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I had one of those classic web-enabled parenting moments tonight that have become so common for me these days that I sometimes fail to appreciate how much of a change it represents from how I grew up.
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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.
I’ve updated the Wow Realm Status extension so that it now properly parses both EU servers and RP-PvP servers. Kev offered me scotch. I told you that would work.
3 years later, I’m still playing WoW. With the recent expansion, we’ve seen a return to lengthy queues and frequent server downtimes as issues are patched. As the father of two small children, I don’t get a lot of time to play, so last night I went looking for a tool that would show me the status of my realm at a glance so I would know whether to even bother trying to log in.
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I had the privilege of attending FSOSS last week.
This is a great open source conference put on by the people at Seneca college in Toronto. The conference is now in its second year, and is priced right to actually allow many smaller open source ventures or individuals to attend. I even got the opportunity to talk to a few high school students who were able to attend because the price point didn’t overwhelm their nascent interest. But I digress…
One of the major themes this year was building community and the various problems inherent therein. Even Microsoft sent a speaker, Bryan Kirschner, to discuss how Microsoft is trying to build a community around its own open source efforts. Regardless of whether you trust Microsoft’s initiatives or not, I respect Bryan a lot for coming into what has traditionally been a very hostile environment and trying to rally support without being defensive.
A lot of projects — e.g. Microsoft, OpenKomodo, Miro — are just starting (relatively speaking) to build their communities. They’re dealing with issues that are a little different than ours: how do I attract people to my project vs. project X? Some of these projects have the added benefit of being newer and/or flashier than us (Miro). Some of the projects will be effectively capped by their target audience (OpenKomodo). Microsoft just has to get past 25 years of bad blood. 
Mozilla shares the recruitment problem of these other projects, but increasingly our problem is also one of retention: how do we keep the testers we already have (many of the newer projects *are* seductive), and how do we embrace new people who do show up to help and not scare them away?
I’m adding my name to the growing list of Mozilla people attending FSOSS 2007 in Toronto at the end of October. I missed out on FSOSS last year, and everyone involved seems to have had a blast. It’s rare to have a relevant conference within VIA1 striking distance of Ottawa, so I’m taking a stab this year.
What will I be doing? Well, first and foremost, the Mozilla QA team has a testday scheduled for the Friday, Oct. 26th with a focus on OS Integration on Vista & Mac, with a secondary focus on Installer testing. Between sessions, I’ll be plugging into testday, and hopefully leading an impromptu remote testday in conjunction with Club Moz @ Seneca. It’s no secret that Seneca has also been a fruitful recruiting ground for us in the past, so I’ll also be chatting with students and generally trying to get people excited about plugging in to the Mozilla community.
Hope to see lots of folks there.
As shaver pointed out in his recent spate of blogging, the good folks at ActiveState announced the Open Komodo Project last week. As a long-time user of the Komodo IDE myself, this is exciting news. For me, working at Mozilla is as much a philosophical choice as anything else, so it’s always encouraging to find another company that gets “it,” where “it” is the Open Web.
Congrats to ActiveState on their announcement. Their community site offers more info about how to get involved if you’re so inclined.
