The B-log

Hey folks! Your friendly neighbourhood Club Moz President here. I wanted to let everyone know that we will be having our second Club Moz session on Tuesday Oct 16th in room S2119 from 430-6. The room will actually be open at 330, so feel free to stop on by early. I have class until 415, so I will show up shortly after.

We had a session last week, but I suspect that after oh so much turkey, most folks forgot that Tuesday Oct 9 was the first session. Unfortunately we only had one person show up. I take responsibility for that as I should have ensured there was an announcement up on the CS main page and My.Seneca. I am working to rectify this today.

Due to this poor showing, we are going to be using last week’s agenda for this week: An Introduction to IRC, and Seneca Testday – An Introduction to Litmus via Firefox 3.0 alpha 9 pre.

Anyone who is not interested in these items is free to show up and find a project that they want to work on.

If you don’t know how you want to get involved, but you do have certain interest areas, we will help find a project that is catered to what you want to do.

If you just want to come and hack away, feel free to stop by and hack away. All are welcome!

I hope to see some of you folks here tomorrow.

Cheers!

Well, I have to say, today was a great success. Even though the announcement did not go out to the Computer Studies website until it was too late, we still had about 15-20 people turn up. I would like to thank everyone that came out and hope to see you folks again on Tuesday.

I have received a lot of great feedback from faculty and enthusiasm from attendees to contribute. This is great. Armen, Cesar and I will probably continue giving this presentation to other classes throughout the year and perhaps do another large scale one as we did today.

If anyone missed the presentation today, no worries. Come out to room S2119 on Tuesday Oct 9th. We welcome all!

We were able to snap a couple post presentation photos. Here they are, for your enjoyment.

Dave and I

Armen and I

Cesar, Dave and I

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good time and I really look forward to where we are going.

Cheers!

Just a follow up to yesterday’s post regarding Club Moz.

Myself, Armen, and Cesar will be giving a presentation about Club Moz tomorrow (Thurs Oct 4th) at 3:30pm EST in room S1209 of the SEQ building at Seneca@York.

All Seneca students and faculty, and Mozilla Toronto employees are free to attend. There will be a Q+A session following the presentation as well as free pizza and pop.

I hope to see some of you there.

Well, it has been a while. I am still trying to settle into a groove here back in Canada. I am finding it to be increasingly difficult, however I am pushing on.

Over the last month, I have been working hard to get Club Moz started back up again. I am happy to say that Club Moz now has a member board organized, a dedicated computer lab and a pretty solid action plan. Here are some of the basics of that action plan:

- meetings every tuesday from 330-6pm
- every meeting to include a “Seneca Testday” or “Seneca Bugday” designed to both mirror and supplement the Mozilla test/bug days, as well as give students an introduction to the tools commonly used by QA. The first test day will be a general Minefield test day so students can wet their palette a little before diving deep into a certain feature. Thanks Tomcat for helping us out with this.
- workshops to introduce students to the tools of the trade. The first workshop will be an intro to IRC.
- provide students with the support and guidance they need to become involved in Mozilla projects
- provide students in the Open Source course at Seneca with a couple hours a week where they can get help and work on their projects
- show students that Mozilla is not just Firefox and help them pursue other “Mozilla-based” projects if interested (Songbird, Thunderbird, Flock, Joost, Miro, etc)
- show students that Mozilla is not just coding for Firefox (QA, Webdev, documentation, extensions/themes, etc)

This list is a work in progress. We will have a better idea, more specifically, of what we are actually going to be doing once we get started.

As far as promoting Club Moz and Mozilla at the school, the QA Flyer has finally been posted around the school. This was put up late last week and we are now preparing a presentation to be given at one of the theatre rooms at Seneca.

Here are some of the highlights of the presentation:
- My Mozilla Journey
- Cesar’s Mozilla Journey
- What is Club Moz and what do we do?
- How can you help?
- Other Mozilla project demos (Thunderbird, Songbird, Flock, Joost, Miro)
- Networking, Experience, Academic opportunities of becoming involved
- Testdays, Bugdays, Hackdays

Since we submitted to the Seneca Student Federation (SSF) for official club status, I am hoping that we can get some free pizza for the presentation. I also have some swag available for handing out to people that show up.

It should be stated, that while I am targeting this presentation toward students and perspective members of Club Moz, I will be welcoming faculty members to come out to see the presentation so they can see what we are doing.

The Club Moz board is having a meeting tomorrow evening to finalize on the details of the presentation and start a couple day promotion plan. This will most likely include passing word around to faculty of Seneca to pass onto their students as well as posting announcements on the school’s website.

I am really looking forward to getting this started up. All of the Club Moz board members have put in a lot of planning, personal time and effort to get to where we are today. This should be less taxing on us once we get the ball rolling.

I hope to see some of you folks at FSOSS this year. It takes place on Oct 25th and 26th at Seneca College and I will be volunteering, so I hope to see some of you there!

As far as the future, I will be using this blog for Club Moz updates, so stay tuned. If any Mozillans want to stop by for one of our sessions to see what we are doing or to lend a helping hand, I would be very interested in talking more about this. Just ping me on irc (ashughes).

Anyway, I have neglected my homework for far too long tonight.

Cheers!

Well, I am back on the ground in Canada. It is great to be home! What a great summer! I really enjoyed my summer at Mozilla. I learned a great deal, accomplished a lot, and had quite a few laughs. As I am writing this, I am kind of torn. On one hand, I am glad to be back at school. Progress is good, and we all like progress. On the other hand, I am really going to miss Mozilla, the people, and the weather

You may be wondering whether or not I will continue to be involved with the Mozilla Project, being back at school and the workload that entails. I can tell you that I remain fully committed to the Mozilla Project. I obviously will not be able to contribute to the Mozilla Project on the same level that I was while in Mountain View over the Summer, however I want to help out with QA efforts about an hour each day or about 6-10 hours a week. More specifically, I am planning on contributing through Bug Days and Test Days, as well as helping with community outreach through the Campus Reps program and becoming much more involved with Club Moz at Seneca College.

As far as Club Moz is concerned, I am going to be having meetings with people in the coming days to figure out what we want to do with Club Moz this year. I will use this blog space to update the community on what is going on with Club Moz.

As far as community outreach is concerned, I am currently working on a joint event with the York University Campus Rep to piggyback on their Frosh Week to hand out some gear.

I also have a bunch of the QA fliers to get posted around the school. I am still working with the Student Federation on getting those posted.

At this point I would like to extend a sincere thank you to everyone at Mozilla that made everything that I accomplished this Summer possible. I am truly appreciative of all the support, advice and knowledge that was given to me throughout the Summer. Mozilla truly is a family and everyone at Mozilla made me feel like an important member of that family.

Thank you very much and have a great Fall/Winter.

Cheers.

Well, this week was the Mozilla All Hands event. It was actually my very first All Hands event…ever! I have never experienced anything quite like it. For anyone that has never heard of the concept of an All Hands, it is essentially bringing everyone that is an employee together for information, education, team building, and fun. I have been to company events with the various companies where I have found myself to be employed, however this one dwarfs them all.

I really do not know how this event was organized so well. I mean, the logistics of this event must have been a nightmare undertaking on its own. Half of Mozilla employees do not actually live in Mountain View. Mozilla is an international company with employees all over the world. With other offices in Canada, Europe, China and Japan (to name a few), and employees everywhere in between; it must have been a massive undertaking to not only organize their transportation to and from Mountain View, but their accommodations, meals during the three day event, and transportation to and from the off site events that were scheduled. Kudos to whomever organized all of this. It could not have been easy. From my point of view everything went really smooth.

The Mozilla All Hands was a three day event, starting on Tuesday and ending on Thursday. The days were filled with talks ranging from Intern Show and Tells, the state of Mozilla and Firefox, the Spread Firefox initiative, RSS, the No Asshole Rule, and everything in between. After the days were complete, there was a fun event planned for the evening. The first night was an evening out in Palo Alto. The second night was a fun filled evening with the 1954 film “Gojira”. The final evening was quite interesting. We all took part in team building event called “Hands On Gourmet”. This event took place at a beautiful location nestled in the mountains of Los Gatos. It involved laughs, drinks and each of us cooking our own food. We were divided into several groups who shared in the responsibility of making a specific dish. The team I was part of was in charge of making the pecan pies. The secret ingredient for the pie was whiskey and they were very tasty.

On the second night, the Gojira night, I actually took part in another off-site event. This was a QA team building event. Most of the QA folks went to Cupertino and had a fun night of bowling and arcade games. It was a lot of fun. Kudos to Tim for planning the event. I think everyone had great time. I discovered that I didn’t suck any more or any less at bowling than I did the last time I played.

The whole All Hands was a really interesting experience and I learned a lot. It was great to finally meet the people I had chatted with so much on irc. Mozilla really has a great crowd of people.

Anyway, stay tuned for my next blog post, “a review of my internship”.

Cheers

Okay, okay! I know I have not blogged as much as I said I would, but I have been teh busy. To start with, I have prepared a short-list for your viewing pleasure. The following is a list of items I will cover in this blog post:

• Firedrills
• Protocol Handler Testing
• Intern Brown Bag
• Intern BBQ
• Giants Game
• Songbird Party
• Computer History Museum

So without further ado, let’s just get into it.

Firedrills…

Firedrills are interesting to say the least. I am actually glad that I was able to experience a firedrill or two, or three while I am here.

What is a firedrill? I am glad you asked. A firedrill is an accelerated point release. A typical point release schedule is 6 to 8 weeks. This means that from the time a point release is out, our next point release is typically planned for 6 to 8 weeks from that date.

So what is involved with a point release? Well there is a lot of QA work that goes into a point release. There is update testing, localization testing, smoketesting and basic functional testing. A typical point release involves about a week of QA dedicating most of its’ resources to this task. It involves a lot of man hours.

This description really doesn’t do the people working on a point release justice, however it gives you a real basic idea of how it works.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what goes into a point release, from a QA standpoint, a firedrill compresses that 6 to 8 week window down to a window of typically one to two weeks, or as Shaver put it “10 days”. Of course, we try to get a release out as soon as possible. To ensure quality we usually make it within the one to two week window. This has certainly been the case for the firedrills for which I have been involved. This one or two week window is not just QA either. Everything that takes place in a point release has to happen in these one or two weeks leaving QA only a few days to do testing. It makes for many late nights and sometimes a few weekends. But all of our efforts usually pay off.

What warrants a point release being dubbed a firedrill? Typically it boils down to a security issue or some sort of bug in our code that could be used to harm users. In this instance, it was related to how protocol URIs were being handled when escaping quotes or being passed null values. I will get into this a little bit more later.

As I said earlier, I actually was glad that I was exposed to not one but two firedrills. No, I am not insane. The experience I gained from not only watching but being an active participant in dealing with multiple firedrills is invaluable. I was really able to learn a lot. It was also good to see that we put just as much care into Thunderbird as we do Firefox.

In the end, I believe we have done excellent work in protecting our users against potential flaws. Kudos to everyone involved with this massive effort.

So…spreadsheets *shiver*

Now don’t get me wrong. I like spreadsheets as much as the next guy, but this thing was massive. I mean gargantuan! 8 columns times 498 rows comes out to 3984 tests. This was all in an effort to discover what sort of behaviour to expect when firefox 2, internet explorer 6, internet explorer 7, and the command line were passed 498 different protocol handler strings on windows XP and vista. Either way you slice it, it involved about 5 of us spending at least 40 hours each in 3 days to complete. Since we started this late on a Friday, some of us, myself included, came in on Saturday and Sunday so that we were able to complete this exhaustive set of tests late Monday (ahead of schedule). Again, kudos to everyone involved with this effort. That spreadsheet seemed to go on forever, but we were able to complete it and I think it was quite an effective tool. I just hope that in the future we can automate these sorts of tests.

So now, onto some of the lighter hearted events of the last month.

First off, the Intern Brown Bag. This was the first part of a three part series of interns presenting to the Mozilla employees what they had been working on for the Summer. Why three parts? There are so many of us, that’s why. We are an intern army! Anyway, 9 of the interns presented what they had been working on for the summer and I have to say, it was really interesting to see the many varied projects that people were working on. There is really so much to do that not one intern was working on the same project, even though there is so many of us. I originally didn’t think I had all that much to talk about. I seriously thought to myself, “this isn’t even gonna fill three minutes”. But I typed up a list of what I had actually accomplished this Summer and I was actually quite impressed. I was able to fill a good 10 minutes of talking time, enthralling the other interns and Mozilla employees. The entire brown bag was recorded and I have a copy of that video. I am still working on getting my section extracted from the video so it is small enough that it can be posted. The long and short of it is that I learned a lot about QA, had a blast doing it, and look forward to continued work in the Mozilla QA community.

The second item of interest was the Intern BBQ which followed soon after. This was organized fairly quickly after an email of disappointment was passed around from Karen to the intern population. What can I say? We aim to please! The intention of the BBQ was to thank the Mozilla employees for the great summer by giving them an evening of RnR at the Oakwood apartments with food and drink prepared and served by their loving interns. From all the feedback we received, it was a fun time had by all. Andrew Stein, one of the marketing interns, was able to snap some great pictures which can be found on my flickr here.

The third event, taking place just this last week, was the Mozilla invasion of a San Francisco Giants game. This was an awesome event. We all loaded onto a bus, enjoyed a brief tailgate party outside the stadium, then went in and watched a rather inactive game of baseball. This game saw the Giants falling to Washington by 3 to 1 (HA!) and saw Mr. Bonds getting out faster than it took him to come up to the plate (double HA!). At it’s heart, this event was more about us all getting out and having a good time. I think it was safe to say that we all had a blast.

The fourth event, taking place this past Friday was another Mozillan invasion. This time of Songbird’s new office in San Francisco. This was an awesome party. I was actually surprised how many people showed up. I figured there would be mostly Songbird people and Mozilla people there, with Mozilla people outnumbering the Songbird people. There was quite a crowd there. Great music, lots of laughs, a bike blender, great people, and a new found love for Mojitos. The Songbird folks have found a great new nest and I wish them the best of luck. I myself love the Songbird application (built on Mozilla no less) and encourage everyone to at least try it out. Not that any of them read my blog, but keep up the great work guys. It truly gets better with each release.

The final event of this whirlwind month was a rather relaxing afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This was quite an interesting, if not geeky, stroll through the history of technology. It was really neat to see some of the relics that I had heard so much about in my freshman computer classes. If you want to see some pictures, I snapped quite a few. They can be found here. What was most interesting wasn’t how bulky and obese computers used to be, it was how far technology has come in such a long time. It was really amazing and I encourage anyone visiting the area to check it out. It doesn’t cost a cent and will easily eat up a couple hours on a lazy afternoon.

Anyway, I think I am finally done rambling on about what I have experienced in the last month or so. I hope I didn’t put you to sleep too much this time. It is probably 10 times more daunting to read through all of this as it was for me to write it, however I am happy you made it this far. I am planning two more posts before I head back to Canada, which will be much shorter than this one. The first will be my take on what an All-hands is all about. The second, and the final post for my internship, will be my final thoughts on the internship.

Cheers!

PS.

You can find slideshow versions of all my pictures at the top of the page (if you feel so inclined).

As promised yesterday, I am here to blog about my “adventure” on Sunday. It was one of the more interesting days I have spent in California for sure.

The day started with me being kidnapped around 1030am. It wasn’t your run of the mill, blind folded, shoved into the back of a van, kidnapping. It was more of a get ready, you are coming with us, kidnapping. I was finally let in on the “secret” purpose of this kidnapping after a brief stop at Starbucks before we hit the freeway.

So, loaded up on caffeine, we proceeded along the freeway, through an extremely foggy San Francisco, across an even foggier Golden Gate Bridge, and along the north side of the bay to Napa. This was to be a day of winery hopping.

Our first stop was the Domaine Carneros Winery just south of Napa. We were able to snap a few pictures and enjoy some wine at this, rather swanky, winery.

After a brief stop at the Boon Fly, a restaurant just down the road, and a $16 lamb burger (it was worth every penny), we headed off to the next winery.

After about a 20 minute drive, we arrived at the Hagafen Cellars Winery in the heart of Napa. This was quite a bit smaller than the other wineries we visited that day. In fact, it was family owned and operated. Apparently, only manned by a few people. This is the kind of winery I have grown accustomed to living in Ontario. We paid $5 to taste 5 different wines. I was sold at that price. I ended up buying my first bottle of wine for the day from Hagafen.

So after tasting and buying some wine, we headed up the road to the Robert Mondavi Winery. I have been a bit of a fan of Robert Mondavi wines for a couple years now, so I was excited to visit this winery. This was quite a large operation compared to the previous two wineries. They have 550 acres of grapes that they harvest every year. It was quite amazing to see the entire operation. It cost us $25 for a 75 minute tour. This tour was very educational, interesting, and we were able to taste three different wines at the end. Like all tours, this one ended up in the store. I ended up purchasing my second bottle of wine here and the tour guide found out that it was my birthday, so he bought me a bottle of wine.

It was getting into the evening at this point, so we proceeded to head back south and stopped in at a restaurant called Mustards Grill for supper. The food was expensive, but it was well worth it. I had the rabbit, which was so mouth watering and delicious. It was definitely the perfect end to an awesome day.

But wait, there’s more…

As an added surprise, we took the freeway along the east side of the bay on the way home. This involved a stop at Treasure Island just outside San Francisco. We were treated to a beautiful skyline. It was so dark and ominous, yet so pretty at the same time.

It was the perfect way to spend a birthday. Many thanks go to those who planned it. Even though I was reluctant to allow myself to be kidnapped, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

If you ever find yourself in the area, I definitely recommend the Robert Mondavi tour and a stop at Treasure Island at night.

I have uploaded all of the pictures from the trip to my flickr. You can find a link for the slideshow on the top of the blog. I hope you enjoy the pictures almost as much as I enjoyed my trip.

Thank you again to everyone involved.

Until my next post,

Cheers.

Well, it has been a while since my last blog post. So here goes with another round of quick updates of what has been going on in the last couple weeks.

First off, we have all been working hard on getting 2.0.0.5 ready. Many of us have been long hours into the night and many weekend hours. It seems that once we had one problem solved and builds ready, another ugly problem would rear it’s head. Fortunately, we have persevered and testing continues. Priority right now is getting this release out to the public as soon as it is ready. The sooner we can get it ready and signed off, the sooner we can get this build out the door and patch that IE/Firefox security bug that most of us have heard so much about.

Secondly, I have been working a lot with Jay Patel trying to get a decent pool of ideas from members of the community for how we can both promote and expand community involvement with QA. The main target of this project is focussed but not limited to post-secondary schools. For more information, and to provide feedback, please click here. The following is a quick excerpt from the post:

I think the first priority for us to get more people involved in QA at Mozilla is to get key people on the ground (students and professors) interested in supporting a local community. QA or otherwise. The majority of students are ignorant as to the many avenues available to them in the software industry. I know I was! Getting the word out is key. Also,I think that all the lessons learned by Dave and everything that he has accomplished can be mirrored to many other schools across the globe.

Please do not be shy and do not hesitate to post any comments, feedback or ideas. The larger pool we have to draw from the better.

On the lighter side of life, I have two trips to tell you about.

The first was a trip I took down to the Santa Cruz area a couple weekends ago. The whole idea of going down to Santa Cruz was born out of boredom. Every weekend, the interns sit around wanting to do something (other than the communal pancake feast that inevitably ensues every saturday) but remain largely unmotivated to do anything. Having put up with this behaviour for far too long, I took it upon myself to plan a day trip to Santa Cruz. The message went out, “All those who want to come are welcome. I leave at 11am!” Initially, I received quite a lot of enthusiasm toward the idea. However, as the departure time approached, the level of motivation that I have grown accustomed to started to show itself. In the end, there were just three of us that went. I would like to think that we had a blast. The drive down CA-17 was interesting, especially in the intern van. The route down to Santa Cruz is a narrow, winding road that snakes through the mountains and the van isn’t exactly the most nimble of vehicles at the best of times. The day involved some baking in the sun at the beach, a couple dips in the ocean, some more baking in the sun, a walk around the boardwalk, and an adventure to downtown Santa Cruz. For pictures of the entire event, please go here. To give you a taste of how Santa Cruz was, here is a shot of my new best friend:

The second trip I took was just this past Saturday. Preed, Cesar and I took a day long trip down to San Luis Obispo by plane. It was a nice flight down, taking about 90 minutes, through the valley. I enjoyed it a lot. San Luis was a nice town too. With Preed as our guide, we walked around downtown, got some eats (tri-tip beef is mouthwatering protein goodness), saw the Mission, bought some wine and even had a brief tour of Preed’s alma mater. The pinnacle of the whole trip didn’t appear until the trip back. Watching the sun set from 8500 feet is truly an amazing experience. You can see pictures of my trip to San Luis here. For a taste of the sunset, check this out:

I have one final event to tell you about that happened this Sunday, but I am still waiting on the photos to be ready. Once they are, I will make a post.

Until then,

Cheers.

Well folks, I have quite a few little points to mention today. I haven’t posted in over a week now because I didn’t have enough to talk about. I don’t like to write a small blurb every day. I prefer to wait until I have something substantial to write about. With everything that has gone on the last week or so, I think I can throw them all together into one blog post. A sort of mystery stew of sorts.

First off, bug triaging. I have been spending a lot of my time triaging unconfirmed bugs for the Firefox Password Manager. I have been able to get the query of bugs down from 38 to 23 and I expect to drop that number to at least 13 by next week. By my math, the unconfirmed password manager bugs are down 39% after the first week and should drop by 43% by next week. These are very good numbers from where I sit.

Next at bat, Major Update. So Major Update, what is it? Well this is where we offer an update to users running an older version of Firefox to the latest version of Firefox. In this case, for users running Firefox 1.5 to be updated to Firefox 2.0.0.4. So Major Update was supposed to get pushed out last week, but there was a little snag with the CJKT (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) locales regarding default homepage and default search engine. Needless to say, the snag has been pretty much tested to death and we are pretty satisfied with the results. We are pretty happy with the product and are confident it will be successful when it is released into the wild soon.

The next major event of the week is the Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 release. There are quite a few improvements and the developers have been working long, hard hours to get it to where it is today. I think everyone is pretty happy with the product as it is today. There is still much work to be done, but for an Alpha, things are looking pretty good. I have been using A6 for a while now and have only run into a couple minor hitches, which were fixed fairly quickly after reporting them. Kudos developers.

On a lighter note, last Friday was the intern hootenanny. There is not much that CAN be said about this event. It was a lot of fun and most of the interns showed up. We talked. We laughed. We played catchphrase. The party got shutdown at 10:30 by the man, so we moved it to the hot tub. Suffice it to say, we had a good time. It was a good icebreaker event for all the interns. I believe that Andrew Stein, marketing intern extraordinaire, took some excellent pictures. If you ask him nicely, he may share them with you.

The final event of the last few days was my aerial tour of the bay area. With Preed piloting and Alex Buchanan along for the ride, we took to the skies over the bay. This was originally supposed to be an aerial tour of San Francisco. Unfortunately, the cloud cover over the west end of the bay was too thick. If we had tried to go to San Francisco, we wouldn’t have seen anything. So we opted for a tour of the east bay area (Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, Livermore, San Jose). Even though I was a little down about not seeing San Francisco, I was not disappointed at all. It was still a nice trip. I was able to snap quite a few pictures, which I added to the flickr set from the time Reed went flying with Preed. You may notice that I renamed the “Preed & Reed’s Flight Tour of Pismo Beech” to “Bay Area Aerial View”. Since all the photos are pretty much the same area, it made sense for me to just collaborate them into a single set.

Oh, and let me tell you about “engine out procedures”. This is basically where one forces the nose of the plane to drop taking the plane with it on a quick decent of a few hundred feet in a few seconds before taking control of the plane back and leveling it off. While this scared the crap out of me, it was a lot of fun. I couldn’t put it any more eloquently as Preed: “it is like being on a roller coaster without any of the safety devices.” Awesome Preed…just awesome. Hopefully we can get out to do an aerial tour of San Francisco soon. Maybe we will get out and do an aerial sunset tour of the coast as well. If so, expect many more photos to come.

Anyway, that is all for now.

Chimo!