mZ
Friday 29 April 2005
- Status update for week of April 29, 2005 - News - Firefox hit 50 million downloads! - SVG now included in Firefox trunk builds for Windows and Mac - Lead Sysadmin position notice posted on MoFo careers page - 2 new Mac build systems added, full configuration pending - met with bclary about JavaScript QA while he visited MoFo - met with tor about SVG while he visited MoFo SVG - Windows and Mac build systems configured to build SVG and their builds now include SVG by default. Using it requires flipping a pref since it's disabled by default. (bugs 285177, 285178) - new Linux build system capable of building with SVG enabled, overcoming problems in building profiled (bug 292377) New build systems - Six new systems: 2 dual G5 XServes, 4 dual Xeon HP DL360 G4s - Worked out cabinet depth problems at colo, two XServes (atlantia and triton) are now properly mounted, attached to network - One XServe (atlantia) is serving as the Firefox trunk build system - One XServe (triton) is allocated to Firefox aviary branch, next step to configure - One DL360 (prometheus) is configured as a Linux build system, shaking out profiled build problems - One DL360 has Windows Server 2003 installed, next step to add build tools - One DL360 has a hardware problem that led to reboots while OS was installing - One DL360 hasn't yet been tested Firefox 1.0.3 - made he-IL build links on firefox/all.html live Deer Park - meetings, emails - provide feedback and thoughts on software update to darin, ben, dougt, dveditz Et cetera - MIME::tools, potential use of this CPAN module in the build scripts to send multiple files to the Tinderbox server (rather than just the build log) - ideas to speed up CVS checkout for some of our build systems - staff meeting... (16:27 | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 26 April 2005
- SVG here we come - SVG is now enabled in the Firefox trunk nightlies: windows, mac Linux coming soon. Update: I should choose my words more carefully. s/enabled/included/... (14:14 | 13 Comments)
Thursday 14 April 2005
- +1, Freedom - "Online Freedom of Speech Act Introduced in House" Let your voice be heard, regardless of stance and forum! You probably won't be able to speak to these officeholders directly, but the staffers will be happy to pass along your opinions. As for me, I appreciate their effort to keep blogging free of FEC regulation. Congressman Jeb Hensarling (contact) 132 Cannon House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Phone: 202-225-3484 Fax: 202-226-4888 Senator Harry Reid (contact) 528 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Phone: 202-224-3542 Fax: 202-224-7327... (18:24 | 0 Comments)
Wednesday 6 April 2005
- Firefox 1.0.3 and Mozilla Suite 1.7.7 candidates available for testing - Asa has posted about our latest builds and in an effort to help him spread the word, I'll post too.. We've ironed out some issues on the branches and came up with a set of Firefox 1.0.3 and Suite 1.7.7 builds that we'd like to get eyes on for testing purposes. If you'd like to join in the testing effort, feel free to try out any or all of them. The more testing they can get the more solid the releases we can offer back to you! Thanks! Firefox 1.0.3 Linux Mac Windows Suite 1.7.7 Linux GTK1 Linux GTK2 Mac Windows... (21:31 | 0 Comments)
Monday 28 March 2005
- Congrats to Bryner! - My congratulations to Brian for his recent move to Google! While I'm here I'll say thanks for the help you continue to offer when I get stuck on those really difficult build problems. Best of luck to you, man.... (22:40 | 4 Comments)
Tuesday 22 March 2005
- Wondering why there are no .zip files for the Fx and Tb 1.0.2 releases? - Some people have been wondering why there are no .zip files for the Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.2 releases. The reason for this is that the Mozilla Foundation has discontinued issuing them for our major releases to avoid the user confusion it was causing. During previous releases, a number of people grabbed the .zip package and used that in their Firefox installation directory. When Firefox 1.0.1 rolled around, they grabbed the .exe installer package. When they setup 1.0.1 using the installer, a lot of them chose the same installation location in which they'd unzipped the .zip file. This led to their Firefox 1.0.1 installation crashing repeatedly and (very!) mysteriously. We tracked down the cause of the large number of Talkback incidents we were receiving late-late-late into the night of the Firefox 1.0.1 release to being caused by misuse of the .zip and .exe packages. It was obvious then there was no quick fix. The smartest thing for us to do was reduce our configuration management/QA complexity while simplifying user experience by assisting those less savvy among us in selecting the correct file to use for their platform. For Windows, people should use the .exe package. If you're a Mozilla developer and love the .zip files, rest assured they aren't going away completely. While we won't issue the .zip package with the rest of the major release files, we will still issue these packages in their standard nightly form.... (17:13 | 185 Comments)
- Snow Crash - Photo courtesy of morgamic.... (15:30 | 0 Comments)
Saturday 12 March 2005
- Cross-compiling Mac executables from Intel x86 - In drawing up a vision for how to turbocharge the Mozilla Foundation's build farm, I've read many cool things that could lead to builds taking very little time. One of the cooler ideas (but not the coolest) is to cross-compile our Mac builds straight from Intel x86 boxes. I've asked around the office and while we all agree that this is intriguing, we wonder what drawbacks we might face. Do we lose a lot of optimizations we would otherwise get if we were compiling natively? Of course, the resulting binaries would need to be sent to a Mac platform for testing, but if we could more closely tie our build farm story to one type of hardware platform (instead of needing G4s, G5s, and/or Xserve G5s, as well), we would be able to go farther, faster, and do so at less cost. Anyone out there have experience with cross-compiling Mac executables from Intel x86? Did your build systems go mad and cause your hard drives to spin out of control? Did your Intel x86 box instantly take on the silver gleam of an Xserve? Spin your tall tales (with a dose of truth about whether or not it actually worked) here!... (20:59 | 17 Comments)
Wednesday 23 February 2005
- Making web applications more user-friendly - Such an interesting article from Adaptive Path's Jesse Garrett today entitled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" highlighting the recent trends in web apps to make them more user-friendly. This provides a good summary of the technical achievements that power the latest breed of Google apps (ie. Gmail, Google Suggest, Google Maps) without the in-depth codeline play-by-play. Brendan pointed me at Dojo, too, which is a browser toolkit that aims to provide a uniform interface to the capabilities that browsers from Firefox to Opera to IE provide. One thing's for sure: the demonstration Google Maps provides rocks, but it's still just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done when common JavaScript techniques are coupled with the DOM and client-server RPC.... (18:07 | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 15 February 2005
- Bonsai linkification - If you've been looking closely enough you'll have noticed that the commit message linkification on Tinderbox and Bonsai has gotten smarter. Now if a group of numbers is preceded by "attachment ", the link will be auto-transformed into a link to a Bugzilla attachment. Example... (11:32 | 0 Comments)
Sunday 13 February 2005
- Modifying Tinderbox, Bonsai, and LXR; Call for Suggestions - Slowly but surely I've been weaving my way through the Tinderbox, Bonsai, and LXR code and straightening out any parts that seem crooked. I've fixed some regressions around the layout of usernames on Tinderbox pages which was giving bad links to their commit info, properly URL-escaped committer names (so we can see what people with '+' in their usernames have changed), and, with the proper encouragement, implemented the equivalent of an "I'm feeling lucky" search for file find in LXR. (If you have an LXR keyword set up for file searching append '&lucky=1'. Hi Ben!) I can't leave out Bonsai, though, due to the amount of time I've spent getting a new installation enabled for l10n work. Packaging was never done for this tool, which means that if the person standing up a new instance isn't familiar with it, this can be pretty challenging. But the challenge is good because it points out one area in particular that the tool needs work. I'm putting a lot of thought into how tools like these are used on the Mozilla project and how they could be made better. What works and what doesn't, strengthening them while at the same time making them more flexible. They are essential for our work and could prove just as invaluable to those projects which aren't using them already.... (16:34 | 0 Comments)