Hacking for Christ

Gerv Status 2009-07-03

This Week

Governance

• Careful comments on fligtar's proposal for changing the AMO sandbox model
• Started looking at the issue of whether we have private mailing lists which shouldn't be private
• Worked with harvey on streamlining procedure for e-signing Committer's Agreements
• Mitchell resolved weekly update meeting move discussion; will now be 11am Monday

Bugzilla

• Summarised where we are so far
• Call with justdave about b.m.o. update procedure, technical feasibility of various plans

Other

• Watched Firefox 3.5 release process with admiration
• Updated Firefox Language coverage data for 3.5 and reblogged it
• Finished OpenTech presentation (nearly)
• Mentored SoC students:
  • Pedro has written a plan which looks very good, and will start implementation this weekend
  • Am working with Seulki to redefine the scope, as the original idea is looking difficult

Next Week

• OpenTech 2009 presentation on the Open Internet (Saturday)
• Firefox Launch Party, London (Monday)
• Make sure sweepstake winners get their prizes
• Wednesday off to prepare summer Bible studies
• Try and unblock some issues now people are not swamped with Firefox 3.5

Sputmic

From a Google search inspired by an idea I got reading Scott Berkun's Why panel sessions suck (and how to fix them):

Why has no-one commercialized this? It's the obvious solution to the "pass the microphone" problem at panels, talks and other audience-participation events.

Dopplr or TripIt?

Where's the action these days? I'm currently on Dopplr but have had TripIt invitations. Where are most people in the Mozilla community? A particular one, or both? I hear TripIt parses your emails from Expedia (which Mozilla uses) and other such places, which would be a time-saver. But migrating everything over would be a pain. I guess this is my first experience of potential social networking data migration anxiety. Open data FTW!

Please declare interests such as board seats or shares ;-)

Bzzzt!

Feel the Shiretoko Shock!

So what am I personally most excited about in the new Firefox? Well, I have no uses for Private Browsing Mode - I think porn is a terrible corruption of God's design for sexual relationships, my personal medical condition that I research is by no means a secret, and I don't share my computer with anyone anyway. The security UI improvements are cool and well worth having, but I'm not going to get phished any time soon. It's wonderful that we're now in even more languages, but I don't speak any of them!

So really, I'm just waiting for sites to take the excellent technical and standards changes and build cool new stuff I can use. Web designers, what are you waiting for? :-)

Firefox 3.5 Launches! (And London Party)

As of 3pm BST this afternoon, Firefox 3.5 has been unleashed on the world! Either do Help | Check For Updates or download it here. Various community members have recorded a video where they get excited about some of the new great stuff. If you are using an older browser, you may need to upgrade before you can view it :-)

All geeks in London who are pleased about this are invited to the Firefox 3.5 Launch Party London, next Monday the 6th of July from 7pm at the Shooting Star pub in Middlesex Street, near Liverpool Street station. Sign up on Upcoming if you plan to be there. We have a big screen, so bring cool stuff to demo if you have it, and a party mood. :-)

&*%!£ Flash

I just lost my browser and my entire desktop, AGAIN, while watching a video. This is an all-too-regular occurrence. Flash is the top cause of crashes on Linux - and has been among the top causes since Firefox 3.

When, oh when, will someone ship a browser I can use that can show me video without needing the Flash plugin?

Firefox 3.5 Language Coverage

Update: fixed a bug where I had confused Maltese and Malayalam. Firefox's numbers improve further :-)

The languages to be included in Firefox 3.5 are now confirmed, and Microsoft has just released the last 5 additional languages for IE 8 on XP they said were pending. That's three months after the original release. I guess they still need to learn from our team on how to simultaneously ship them all at once ;-P (And it's worth noting quite a few of their languages are still Vista and/or 32-bit only. Should we count a language if it's not available on their most common OS?)

Anyway, it's time for an update on our plans for world domination. A reminder for those joining the party: I have a spreadsheet which combines the Internet population of a country with its first-language-spoken percentages to try and get an accurate idea of what languages the world Internet population speaks.

The headline is that of the latest releases of all the browser vendors, Firefox now has the highest percentage of world Internet population first-language coverage - 95.7%:

The key change from the last release of the data is that I've got much more up-to-date figures for Internet population from InternetWorldStats (thanks very much to them). There are 28.5% more people on the net than in the last release of the statistics - an extra 300 million people. Almost every country's net population has gone up, but they've gone up by different amounts, and so that has had a knock-on effect on the relative importance of different languages, and of the percentages of the world covered. So, for example, Firefox 3.0 "dropped" more than one percentage point from 93.5% to 92.4%, despite still covering the same languages it always did! As more of the developing world comes online, the goalposts are moving :-)

The stats have their own page, where you can find the spreadsheet, FAQs and a more detailed explanation. A few noteworthy points:

• If you want a current browser in Esperanto, Welsh, Persian, Irish, Galician, Icelandic, Kurdish, Occitan, Romansh or Sinhala, Firefox is the only game in town.
• We are releasing 3.5 in Turkish despite the Turkish localizer breaking his leg. That's dedication.
• Axel says we are looking at taking a Malay localization from Ubuntu. That would be another 0.72%. Seth says Azerbaijani is in progress, and it could be that some friends of build engineer Ben Hearsum are looking at Tagalog. Exciting times :-)

Gerv Status 2009-06-26

This Week

Governance

• Call with reed to gain lots of useful technical info about possible solutions to various governance questions
• Did groundwork necessary for mozilla.org/hacking/ to redirect to the Developer's Guide on MDC
• Wrote first draft of Committing Rules and Responsibilities and had it reviewed by bsmedberg
• Participated in discussions on moving weekly update meeting

Bugzilla

• Discussion has now been wrapped up or taken to email
• Triaged a few bugs filed against b.m.o. to get a feel for the space
• Need to do more work on the issues list

Other

• Tuesday off to finish moving house
• Wrapped up the Bugzilla 500,000 bug sweepstake
• Reviewed and commented on CSP spec
• Started work on talk for OpenTech 2009
• Updated credits.html with backlog of requests, in preparation for release
• Mentored SoC students
  • Pedro is trying to grok liveHTTPheaders
  • Seulki is working on a plan

Next Week

• Make sure sweepstake winners get their prizes
• Call with David to discuss our OSCON presentation
• Finish OpenTech presentation

Improving Free Software Usability

mpt wrote an essay last year, "Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it", which is a follow-up to his original, "Why Free Software usability tends to suck". The more diplomatic title is perhaps a reflection in microcosm of mpt's own personal journey ;-)

We are already doing some of the stuff he suggests, such as (by example) "establish[ing] a culture of simplicity" and using distributed version control. Is there more we can do? Some ideas:

• "Establish more and stronger incentives. For example, annual Free Software design awards". Could we run these, perhaps in collaboration with openusability.org (although it seems to have gone a bit quiet)? We are at the forefront of pulling together volunteer designers to work on free software with the Mozilla Creative Collective. Graphic design isn't usability, but it does show we are reaching out to non-traditional communities. Disadvantage: we wouldn't be able to win. ;-)

• "Develop and promote screen capture, video recording, and other software that makes tests easier to run". We have to figure out how to do user testing remotely. Is there any recording software out there that will record a user's desktop, and audio, and video from their webcam? All three are IMO necessary if you want to be able to review a usability test remotely. I can find software, like RecordMyDesktop, which will do desktop and audio, but no-one has added in webcam support yet. I guess this it outside the expertise of the Mozilla project, but hopefully someone else will read this and take the task on.

• Develop and promote VoIP, video chat, virtual whiteboard, sketching, and animation software that allows easier communication of design ideas over the Internet. There seems to be no web-standards-based virtual whiteboard software, and yet with <canvas> it should be easy. Anyone fancy knocking up a demo? You wouldn't even need to do conflict resolution - lines just overlay each other. Add the ability to import images (screenshots), join a phone conference, and you have a ready-made design space.
  

Bugzilla 500,000 Bug Sweepstake Results

Milestone bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 500,000 was filed on 2009-06-23 at 11:06 ZST by long-time Mozilla contributor 'timeless'. Which makes it the third time he's filed a milestone bug. And we can see how he does it. :-)

The winner is Jean-Yves Perrier, who guessed 2009-06-28 11:32:26 - 5 days and 26 minutes out. It looks like the accuracy is decreasing - the 300,000 bug winner was less than 7 hours out, and the 400,000 bug winner was 1 day 15 hours out. It's getting easier to win! :-)

Jean-Yves writes:

I'm a tester of nightlies. I download them almost every day and use them for day browsing. I reported a couple of bugs, but not much. I also tried (on the french forum www.geckozone.org) to maintain a thread annoucing the main new stuff that land on the trunk, so that non-english speaker can follow the development.

I was a long time user of Netscape (and Mosaic before). End of the 90s/early 2000s, after a brief period with Opera (not yet free as a beer) and with IE, I switched to Mozilla, then Firefox 1.0. One bug that drove me crazy while Firefox 1.5 was still in beta made me look at the development of Firefox and since then I switched to the nightlies (who got the patch :-) and sticked to them since then.

Jean-Yves wins a Firefox backpack. The two runners-up are Wladimir Palant (5d 13h 54m) and Phil Ringnalda (12d 20h 54m). They both win their choice of a t-shirt from the Mozilla store. Wladimir writes:

I am the developer of the Adblock Plus extension. I got involved with Mozilla in 2003 shortly after switching to Mozilla Suite - playing around with add-ons was just natural, it didn't take long for me to start fixing issues in the ones I used.

Phil writes:

I started triaging and offering occasionally-useful advice on livemark bugs in the summer of 2004, then noticed that there were lots of other bugs I could triage, then realized that if I wanted things fixed right I could just download the source and figure out how to patch things myself, then some time passed, and I somehow wound up a Thunderbird peer.

Gerv Status 2009-06-18

I plan to post a status document like this each week from now on.

This Week

Governance

• Call with Mitchell and Mark on governance project
• Created list of priorities - first focus on things related to commit access, as people are already thinking about them
• Long call with reed about technical aspects of various issues
• Participated in discussions in mozilla.governance

Bugzilla

• Continued discussion, of which there was a lot - this occupied the bulk of the week
• Continued to update wiki page based on feedback
• Things seem to be simmering down now

Other

• Gave careers presentation at my old school - all Friday
• Mentored SoC student

Next Week

• Wrap up Bugzilla discussions and attempt to prioritize issues
• Make proposals on various governance issues to governance newsgroup
• Call with David to discuss our OSCON presentation

The Problem With Newsgroups

I love newsgroups; I read the Mozilla discussion forums in that form, as it keeps everything together, it's threaded, and so on. But newsgroups are dropping out of use in favour of web-based forums. I wrote a while back expressing incredulity about this, and suggesting it was a case of "worse is better". But recently, I did come across this, which succinctly sums up some of the undeniable problems:

I and many others never were entirely happy with the newsgroup support for Logos software. It meant having to open up and set up Outlook Express (or some other news reader) and then plowing through the multitude of posts. The size of the newsgroup postings kept getting bigger, and if you deleted any thread, it would still come back to life in the ongoing responses to it. And if you deleted a thread and then wanted to find something in a deleted thread, it meant unsubscribing and resubscribing and then having the whole mess back on your computer. Another major problem for me was that I am regularly using two different computers, and that meant having to plow through the same stuff twice.

So, I am happy to report that Logos has now started the Logos Bible Software Forums, a web-based, online discussion and support forum. The newsgroups will be allowed to continue, but they will eventually become irrelevant. (Material from the newsgroups will not be moved into the new forums.)

This is very good news, and in just a few days of being online, there is a ton of activity. ...

What changes could we make to Thunderbird's news support to mitigate some of these problems? Some suggestions:

• When you join a new group, it does not give you "the last 500 messages" to read, but e.g. all the messages in the most recent N threads
• Make the UI and capability for watching/ignoring threads more obvious (I only discovered it today, and I've been using Thunderbird for 9 years!)
• Weave support for cross-computer syncing of which messages have been read

What else?

Linux's Hardware Support Better Than Windows?

You know, the old thing about Linux was that it didn't necessarily support your (new) hardware. Greg Kroah-Hartman has been trying to bust that myth with the Linux Driver Project for a while now. But recent events have proved beyond doubt that not only is he right, but installing and using new devices on Linux is now much easier than on Windows. In the last seven days, my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop encountered five new devices, and here's what happened:

• My uncle's camera, which he gave me to take a copy of the photos of a family wedding. I connected it via a USB cable, up popped a Nautilus window and I could drag and drop the photos off easily. On a Windows machine, I suspect I'd have needed a driver CD.
• My new Logitech Presenter (as recommended by gandalf). I plugged it into the laptop, and all the buttons just started working. Brilliant. By contrast, I plugged it into the Windows PC hardwired to the projector where I was doing a presentation, and I first got a "New hardware detected - what do you want to do?" dialog. I picked "find a driver" (well, duh) and then I got a "Enter admin password" prompt. Of course, I didn't know the admin password and so had to advance my presentation using the Page Down key. :-(
• T-Mobile Mobile Broadband. I bought a mobile broadband stick on a £2-a-day flat rate PAYG plan for occasional use when travelling on trains and also now, while I get internet in my new place set up properly. Plug it in, a wizard asks "Who is your provider?", pick T-Mobile and you are up and running. When, of course, you remember to switch back to Wifi, register on their website (they texted me a confirm code - doh! I had to put the SIM into my phone to get the text!) and add some credit :-) To be fair, the docs suggest it's this easy on Windows too, although it may require a reboot.
• HP Deskjet D1560 Printer. I had to print some forms for a training day on the printer the leaders had brought with them. Plugged it in, and it turned up in the evince print dialog without even needing to restart evince. Magic.
• Hauppage Win-TV Nova-T DVB stick. I bought this three years ago, but for the last two years we haven't had a TV licence, so I haven't been able to use it. Getting it working last time was an enormous hassle. Now, the kernel just recognizes it. Although actually getting to watch TV has, so far, been stymied by problems further up the software stack.

A pretty good record. I don't know if it's relevant that all the devices were USB. But what isn't, these days?