December 2003 Archives

For years, I've been hoping that we'd find the resources to build a testcase manager, something Bugzilla-like that would allow us to store testcases, track test results over time, and most importantly to distribute the testing load by breaking it up into smaller chunks. Zach, Dawn, Myk and I have had many discussions about building this system and I've, at least twice, drawn up some design docs for how it might work.

A couple of months ago, Myk pointed out an existing testcase manager which was designed to be integrated with Bugzilla (how cool is that!) It was originally implemented by Maciej Maczynski and then ported forward to work with a more recent Bugzilla version by Ed Fuentetaja.

It's pretty clear to me that both of these people put a lot of effort into what is a very sophisticated tool but my initial evaluation of the tool was that it didn't seem to fit well with our model for distributing work and that it wasn't "continuous" enough - it appears to be designed for one person to run one set of tests against one particular build where Mozilla is constantly pushing new nightly builds to thousands of nightly build testers and soliciting bug (and other) feedback incrementally and progressively.

Also, while it is a very powerful tool with, for example, sophisticated mechanisms for doing things like diff'ing versions of a particular testcase or assigning testers to specific components or testcases, it is also seemed quite difficult to use and it wasn't the kind of system that I felt would attract a lot of people willing to give a few minutes of time to run a few tests against their latest nightly build.

Well, Myk's been hacking on it for a couple of weeks, streamlining a few of the primary interfaces and generally making it fit a little closer with my ideas for how a testcase manager ought to function. I'm starting to come around. With some help from Marcia, I've got our smoketests plugged into TestRunner and have been running those tests and recording results for the last few days. So far so good.

I'll be posting more information and links to a test installation as soon as we get a little bit further along. If you're interested in helping hack on this new tool or you've got experience with testcase management and you can offer suggestions, please click that "Comments" link and let me know.

John Perry Barlow has a blog and has a very good post on voice over IP.

Still no word from the Beagle 2. Bummer :(

Even the normally reasonable BBC has picked up the failure meme that seems to be spreading through the less reputable (AP and Reuters) space news sites.

Despite more than 30 missions launched to the Red Planet since the 1960s, only three landers have ever reached the Martian surface successfully.

We're a couple of hours away from the opening of the next window of contact opportunity. I'll post again when there's new information.

If you haven't been keeping up with our planet's effort to get cozy with a few of the other planets, I posted briefly on the state of things back in January of this year.

No answer yet :( At least the Mars Express orbiter seems to be where it's supposed to be. Keep your fingers crossed for Beagle.

udate: More information. It looks like the first opportunity, an Odyssey flyover, didn't pick up Beagle's signal but that doesn't mean that Beagle's lost. It sounds like the next opportunity to get Beagle's signal will be mid-day (USA time) Thursday.

update2: Reuters has a much less optimistic headline but based on their obvious failure to understand basics like which crafts were actually involved, I'm holding out hope that they're just clueless.

update3: more: "I'm afraid it's a bit disappointing but it's not the end of the world," Pillinger told the press. "Please don't go away from here believing we've lost the spacecraft."
There was a further chance later Thursday, from 2200 GMT onwards, that the British radio telescope Jodrell Bank might pick up a signal, and also an opportunity on Friday, before Beagle's batteries failed, he said.

update4: more quotes from the AP, "We have had the information from Odyssey and it does not contain any data from Beagle," said Peter Barratt, a spokesman for the Beagle 2 mission in London. However, he added, "we are quite confident" that the landing will still be confirmed.

last update of the night: Quite a few online papers have picked up a line that goes something like this: "Two-thirds of all of the Mars missions have ended in failure." This is intentionally misleading, sensationalist, and just really lame reporting. Take out the Soviet and Russian Mars missions (which have pretty much all failed) and you've got just the opposite, something closer to two-thirds success, for NASA missions. Mars Express and Beagle 2 are a joint British/ESA production and I'd put them a whole lot closer to NASA in competence than to Russia. I've still got my fingers crossed :-) More tomorrow as it comes in.

Well, I didn't get it together to organize a BugDay this week. I'll see if I can get something together for next week. Happy holidays. See y'all in a few days.

I'm probably going to be working on the 1.6 release during the ealry part of the week with only a short break for some of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I don't expect many other folks to be around so it's not likely that there will be any serious activity, like a release, until people return in early January. If we can get candidate builds before Wednesday, then I'll probably be begging here for some testing help so if you're around and want to help out, keep an eye on the blog. I might try to host a BugDay on Tuesday, but that's gonna depend on how much I'm getting done with the release and if there's any interest from new contributors.

NASA has put together three cool movie trailer-like animations bringing attention to the two MER missions scheduled to arrive at Mars beginning in January of 2004. The animations look familiar and I think I must have blogged and linked to previous iterations that lacked the splash and theme music but contained some of the same footage. Nice work, NASA.

The Beagle 2 lander successfully separated from the Mars Express (delivery and orbiter) craft and is on its way to the Martian surface. There are three scary failure spots, launch, separation/orbit insertion, and landing, and the crafts have survived the first two. Keep your eye on the Beagle 2 Weblog and your fingers crossed.

The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Caltech Space Infrared Telescope Facility) is snapping some sexy images. A few of my favorites: image 1 | image 2 | image 3 | image 4

The Beagle 2 lander is scheduled to seperate from it's partner, Mars Express, and begin it's solo trek to the Martian surface in about two hours. Cross your fingers.

BugDay, yesterday, was a blast! We had over 250 people come in to #mozillazine over the course of the day and dozens of people got more directly involved in making Mozilla better, triaging hundreds of bugs in Bugzilla. If you've been looking for ways to get more involved with the project, keep your eyes out for the next BugDay.

It's BugDay. Join us and help make Mozilla better.

Finally, mozillaZine has posted something about tomorrow's BugDay.

If you're new to Mozilla or Bugzilla and are looking for help getting involved, stop in to IRC server irc.mozilla.org channel #mozillazine and give me a shout.

I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow so Simon and I have decided to attempt BugDay on Wednesday. Hope to see you all there.

A sad story came to an end when Keiko succomed to pneumonia and died off of the Norway coast this weekend. Keiko ("Lucky One" in Japanese) had a very difficult life. His death was apparently quick.



An orca's brain is four times the size of a human's. I don't know much about the whale mind, but I hope that Keiko died thinking about his rescuers, his trek across the Atlantic, and the Norway fjords, and not his many years of captivity in 12 ft. tank in a Mexican amusement park.

Simon and I talked some more about BugDays and since we're both available next Tuesday (and Tuesday was the traditional BugDay day) we've settled on that as the day of the return of BugDay! More info to come.

APOD does Cassini's view of Saturn and the January edition of Astronomy has a beautiful Saturnian spread.

There's a really annoying bug on Mac Mozilla where the personal toolbar links disappear on click and I'm wondering if any of you css or theme wizards out there could help us get a patch together for 1.6.

Sorry 'bout the lack of updates. I've got one two many things going on and the blog is at the bottom of the list. Hopefully I'll get things goin' again around here after Christmas.

For those looking for Mozilla updates, we're pretty much wrapped up and you can get an early peek at 1.6 Beta by grabbing this morning's builds (the -05, -09, and -14 dirs). We've still got a ways to go before final and not much time to get there if we want to get this thing out the door before Christmas. We'll see.

If it's not one thing, it's another. Beta is likely to be delayed until at least Monday while we sort out some build machine issues :(

Today I see that mozdev's extensionroom is up to 150 extensions. There are a few new ones for me to check out. Do you all have any recommendations (for or against) any of the recent additions? I'm still using mostly the same Firebird extensions that I was using when I last brought this up on the blog: Text Zoom, RSS Reader Panel, Cute Menus, Link Visitor, and Bugxula. I plan to try out at least Inspect This (since I'm using the DOM Inspector a lot more now) Nuke anything, and MozEdit and I might try the QuickManager extension manager thing.

We're in the home stretch for Mozilla 1.6 Beta so if you know of any issues that should block the release of the Beta (or final), time is short to make your nominations to drivers@mozilla.org. Also worth noting, Beta is the localization freeze. After Beta, drivers will not be approving any changes to localizable strings so that our L10N community can use the last few weeks of 1.6 to finish up their language packs. So if you know of any string changes that need to happen, run, don't walk, to make those nominations and approval requests.

Vega may have Earth-like planets!! For those of you who don't know, Vega is close, really close, only 25.3 ly away and appears as one of the brightest stars in the sky. It's about three and a half times the size of the sun and about 75 times brighter. A part of the constallation Lyra, and one point of the Summer Triangle (with Altair and Deneb the other two), Vega is visible high in the western sky at sunset sinking to set in the northwest around 10 PM. It will rise above the northeastern horizon just before sunrise around 5:30 am if you're awake and want to take another look. (plug for Sarry Night.)

It's been known for a couple of decades that Vega had a dusty halo but recent data gathered by the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array at the James Clerk Maxwell radio telescope in Hawaii, when pushed through sophisticated computer models, suggests that there's opportunity for Earth-like planets to have formed inside of the relatively distant orbit of a Neptune-sized gas giant plowing through Vega's dusty disk.

We're still a few years away from the next generation of telescopes that will allow us a much ore accurate picture of extra-solar planets. Today's extra-solar planet finders are using indirect observation methods but in 2012 we will see the launch of the Terrestrial Planet Finder which will provide direct observation of extra-solar planets as small as Earth. This direct method will allow observers to measure the spectrum of light from a planet's atmosphere giving strong indications of its makeup including our first real shot at observing the hallmarks of extra-terrestrial life.