preed's blah-blah-blahg

I made a post last week, ostensibly about my experiences with Google Wifi. It was actually about much more.

It had an umlaut in the title, so I wasn't entirely surprised when it didn't show up on Planet.m.o, thinking maybe foreign languages caused inter-Planetary indigestion.

After some debugging, we found that Planet's parser was indeed crashing, but not on my blog.

I filed a bug to track the issue and within minutes—go go Gadget Mozilla Community—an... interesting configuration change was pointed out.

This change, which turned out to be the reason my post didn't make its way onto Planet, raises a couple of important issues which, from what I can tell, haven't really been raised or addressed heretofore:

The first is how editorial changes are made on planet.m.o, and how those changes get communicated, not only to those publishing to the feed, but to those reading it.

In my case, I was not notified that Planet's seemingly de facto (and sole) editor, Tim Rowley, had added the filter.¹ I'm not entirely sure how planet filtering works,² so adding filters to my blog without telling me effectively removed my blog from Planet's feed, because there's no way I would know which "magical keywords" I needed to use to get my content onto Planet now.

In looking at the (admittedly short) planet.m.o config history, it looks like I'm not the only one who's been silently censored: numerous people have been completely removed from Planet, without being given any notification or even a detailed explanation.³

In the bug, others have noticed community members' blogs missing from the Planet feed, which begs the question: just how many blogs were removed because a single person decided the content contained in those blogs wasn't what he (or his office⁴) was interested in reading?

It leaves me wondering "how much content, Mozilla-related, or otherwise am I missing from members of our community?"

The second obvious issue this raises is "What content is appropriate for Planet.m.o," and, slightly related, "How do we enforce that content policy?"

Obviously, this is a fairly gray line, with lots of opinions on the subject.

For myself, I write about a myriad of subjects, which tend to fall into "very Mozilla-related," "technology/web-industry related," and "not-at-all Mozilla-related."

Personally, I enjoy reading content on Planet that isn't necessarily (or maybe not directly) Mozilla-related; I see Planet as a community resource that illustrates the Community—what its working on, what its interested in and worried about, its trials and successes, how it relieves stress, what big changes are happening in people's lives that may affect the community—not merely the browser-and-related-projects and the code-that-goes-in-one-end and the bits-that-come-out-the-other.

Surely we could reduce Planet.m.o to a listing of fixed bugs and posts about what features we're working on and when releases are available. But doing so would remove the human face of our work, sucking the humanity out of the Mozilla Project. A feed that lacks these elements would serve to imply that we're all just a bunch of code-robots, hacking 24 hours a day, who don't [need to] have families or hobbies, who don't [need to] require sleep, and who don't need to be treated like we have lives outside of our work on Mozilla.

Not only would that be a tragic and depressing face to put on our project, it would be an insulting one.

I understand that not everyone may agree with me, though. For my own part, I have often written about topics not particularly Mozilla-related. I've continued to write about these because I've received numerous comments on IRC and in person saying they really liked a particular post. Sometimes it's been about why Digg and Slashdot users screw us. Sometimes it's been about flying.⁶

To be clear, I'm not saying that a more open policy of content on a space like planet.m.o does not require some consideration and respect for the forum their content is being featured in. I take special care to my non-Mozilla related posts in the "extended post" section, making it easy to skip over if the first paragraph doesn't grab your attention.⁷

In some cases, I try to use the same title, so it's really easy to skip in the feed reader. This is not about forcing people to read content they don't want to read. And you can be sure that if I'd gotten a couple of "Geez, man... stop with the stupid open letters"- or "I really hate your Gimp Art (tm)"-comments, I would've found another outlet for that particular content. But that hasn't been the case.

In fact, it's been quite the contrary.

Immaterial of the feedback from readers in the Community, I find myself experiencing a paralysis over writing anything now. It's been communicated—without being given the respect of being emailed or otherwise talked to— that I'm "allowed" to write about Mozilla, Firefox, Gecko, and Tunderbird. I find myself thinking "Well, I don't really have anything to say about those four specific topics. So I guess I won't bother writing anything," mostly for fear that this stuff really is boring and no one wants to read it.

That's a [hopefully?] unintended chilling effect of someone striving for "a lightweight process," but it nonetheless exists, and it's not very pleasant.

I'm not exactly sure how we're going to solve the problem; there are lots of possible solutions⁸, but I am sure of one thing: the silent filtering and dropping of content needs to stop.

The unilateral implementation of editorial policy that has not been discussed and is not posted anywhere needs to stop.

And the conversation about what's appropriate for our community needs to be had, not avoided.

We're the Mozilla Project; we have a history of doing better, and we can do better.

__________________________
¹ But, being among only three people being filtered, I guess I'm in good company.
² Does it filter subject titles? Tags? Posts? Blog comments? What? I actually spent some time Googling for this, and never did find a clear explanation.
³ In Pink's case, it is especially ironic that every single post he's made since he was removed for "very little Mozilla content" has been about Camino and/or Mozilla.
⁴ Pinkerton refers to a scary situation "when voices in the community can be turned off like a faucet at the whim of people at a corporation." I think this is somewhat confusing, because when we talk about "a" or "the Corporation," we're typically referring to the Mozilla Corporation. Tim Rowey works for IBM, not MoCo.^5
5 And I think it needs to be said: I have no doubt in my mind that there would be rioting in the virtual-streets if someone at MoCo were asserting this level of editorial control-without-input over a resource like Planet.
⁶ But if you read between the lines, it's actually not, which is why people said they like it; it actually applied to the Mozilla project in a usually-tangential way.
⁷ Which, of course, turns out to make it a [useful] challenge for me, the writer, to grab your attention, using only a single paragraph!
⁸ This whole problems screams out for a solution addressed by that Web 2.0-ey concept of semantics; this seems like a solved problem, what with tags and feed readers that can filter, based on tags. I would gladly tag my posts with an agreed-upon tag, so that those not wanting the strictly-not-Mozilla-stuff could filter. In fact, I already do, but "blahblahblah" isn't a very standard tag. ;-)

Posted by preed at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

The impending 2.0.0.2/1.5.0.10 release has been heretofore painful in a way reminiscent of the 2.0.0.1/1.5.0.9 release, but interestingly enough, it's been so for completely different reasons.

I'm currently at the office, signing bits and pushing them out to the mirror farm.

It's been an interesting release from a build/release standpoint: I fried my brain doing the first half of the release; rhelmer graciously saved my (and, by extension, our collective) ass(es) by stepping in last weekend to finish up another round of release candidates (which turned out to be _RELEASE candidates), but pulled the same burnout trick I pulled. So I swapped back in for him to finish it all up. There's been a bunch of handoffs that we've never really done before, but it's seemingly worked thus far.

I've done late nights before, as most of the Mozilla project is used to, but not as consistently during any release as I have during this one, except 1.5.0.2. Maybe.

Anyway, this will be a very different night from the morning I was here, working sometime around the RC1 cycle and feel asleep, to be awoken by the finance guys coming in promptly at 8:30 am.

And it'll be different than the night I had to come in to do some binary signing, and "accidentally" had a party no one was supposed to know about, which, incidentally, "leaked" the top secret information of where I spend all my time building and releasing looks like.¹

Yes, this morning will be different because, armed with a pillow and snuggly blanket from home, I'm totally prepared to snag a quality 2.5 hours of shuteye, just to ensure maximal freshness for release activities.

I've learned my lesson.

I never thought I'd still be having slumber parties at this age.

But I must admit, I'm actually kinda happy that I still am, though.

______________________
¹ Number one comment from people walking by? "You don't, by chance, like planes... do you?"

Posted by preed at 2:50 AM | Permalink

Having spent most of my weekend moving¹, I haven't had much time to miss the fact that I don't yet have Innerwebs at the New Hotness.²

Being the geek that I am, I of course called Comcast to set up a deactivate/reactivate service appointment, and they promptly showed up on moving day, but then after about a rousing twenty-minute round of "coax cable hunt," followed by bothering my [new] downstairs neighbor to find out why the cable goes into her balcony, but does not pop out of the floor of mine, I get some sordid tale involving remodeling-gone-wrong-three-years-ago-and-the-cable-was-broken-after-that-
and-you'll-have-to-drill-through-concrete-and-that-involves-talking-to-the-homeowner's-
association-but-they-only-meet-once-every-three-decades.

Or something like that.

Not such a huge deal since I've been busy packing, unpacking, and repacking. But since I decided to take it easy tonight, I really started jonesing for the Series of Tubes.

On a lark, I decided to see if there were any open Whee-fee access points. I'm still in Mountain View, so I wasn't too surprised when my laptop associated with an access point called "GoogleWiFi."

I had never used it before, but knowing Google and their penchant for recording-every-single-thing-any-user-ever-searches-for, I wasn't very surprised when they wanted me to log in with my Gmail account before I could do anything.

In some sense, while it kinda grates on me, I admit that I can't complain about it too much. I'll also openly say: I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the service³; and they don't seem to filter out things like outbound ssh and such.⁴

(It also makes me wonder how many Mountain View-ites are completely basking in Google-backed electromagnetic radiation, since I have no idea where the Google access point is, but I'm writing this from my bed in my new apartment, and I'm getting an average of 44 msec ping times to the default gateway with about four percent packet loss.)

But none of that is actually what I was thinking about when I started writing this.

No, what prompted this particular episode of blahginess was the blatant [and somewhat unsettling] realization of how much I happen to rely on a particular entity (to say nothing of that entity being a privately traded corporation) to provide me with a chunk of my daily Internet experience.

This realization took form after I clicked on someone's Picassa web album, linked to from a blog post indexed by Google Reader, all served up by [some AP claiming to be] GoogleWiFi.

As I traced back my steps of my quick checkin this evening, I've spent most of it on Google properties: Gmail, Reader, Google News.

And I don't know how I feel about that.⁵

Either way, it now makes the prospect of those saying there will be a "shadow GoogleNet" that we'll all be using in 5ish years less... insane-sounding.

But, until the home owner's association can get its butt in gear to get stuff fixed⁶, I'm pleasantly surprised such a service exists and actually works... and will gladly use it to let you all know that I'm somewhat troubled by the thoughts I'm having while mulling over its privacy- and future-of-the-Internet-implications as I do so.

____________________
¹ One almost-down, five to go
² As rhelmer would tell you, this has been my new catch phrase over the last week. "New Vista-Signing Hotness." "New BuildBot Hotness." Etc. Yes, It's pretty 1995-ish.
³ Which is to say it actually works, and is usable
⁴ Which, if I really cared about the privacy implications, I would shunt all of my web traffic through an ssh proxy. I won't, however, be using this particular link to be doing any Interwebs banking.
⁵ Of course, it can't be very great and/or squee-u-lar, since I took the time to write this...
⁶ That's not me being purposefully vague; I don't think anyone really knows what the problem is, and thus any solutions are still scary and mysterious.

Posted by preed at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My IFR clearance—a concept which I've been meaning to devote an entire bloggity-blog post to—was issued by air traffic control as follows:

Cessna three-two-three-romeo-foxtrot is cleared to the Napa County Airport via: on takeoff, right turn, heading zero-six-zero within one nautical mile of the airport, radar vectors IMPLY intersection, Victor one-oh-seven, Oakland, Victor one-ninety-five, CROIT intersection, Victor one-oh-eight, Scaggs Island, direct. Climb and maintain three thousand; expect five thousand, five minutes after departure. Departure frequency is one-two-one-point-three, squawk zero-three-two-three.

It took me about ten minutes to set up the departure.

Everything went mostly fine... until my vacuum pump failed.

Then it got interesting.

The course I flew is green.

Altitude graph is highlighted in teal.

Commentary in red.

Obviously.

Not bad for my first attempt at a departure procedure, which included a instrument failure.

I immediately declared an emergency when equipment started failing, which is what you'd do in the real world, but "air traffic control," (aka my flight instructor) said "Alright; radar services terminated, resume your own navigation, good day."

Jerk. ;-)

All in all, it was a fun, useful day of (simulated) flying.

Posted by preed at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The FAA, in its infinite wisdom—and, for once, I'm actually not being sarcastic while referring to the concepts of "the FAA" and "wisdom"—allows you to record up to twenty hours of your required forty hours of in-IFR-conditions training to be in a sim. This tends to help out, since flying a sim is around $50/hour (depending on the sim) and flying a real plane is $130+/hour (depending on the plane).

As such, I've been putting some amount of sim time in lately, and I think I've begun to discover an interesting secret of IFR flying.

Its application(s) to Real Life (tm), if any, are left up as an exercise to the reader.

When first learning to fly, most people are overwhelmed. If you can remember back to learning to drive (or to operate any new complicated machinery, really), it's much the same thing: since you're not used to knowing what you have to pay attention to, when and what you can just glance at (or even ignore), you tend to overwork yourself, because you're trying to pay attention to everything.

As with driving, you eventually begin to realize that you don't need to stare at the oil gauge all the time... and you learn to get a pretty good idea of your speed not by fixating on the speedometer, but rather getting sense of your relative speed by looking at your pitch attitude surroundings, and glancing at dashboard.

In many ways, learning to fly on instruments is that whole lesson over again: I'm finding myself completely worn out after just an hour in the sim, but I'm pretty sure it's because I don't quite have down the flow—typically referred to as The Scan^TM— for looking at the right instruments, at the right times, in the right order, with the right intervals.

Yet.

One thing I realized last time I was flying the sim, though, was that if you take the time to set the plane up for the flight mode you're about to enter—the big boys often call this "configuring" the plane—it dramatically decreases your workload.

Instrument flying is all about a stabilized plane with the right amount of power and (pitch) attitude, at the right times. Kinda like life?

What's interesting about the whole thing is I'm beginning to find that you really only need two pieces of data and a properly trimmed airplane to get the desired effect.

My first couple of times in the sim, I found that I'd be concentrating on all the instruments so much, that I'd let one of the parameters—airspeed, heading, or altitude—get out of whack... and then I'd go into oscillation-hell trying to fix it. For instance, I'd let my altitude get off my 150 feet, and I'd correct by pitching down, and find myself 150 feet on the other side... and then I'd pitch up, and overshoot. Rinse and repeat for two nautical miles, pissing off air traffic control the entire time.

The better method is to make sure your airplane is properly trimmed, and then set your power and pitch, making small, controlled pitch corrections if you get off. What's most amazing about it all is that you have the right power setting and the right pitch attitude for the flight mode you want, hitting the other things that matter—climbing at 90 knots or level flight at 90 knots or a V_y-climb—just fall out. You don't have to do anything to hit them.

And even more amazing, to switch from the 90-knot flight modes, it's a power adjustment, and you tend to just hit the 90 knots, at the right vertical speeds.

The only analogy I can think of that is remotely similar is imagining if you had a car that had cruise control stuck on. You're allowed to program the cruise control to do anything you want, whenever you want, but you can't turn it off.

My original method of flying was kinda like setting the cruise control, but not really paying to close attention to what I was setting it to and then trying to just mash my foot on the gas to go faster or repeatedly stomping the brake to slow down. Obviously, if the cruise control were locked on, this would cause interesting oscillations, thus taking more of your concentration and reducing the general stability of your vehicle. You'd begin to realize that you have to anticipate changes so that you can let the system and the speed of your car catch up. If you got that down, though, you'd have a lot less of a workload.

It's really weird to realize that the plane will do all the work for you, a byproduct of aerodynamics and physics, if you let it. You just have to know what two really important things to keep a close eye on, and then crosscheck your other instruments.

It reduces the problem from trying to figure out the right seven or eight possible inputs and having to monitor easily-double that many outputs to modifying three and concentrating on two... which makes the possibility of operating in the IFR environment understandably tenable.

This discovery, which I really only began to grasp the last few minutes I was in the sim last time, has me wondering if such a model is applicable to leading an adult life.

Unfortunately (or... maybe fortunately?), there's no sim for that... so I'll just have to try to make sure I keep my wings straight and level.

Both in the air and everywhere else.

Posted by preed at 3:01 AM | Permalink

Before I present my open letter, some context is necessary.

From #foxymonkies:

00:23 <@Ryan> @preed-scotch: Drinking at the office? :0
00:24 <@preed-scotch> Ryan: hell yeah.
00:24 <@preed-scotch> I'm stuck here until 4 am.
00:24 <@preed-scotch> What would *you* be doing if you wer stuck here until 4 am.
00:24 <@Ryan> ouch
00:24 <@preed-scotch> so
00:24 <@preed-scotch> I've got me some Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVDs
00:24 <@preed-scotch> and three bottles of scotch
00:24 <@preed-scotch> and three hours to kill.
00:25 <@preed-scotch> time to get tore up.
00:25 <@preed-scotch> followed immediately by signing Win32 builds.

Dear Cygwin,

Please kindly FOaD.

Love,
preed

Posted by preed at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Dear Firefox Community,

I need your help here: how do you best pimp Firefox in three minutes?

Slashdot recently posed this question in regard to Linux, and at the time, I mostly ignored it, because... well... I didn't find it particularly relevant.

But then, in a coffee shop this weekend, I was getting my morning cup o' awakeness, and the woman behind me in line started up a conversation: "Oh, I have Firefox installed! But I was going to delete it. I like your shirt though..."

I smiled and said "No! You should start using it! We just released a new version."

She asked "Well... why should I use Firefox?"

I first said "Well, because it's more secure than Internet Explorer," and then I quoted the IE was insecure for "like hundreds of days last year," and Firefox was insecure for "like a week or something."

She said "Wow, that's really cool." But then seemed underimpressed.

I then said "It's also one of those 'feel-good' things, you know; Firefox is built and supported by a community of people, and we work really hard to a build a browser with only users and their online experience in mind."

"Yeah, that's true," she said. She then said "I originally downloaded it because Safari wouldn't display something I wanted to see."

Before I could really respond, it was time to order my coffee, and then since she was behind me, we both got distracted, and never were able to really finish the conversation.

So, my question to you: if you only had two to three minutes to talk up Firefox and get someone to keep it on their machine, how would you explain why it's the best browser around to someone who doesn't care a bout (or maybe even understand) "attack surfaces" and "days of exposure," and gets "The Community" in the abstract, but... not enough to make it relevant to their personal livfe.

Which aspects of the 'fox we all know and love so well would you focus on in 150 seconds?

Aaand... go!

Sincerely,
Your Friendly Build Engineer

P.S. I've also been trying to figure out whether or not she was flirting with me, but... that's another post altogether.

Posted by preed at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Mozilla IT (thanks Aravind and Justin!) recently archived to tape a huge set of builds from the mozilla.org FTP staging server.¹

These aren't just the builds, but also the original build artifacts, from the original tinderboxen, through what was released (and probably [hopefully?!] is still available) on the FTP server.

To achieve the last requirement, Beltzner, who happened to be in town this week, will be helping me to find a safe, shady spot in the Toronto office for this little bit of Mozilla Project history.

_________________
¹ Thus reclaiming a bunch of space so we could keep... releasing software.
² Which is likely to translate to "somewhere in my apartment."

Posted by preed at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

It's a sour medicine, but if the list is ever going to become... realistic, it has to happen.

I, too, joined Coop and rhelmer in making my bug list reflect reality this evening. Now I only have five bugs!!

What ever will I do with all my free time?!

I think the weirdest part of going through my bug list was finding bugs I had actually already fixed, just never RESOLVED. D'oh!

Going through the queue also prompted me to update one of everyone's favorite bugs (with good news, even!) and file a new, necessary bug (it's that time of year... although I hear from the ReedBot it's a dup.)

I don't expect our bug list will reflect reality in the short term... but I think we can get there in the medium term. It will require being realistic about it, and it will involve gnashing of teeth in some cases, but... it'll be nice to look at an open bug list that doesn't

Posted by preed at 12:39 AM | Permalink

I had a couple of people ask me about a recent post.

Their inquiry basically amounted to "Woah... are you ok?"

Truth be told, I was appreciating the picture on a "sometimes you can't quite see where you're going, but if you have the right tools, you'll probably be OK"-level, not an apocalyptic "OMG We're all going to die!"-level.

Plus, as I said, I really enjoy the composition.

I didn't do any such thing for my private pilot's license, probably because I had so many things going on in my life when I started, and I dragged it out for so long... but I thought I'd try and write a bit about my experience getting my IFR ticket...

(I'll always make these as mostly-extended posts, since they're not particularly Mozilla-specific.)

There's a long standing debate about the length of time a pilot should wait between becoming VFR-licensed and starting work on an instrument rating. Some jump immediately into working onit, while others work on getting more flight time under their belt; some never become instrument rated.

I originally got into flying because I admired "The System" and its ability to move people, cargo, and planes safely around the country. You only use a very limited part of "The System" as a VFR-only pilot, and since I have something around 220 hours now, and I've been doing so many [night] cross countries lately that I already met the IFR rating's cross-country pilot-in-command requirements before even starting training, I decided to jump into getting the rating only three months after I finished my PPL.

The first lesson involved a standard (and expected) review of the flight instruments that you stare at when you're flying IFR; we focused on the pitot-static instruments (as opposed to the gyro instruments, which we looked at the next lesson).

At the end of the first lesson, we had a long, protracted discussion about what type of training I wanted to do, a discussion that you don't really have as a PPL.

The first question was "steam gauges or glass":

"But does it run Microsoft Flight Simulator?"

vs.

"Hello 1960s!"

The second question was "where do you want to get your charts?"

Jepp chart of the VOR/DME 12 Approach into Dulles

Jepp charts are used by all the airlines, and they have some nice features, but they have a reputation of being more expensive. Interestingly enough, my instructor said that for a subscription to California-only, the Jepp charts and the NACO charts were about the same cost. He said he's gone to Jepp charts for California, and NACO charts for the rest of the country.

In the end, they show you basically the same information, just presented slightly differently.

I punted on this decision, and decided to try to read both when I'm learning about charts, and decide when I'm forced to, based on which I find easier to utilize in the plane, on an approach.

NACO Chart of the same

The differences between the charts are starting to be less relevant now, since the government is taking a hint from all those cognitive psychologists, and copying a lot of the niceties that made Jepp charts worth the added cost.

I finished my third IFR lesson tonight. It's been the expected coverage of the gyro (and other instruments), plus some sim time performing exercises that teach precision aircraft control. These exercises turn out to be pretty boring, actually (things like flying in a racecar track-shape, using timed turns, vertical S-loops at constant airspeeds, etc.), but I shouldn't really say that since I'm not very good at them.

The few things I have begun to internalize thus far:

1. Your instruments are pretty much always trying to kill you... which is ironic, since IFR is all about "beliving in your instruments."
2. If you don't stay IFR current, and then you find yourself flying home and stuck in an IFR situation and everything doesn't go perfectly, your chances of dying—not just "oopsing" and having a bad day, of dying—go wayyyy up.
3. Flying IFR is surprisingly tiring; part of the training is building up the stamina to focus on 6-8 instruments for hours at a time, but I've found that I become mentally exhausted after being in the sim for about an hour.

It's kinda weird... I'm excited about the training, but every time I think about sitting in the sim, I sort of have this "Why am I doing this? I'd rather be at home, watching TV"-reaction. But then I still come back for another lesson.

At least for now.

Posted by preed at 1:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)