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.

[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. As you can see in the bug, I tried just about everything to diagnose (and then fix) the segfaults. I eventually caught a coredump from one of the failures and tracked the problem to mysql_ping() as called by the DBD::mysql perl module:

#0 0x057d8e5b in mysql_ping () from /usr/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15
#1 0×0082a8c1 in XS_DBD__mysql__db_ping (my_perl=0×8504ba0, cv=0×8a3bff0) at mysql.xs:516

The full trace is in the bug.

That gave me a little more to work with. After some searching, I eventually found this article in Portuguese that Google was able to trans-massacre-late just enough for it to implicate the most recent version of the DBD::mysql module (4.007). This is the version that ships with RHEL5 (or can be installed via yum install at any rate). It works just fine with a local database like in our staging setup, but repeatedly segfaults for us when connecting to our remote database pool in production.

As suggested in the Portuguese article, downgrading the version of DBD::mysql to 4.006 fixed the problem. We haven’t had another segfault since. My hope is that this will help the next non-Portuguese person that goes looking for this information.

If you need something to watch once you download Firefox 3 later today, I’ve uploaded a few videos of the action. Sadly, there was no Truckasaurus.

A new version of Firefox is coming out on Tuesday. Casual internet users may be asking themselves, “I already have a web browser. Why should I update to Firefox 3?” There’s lots of great stuff in Firefox 3, but several of the new features bear special highlighting for casual users:

• AwesomeBar, aka the Smart Location Bar:

  Can’t remember the address of that web site you visited last week? Start typing some search terms into the location bar and Firefox 3 will automatically search through your history and present you with a list of potential matches. Couple this with a new tagging/bookmarking system, and you got an incredibly powerful system that makes things much easier and friendlier to use, but it’s better to see it for yourself.

  It’s hard to overstate just how awesome the AwesomeBar is, especially for casual users. Like tabbed browsing, the AwesomeBar represents a sea change in how web browsers are used. I think any future browser that doesn’t ship with something like the AwesomeBar out-of-the-box will ship broken. Deb has more information in her post, AwesomeBar is awesome.

• Security:

  I saw weird stuff in that place last night. Weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil stuff! And I want in.
  – Homer Simpson

  There are a lot of mean, evil people on the internet these days, but that knowledge alone doesn’t seem to stop us from from repeatedly putting ourselves in harm’s way by clicking random links in email, downloading dubious files, and such. Those of us who spend (seemingly) all day, every day in front of computers should know better, but casual users rarely have the tools or experience to make these kinds of judgment calls.

  Well, the people who *do* spend all day, every day in front of computers are coming to the rescue. Firefox 3 contains greatly improved site identification, as well as marked improvements to phishing and malware protection. These features don’t replace common sense, but they make it easier for users to make informed choices about resources on the internet.

• Performance and memory usage:

  It’s no secret that Firefox 2 had some “issues” with memory usage. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise — for us, at least. Those of you who suffered through bloated browser experiences may not agree — because it forced us to develop tools to detect and measure the problems, and then get them fixed.

  And fixed them we have. Simply put, Firefox 3 kicks ass in the performance department. Whether you’re like me and have a million applications and tabs open at once, or just use your web browser to check out the latest pictures of your grandchildren, Firefox 3 is going to play nice.

There’s more, so much more, but at some point, I’m just repeating what Deb has already presented much more eloquently and succinctly in her Field Guide to Firefox 3, which is *THE* post on the subject.

Give Firefox 3 a try on Tuesday, or I’ll install it for you next time I’m over.

In the past, testing with Selenium has entailed firing up Firefox 2 because the Selenium IDE had not yet been updated to work with the Firefox 3 betas/release candidates. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to find a new version 1.0 beta 2 available for download that has been updated to support Firefox 3. Not a moment too soon either!

Aside from minimizing my need to switch between major revs of my favorite browser, the 1.0 betas of the IDE have introduced a wealth of new functionality that make my webdev testing life easier. Of key importance to me are two features:

1. Dynamic/automatic addition of test commands to the right-click context menu as I use them. I’m likely to use the same commands again and again based on the way I write tests, and this may not be the same as other people, so not having a static list is great.
2. Ability to edit/run test suites directly. No more firing up selenium-core or switching between the IDE and a browser tab. This is a HUGE win for me.

Thanks to the Selenium team for your hard work on a great tool. I’m very interested to see how Bromine shapes up.

More Save Dollhouse hilarity, courtesy of the Dollverse.

Glad to see someone gaining traction from our idea, even if we could not.

• cleanup my desk
• file expenses for my last work trip
• catchup on bugmail…so very much bugmail
• survive

And for the more forward thinking cynics among us, I present this.

For those who want the lowdown on all the whizbang going on behind the scenes, brace yourselves:

• Wordpress 2.5 - duh
• Elixir Orange 1.2 Theme by Michael Whalen, with a good deal of personal tweaking for style and to get it playing nicely with widgets.
• Akismet anti-spam plugin - de rigeur
• Flickr Photo Gallery plugin - sidebar photo widget, among other things
• UTF8 Database Converter plugin - life-saver of a plugin for upgrading an existing Wordpress database to utf-8 automatically. I recently went through this pain manually with Litmus, so this plugin was a godsend.
• Single Bookmark Category List widget - finer control over sidebar links