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Posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:11. 2 comments
What a difference a year makes.
In fact, it was less than a year ago that Armen and John gave this presentation at the Summit in Whistler outlining the then-current problems with the l10n build system as it related to release engineering.
Axel has a new post up about how we’ve been systematically addressing those failings over the last 10 months, and what we’re tackling next.
We’re all about lowering bars to entry into the Mozilla community. I’m thrilled to see our localized Firefox builds approaching parity with the default English (en-US) builds. Not requiring potential localizers to have a complete translation before they can get meaningful feedback, and greatly reducing the turnaround time for that feedback to a few minutes is huge. Taking the stress of generating those builds off of Axel’s shoulders is also a big deal, because it gives him more time to work on other improvements for the l10n community.
There is more work still to do, certainly, but we’re a lot better off than a year ago. Cheers to Aki, Armen, Axel, John, and Seth for their help in getting us this far.
Current Tunes: Beastie Boys - The Sounds of Science | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, l10n
Posted 10 months, 1 week ago at 10:59. 0 comments
Let me join joduinn in welcoming back Armen to Mozilla, this time as an actual employee.
Armen tackled some pretty hairy stuff during his internship, and he’s not shying away from the tough stuff now either. His first task will be helping me to get nightly updates rolling for l10n builds. This is something we’ve wanted to provide to localizers and non-en-US testers for a long time, and are only finally getting the human bandwidth to tackle now.
So, welcome back, Armen! Let’s get to work! 
NB: Our VP Eng should probably keep a spare shirt on-hand if he’s going to be working in the same office as Armen.
Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 267 - Kyau & Albert - 2009-05-08 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:38. 0 comments
With the “recent” changes to QMO, a lot of the Litmus documentation went missing. It was still available at an archived site if you knew to look there, but there was no automatic migration or visible linkages in place.
I *think* all the relevant docs have been migrated now, and those that were not migrated have been moved back to the wiki. In general, the how-to-use Litmus (including Admin) information is available on QMO, and the how-to-install Litmus information is back in the wiki.
All the information is now properly linked from the Litmus wiki, but here are some quick links for the impatient:
I’m not actively maintaining Litmus any more myself, but I encourage interested parties to participate in the QMO discussion about Improving Litmus.
Current Tunes: Metric - Gold Guns Girls | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Posted 1 year, 1 month ago at 15:19. 1 comment
Nothing irritates me more than something that *almost* works.
I recently purchased a Razer ProType keyboard. On the whole, I like the keyboard feel and layout, although their claim of minimalism is somewhat laughable. It is easily the largest thing on my desk right now, and is probably 50% larger than the standard Apple pack-in keyboard. I didn’t buy it for its size though, I bought it for the programmable keys and application-switchable profiles.
e.g. I have one macro key bound to a piece of AppleScript that automagically queues up the entire album for the currently playing iTunes track while I’m in my Desktop, and the same key is also bound to my mount macro when I’m playing WoW.
On the far left-hand side of the keyboard is an innocuous little button named “Home,” that according to the manual is supposed to “allow user to access browser home page.” By “browser,” they of course meant Safari.
Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 18:36. 1 comment
Inspired by Jesse’s work on TidyBox, I’ve adapted his Greasemonkey script to do the same type of column/row collapsing for the buildbot waterfall.
I’ve gone to the extreme here, minimizing everything and putting the contents into pop-ups. With this script running, I can *almost* fit our entire staging buildbot waterfall onto a single screen. Almost.
The classnames used in the script should be universally applicable to any buildbot installation. Tweak away, if that’s your deal.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 16:34. 0 comments
As an offshoot of bug 442720, we now have a wiki page to track the various failure modes that can cause Tinderbox builds to go orange or red. This should hopefully help sheriffs and other interested parties to figure out where builds are going off the rails.
We encourage people who are already knowledgeable about certain failure types to add to the page as needed. I’ve seeded the page with some basic unit test error modes, and Alice has already added a whole whack of Talos failure info.
Current Tunes: Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 11:32. 0 comments
I’ve added the notes from the Litmus/QAC session directly to the Session Proposal page.
I wasn’t really planning on giving a session, but I was pleased to see it well attended. It was nice to meet Wayne (whose recently picked up the Thunderbird QA torch from Gary), Henrik who has been very active in Bugzilla as of late, and Emily, who has been doing fantastic work testing for Mozilla while working for Sun China over the last few years.
Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Above & Beyond - Trance Around The World 277 - Anhken - 2008-08-01 | Filed under Firefox, Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 19:09. 1 comment
As the old adage goes, when life gives you lemons, you go play disc golf.
Kev, Tracy, and I took a little break from the Firefox Summit and squeezed in a “quick” 27 holes before/during dinner last night. Having not played since…last fall?, I had a fantastic round, putting very well and scoring -1 over 27 holes.
…
Despite the rock slide and other unrelated snafus, the Summit itself is going very well. You can follow along using our stream of consciousness mash-up. If nothing else, it’s fun to witness the varying degrees of aplomb that people are exhibiting in the face of adversity.
Posted 1 year, 8 months ago at 23:45. 0 comments
Mike Shaver and I met back in high school during the early ’90s. I took him under my wing and soon taught him the finer points of making taped announcements, how to drop a House of Pain remix on a crowd at *precisely* the right moment, and how to skip class to play cage basketball.
Despite all that, something must have clicked. Since high school, I’ve had the pleasure of working with him at four (!) separate companies. I owe my professional existence to Mr. Shaver, so I’m thrilled today to see him get a little back.
I raise my glass to you tonight, Mike. The handlebars are firmly attached to the bike now, my friend.
Current Tunes: Ananda Project - Cascades of Colour | Filed under Friends, Mozilla, Nostalgia
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 14:20. 4 comments
2 weeks ago, the Litmus servers were updated from RHEL4 to RHEL5. The dry run on the staging install was without incident, but soon after we upgraded the production server, we started receiving complaints about blank pages being served. A quick check of the error logs indicated that the blank pages corresponded to httpd child process segfaults:
[Sat Jun 14 13:39:18 2008] [notice] child pid 31570 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
Normally, this issue would have landed squarely on Mozilla IT’s plate, but they were a little busy last week. Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Richard Durand and Paul Van Dyk - Essential Mix - 2008-06-14 | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, Software
