Nagappan: Announce: Linux Desktop Testing Project 1.2.0 released Highlights of this release
* Performance fix, which improves the LDTP execution time drastically
* 3 crasher fixes in LDTP execution engine
* LDTP editor bug fixes reported by Shreyank Gupta
* Added 2 new API required for VMware Workstation automation
* API manual is updated
* Moved from CVS to GIT - Thanks to FreeDesktop administrators
* Thanks to Ubuntu automation team for using / evaluating LDTP
* LDTP is being evaluated by the project Open Source based Desktop Benchmark of the Linux Solutions Group e.V. (LiSoG) in Germany, Switzerland and Austria [Source: Planet Mozilla]

Andrew Sutherland: gloda’s first (primitive) visualization

A primitive visualization augments the gloda “other messages by author” listing by showing the messages sent by the author over time.  Messages are stacked by day.  The currently selected message is in darkest blue and also very wide.  Other messages from the same thread/conversation are in lighter blue and less wide.  Messages not in the conversation are light grey and rather narrow.

It’s not clickable, it lacks any form of scale or any feedback at all, and there are scaling issues.  (If anyone wants to save me the effort of figuring out how to get the canvas to maintain a 1:1 pixel mapping to the actual display and still ‘flex’ by adding/losing pixels, please do drop me a message or leave a comment.)  These will all change, but not yet.

I’ve pushed the changes to the mercurial repos and updated the stable tag, but I’m not publishing updated xpi’s, so you’ll need to roll your own if you care.  (The DB schema has not changed and so does not need to be blown away.)

Jane Finette: Mozilla Events Triage call Jul 9th - please join in

Reminder - we have a Mozilla Events Triage Call tomorrow July 9th, 2008 at 10 a.m. PDT (that’s 6pm GMT, 7pm CET)

Please join us!

Dial-in is 650-903-0800, ext 91, id 248.

Here is the agenda:

* OSCON:
o Booth
o QA BoF
o Community Party
* Black Hat:
o Milk & Cookies Party
o T-Shirt
* Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre
o Need to determine preferred speaking day for Chris Hofmann
o Any other needs from Mozilla Argentina for the event?
* Congresso Estadual de Software Livre – Ceará (CESoL-CE) - August 19 – 23, 2008
o Need to determine preferred speaking day for Chris Hofmann
* Test Writing Workshop

QMO: Thunderbird Bugday, Thursday 07/10 - Help us triage Thunderbird bug reports!

Hello Thunderbird Enthusiasts!! *Join us this Thursday, and every Thursday, for great bug triage*

July 4 and Canada Day are past. Spring is gone. But the bugs are not - they're still here!

You don't need special skills - experienced staffers are available to help you in #bugday IRC.
And bug day is fun!

See http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Bugdays for schedule (spread throught the day) and simple
steps to participate.

read more

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mozilla Project Meeting Minutes: 2008-07-07

Jan Odvarko: List of Firebug Extensions

Have you ever been interested in what extensions are available for Firebug? If yes, take a look at what I have found. Frankly, I was quite surprised how many Firebug extensions already exists out there.

• YSlow
• Firecookie
• FirePHP
• RainbowForFirebug
• Jiffy
• Firequark
• LiveCoder
• PixelPerfect
• FirebugCodeCoverage
• Firebug Net Panel History Overlay
• Fireclipse
• Chromebug

(more...)

Bookmark to:

Taras Glek: Where is the sanity in the C++ std library?

Dear lazyweb,

Please explain to me why the following code works the way it does. From looking at the following code and stringstream::str(), stringstream::str(string) docs the behavior of the following code does not make sense to me.

#include <sstream>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char**) {
stringstream ss(”foo”);
cout << ss.str() << endl;
ss << “bar”;
cout << ss.str() << endl;
//cout << ss.str() << endl;
ss << “more”;
cout << ss.str() << endl;
}

Why is doing << after str(string) causing this stringstream to loose the initialization string? What possible API usecase would justify such behavior?

For the curious, output is:

foo
bar
barmore

John Lilly: Global Voices

Rebecca and Joi have each made postings (here and here) about the Global Voices Summit that happened a couple of weeks ago in Budapest, and it sounds like it was an incredible, wonderful event. I’ve been tracking Global Voices for just a little while, so not long enough to know the history, but long enough to know that it’s a wondrous thing that shows so much of the global promise of the web. The idea is simple: it’s a set of bloggers from all around the world, collected in one stream. The impact is profound: you get a sense of some of the real-time feelings & thoughts & perspectives that are happening around the world, not mediated through our traditional media or governmental channels.

The last couple of years I’ve been lucky to do some traveling for Mozilla — in particular to China, Japan, and Europe — and have found my perspective on what the world looks like (and can/should look like) changing greatly. (And I’m currently in the middle of Fareed Zakaria’s excellent new book The Post-American World on this subject.)

I’m just repeatedly blown away (and sometimes overwhelmed) by what Global Voices is doing — it seems to me a necessary point of view in a world where national boundaries seem more & more artificial and sometimes obstructive to the way people are having conversations and getting things done.

Songbird: Songbird @ OSCON 2008

Songbird is heading to OSCON 2008!

stevel, pvh, and our fearless leader b0bg0d, will be heading up to Portland, Oregon to spread the good word about the ‘bird. Here’s a run-down of our Songbird activities:

• stevel will be presenting a talk on Songbird, Thursday 07/24 at 2:35pm in room E146
• The whole ‘bird crew will be manning a Songbird pod in the Mozilla Booth during the exhibition show on Wednesday & Thursday. We’ll have Songbird posters, stickers, pins, and t-shirts - so make sure you drop by. All proceeds from t-shirt sales will be donated to the Mozilla Foundation, so you can both feel AND look good!
• Songbird PARTY!!! We’re throwing a party with our friends at Mozilla, OSL, OpenSourcery, Vidoop, and Jive. So make sure you come by our booth and grab an invite (and RSVP here) to Beerforge happening Thursday evening from 8pm to 11pm at the Bossanova Ballroom)

Blog of Metrics: Colbert Bump - Firefox 3 Proves its Existence

Many of us at Mozilla and within the Mozilla community were excited when Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump” on the day of Firefox 3’s launch (a big thanks to Jonathan Zittrain).  You can watch the video here.

Download Day was a wild success, and we were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen.  However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?

Here’s what we did:  we looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then we drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected.  At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.”  What happened next?

We saw a big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later:

Apparently we’re not the first to find scientific evidence proving the Bump’s effect.  If you’re interested in that previous study by James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego, you can read the complete version here.

Mozilla Developer DevNews: about:mozilla — Official World Record, Firefox 2.0.0.15, security metrics, Weave, JavaScript, and more…

In this issue…

• Official Guinness World Record!
• Firefox 2.0.0.15 released
• Mozilla security metrics project
• Weave 0.2 development milestone
• Two new members of the about:* newsletter family
• Help test-drive the new Mozilla Developer Center!
• Next generation JavaScripting
• Developer calendar
• Subscribe to the email newsletter

Official Guinness World Record!

The Firefox community is the proud holder of a new Guinness World Record. On July 2nd, Mozilla received confirmation from Guinness that we’ve officially achieved the record for the “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours,” with a final total of 8,002,530 downloads. This is another in a long line of wonderful accomplishments for our community. Ever since Firefox was launched in 2004 we’ve relied on Firefox supporters to help spread the word, and we now have over 180 million users in more than 230 countries. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and we’re all extremely grateful. Don’t forget to get your very own personalized Download Day certificate!

Firefox 2.0.0.15 released

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.15 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Please note that Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December 2008. We encourage you to upgrade to Firefox 3, which is now available at GetFirefox.com. For more information, please see the DevNews blog post.

Mozilla security metrics project

Mozilla has been working with security researcher and analyst Rich Mogull on developing a metrics model to measure the relative security of Firefox over time. The team is trying to develop a model that goes beyond simple bug counts and more accurately reflects both the effectiveness of secure development efforts and the relative risk to users over time. The goal for the first phase of the project is to build a baseline model that can evolve over time. A preliminary version of the project goals and a spreadsheet of the model have been published by the team. These, along with more information about the project, are available through the Mozilla Security blog.

Weave 0.2 development milestone

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project focused on building online services into the browser. The project’s goals are to enhance the new Firefox user experience and increase your control over how you share your personal information between computers, and with other people. Version 0.2 is a major update to the Weave client and to the servers than control it, and has significant new features. For more information, including details about the changes, or to try it out for yourself, check out the Mozilla Labs’ weblog post.

Two new members of the about:* newsletter family

Mozilla has started two new newsletters: about:addons and about:mobile. Strictly dealing with add-on related news and development information, about:addons is targeted at our increasingly large and vibrant addon development community. The more recent addition, about:mobile, is all about Mozilla’s nascent mobile project. Both newsletters plan to publish on a monthly basis, and both are available by email, web, and RSS feed. For more information, including how to sign up, see Mark Finkle’s blog post for about:addons, and Chris Blizzard’s blog post for about:mobile.

Help test-drive the new Mozilla Developer Center!

Eric Shepherd, Mozilla’s Developer Documentation lead and MDC project coordinator, is looking for help testing the new Mozilla Developer Center system and design. Before diving in to help out, it’s important to note that changes made on the test server will not be ported back into the real database. The test version of the site is available at http://devmo.dekiwiki.mozilla.org. For further information and up-to-date details about the state of the server and testing, see Eric’s weblog.

Next generation JavaScripting

Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin has posted about “next generation JavaScripting” over on the Labs’ weblog. In it he points to three very interesting recent JavaScript-related projects by folks in the Mozilla community: John Resig’s Processing.js, a port of the Java-based Processing programming language; Atul Varma’s Parchment project, which is a JavaScript-based interpreter for the Z-Machine; and Aza’s own ContextFree.js, a project focused on drawing striking images and making art with minimal amounts of code. Check out the full blog post for more details.

Developer calendar

Monday

• Mobile Meeting
• SUMO Meeting
• General Status Meeting

Tuesday

• Thunderbird Meeting
• Firefox/Gecko Meeting
• Bug Day!

Wednesday

• Mac Gecko Meeting
• Performance Infrastructure Meeting
• Performance/Leaks Meeting
• Platform Meeting
• Crash Reporter + Analysis Meeting
• Weave Meeting
• Calendar Meeting

Thursday

• Thunderbird Bugday

Friday

• Test Day! (now biweekly)

Subscribe to the email newsletter
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

Mitchell Baker: Sometimes a phone call is the answer!

I had a long talk with Dave Eaves today as a result of a couple of his recent posts which I didn’t quite understand.   It’s fun to find someone explicitly interested in how Mozilla works as well as what we do.  But I was confused, especially by the post on the Manifesto.  It felt a bit to me like a post that said “let’s replace the Manifesto” in order to appeal to an undefined set of people for unknown reasons.  That seemed odd.

I was pretty sure this wasn’t quite what was intended, but I couldn’t figure out what was intended.  Sometimes it really is good to be able to talk to someone, “real-time,” voice to voice — rather than exchange comments back and forth through a blog or IM or email.

Dave’s focus as I understand it now, without putting too many words in Dave’s mouth — though he has read this post in draft form, so I know I’m close — is whether we can make it easier for people  to adopt the Mozilla Manifesto as their own, to figure out what they want to do to move the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto forward.     In particular, for people outside the current Mozilla Communities of Practice and Action to do this.  We can see there are a bunch of people who care about these goals (or goals similar to them, since the Manifesto isn’t perfect) but don’t see their main contribution as building software.  There’s many interesting contributions this group could make to an open, transparent, participatory Internet.  Is there some way we can be more welcoming to people wanting to do this?  Dave was suggesting maybe making the Manifesto more approachable would be a way to do this.  And the underlying question is:  can we be more welcoming to people who want to move the Mozilla Manifesto forward through new types of activities?

That’s a great question.  It’s something I want to see happen. However,my top priorities each day are still more  tightly focused on supporting our current communities.  So it’s good to have new energy looking at this question.

Dave Townsend: Keeping Track

In the past year or so that I’ve been working for Mozilla I’ve found myself slowly working my way through a bunch of different ways to keep track of all of the work on my plate. I still don’t think I’ve found the best way so I wondered what other people do to manage suck things?

For a rough idea of my work, most of my work is bug oriented. Either bugs that I want to work on when I get some time, bugs I am actively working on, bugs I am waiting for review on, bugs I am reviewing, bugs I am waiting to check in, bugs I want to backport to a branch… and so on. Then there is other work like planning future work and working with extension authors to help resolve their problems.

A few different approaches I’ve tried:

Bug ASSIGNED status

Simplest of all, gives me a long list of stuff I am looking at. Totally fails for prospective work though and the list gets somewhat daunting.

Status whiteboard flags

I tried for a while sticking special flags into the status whiteboard that could then be spotted in special bug queries so I could see what state each bug was in. This kind of worked, though I imagine irritated some with bugspam as I maintained the flags and a couple of times other people changed the flags.

Bugzilla tagging

Bugzilla has this tagging feature that basically lets you create named buglists. Basically like using the whiteboard stuff without having to use the whiteboard. Sadly Bugzilla’s tagging UI sucks really hard.

Bookmark tagging

With Firefox 3 I can bookmark my bugs and tag them, and use smart bookmark folders as my buglists right? Well sort of, the folder list isn’t really enough detail and there are issues with manually created smart folders that kept losing my bookmarks.

Task management software

Finally bit the bullet and stuck all of this stuff into some task managent software (Omnifocus as it happens). This is so far going ok but seems to require more dedication to keep the list up to date, I think because of having to switch to a different application so much.

So what are other people doing?

Robert Helmer: OS as platform

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of operating systems lately. Why is there no operating system vendor that focuses on being a platform for applications, rather than trying to compete directly in the application space?

Maybe this is a naive question, but it really makes application developer’s lives a huge pain to have to compete with platform vendors all the time, and it’s surprising to me that the market puts up with it. It also brings up the whole “core competency” argument, can one company really do two fairly specialized things well?

These are who I consider to be the top-tier OS vendors:

• Microsoft Windows
• Apple Mac OS X
• Ubuntu Linux

Why don’t any of them provide just the base OS + gotta-have applications (editor, email, web), and give the ISVs the ability to:

• register new applications in a central catalog
• deliver updates to specific applications
• send crash data back to the vendor

This would allow the OS vendor to focus on the core OS functionality, and provide means to the users to select applications that suited their needs (shipping preinstalled with the top editor, email and web clients, of course). Having formal reviewers as well as user ratings would be a great way to promote good and trustworthy applications.

I don’t anticipate any of these top-tier OS vendors focusing on this space, although for different reasons.

Microsoft is particularly adept at watching application vendor’s innovations and making functional facsimiles (some say “Worse is Better” versions). For example “Word Perfect”, “Lotus 123″, and “Netscape”. Once they’ve decided to commit serious developer time though they tend to slowly overwhelm and overtake the slice of the market that they target. I think that the convenience of a single vendor is what people like, and I guess dominating the stack is one way to control the pipeline.

Prior to OS X, Apple seemed to avoid this (with the notable exception of Claris) but since has embarked on Office competitors, and it’s own web browser (Safari/WebKit). Maybe this is a copy out of the Windows playbook, but it seems just as likely that it’s a bid to control the full user experience, which is very Apple.

Ubuntu comes closest to my ideal, but still insists on packaging everything themselves, and doesn’t do a 1:1 mapping for bug and crash reports. They have their own build, their own crash reporting system, etc.

Why can’t I log into an interface for each of these vendors, register my latest release, and let them handle updating the user catalog, advertising updates to existing users, and a means to funnel back crash reports?

If history is any guide, OS vendors will continue to oscillate between focusing on their core competency (providing an interface between the bare metal and the human) and trying to take over the full application stack flavor of the week. There’s just too much money and power on the table when you control the whole thing for people to leave it alone.

Myk Melez: Why I Host Projects on Mozdev I've been using Mozdev for almost eight years, ever since it started hosting Forumzilla, my project to build a Mozilla-based web forum reader (which eventually became a Thunderbird extension and then Thunderbird's built-in feed reading feature).

Mozdev plays the critical role in the Mozilla community of hosting Mozilla-related projects that aren't considered core enough to the Mozilla mission to host on official community infrastructure.  It's a great adjunct to AMO, which distributes many of the projects that Mozdev hosts.

Over the years, I've been happy to host a number of such projects there, including the aforementioned Forumzilla plus Bugxula (defunct), Tinderstatus, and revision control/bug tracking for the Labs project Personas.

Although there have always been alternatives, they have been unpalatable: SourceForge has a cumbersome and unfamiliar interface, and hosting on my own server would have meant doing all my own systems administration.  I use Mozdev because I want to focus on my projects, not on the infrastructure for developing them.

Over the last couple of years, Google Code has become an option.  Although it provides much less functionality than Mozdev (and limits how many projects you can create), it does have a simpler interface and a more modern revision control system.

The folks who run Mozdev (which includes me) want simplicity and modern services (without sacrificing power) for Mozdev too, and we've identified three priorities in that regard: adding Mercurial for revision control, implementing WYSIWYG content editing, and automating project creation and management.

So I'm thrilled to read Mozdev developer Doug Warner's announcement today, via a post to the project owners mailing list, that he has landed Mercurial support.  Now you can get all the goodness of Hg hosted on your behalf for any of your Mozilla-related projects.

Eight years later, I think Mozdev remains the best place to host my projects, and it's just getting better.  I can't wait to see what's next (and I have some ideas about what simple WYSIWYG editing could look like, about which more soon).

[Source: Planet Mozilla]

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