Hacking for Christ

100,000 Bug Reporters

Sometime around now (it's not a statistic we keep an eye on daily), we will pass 100,000 unique bug reporters in bugzilla.mozilla.org. To try and give you some sort of handle on that, this is approximately equivalent to the entire population of Chelmsford (UK), Cambridge (Mass., USA) or Cairns (Australia) each filing at least one bug. (Submissions of other correctly-sized cities in your country welcomed in the comments.)

This is yet more proof, if more were needed, of the broad reach of the Mozilla project across the world - not just in terms of users, but in terms of contributors.

Other interesting stats: our average-bugs-filed-per-day has gone from about 70 to 119 over the last year, and there are currently 294,115 Bugzilla user accounts.

Occasionally people complain about the cryptic nature of the Bugzilla UI, and we have done things to address it. When considering that question, there are two ways to look at these stats. Either, "if 100,000 people can work it out, we can' t be doing too badly", or "if only 1/3 of account creators successfully file a bug, then our UI is too complex". The latter view, of course, assumes that filing a bug is the only reason that people create accounts. How solid is that assumption, I wonder?

Scans

My scans have arrived :-) Here's a good picture of the lump, at its largest. It's the light-coloured round-ish thing on the left of the picture, which is the right hand side of me. Impressive, huh? The scan report describes it as "well-circumscribed" and suggests that none of the major veins or ducts are (yet) involved. I have an appointment with a liver specialist next Monday.

The scan folder contains all sorts of images in all sorts of configurations. Some I'll keep to myself for the sake of modesty but, just for fun, here's a fairly low-res animated GIF (500k) of a 360 degree 3D view of my head and shoulders. Thanks to ImageMagick for the heavy lifting. Can't wait for it to support APNG ;-)

Amazon Marketplace Margins

I recently bought an item from Amazon Marketplace. The seller sent me a hand-written confirmation dispatch email, which happened also to forward me the email Amazon sent them. From it, it was clear that Amazon's cut for Marketplace sales, at least of books, is 15% of the total price, or 20% of the price before shipping. (With only one data point, I can't tell which.)

Just thinking about the sort of volumes they must do, and the tiny amount of actual computing resources it takes to make such a sale once the system is set up, I suspect they are making what is technically known as a boatload of money.

Tennis Balls

Every six months, I have a full body scan to see if there's been any recurrence of my cancer. Normally it's a CT, but at the beginning of October, I had a PET, which shows metabolic activity. It came back clearly showing an area of non-uniform metabolic activity in my liver, about 5cm across. A further MRI six weeks after confirmed that there's a single, well-defined lump, which is now about 6cm across - about the size of a tennis ball. That's a 20% increase in six weeks. And I am beginning to have a vague awareness of its presence.

This rapid growth is somewhat surprising, as previous occurrences have been very slow. The largest of my lung metastases, for example (an image of which now graces the "CT" page on Wikipedia) was about 1cm across after several years. So there is at least some possibility this is something else entirely. But the primary hypothesis is a recurrence, so next stop is a liver specialist, and then almost certainly an operation. More scars for the collection :-)

I haven't yet managed to get CDs of the scans, but when I do, I'll put up some pictures.

"O great and powerful God, whose name is the LORD Almighty, great are your purposes and mighty are your deeds." -- Jeremiah 32:18b-19a

Why I Can't Test 3.0b1

I can't test 3.0b1, because it's a completely different browser to 2.0.0.9. It's not that the core team has rewritten stuff, it's just that my 3.0b1 does a lot less - because almost none of my addons are compatible.

The Firefox addons system is a victim of its own success. I wager that most of the technically-adept Mozilla community, who should be the first people to test new versions of the browser and file high quality bug reports, have a large set of addons they can't do without. And until those addons are available for Firefox 3.0b1, they won't be migrating - or will do so only for dedicated testing sessions, not every-day browsing. This is certainly true for me.

Here's the list of my important addons which currently don't work:

• Aardvark
• Auto Auth
• Firebug
• Flashblock
• Greasemonkey
• Highlight Focus
• Link Alert
• Live HTTP Headers
• Nightly Tester Tools (!)
• Web Developer
• Zotero

And that's just the ones I'd have trouble managing without. There's another five or ten (e.g. CustomiseGoogle) that don't work but I don't care too much.

I'm not sure if this is because the addon authors are fed up of writing to moving APIs and are waiting for the final release, or because it just takes time, or because they've done all the work but it's stuck in the a.m.o. review queue.

Still, if we want good testing coverage for 3.0b1, we need to find a way to get updated addons (at least, the most popular ones) done and available on a.m.o. ASAP.

Gerv Status 2007-11-24

Last Two Weeks

• Wrote a patch to relicense the mozITXTToHTMLConverter
• Patch to add .es to IDN whitelist
• Made CA pending request list pass W3C Validator
• Submitted detailed feedback on Alex Faaborg's UI mockups
• Clarified licensing status of the output of the XPIDL compiler

Next Two Weeks

• Bugzilla reorg is still top of the list, but nothing's come off the list in a while...

Open Rights Group is Two

The Open Rights Group is two years old, and they've published a review of everything they've achieved so far. For a young organisation, it's an impressive list: e-voting, DRM, data retention...

I was particularly impressed with their work on the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, where they (with others) persuaded Andrew Gowers that copyright term extension is a really bad idea. Of course, the term is still 70 years, which means I basically can't hack on any culture created during my lifetime. But at least it's not any worse.

If you live in the UK and aren't a supporter, consider becoming one.

Meal Bookings Software

Dear lazyweb,

(Although actually, I have looked a bit myself, so maybe it's more Dear knowledgeableweb)

Does anyone know of any Free web-based software for managing meal bookings in a canteen? Say e.g. for a university - you want people to be able to say when they are in or out, so the canteen knows how many meals to cook and the accounts department knows how much to bill. I can't seem to find anything, although it seems to me like it would be a common problem for institutions to have.

What Is It With...

[Number 1 in an occasional series]

...people who create pledges on Pledgebank for things that they are clearly going to do anyway even if no-one else signs up?

"I will only buy food Produced in the uk to help our Economy and jobs but only if 100 other people will do the same."

"I will buy a Dignity. Period! wristband to support the campaign for access to sanitary products for women in Zimbabwe but only if 50 other people will do the same."

"I will donate $100 [to Dennis Kucinich's campaign for President] but only if 100 other people will do the same."

...

Gerv Status 2007-11-09

Last Two Weeks

• Talked to marketing team about the community situation in the UK
• Managed the email flood, which is all I have time for at the moment

Next Two Weeks

• I'm not making much progress on non-immediate projects, such as the Bugzilla reorganisation. I need to consider carefully how to manage that, and how and when to delegate.

Anchor Markers

We've had a bug open for quite a long time about implementing the W3C Common User Agent Problems recommendation from 2001 to highlight the target of intra-page named anchors.

Someone recently posted their ideas in that bug; I don't think much of their UI, but I think it would be great if Firefox had a solution for this. (It would be nice also to style internal links slightly differently, perhaps with a dotted underline, so people don't do "Open In New Tab", and end up with five copies of the same large page.)

Is there an extension which does this? If not, does anyone feel like knocking one up?

One implementation method would be to highlight and then fade out the elements contained in the <a name=""> tag. However, this might not work everywhere because of the following pattern:

<a name="heading"></a>
<h3>Heading</h3>

People do this a) to make sure the heading is visible on the page, and b) because people used to write bad CSS which caused hover effects to apply to anything within an <a> tag, whether it had an href or not. But maybe this problem isn't a showstopper.

400,000 Bug Sweepstake Follow-up

I've been in touch with Christian Schmidt, who won the 400,000 Bug Sweepstake. As his prize, he's chosen a Firefox t-shirt and a Thunderbird t-shirt.

I asked him to tell us a little bit about himself; he says;

I got my Bugzilla account back in 2000. I have written a few patches (the most notable being the "show line number" and "go to line" features in the view source window) and reported a number of bugs over the years. Lately I haven't been doing much on the project, but I still keep track of the development using Henrik Gemal's Blogupdates.

DisORGanised

The Open Rights Group, the UK's equivalent of the EFF, is a great thing. However, and I hope I won't upset Becky too much by saying this, their organisation leaves much to be desired.

I wanted to make sure I was supporting them. So on 21st May 2007, I sent this email to supporters@:

Have I ever and/or am I currently supporting ORG financially? If so, in what way?

Gerv

No response. A month later, on the 20th June, I tried again:

Hey,

Don't you want my money? :-) If you tell me I'm not currently supporting ORG, I intend to.

Gerv

Still nothing. At LUGRadio Live, I found Becky Hogge (who runs it) and she said she'd get it sorted, and I should email again. So, on the 27th of July:

Despite having buttonholed Becky Hogge about it at LUGRadio Live, I still haven't heard definitively whether or not I'm an ORG supporter.

I still want to give you guys money if I'm not already! Please help me! :-)

Gerv

As of today, still no response :-( I've had this problem before. I'm very happy to support them once, but I don't want to do so twice. What do I have to do to get them to talk to me?

[Update 2007-11-03: Just noticed that my amusing punning title, "DisORGanised", doesn't work using my blog's default stylesheet in Firefox, which respects the text-transform: upper-case I use for titles. So it just looks like a bald insult. Sorry about that, ORG :-) ]