getting involved with EdMo as Mozillan (is that a word?)

Following each of these tasks leads to an overview of what you need to accomplish those tasks. And digging deeper takes you the learning units. I haven't show links to external references in all units to avoid clutter.

All comments and criticism welcome.

James Boston: Brainstorming with profs about Mozilla Education

James — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:30:21 +0000

An interesting round of meetings surrounding Mozilla Education this week. At the start of the week, professors from a diverse collection schools joined the weekly conference call. On Thursday, some professors came into the Mozilla Toronto office for further discussions.

There were some high level discussions and some nuts and bolts discussions about using Mozilla in the classroom. Here's my completely non-comprehensive observations of issues raised in no particular order and being of unassigned value.

Research versus applied schools
Institutions that produce primary research (universities) will approach open source in the classroom room differently from institutions that do not (community colleges, polytechnicals).

Working with open source may be easier for colleges. The emphasis on practical skills and finding student placements in industry connects to open source organically. Colleges may not realize this yet, but it makes sense.

Universities have more of a theoretical focus. More importantly, professors have a research focus. How can working with Mozilla further that research and create value for Mozilla? Developers and researchers need to find an alignment of self-interest.

Being like the community
The methodologies used to teach should map to the methodologies used in open source (ie. using Mozilla's tools and not creating your own parallel universe). Not doing things the way the community you are engaging with does can lead to working in isolation. This is a novel way of working for teachers.

Inviting contribution
One of the goals of EdMo should be lowering the barrier for contributing back to Mozilla. The material we are producing is something that teachers and students can take and use anyway they find useful. But how can we make it easier for them to feed back into the project?

One way is for EdMo to be a place like the Ubuntu Community Documentation that invites contribution. DevMo is a great reference source, but it's not a place for random how-to pages. Changing DevMo is not unlike changing the Mozilla source code. There's a sense of changes being reviewed to see if they belong.

EdMo could be a place where people create the kind of documentation that doesn't belong on DevMo. (It's important to create something that will be used by the wider community and not duplicate something that already exists.)

There are some important differences between Ubuntu and Mozilla. The Ubuntu docs are process oriented. (eg., how to install a LAMP server). Only a portion of Mozilla documentation is about duplicating a process with expected results (eg. building source).

James Boston: nsIProcess2: The Awakening

James — Tue, 19 May 2009 04:26:00 +0000

People have been asking me for a status update on my Google Summer of Code project. Here's the scoop.

If you want to follow along the best place to bookmark is the project wiki page:
http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/User:Jamesboston/nsIProcess

The other place to look is the mercurial server that I use to publish code:
http://hg.jamesboston.ca/mozilla/gsoc

If you want a plain text patch containing all the changes from trunk visit:
http://jamesboston.ca/misc/patch.cgi

I will push code there every Sunday at the very least. For now I am working on top of revision 28222 of mozilla-central.

The first push is a jsm file with a simple wrapper for nsIProcess. I've never written a js module before so I wanted to figure that out first. I've piggy backed on the Makefile for a few existing jsm files, but doubt that js/src/xpconnect/loader is best place for the file. However, it will be a trivial task to relocate it later when it wraps nsIProcess2.

The next push creates the skeleton necessary for implementing nsIProcess2. I've started with the proposed API.

Now all I have to do is fill in the code that does stuff.

James Boston: Use twitter from irssi

James — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:56:12 +0000

If you don't know about the magic of screen + irssi this probably won't interest. (We don't want your kind around here anyway.)

I've written an irssi script to work with Twitter. It allows you to send and receive tweets from irssi.

Instructions:
Install the perl module Net::Twitter. On Fedora you would do it like so:

$ yum install perl-CPAN

$ cpan

cpan> install Net::Twitter 

Download this script twitter.pl:
twitter.pl [zip]

Edit the script with your own twitter credentials.

Put it in your ~/.irssi/scripts folder.

In irssi load the script:

/script load twitter.pl

To send a twitter:

/twitter Hey, I'm a tweeting fool.

Tweets from people you are following appear in your current window in a typical irc style, but prepended with the text "tweet:" like this:

<mhoye> tweet: Someday, my daughter will say "My dad says that pink is the thin, pale colour of the blood of my weakest enemies."

The tweets you send and receive are not visible to the channel. Only you (and your twitter followers) see them.

If you want to submit a patch the development version is here:
http://hg.jamesboston.ca/irssi/twitter/

Aaron Train: Exploration of Reftests

Aaron — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:41:28 +0000

This week, my second week down here at Mozilla has been an interesting week as I had the opportunity to explore a variety of hot listed (a list of bugs that need test development attention) bugs found within the layout component – see the bugs.

In particular, I have analyzed a variety of the hot listed and decided to pick up on writing invalidation reftests for the bugs that give me a starting point, in my case – a test case.

The bugs I have written invalidation reftests for this week, and, am continuing to correct and finalize include:

Bug 437704 – SVG rendering stops, is a very easily identifiable regression that is in fact, visible in the browser between that of current Firefox 3.0.x and any recent Minefield release (as of writing, I am testing in Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090508 Minefield/3.6a1pre. A problem exists in the layout rendering engine where an SVG graphic (Scalable Vector Graphic, an XML specification and file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated) does not completely render. See screenshot below.

On the top (or left depending on your screen width) we have Firefox 3.0.10 and on the bottom (or right depending on your screen width) we have a recent build of Minefield (3.6a1pre), where Minefield (1.9.2a1pre) renders correctly and Firefox 3.0.10 (1.9.0.10) does not.

The reftest would be interesting in that, despite this scenario being difficult to duplicate as a reference, one might simply use the perfect rendering as the reference for comparison to the test. The image on the left should ideally render complete and look like the image on the right. The test would pass and only pass if every pixel rendered is an exact duplicate of the reference (in this case, the perfect rendered copy).

You can in fact test it out right now, no tools necessary. If you’re on Firefox 3.0.x (1.9.0.10), simply click here – the image is supposed to display the average gasoline prices per country – but alas the image does not render properly, or in fact completely. If you’re on a newer build of Firefox 3.5 (Shiretoko) or Minefield 3.6a1 (1.9.2a1pre) try loading the same image – the results are what you would expect.

As this week comes to a close, I look forward to next week to make any revisions in my tests and move on to other bugs.

Cheers,

Aaron

Nino D'Aversa: JavaScript Error Console for Fennec

Nino D'Aversa — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:11:28 +0000

JavaScript Error Console on Fennec

This week as the mobile guys finalize the alpha for Windows Mobile I have busied myself with adding the JavaScript console to Fennec. Both Mark, Doug and Brad had expressed interest in the feature and it sounded like a nice chunk of work to keep me productive while the other guys concentrated on pushing out the alpha. I have a WIP patch up. I still need to spruce up the warning and error rows to more completely represent the data, however the whole console (filter and evaluation) currently functions just like the desktop version.

It has been very interesting to move away from C++ and into XUL and JavaScript. I have enjoyed being outside my comfort zone and lucky enough to have Mark right over my shoulder to help me along the way. I plan to spend some time reading my JavaScript book and XUL tutorials on the road to LA this weekend.

The second week here at Mozilla is somehow even better then the first. I enjoyed going out with the mobile team last night to take in some dinner and movie (Star Trek), it was nerdtacular. I’m lucky to be here and I don’t plan on forgetting that anytime soon.

James Boston: EdMo big picture revision

James — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:43:13 +0000

I revised the Mozilla Education front page today. Some information that was previously located one or two links into the site is now the first thing you read. The intro section focuses on the big picture of bringing open source methods into the classroom.

I've also added a new section beneath the site introduction called "Mozilla in the Classroom". It still needs to be fleshed out with more detail, but the I think that explaining how teachers are going to use/benefit from partnering with Mozilla needs to be explained in a separate unit from the big picture. I think I may steal some information from the case studies page.

I've put together a page for my notes on an info architecture for the site:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Jamesboston/InfoArchitecture

One of the products of that is the addition of a site map. When you organize the site map according to the existing naming conventions, the site is easier to understand. But if you look at the how the site is navigated by links instead, it is harder to understand.

What this tells me is that it is easier to group pages by content than it is to find paths through that content. But the latter problem needs to be solved.

John Ford: First week at Mozilla!

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:15:16 +0000

I have been meaning to make this post for the last week and a half. I have been so occupied getting everything set up and visiting San Fransisco. The internet alone required about 4 trips to get set up. Even then we had to have a service call. Anyway, here is the story of my first week as a Mozilla intern!

I flew on an Air Canada A320 going from Toronto to San Fransisco. Apart from circling around San Fransisco for a while in a cloud, it was a very boring flight. That being said, a flight should never be interesting! After landing we needed to take the seemingly hundred mile cab ride to Oakwood Apartments in Mountain View, CA. This was the most scary cab ride of my life. I had to show him how to work the van and we weaved all over the Bayshore Freeway. Eventually, it all worked out and we made it to Oakwood Appartments safe. I am very impressed by the accommodations so far aside from the internet connection. We have decided to set up Comcast cable internet in our appartment. Setting up Comcast required us to make about four trips, including one half way to San Fransisco

On the Monday of the first week, we all met in front of Oakwood where we were greeted by Julie who gave us the cars. I am driving the Nissan until Nino heads back for Toronto when I am going to switch with him for the Jetta.After arriving at the office we were given the grand tour and the IT talk. During this talk we were each given a Macbook Pro and we had the internal network specifics explained to us. My original Macbook Pro was giving me random kernel panics. I spoke to Sean who swapped it for a new one. The new one so far has been running really well for me. I find that the 2gb of ram that this machine has is very constraining as it limits me to running one VM and being very selective about which programs I am running.
After the IT meeting all of us interns met with our managers. My manager is John O'Duinn and my mentor is Aki Sasaki. I spent some time with them while they showed me around. We did the weekly Mozilla Foundation call where John introduced me on the video feed. This was done in our big meeting area. Really though, this area is much more useful for watching movies!
Over the next few days John and Aki spent a bunch of time explaining our current build system and went over some areas where I could do work. It is really nice to know that the projects they are putting me on are of actual value instead of being busy work! My first project is to work on getting TryServer to work for Maemo. Maemo is the Linux based operating system that runs on Nokia's internet tablets. The bug I am working on right now is limited in scope to trying the build and not running unit tests. Because of the low power in the actual tablets I am cross compiling fennec using my Linux VM. This is done with scratchbox. Scratchbox is a cross compilation environment for Maemo. In order for the unit test's to execute they need to be run on actual devices. This means that I would have to hook up the completion of the try build to a unit test run on device. When I get unit tests to work I may get to work with the n810 cluster Aki has on his desk :)
I am using Aki's Wince Try Server patch as a basis for my Maemo try work. Wince is the other Fennec platform we are working on right now. Wince has a much easier build environment as it does not require file path manipulation as much as Maemo does. I will put this in its own blog entry as I don't want it to get lost.

Anyway, last week was hectic but also a ton of fun. I am really looking forward to a challenging summer!

James Boston: Editing in the open

James — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:34:00 +0000

I'm working towards revising the front page of Mozilla Education this week.

In the hope of getting feedback, suggestions, or criticism, I'm attempting to put my works-in-progress in the public eye.

There is a discussion page now with some draft material for you consideration:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Education

I've also started a wiki page for myself to use for project planning:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Jamesboston

I'm hoping it makes my job easier if it is publicly known what I am trying to accomplish.

Nino D'Aversa: Viva Las Vegas

Nino D'Aversa — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:58:36 +0000

So with my first weekend in California, what did I do? Well I left California, for Nevada. Anthony, Matt and I packed ourselves into the Jetta. The drive was exciting; speed limits be dammed. Going through the twisty bits in the mountains was a real thrill; all driving should be like that. Arriving in Vegas, having never been before, I was shocked as to how large everything was, the casinos are massive; and wow were there lots of people. We were walking around at 3am and there were hordes people travelling from casino to casino and drinking — on the streets! The next morning the people were still there, but the sun was out, and boy was it hot, 103°F (40°C). We saw Penn & Teller and I had some time to win some money at the poker tables, which really only served as a recovery from the losses at the roulette table. I would definitely go back, but next time I would stay at Paris, the lunch there was phenomenal and the view of the Bellagio fountain was spectacular. Here are some pictures from our travels.

James Boston: Organzing EdMo

James — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:42:15 +0000

Working towards a pedagogical understanding of information architecture in networked communities of self-organizing social constructs where the ontological.... just kidding. This post is about organizing Mozilla Education (aka EdMo).

I had a chance to meet face-to-face with David Humphrey yesterday to talk about plans for the Mozilla Education site. The overall goal in broad strokes is known, but what are the short term deliverables and how can success be measured?

I have a rough outline of what needs to be accomplished in the first month:

Revise the front page of Mozilla Education site to better tell the story of Mozilla Education and provide a better introduction to new visitors.
Create a plan for an overall information architecture of Mozilla Education site.
Create an inventory of education-related resources from other Mozilla sites, and link to them from the Mozilla Education site.
Ensure that all Mozilla Education-related projects and people (including faculty and institutions expressing interest in Mozilla Education activities) are easily findable from the Mozilla Education site.

One way of approaching these tasks is asking, who is the audience for this site?

Here is one possible list with (incomplete) notes on what people may need or be prepared to give:

Schools

Teachers
- Need resources for curriculum planning. Part of what I discussed with David Humphrey yesterday was what form resources take. Is it ready-made courseware and a week-by-week syllabus? Or the fodder to make those things?
- Professional development. Teachers will have different levels of familiarity with Mozilla technology and open source development.
- Access to developers. Teachers need find developers who can mentor students. They need to get a road map of future development.
- Projects at the right scale for students.
- Other schools. Teachers will want to find teachers at other schools for advice.
Students
- A guide to available resources. MDC, for instance, is massive enough that it is easy to get lost. Even after a year of regular use I'm still discovering documentation I didn't know existed.
- A guide to interacting with developers and other contributors.
- A guide on how to use tools for collaboration such IRC, blogs, bugzilla, et al. For instance, not everyone new to Mozilla knows about Planet Mozilla.
Administrators and Policy Makers
- We probably don't need more than one dedicated page explaining school-Mozilla partnerships and how wonderful they are.

Developers

Mozilla Education could be a way of organizing the army of students who want to contribute to Mozilla. Only the developers really know what projects they are willing to mentor, but defining those projects involves some heavy lifting on their part. Is there a way that Mozilla Education can lighten the load?

Community

This is the wider community of Mozilla contributors. This group could be an invaluable source of mentoring, especially for absolute beginnners. They could play a role in creating documentation useful for classroom teaching. What draws them to Mozilla Education or makes that mentoring easier?

Mozilla Education Planners

People involved in creating resources for Mozilla Education will want a place for project planning for all sorts of things: co-ordinating meetings between teachers, co-ordinator work on courseware, etc...
People who are creating the support structure for the above to happen also need project planning. Right now this kind of planning is right on the front page. It probably doesn't need to be.

Each of these groups needs a path through the site to the information they need. However, I don't think that creating top level nodes for each is necessarily the best approach. For instance, school administrators and students are looking for very different kinds of information, so a starting point labelled 'schools' wouldn't work. Another way of finding paths through the site is to make roles rather than organizational affinity the top criteria. For instance paths for Mentor, Teacher, Learner and Planner.

Another consideration is that only some of this information will be hosted at EdMo. Much of what will be provided is information found off-site, but given an annotation on EdMo that makes it clear what it's value is.

David Humphrey's feeling is that there isn't one right way to do this. I think it should be a goal to accommodate different routes through the site.

Aaron Train: They call it Mozilla

Aaron — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:11:32 +0000

They call it Mozilla. Home to many open source software projects, ranging from Firefox and beyond – and boy does the keyword ‘open’ ever so stand out.

Having worked three days at Mozilla (building K) is surreal. As mentioned on the wiki, I have been ’splashed’ with the Mozilla hose! From bewilderment to clarity and astonishment to excitement, my last three days can relate to a unique roller coaster ride.

Mozilla is unlike any office I have envisioned or have worked in before. From the surprisingly large bottom floor open area with the sectional couches, lawn chairs, bean bag chairs and projector screen to the open area conference rooms and work stations, Mozilla truly understands what being open is all about. The openness and split from the ‘norm’ definitely brings forth a true sense of comfort. When I sit on the large sectional couches, I cant help but envision sitting in a friend’s basement and I understand why – it brings about the most interesting ideas, discussions and topics.

The people I have met so far are all truly passionate about their work and it definitely shows when the opportunity arises through weekly meetings. Having attended three meetings, I have heard the thoughts of many unique individuals speak passionately about the work they do. Of the three, from platform discussion to weekly QA to last Monday’s ‘all hands’, each a one-of-a-kind event.

They call it Mozilla because they are about openness and difference and it demonstrates – they really are a workplace like no other. I am happy to contribute through my internship this summer.

On a more technical note, I am working on writing tests for bugs that bring forth rendering issues in the layout engine caused by invalidation. The type of tests are considered reference tests or reftests. They traditionally work by taking a snapshot of the entire window at the end of the test and comparing that to a snapshot of the reference page.

However, there’s a fairly large class of bugs classified as “invalidation bugs” — they only show up when you redraw part of a page, and when you draw the whole page everything’s fine. This is where the new form testing comes in that I am currently focusing on.

An example of a bug I picked, is bug 449362 – where in the past, simple HTML table borders have been rendered incorrectly when table cell sizes changes due as a result of running JavaScript.

Only three days in and lots more to come so stay tuned – I know at least one is waiting

Cheers,
Aaron

Nino D'Aversa: A Rare Place

Nino D'Aversa — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:12:17 +0000

To be honest, I still haven’t taken all this in yet. Being at Mozilla feels surreal still. From the moment you walk in you are greeted by a giant sectional couch and a massive screen. People just plop down and start working in different locations, what kind of office is this? Well it’s less of an office and more like a home. The people I have met so far are so welcoming and happy, it’s easy to be motivated around such amazing people. Conversations can go above my head sometimes, but its stimulating, there is so much to learn and really no better place to do it.

I have had some issues with my laptop, which have been resolved, the fourth one proves to not be kernel panic-y and has a functional disc drive!

The interns are organizing a movie night tonight and Anthony and I are putting together some plans for a trip to Las Vegas this weekend. I also want to check out LA before I leave, which we are tentatively scheduling for next weekend.

As for the reason I’m here, to work on Fennec! After spending a lot of time setting up systems that proved to be duds I managed to build Fennec on OSX and get started on some Camera work. Stuart suggested that once the Fennec Alpha for Windows Mobile clears this week that I work with Brad to get the Camera stuff spec’d out and going. I have created a stand alone app for OSX that accesses the built in iSight camera and allows you to record video. I have plans to review Brad’s work on the Camera work for Maemo more closely so that I may have some suggestions when we finally get a chance to crash on that.

I’ll try and update as often as possible, cause I know people are interested!

James Boston: Internship at Mozilla Education

James — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:00:35 +0000

I will be interning at Mozilla for the next 3-4 months. The project I'm working on is Mozilla Education. Specifically, I am tasked with:

Creating a plan for the Mozilla Education site, including criteria for what material should be included and how it should be presented.
Creating an inventory of existing Mozilla-related educational material (e.g., at the Mozilla Developer Center or elsewhere) that could be referenced by or repurposed for the Mozilla Education site.
Identifying third-party materials (e.g., from OER sites or other sites focusing on participatory learning in an open source context) that would be of interest in a Mozilla context.
Creating content for the Mozilla Education site, including new material, repurposed material, and links to material on other sites.
Working with Mozilla localization teams to create localized versions of the Mozilla Education site.
Researching and implementing options for transforming existing Mozilla materials into formats suitable for custom textbooks and other printable instructional materials.
Defining a plan for ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the Mozilla Education site's collections.

In short, enough work to keep me busy all summer.

The first task is revising the front page of Mozilla Education. At the moment, the site is a bit meta in that it's planning about future planning. What is wanted is a narrative explaining exactly what Mozilla Education is trying to accomplish.

I'm guided in my thinking by Mark Surman's post What is a hybrid organization?

So, what is a hybrid org? In the case of Mozilla — and an increasing number of other orgs — it’s a mix of social mission, disruptive market strategies and web-like scale and collaboration. Or, at least, that’s the definition I see emerging.

Higher learning institutions are also hybrid organizations. They have a clear social mission with an obvious social benefit: to educate. On the other hand, schools are also businesses. They compete for students, research money and industry partnerships. Schools can benefit from disruptive market strategies and web-like scale and collaboration as much as Mozilla does. Mozilla Education is not only about learning Mozilla technology, but embracing the open source way of doing things.

For students, it's an easy sell. Participating in a large open source project is a great way to learn. You get to rub shoulders with some of the most talented and experienced developers around. You get experience with things that are difficult to learn without real world practice. However, without guidance, it can be confusing to navigate something as big as Mozilla. For instance, finding something to work on that matches your abilities and is something that will capture the interest of the community is not easy. Core developers want people to find those projects, but won't usually have the time to match people and projects. A teacher can play an important role as a matchmaker between students, interesting projects, and mentors inside Mozilla.

I'm struggling to put some of those thoughts into something that belongs on the front page. These points need to be there too:

Mozilla is not just Firefox. Not everyone is familiar with the Mozilla Foundation's mission and so it bears repeating.
How the social mission relates to education.
Mozilla Education is not just for computer programmers. The desire is involve different disciplines as well.
Mozilla Education is adaptable. It is a resource for developing a curriculum rather than a template. The possibilities are very broad.
Using open source methods to teach is as important as teaching the technology.

I expect the process of getting this information into shape will be iterative.

Nino D'Aversa: It’s a new Dawn, It’s a new Day, It’s a new Life

Nino D'Aversa — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:04:56 +0000

For Me.
And I’m feeling Good.

I’m reminded of this song by Nina Simone, as today Natasha and I get the keys to our new home! This brings us one step closer to marriage and serves as a precursor to the big changes to come for the both of us.

I’m also bolstered by my impending trip to Mountain View to join the ranks of Mozilla as an intern. I feel privileged to have such an amazing opportunity, due in no small part the wonderful people of Seneca. I plan to blog about my experiences in California in the coming weeks, as well as my time in the MoTo offices upon my return. Here’s to a sunny Friday morning in Toronto.

Aaron Train: The Future?

Aaron — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:18:04 +0000

Aaron Train: Mozilla Internship (Week 0)

Aaron — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:07:18 +0000

As many of you know, I am doing an summer internship with Mozilla Corporation.

The Mozilla Corporation (abbreviated MoCo) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client by the growing global community of open-source developers, only some of whom are employed by the corporation itself.

At Mozilla, I will be coordinating with QA Engineers, interns and other colleagues within the QA Team. We will be rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands messy in creating and working with tests and testing utilities, all in the pursuit of inching towards a Firefox 3.5 release down the road.

Over the course of the summer, I will conclude each week with a reflection via a posting - each tagged ‘internship’.

My next posting will focus on what I have accomplished in my first week.

Cheers,

Aaron

Paul O'Shannessy: Undo Close Window Has Landed!

paul@zpao.com (Paul O’Shannessy) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:32:21 +0000

I’m happy to announce the landing of Undo Close Window. This adds a menu & keyboard shortcut for reopening your previously closed windows. By default we store 3 windows (though sometimes more due to special cases involving pop-up windows). I’m not going to go into further implementation details (because really, I know you don’t care), but if you’re interested, you can take a look at the patches on the bug.

A Little History

Sometime before Firefox 2, there were APIs in place for handling recently closed windows. The only thing missing at that point was the front-end work to tie it together. But that never happened. Instead, since the code wasn’t even being published for extensions to use, all that was happening is that we were eating memory for no good reason. So the code was taken out late in the 2.0 development cycle.

Bug 360408 was added for Firefox 3, making it possible for extensions to be able to implement their own Undo Close Window if they wanted. The description of that bug was unclear though, since it didn’t actually adding any APIs, it just made sure the data was kept around long enough to be saved by somebody else.

Along comes Bug 394759 – Add undo close window feature, which sat untouched for almost a year. After I finished the primary project I worked on during my internship, I still had a week left, so I looked for bugs that I found interesting and allowed me to explore a new area of the code. I found this bug and wrote a “working” patch over a weekend. At that point I was really surprised that we didn’t have this already. We’ve had Undo Close Tab for a while, and this seemed like the sensible next step. In all honesty, somebody familiar with the code involved here could have written that patch in an hour or two. That’s when I found out that I had essentially reimplemented the code that had been taken out and added the front-end to it.

I worked on it a bit more before I was done interning, then went back to school and time to work on this became increasingly rare. I dropped the ball a bit, and then suddenly we were at string freeze, and this wasn’t done. Fast forward a few months; I graduated & started working for Mozilla full time. I found out we were still going to have another string freeze for beta 4, so I got my patch out of bitrot and continued working on it. It needed more work and testing by then due to Private Browsing and a few other changes that were made. Strings went in right before we froze them & the actual patch went in very last minute, and only because code freeze had slipped for other reasons.

A huge thanks to Simon for all the reviewing he did and help he gave me, Dietrich for the heroic “today is code freeze” review and help, Dão for fixing the problems that popped up as this had a rocky landing (there was no time to bake on trunk), and Beltzner for approving this without the normal bake time.

John Ford: 1.0 Code

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:35:13 +0000

For anyone interested, I have posted my code through a BitBucked repository here:http://bitbucket.org/jhford/logfribulator/

I plan to make a video to demonstrate my system tomorrow as it requires quite a bit of setup to be fully functional

John Ford: 1.0 - It lives!

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:32:40 +0000

I have finally finished my DPS911 course work. For this release I have written a log view page and hooked Logfribulator into the BuildBot. After fixing a bunch of bugs with data persistence I wrote a viewing page. Because of the data persistence framework I am using (SQLAlchemy), this was an enjoyable experience. This framework makes querying very logical, almost functioning like jQuery. I haven’t enabled the filtering that was on the old page because I am going to be re-implementing the HTML generation using Pylon’s Mako templating engine. Originally I had planned to use CherryPy for the controller of my page.

After a chat on irc.freenode.net/#python I have decided to look at Pylons instead. It is a popular framework and already has SQLAlchemy built in. The only reason I don’t like this framework is because I don’t understand how it works yet. Unlike CherryPy, I haven’t yet figured out how to run the development server from within Eclipse. This is something which would be very nice as I love the Eclipse debugger interface.

To help with debugging my system and aid in hacking on BuildBot, I wrote a simple ‘dump’ script in Python. I used SQLAlchemy to create a simple table which I could use anywhere. This was a great solution for my next bit of hacking. I finally hooked up BuildBot to submit logs to Logfribulator as they are completed. To do this I spent quite a few hours figuring out how each class in BuildBot is connected. In the end I was successful. I found that between the exception handler build into BuildBot and my database dump script this wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.

The main thing I learned from this exercise is that code searching is invaluable. I used the built in Eclipse project search function. An example was where the string form of an object had the information I wanted. It would print in the format <Build ‘full-osx’>. When I did a search for “<Build “ I was directed to code which shows how this information was retreived. The hardest bit of information to find was the BuildBot’s running base URL. Once I found this I tried to use the Python urllib.urlopen method. This didn’t work the way I had hoped. This function blocks the main thread of BuildBot. If I had left this as is, I would have frozen BuildBot at the end of every test run. That is unacceptable.

BuildBot is coded on a framework called Twisted. This is a very network oriented framework and luckily has a built in http client. After some time on the Matrix irc channel I had a working replacement, sans freezing. After I put together the URL and tested the post I was greated by a nice little surprise. my code works :) I only have XPCShells fully tested but it shouldn’t be difficult to modify the Reftest and Mochitest build steps to work with my system.

On the patch front, I have reworked my XPCShell harness patch after Ted’s requests. There is question of the merit of individual test times. I am neutral on this issue and will let other people decide if this is useful information. I have designed my system to be able to store this information, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to add at a later time if need be.

I am really excited that I am going to California to do an internship with Mozilla. I am going to continue to work on this system there and I hope that it is used, once the kinks are worked out.

Nino D'Aversa: 1.0 Release - Camera Capture with Live Preview

Nino D'Aversa — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:59:18 +0000

This is a picture of a very happy person…

1.0 Release - Nino Shot

That’s my Camera Capture application in action! I started from the built in Microsoft SDK sample and added the live preview. This is a big first step towards introducing the functionality to Fennec. I have zipped up all the code which can be found here. Also see the gallery for a few other shots: Ted wanted a picture of the code that lets me takes pictures and Mike wanted a picture of my blog within a picture of my blog, in order to create a singularity that would implode the blogsphere (however I believe I have failed him - sorry Mike!). Finally the last image is a picture of my car from the window, this is the image captured after tapping ‘Take a still image’.

This concludes my DPS911 course work, however I have managed to land myself an internship this summer at Mozilla! So that means I’ll be taking all my work this term further and starting new and exciting things for Fennec, so stay tuned!

Nino D'Aversa: 1.0 Release Update

Nino D'Aversa — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:57:52 +0000

It’s finally here, my last week at Seneca. It’s been a long time coming and I can sense the good feeling of being done coming along. However before I let myself enjoy my graduation I have a few more things to clear up. One being my 1.0 release. I will be working today and tomorrow on it, with an expected release for no later then Wednesday night.

Also I’m happy to report that my WiFi patch submitted for my 0.9 release has landed. The r+ and sr+ from Doug and Johnny came through yesterday and today.

Hopefully my next blog post will be for my 1.0 release.

Wei Zhou: GPS should make people feel better of themselves, so as other softwares.

weizhou — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:30:29 +0000

Yesterday at Hugh Dubberly’s class, Chris, Paul, Phil, Kyle and I were studying some UX theories.

For some reason Chris began to complain how much he hated his Garmin GPS: It apparently gives him sort of connivence and freedom of exploring a city, but at the same time it makes him lose the ability of way-finding, as he said he wouldn’t be able to make anywhere without his GPS in Pittsburgh, where he already spent two years in his life. As he begins to be dependent upon a tool, his life choices are restricted to a certain level, and the original good feeling diminishes – Well, I have the same feeling about my iPhone before I abandoned it.

People talked about GPS like this all the time. However, it makes us think, what is the criteria of a good software?

I think a good software needs to “perform” two fundamental functions:

A. Functions as a tool to help people accomplish tasks in its most convenient and considerate way.

B. Empowers people to feel better of themselves. Let people have a better control of their life, meaning, a GPS has the responsibility to make people feel they are a good driver, not some stupid followers that obey a machine.

A good and successful software = A + B

A quick example is Pandora, whenever I express dislikes for a song, it responses this way” Thank you, I’ll never play this song again”, it flatters me in a strange way, and it just makes me feel fabulous, even it never speaks like”You are so right about this damn song, I totally agree with you, how about let’s play something with taste, my master?”

One thing I don’t like User centered design is that users are given too much meaningless burden, either for concept generation or usability testing, however, in real life users adapt to what they already have, and its’ interaction designers’ responsibility to make the software more humane. I appreciate brave designers impose their own bold visions onto a product, which is a more artistic way of designing softwares – make the users your audience to enjoy the performances, at the same time, give their the authority to twist the product better.

Wei Zhou: Luxurious software

weizhou — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:28:38 +0000

Sounds intriguing, I know. Software as a luxury. I had a hard time propose and market this idea to my peers. It indeed comes from my terribly artistic psyche, but that’s also a buzzword hidden in all the things we talk about today, User-centered design, web 3.0, SNS, etc., I have been thinking about this for a while, and I define the thesis work I have been working on as a cutting-edge luxurious software for collectors to express themselves, manage their collections, and fundamentally, turn their mundane everyday life into a scared, ritual journey. (You may see this work in the next CHI conference).
I want to start with the term luxury. Luxury is the state of great comfort and extravagant living, it is an inessential, desirable item that is expensive or difficult to obtain. This sounds like so contradictory to the definition of a software, which is, traditionally, viewed as a tool that suppose to help people to accomplish a certain task, instead of fulfilling some extravagant emotionally needs. I also assume “luxury software”’s core concept will not be associated to luxurious price, but luxurious experiences.
There’re a lot of existing softwares deal with luxurious experiences, the popular ones are facebook and twitter, perceived generally as social softwares, but essentially contain a large part of luxurious component.
As the concept of luxurious experience comes to the digital domain, we do need a deep study of what existing conventions in the physical world should be borrowed, and which conventions should be abandoned to achieve a better luxurious experience in virtual world. The transition of old-form software(productive product, desktop apps) to new-form software(experience product, web apps) is phenomenal. I tried to avoid the concept of “software as an art form” but “software as an luxurious product”, however, I do see a lot of opportunities for traditional artists, filmmakers, composers and product designers to participate into the process of user-centered design, helping interaction designers to impose better pitches for the creative leap.

Nino D'Aversa: 0.9 Release - WiFi Scanning Updates on Windows Mobile

Nino D'Aversa — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:31:57 +0000

Needless to say for those in and around Seneca, and especially those in the BSD program, things have been non-stop for the last few weeks. After meeting with Dave I adjusted my 0.9 release target to something more realistic. I have been pushing on my WiFi bug to try and get it to the landing stage. I believe my latest patch gets it quite close, if not there. I know Doug is tied up with FF3.5 tree freeze so I’m not expecting a review for a little while. Thanks to Dave who understands the juggling act that consumes our lives right now and bringing real world solutions to real world problems; everything is not always clean and simple, as he says. For my next release I plan to produce a stand alone Camera application that at the very least captures still images using DirectDraw. In a more ideal scenario I will also add the live preview functionality, but I want to temper my expectations surrounding exams. More to follow in the coming days.

John Ford: 0.9 Release

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:04:06 +0000

0.9 is done! For this release I have implemented Data Persistence. To do this I made use of the SQL Alchemy framework. This framework is similar to the Hibernate Java framework from the JBoss project. A couple major stumbling blocks were encountered. The main source of frustration this release occured with the Log -> LogLine relation. I thought I had coded everything correctly, but it turns out that I had forgotten to derive my LogLine class from the special SQL Alchmey base class. Once I did this things worked much better.

I have also done some investigation into my SQLite issue and it turns out that it is not possible for SQLite to work properly. The CGI environment is limited to one writable file at a time. SQLite requires that the db file be writable as well as four temporary files. Dave told me about a pragma which can instruct SQLite to use memory for temporary files but it turns out that only 1 of the 4 files obey this request. In order for the SQLite library to use purely memory for temporary files you would need to recompile the SQLite library. This means that you would likely need to recompile PySqlite (the Python -> SQLite3 binding).

I also found that I needed to write another class. The class structure I have was not using 1:1 mappings between domain objects and code objects. Each log has tests. Each failing test has its own log. Right now I am storing this 'sub-log' as an array of strings. In order to simplify the logic in my application and the persistence I am going to seperate this into its own class. I can use the __init__ and __repr__ methods in place of special names that I am currently using.

I would have like to get more done in this release but between some really annoying bugs and my white paper I just didn't have the time. This comming release cycle should have a lot in it because I have nothing other than an iPhone app to write :)

For my 1.0 release I would like to have the insertion and viewing logic completed and I would like to convert my code to CherryPy from CGI. CherryPy is an HTML controller which works on WSGI. I am hoping that this framework will allow SQLite to work as I am finding Postgres to be a little slow for what I am doing.

John Ford: 0.9 Status

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:16:13 +0000

Because of the impending doom that is the BTR820 white paper I didn't have any time to finish up my 0.9 release this weekend. I plan to get this done for Monday/early Tuesday in time for my Demo!

Nino D'Aversa: 0.9 Release Update

Nino D'Aversa — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:41:08 +0000

So it’s Easter weekend and I’m plugging away at some code. I wish I didn’t have to be like this but its been a crazy couple weeks and this release was put on the back burner even though it was the only assignment I really desired to work on; due dates are due dates and you need to prioritize. However I am alienating some family to get some coding done today. I updated my WiFi scanning bug with an updated patch. This new approach now utilizes the code already existing for the win32 implementation and adds some #ifdef’ing to allow for the changes needed for my Windows Mobile implementation. This approach was suggested by Doug and it makes sense to reduce code duplication and increase maintainability. I’m switching gears to the Camera API now with hopes to get a WIP patch out before the end of the night. Wish me luck and Happy Easter to those to whom it applies.

Nino D'Aversa: 0.9 Release Update

Nino D'Aversa — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:00:20 +0000

Okay so its been a while since I blogged (I know Dave is going to yell at me). I have been pushing hard on this open source course work all semester and I really needed to concentrate on my other courses for a while. Gladly I have completed my white paper which was the single largest assignment we have had in BSD. I’m happy with the result but it definitely ate up a lot of my time. Moving forward to my 0.9 release, I got some feedback from Doug yesterday and after further discussion on IRC I plan to take his advice and move the Windows Mobile WiFi code into the same implementation as the Win32 version. There is quite a bit of code overlap and it makes more sense to maintain it in one location if I can manage it (unforeseen blowups notwithstanding). I have started researching my Camera API work, however it seems to me that the only solution is to pop-up the built in camera application and then receive the picture once the user clicks to take a picture. Brad asked me to look into direct way through DirectDraw, however I have been unable to find anything yet. If someone knows a bit more I would appreciate some leads. To reiterate my goals for this release cycle: I plan to update my WiFi code to use the win32 implementation file, get a WIP patch for the Camera API (hopefully) and write that guest blog post for the GPSObessed.com. Look for more blog posts in the coming days now that I can focus on open source again.

Wei Zhou: UX + Branding case: a Chinese web 2.0 beauty website that expands fantasy.

weizhou — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:19:01 +0000

Recently I’m attending CHI at Boston. I got a chance to hang out with my high school friends who happen to attend harvard and MIT here. I’m happy to find my best friends are way more successful than I do – I’m impressed that they(who used to be my crappy highschool mates)becomes the leader of Chinese industries. Leo Guo(Founder of tongxue.com) recommends me this website that I began to fall in love with: Moko.cc. It’s a Chinese website that gathers the prettiest girls, uses can rate them online based on their judgement of “beauty”. This idea is bold, I expect to see a similar web service in US soon.

Obviously they have a very good user experience designer, the website looks consistant, energetic and bold. Here’s a screenshot of their website:

I know, a beauty industry 2.0.

The most impressive thing is, I’m amazed by their advanced user experience ideo, they integrate the user experience and branding rightly, and creates a very user-friendly look and feel. It proves the moto:”User-centered design’s biggest failure is, users only adapts to what they have, and real cool experience emerges from talent design.”

Here’s a list of cute icons.

1.Fashion model. 2. Magzine model. 3. Car model.

1. Fashion photography. 2. Advertising photography. 3. Personal photography.

1. Makeup artist. 2. Hair stylist. 3. Nail artist.

1.Producer. 2. TV/Movie director. 3. TV/Movie supervisor.

1. 3D designer. 2. Visual effect designer. 3. Visual Designer.

1. Fashion designer. 2. Architect. 3. Interior designer.

1.Industrial designer. 2. Interaction designer. 3. Game designer.

1. Painter/Illustrator. 2. Writer. 3. Dancer.

1. Drama performer. 2. planner/Coordinator. 3. Caligrapher.

1. Visual artist. 2. Behavior artist. 3. Collector.

1. Sculptor. 2. Drama director. 3. Talk show artist/Acrobatics artist.

1. President. 2. VP. 3. CEO

1. Actor. 2. Scriptwriter. 3. Photographer/Camera people.

1. Agent. 2. Lawyer. 3. Nurse.

1. TV photographer. 2. MC. 3. Post production producer

1. Visual effect director. 2. Movie/TV producer. 3. Body Model

1. Music producer. 2. Singer. 3. Music player.

1. Landscape photographer. 2. Post-production artist. 3. Fashion stylist/consultant.

1. Graphic designer. 2. Interaction designer. 3. Illustrator.

1. Flight attendants. 2. Pilot. 3. Programmer.

1. Drum player. 2. DJ. 3. Scriptwriter/ Composer.

1. Recorder. 2. Music post-poduction producer. 3. Music related people

I love those icons and think they are very innovational. It’s a good branding + user experience stragtigy as well.

Bonus:

the moko man

MOKO: cannot find the user.

Paul O'Shannessy: Changing Tab Load Order

paul@zpao.com (Paul O’Shannessy) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:38:48 +0000

During the Firefox work week last month, somebody had the idea of loading visible tabs first. It’s one of those things that just make sense. Since I had done some work in the SessionStore component before, I volunteered to head up this task.

What does it do exactly?

When you open Firefox using session restore (and through some other paths), you often load several tabs. I know I’ve personally restored windows with 50+ open tabs. It takes a lot of time to load 50 tabs. One optimization that was done previously was to (roughly speaking) prioritize the selected tab, so that it would in theory load first. This change make it so that the tabs visible in your tab strip are also prioritized.

How does it work?

When we were doing this for just the selected tab, it was extremely simple – we just reordered the array of tab data so that the selected one was first. Now we prioritize a set of tabs (keeping the selected tab first). That’s it.

To be clear, this does not actually improve performance. All it does is make the browser feel faster. But hey, isn’t that just as almost as important.

Go ahead and try it out. It’s been in Minefield (mozilla-central) for over a week and landed in Shiretoko (mozilla-1.9.1) yesterday.

Wei Zhou: The future web trends talk

weizhou — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:15:36 +0000

I gave a talk about future web trends the other day, here’s a link for the original Vimeo video:

Design or Die – Innovation, UCD, Web and Life (Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Spring 09) from Mozilla Labs – Concept Series on Vimeo.

I listed four themes for the future web, they are:

1. Data. Open, linked data and Metadata.

- Semantic web

- Human computation

2. Self. Self representation.

- Personalization

- Self extension

3. World. A connected world.

- Tangible interaction

- Contextual awareness

4. Life. A digitalized life.

- Virtual reality

- Service web

I also raised about the topics of:

1. What is design?

2. Designer’s multiple roles

3. Where indeed does innovation come from?

4. Custimazable user centered design process.

John Ford: Python Frameworks

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:40:31 +0000

I came to a descision today that I was going to learn a Python ORM framework to use. My project is going to require a lot of database access and using an ORM framework simplifies this. The ORM also hides many of the complexities. If you are interested, I'd highly recomend following this tutorial.

In doing some research into my CGI + SQLite issue I have been constantly asked "...but why are you using CGI". It turns out that CGI + Python is not really used much. Many people recomend using mod_wsgi, and I think that instead of using raw wsgi I would like to use a framework. So far, CherryPy is what is sticking out to me because it is very lightweight and includes its own development server. This makes it easier to test my code because I (hopefully) would be able to use the Eclipse/Pydev debugger. This is something I have wanted to for quite some time. The main reason I am looking into CherryPy is that it seems to not worry itself with forcing a templating system on you.

In a related note, I found a JavaScript jQuery plugin which looks really neat and could prove to be very valuable. It is called TableSorter. There is an example of a pagination system that really caught my eye here.

John Ford: 0.8

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:10:26 +0000

This release represents a large amount of work. I am having trouble remembering what I have done, so I will mention what I can remember. I started this release cycle by testing out a whole bunch of different ways to display the data in markup and different ways I could deal with in JavaScript. On the markup side I tried to write a div+css table to replace the default HTML tables. This has been done by others with success, but I couldn’t quite get it to size horizontally correctly. I have decided that for now, this is a secondary concern to me.

Another thing I worked on was doing table filtering. I found that my javascript code to do filtering on test status worked really well. The only problem is that it also worked quite slowly. It actually took all browsers I tried a non-trivial amount of time to render the changes. All of my approaches involved either changing a CSS class to alter its display:none property or to change the table rows to have a new css class show and hide. My first attack was raw DOM queries followed by performing regular expressions on the className property for each row. This was a very naive implementation which was incredibly slow on the 2800 test sample I was using. After some chat on IRC Dave suggested that I check out jQuery. I did. I was amazed. How have I not found this insanely cool library before? I was able to very quickly replace my horrid code with about 3-4 lines which worked much faster. Even with jQuery, the show/hide functionality took a long time to render.

The next suggestion I was given (by ted if i remember correctly) was to use CSSOM. This method involves modifying the actual CSS classes programatically. I found that this had the unwanted side effect of hiding my summary table’s counts. This was to be expected because they are using the same CSS class. This method was about as slow as the jQuery method so I decided to go back to jQuery. My hypothesis is that the delay I was experiencing was just the time it took Gecko to do the actual rendering of the table and either method will yield the same results. The more I work on my markup, the more I realise that I will make extensive use of the jQuery framework. One area I know that I am going to do this, specifically to cut down overhead is the popup image links I have in the log display. Currently, each image has an onclick=imgClick(this). This is at least 23byte overhead for each image. The sample log i was working on had 6 images. While this is not going to break anything, efficiency is efficiency. On a side note, i did a test with 48000 line file and the filters, regardless of type froze Firefox!

It was at this point that I decided that I needed to start thinking about how I was going to integrate this into the Mozilla infrastructure. When there is a check in, Mozilla has a buildbot cluster at work building the changed tree and running the unittest suite. Right now, there is no easy way to look at the output of the unittesting. What my project is doing is unifying the output logs across all machines to a single system which maintains history of each machine and each test run. In order to hook into the buildbot I needed to write a whole lot of code.

The first step was to figure out a simple way to send a log to my system. Since buildbot is written in python, I wrote a script which posts a request to a new page I created called insertlog.py. This page takes a whole bunch of log parameters including the URL that the log can be found. The reason these parameters are not included in the log itself is that it would require a modification to buildbot to put this information into the build logs. It is really easy to find out this information, and adding it to the post is one append() away. A snippet of code that will do a post is:

    data = urllib.urlencode(params)
    file = urllib.urlopen('http://localhost/logs/insertlog.py', data)

Assuming that params is a dictionary, this will post to the URL with all the key value pairings.

Once the insertlog.py page has been posted to it will download the url, parse it to become a Log object and send it to the database. This is an area where my system needs major improvement. I need to talk about the design with someone. Currently I just have a function that knows how to take a Log object and insert it into the database. This solution works, but is very inflexible and I feel that I will be embarrassed by it. I hate writing code that I know will break, and I know 1000000% that this code will break on the first change I make to it. I am thinking that this might be enough to get by, but I’d really like to discuss it with someone else before going full steam ahead with it.

I have also doodled (image coming soon) a diagram of the information flow of Logfribulator. As it stands right now, there is an insert and view page. I am thinking that a basic administration page would be of use to deal with common situations like “purge all tests before xxx date” or “delete tests from machine xyz”. This is something to look at later. The view page is still up in the air. I am currently thinking that for DPS911 I am going to aim to have a list of the logs in the database as well as the ability to view all the records in the database when clicked in the log list.

I received a conditional r+ on my XPCShell timestamps patch from Ted. I have a couple issues that need to be addressed, but it was otherwise acceptable. Thanks for your reviewing time Ted :) My autoconf option patch got r-. I have to figure out whether this option should be kept. For this, I will need to speak to the Reftest and Mochitest folks to find out if it is ok to just have the timestamps always on. If it is decided that there should be an option, I will need to figure out whether the default should be on or off and rework the autoconf option patch. I am starting to wonder if there is any value in writing a little document specifying a standard way that Mozilla unit tests could present testing output.

This brings me to the final portion of my 0.8 release. I decided that I was getting sick of working with my code. I felt that I had learned so much in the last little while that I had made lots of mistakes. I rewrote 90% of my parser. The only things that wasn’t touched was the parser core which worked, and works well for my purposes. I also rewrote my unit tests from scratch. My older ones were a little shoddy and didn’t really have good test coverage. For the absolutely critical parts, like the functions which test if a line has passed, I have covered every permutation. Thankfully, they all work. I am still debating the value of the cgi script to upload a log file and show the parsed output. I don’t think this is as valuable as a python script that the individual developer can run against their log and get the output in a format of their choosing. I am going to do some optparse magic on my main parser, as it works as a standalone parser.

I am really enjoying working on this project. I have learned so much this semester!

John Ford: Database issues

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:59:16 +0000

I have been having major issues with getting SQLite to work from within my CGI scripts. I am able to read from the database perfectly fine, but I cannot write to the database from within the CGI environment. When I am outside of the CGI execution environment it works fine. I have tried everything I and many others can think of. I even set up a fresh Fedora vm just to test this out and it exhibited the same problems. Here is a test case of my issue. The database in question can be created with “CREATE TABLE test (x);” entered into the command “sqlite3 /tmp/db.sqlite”

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sqlite3
import cgi
import os
print "Content-type: text/html\n"
try:
  con = sqlite3.connect('/tmp/db.sqlite')
  cur = con.cursor()
  cur.execute("select * from test;")
  for line in cur:
      print line
  cur.execute("""INSERT INTO test VALUES(1);""")
  con.commit()
  con.close()
except:
  cgi.print_exception()

Either way, I have decided to focus my efforts on working with Postgres. I have done this because I have spent hours and hours trying to get this to work with no progress. I just get an “OperationalError: unable to open database” message. I feel that in the long term Postgres will be the better solution. Each time unit tests are run for a build on the build bot cluster there will be approximately 40-60 thousand tests that will need to be inserted.

My next challenge was to get Postgres working on my Macbook. I have been working on my Macbook because it makes my workflow very simple. I just save my python scripts and they are live in my CGI environment. To install Postgres I had a choice of using macports or the semi-official EnterpriseDB installer. I ended up going with the EnterpriseDB version for no particular reason. The next step in converting to Postgres was to install a Postgres driver for python. I am using the system default python installation located at /Library/Python/2.5. This means that when I try to install python modules, I cannot use macports as it uses its own python installation in /opt/local. This has worked really well for me so far, but while trying to install the database driver I kept getting a file not found error. This was a very cryptic and highly annoying error. Turns out that the problem I was having was that the driver, called psycopg2, uses a C extension to interface with Postgres. This C extension requires that the ‘pg_config’ executable be in the PATH variable during build time. I solved this by changing the pg_config attribute in setup.cfg for psycopg2 to pg_config=/Library/PostgreSQL/8.3/bin/pg_config. I am assuming that I could also accomplish this by adding my Postgres installation’s bin directory to my path.

Once I had this, I checked that I had a working module by launching the interactive python interpreter and running import psycopg2. It didn’t blow up and that makes me happy!

Here is a sample of code for Postgres which works in the CGI environment:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import psycopg2
import cgi
#import os
print "Content-type: text/html\n"
print "Hello"
try:
  con = psycopg2.connect("dbname='logfribulator' user='logfribulator' password='mozilla'")
  cur = con.cursor()
  try:
      cur.execute("""INSERT INTO log (build_number, start_time, end_time, builder, factory, slave, machine_name, log_url)
VALUES(1,timestamp '2001-09-28 01:00',timestamp '2001-09-28 01:00','builder', 'factory', 'slave', 'machine', 'url4');
""")
  except psycopg2.IntegrityError:
      con.rollback()
  else:
      con.commit()
  cur.execute('select * from log;')
  for line in cur:
      print line
  con.close()
except:
  cgi.print_exception()

This script will only do the insert if there is no issue. If there is an issue only the select query will be done.

John Ford: 0.8 Status

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:59:56 +0000

I am working on writing up a full blog post for my 0.8 release, but the long and short of it is that I have designed the rest of my system and written the database for use with Postgres. I have had a lot of frustration with Sqlite, culminating in a weekend wasted because code which would execute outside of CGI wouldn't execute inside of CGI.

Nino D'Aversa: 0.8 Release - WiFi Scanning on Windows Mobile for Fennec

Nino D'Aversa — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:44:26 +0000

As I blogged about yesterday, I finally got my WiFi scanning stuff to work successfully on Windows Mobile for Fennec. This post serves as my official announcement of it’s release. I have cleaned up the code and updated my bug to include my latest revision. Also during my travels I discovered a minor bug in the win32 implementation of the code and filled a bug, and attached a patch to correct it (it’s very minor — a one liner). I found this release to be my most challenging yet. I’m proud that I was able to push through and get it working after getting my mind concrete on pointers.

Looking forward to my next release (only two more to go, where has the time gone) I plan to focus mainly on the Camera API implementation for Windows Mobile and to clean up any revisions necessary on my WiFi scanning code. I suspect the Camera API will be the last bug I tackle for this course, but definitely not my last contribution to Mozilla and Fennec. Also during this next release cycle I plan to blog on the state of Geolocation within Fennec at the request of Justin from the GPSObsessed.com.

Nino D'Aversa: 0.8 Release Update - Know Thy Pointers

Nino D'Aversa — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 04:36:46 +0000

I want to start by saying I’m so glad to be writing this blog post. I spent the past 12 hours going through a pointer and memory shit pipe and I have come out clean on the other end. I can’t help but feel like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption.

I (re)learned some critical skills today and I’m happy I took the time to refresh. My WiFi scanning code has an abundance of memory allocations (stack vs heap) and heavy usage of pointers with a whole slew of reinterpret_cast’s. I found myself a little rusty on the topic of pointers (I blame my lazy ASP/C# thinking) and as fate would have it Academic Earth came across my feeds this morning. I was wracking my brain trying to remember all the things Chris Szalwinski taught us in those first year BTP courses and I was glad to find an excellent professor on Academic Earth. I highly recommend the lecture on pointers and the subsequent one on arrays and dynamic memory allocation. I know it’s old knowledge and stuff we should all know like the back of our hands, but the old adage if you don’t use it, you lose it applies. I have spent the last two years focusing on nice safe languages like C# and Java where pointers and memory management are all hidden away and forgotten about. This refresh has been invaluable in my days success and I thought I would make a point (no pun intended) to getting on my soap box of the importance of fundamentals </rant>.

So after all that hard work I managed to get the WiFi scanning stuff going, it’s not at the point where it’s ready for Doug to peruse but it is working and that makes me very happy. I have some cleanup work to do on this tomorrow in preparation for submission for review from Doug and as my 0.8 release for Dave. In the meantime checkout this screen shot which shows an alert dialog with my home access point’s MAC address, SSID and RSSI.

0.8 Release: WiFi Scanning Test

I’m excited to get this patch in the tree soon, this will make the geolocation request on Windows Mobile quicker by providing location data from WiFi while the GPS unit turns on.

Finally thanks to Mike for the answer to my question (use a reference to a pointer — which lead me to this excellent resource) and to Gavin who pointed out the ‘dom.max_script_run_time’ preference so I could get rid of those annoying slow running script prompts.

Paul O'Shannessy: Is The Tree Green? For Your Desktop

paul@zpao.com (Paul O’Shannessy) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:08:39 +0000

GeekTool is awesome. Is the Tree Green? is awesome. So together they are SUPER AWESOME!

Python?

Historically, I’m a Ruby guy, but I started learning Python for a Django project I’m (barely) working on. So I picked up a book here at work & decided to flex my pythons a little bit. You can laugh, it’s punny.

The first pass of this took me ~20 minutes, and I just tidied it up this morning so it would take command line options.

How?

If you’re reading this and actually need to know whether or not the tree is green, then you should be able to figure it out. GeekTool is OS X only, but there are similar programs for Windows and Linux.

It’s easy enough to do what I did in the image above. The program can take 2 arguments treename and output. Run it with -h for usage.

Code?

A big thanks to Justin Dolske for Is the Tree Green?. He deserves more credit for this than I.

Anant Narayanan: The Summer of Code is here again!

Anant — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:11:30 +0000

It’s that time of the year. Google is, yet again, sponsoring students to write some awesome open source code this summer. If you’re a student, and you’d like to make some money contributing to some of the most well known and exciting open source software projects out there, you’d be missing out on a lot by not applying.

If you’re wondering about what the best way to get started is, check out this great advice page. All projects have also been tagged by programming language and field in this delicious profile. You can also search for ideas here.

I’m going to be mentoring for Mozilla, Glendix (under the Plan 9 Umbrella) and Gentoo this year. Get in touch if you’re interested in any of those ideas

The window for applications opens in a few hours. Good luck everyone!

Nino D'Aversa: 0.8 Release Update - WiFi Scanning on Windows Mobile for Fennec

Nino D'Aversa — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:11:30 +0000

I have spent a considerable amount of time on my 0.8 release this weekend (I really need to catch up in a few other courses :S ). I’m still trying to get the WiFi scanning stuff working for Windows Mobile. I have corrected some bugs and in the process have introduced a new one. After some code rearranging my nsStringArray no longer seems to work right, I get a null pointer now (more specifically the impl structure inside nsVoidArray is null). I have followed the same logic as Doug in his win32 implementation here. However I have this null pointer problem now, I’m going to seek some help tomorrow when more people are alive on IRC. As a result I am redrafting my release expectations for my 0.8. I am dropping the Camera API for this iteration and plan to focus on getting a working WiFi scanner for Windows Mobile. This will leave me with two release cycles to do the Camera API and clean up any issues with the WiFi scanner. I have updated my WIP bug to include the latest version of my patch. If anyone can shed some light on this problem it would be appreciated.

Paul O'Shannessy: Your Browser is Special

paul@zpao.com (Paul O’Shannessy) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:03:52 +0000

Roughly 6% of the people visiting this site in the past month were using IE6. That’s mostly insignificant, but I despise IE6 and had to do my part to put an end to it. So, following in the footsteps of The Rissington Podcast (and surely others), I’m serving up an IE6 stylesheet complete with Comic Sans. I also put together a super tiny script that puts a special message up top.

I’d been wanting to do this for a while, but it’s finally done. I’m using conditional comments to differentiate browsers. I used JavaScript to display the message so I wouldn’t be adding clutter to my source, even if nobody else would see it. View the source if you’re interested.

And yes, I’m biased about the browser I’m suggesting, but I’m allowed to be.

Lukas Blakk: Tryserver now has unittests on all 3 platforms

noreply@blogger.com (Lukas Blakk) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:28:07 +0000

Bug 445611 is now resolved fixed, you can see the unittest results on all three platforms here: MozillaTry.

There are hopefully more machines coming that will be allotted to tryserver, with the likelihood that more developers will now use the tryserver. I'm also hoping to start working on setting up the web interface to allow for the selection of which platforms you want to try your patch on and whether you want unittests run or not since at the moment they are turned on for all patch submissions by default.

This patch also required the landing of a patch for bug 479225 where we now call the reftest/crashtest suites and the mochitest suites with make from the top level directory which helped us get rid of a bunch of extra workarounds we had to do for Mac OS since it needed to know which .app file to look for and we're changing that name so often (Minefield, Shiretoko, etc). Now all three platforms are even closer to being alike. Many thanks to Ted for making this possible.

Lukas Blakk: No More Passwords Please

noreply@blogger.com (Lukas Blakk) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:45:06 +0000

This is the tentative title for my upcoming white paper, which is the major deliverable for the btr820 course on Research Methodologies and Writing. I'm excited to be doing this paper because a) I love writing and b) I'm looking forward to learning more about my topic which is essentially looking at solutions for the future of authentication on the web.

As users of web sites and applications, we are now subject to having to authenticate ourselves multiple times a day - I read somewhere than an average is 13 but for some of us who spend more time online it's probably twice that. Having your passwords remembered for you by the site or by your browser helps, but that is not a great solution for folks who are on multiple computers. Besides our passwords aren't even that safe to begin with (my bank won't let me use more than alpha numeric characters) and some sites make you change them regularly for extra security (a lie) and so as users we are caught up in a game of constantly trying to stay on top of the latest password for which site and please stop the web now, I want to get off.

What I want to look at is open, decentralized authentication identifiers that go beyond passwords with regards to actual security, that could be in your browser itself, and that would move with you easily no matter what computer you are on.

So I have some questions.

What are the implications of a web browser incorporating an open authentication protocol out of the box where the identifier is the browser itself?

What other options are coming down the pipe in terms of built-in browser features that help users deal with authentication? Is there something better than a decentralized open authentication protocol?

Do browser providers have to stay neutral and leave it up to web application providers to decide how users authenticate on the web or can they step in and lead the charge towards a certain protocol and influence sites instead?

While Weave is an excellent way of syncing your profile across various computers - is it really scalable? What other options are there for having an easy, portable profile which would be able to contain your identity as you move between computers, countries, even to your mobile device?

Thanks for reading this, I look forward to your thoughts on this issue.

John Ford: Release 0.7 Code

noreply@blogger.com (John H. Ford) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:22:25 +0000

Code is now up at here.

EDIT: Our planet doesn't seem to like html being in the post's body