preed's blah-blah-blahg

I was looking for a specific air traffic control clip (more on that later), but I randomly found this clip of KJFK Ground Control.

It's kinda long (12 minutes), but it's got tons of great lines; highly amusing.

Upon hearing it, a friend said the New York accent makes it all the better.

There are a couple of points in the clip where I just expected him to blurt out: "I can't f@#*(! make my mind work...," ala Winnebago Man.

"We'll visit you in the duty free..."¹

Definitely recommended.

________________________
¹ Makes you wonder: can you bribe ground controllers the same way you can bribe build engineers?

Posted by preed at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Over a month ago now, I blogged about the... "hilarity" that ensued when I moved into a (pretty nice) new apartment that... had no Internet (or cable, for that matter) connection to speak of.

In the ensuing month+, I've learned the following things:

• My apartment turned out to be the only apartment in the entire F#!(*!!9#% complex that didn't have a cable connection. Go figure.
• Google Wifi is... ok. But you can't really rely on it too much. I think it only worked a few times because there were low clouds, or something, because it never really worked again after I blogged about it.

  On the other hand, I never got an external antenna, and I don't assume it's supposed to work from your bedroom.

• Home owner's associations move slowly.
• Contractors that are "the cheapest bid" move even slower.
• Drilling holes in concrete to run eensy-weensy wires through is fun!

  Oh wait, no... what's the complete opposite of fun? Oh yeah... loud.

• When you have no TV and no Internets, your DVD collection becomes relatively... important. And DVDs you had forgotten you owned become surprisingly interesting again!
• Despite this, you can only watch so much [[QaF]] before... you just can't really watch it anymore.

  I never thought I'd get there, but... here we are.

• At some point, you start to care less about the "why" to the whole question about "wires being cut to your apartment in some painting/remodeling accident" and you start to care more about the "What the H&#@$! are you going to do about it in a not-six-month-timeframe?"-question
• Planning a flight without innerwebs is hard. And has not-so-great results (in terms of less-pilot-stress; in terms of artistic beauty, the results were spectacular...)
• When the innerwebs return to you after being gone for a month,
  
  • The Flickrsphere is brighter.
  
  
  • The You-Tubes are tubier.
  
  
  • The Blah-go-sphere is emo-er.
  
  
  • The bugs are bugier.
  
  
  • The torrents seem torrent-ier.

  It's like I'm a teenager again, running pine on an OSF/1 box for the first time.

  And everything is new.

There's probably something to be said for the fact that I haven't really felt as "moved in" to this new place until this evening, when I could actually write email(s) from my couch. There's probably something... pathological about that.

But for now, I'm going to bask in the niceness of it.

More as I catch up.

On everything.

(Interesting factoid: it literally took my computer at home some 30+ minutes to process my entire mailspool with spamassassin; and my computer is a 3 GHz Pentium 4, so it's not like it's slow. I also found about 10 emails that I hadn't seen among all the spam. That's... wow... in a depressing sort of way.)

Posted by preed at 12:42 AM | Permalink

Some months ago now, I was trolling through the [[Build:Farm]] for some free space to run some then-critical builds, and I happened upon a set of Tinderboxen named "Firefox-FS."

While looking at other machines, I found more of these "FS" builds. We ended up turning them off at the time, because it wasn't entirely clear what they were, and it didn't look like they were being used.

Well, that "FS" stood for "free software" and those were the builds of Firefox that were composed of completely free software (which tends to mean "no branding, no talkback, etc.")

These builds were missing for some number of releases, but now they've returned, and we've added them to our release manifest.

We will provide these free software builds moving forward for the 2.x releases.

You can find them hiding out on ftp.m.o in the contrib/free-software directories.

You might notice there aren't any Mac FS builds.

That would be bug 372859. (Now accepting patches!)

A big thanks to Coop, by the way, for reviving these builds and wrestling them to the ground for the 2.0.0.2 release. It was a lot of... not-entirely-pleasant work, shall we say, but he got it done.

Posted by preed at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Someone once told me: "[Your] release procedures are the most primitive and barbaric I've ever encountered."

After thinking about it for awhile (and getting over the initial sting of the commentary), I came to a couple of conclusions:

First, the person providing the critique had limited experience with... well... a complicated release process, one that involves releasing builds in 40+ locales and delivering updates to the desktops¹ of millions of users. This person did have a lot of experience with release processes that he had [the fortune] of being able to design (and implement!) himself, and therefore seldom had to address the issues related to legacy- and/or poorly documented-infrastructure that we must deal with every day².

Second, in some very real sense, he's right.

Our current release process, which is the fourth or fifth generation of, from what I can tell, is approximately the third or fourth mostly-completely-different version of a Release Process (tm) that we've used. It is way more manual3 than it needs to be, has a number of especially-retarded-if-you-don't-happen-to-know-the-history steps and provisions, encapsulates processes in unnatural-and-hard-to-understand ways, generally takes too long4, and requires an extreme amount of mostly-constant-while-it's-going-on focus.

On the charitable side it... well... addresses the requirements necessary to release 40+ locales, on three major platforms, including automated updates, for... millions of users.

At the beginning of last October, rhelmer, after having done a number of releases, began looking at ways to automate the current Firefox/Thunderbird release process, warts and all.

He, along with help from others, have made great strides in creating a solid framework for handling the various steps involved in putting out a release. A great side-effect of his work is that it has put our release process—warts and all—into the public repository with all our other code, so others can benefit⁵... and hopefully contribute.

One of our goals for the month of March is to knit together the release automation so that we can realize the seemingly-never-to-materialize-mirage of complete, end-to-end automation.

To that end, we're working towards that goal fully in the open, and as I made reference to last week, this is month for it.

I spent time today filing a bunch of bugs on the various issues we need to fix to get this to work, and made them all dependent on the tracking bug for this effort.

We also have a sorta-Joelish Google spreadsheet to help track the effort.

If you're interested in grabbing one of the bugs or generally helping out with the automation effort, please feel free to mosey into #build.

I can't promise that it will be the most glamorous work in the project, but it's some of the most-used and -useful work, and it will be appreciated—even if indirectly—by... well... millions of users.

In 40+ locales.

On three platforms.

______________________
¹ The issues involved with releasing desktop software are not entirely similar to those related to releasing web-only software; that's not to say one is easier/better or harder/worse than the other, but rather that a lot of release engineers from my "generation," shall we say, have very limited desktop release experience, becuase they've only worked for dot-coms, and thus they were focused on website/web-app pushes.
² As bsmedberg asked me in #build last week, "that's making things unhappy on msys... do you remember why it was necessary (shouldn't be)" and my answer was something along the lines of "No I don't, but I remember it was breaking something."
³ Read as "requiring human intervention, thus burning through people as if they were crumpled newsprint"
⁴ As in wall-clock time
⁵ Or, at least see how the magic happens.

Posted by preed at 6:51 PM | Permalink

A lot of interesting things happen to you as a pilot at the 90-day mark of being stuck on the ground, both from a government/regulatory standpoint and a club standpoint.

The weather here has been pretty not-VFR for the last couple of weeks, and I've been getting antsy about the fact that I may be getting close to hitting the 90-day mark. I pulled my logbook the other day to find out when I last went up, and it was January 24th, for a Bay Tour (with mento, actually!)

I'm not even close to hitting the 90 day mark, but I've been on the ground so long, it feels like it's been 90 days.

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear I'm hopeless.

Fortunately, looks like I'll be going up today, which is good, because I need to remind myself how to land.

(Surprising factoid: it turns out that finding yourself 1000 feet above a runway is a pretty good motivator to remembering [or figuring it out again], because... you're coming down one way or another, eventually.)

That's right, a cat.

I've made reference in the past to the skill of the IFR Scan (tm).

I Googled for a picture to help to explain it, but couldn't find one.

Basically it's the method by which you scan all of your instruments to make sure the flight performance is what you a) expect and b) actually want.

It is arguably the hardest skill to learn and it's the first to go if you don't practice it.

I'm still learning it. In the simulator, I tend to fixate on either my heading or my altitude, and when I concentrate on (fixing) one of them, the other tends to go to hell.

After a couple of... interesting mini-flights in the sim last night, my instructor said "I've always wanted to try this..." He got up and left the room, to go get something.

"Oh great," I thought.

He comes back with a laser pointer; "Ok, let's try this again."

We take off from Concorde Airport and I start trying to intercept airways and fly my clearance.

As usual, my heading was good—because I was concentrating on it so I could intercept the course—and my altitude started going to hell.

He shined the laser pointer on my altimeter. I saw it, and corrected.

Then my course interception started to falter: laser light on the directional gyro and turn coordinator.

The next twenty minutes were pretty much spent like this: he'd shine his laser pointer at whatever instrument I was missing in my scan, and my head bobbed and darted around, following... like a cat, amused for hours with the red dot against a white wall.

Lamentably, there was no catnip after I successfully navigated to the Oakland VOR.

Posted by preed at 12:07 PM | Permalink