New Branch Timeline: Electrolysis

Now, a week or so later - we are setting up a new project branch. Here's the break down:

2009-06-26 11:55 PDT

• Bug requesting the branch [500755] was created
  

2009/07/09 11:13:41 PDT

• Created a tinderbox page for the branch to report to [Tinderbox Page]
  

2009-07-14 17:44:27 PDT

• Patches to add Electrolysis branch to buildbot are written and put up on staging-master. There are several compile fails.
  
  

2009-07-22 06:12:49 PDT

• After testing and scheduling downtime, the config files are checked in and P-M is reconfigured - last minute patch to turn on debug builds is added as well when we realize that is not in the default template for turning on a new branch.
  

2009-07-22 13:31:59 PDT

• Need graph server machine table updated for new branch - we did a bunch all at once in [504435]
  

2009-07-23 06:25:18 PDT

• Add Nagios monitoring support file is checked in and bug filed requesting IT turn it on. [505986]
  
  

What remains is to check in the debug builds patch, this should happen in a downtime next week at which point the project branch request bug will be closed.

New Branch Timeline: Places

A brief rundown of what was involved setting up the Places project branch. This is based on the time since the branch request was given the go-ahead, not when the bug was filed since that happened quite a bit earlier.

2009-04-29 17:17:43 PDT

• Bug requesting the branch [459269] was re-opened
  

2009-05-18 16:31:46 PDT

• Created a tinderbox page for the branch to report to [Tinderbox Page]
  

2009-05-19 09:16 PDT

• A separate bug was filed requesting a repo [493745]
  
  

2009-05-26 16:32:18 PDT

• Repo is created and [493745] is closed as FIXED
  

2009-06-24 10:22 PDT

• Patches submitted to update config files for Staging-Master and Production-Master
  

2009-06-30 12:51 PDT

• After testing and patch updates, the config files are checked in and P-M is reconfigured
  
  

2009-07-01 08:49 PDT

• Add Nagios monitoring support by filing a bug with IT [501710]
  

2009-07-08 08:04:40 PDT

• [493740] is fixed to deal with the scheduler not picking up the new Places poller after a reconfig, only after a stop/start
  

2009-07-09 14:36 PDT - 2009-07-10 12:50 PDT

• Patches submitted to turn on talos and graph server support for the new builds. The first set were not patches to Talos-Pool so a second set was required.
  
  
• New row in graph server added for branch (bug 459269. IT (justdave) ran the INSERT statement against the production database)
  

2009-07-13 11:18 PDT

• Patches submitted to turn on leak testing debug builds. This was checked-in and P-M was reconfigured the same day.
  

2009-07-13 14:57 PDT

• Bug closed - project branch is up and running on P-M
  

Celebrating Firefox 3.5 with sparkly accessories...

A month or so ago when the Firefox 3.5 was close to launching I got in touch with some artist friends of mine who have a small jewellery making business to create some custom accessories for me in celebration. They have been making these awesome belt buckles, cuff links, magnets and many other items for years and I have several of their pieces including a custom "fancy deluxe" belt buckle with my hound dog on it surrounded by shiny Swarovski crystals. They did a great job with the Firefox logo and I am now the proud owner of

A belt buckle:

And cuff links (though I only have one shirt that uses them):


I'm looking forward to wearing them about town and spreading the word about Firefox 3.5. Many of my pals outside of tech circles have been excited about the new Firefox because they see how excited I am about it. For anyone else looking for a custom buckle or accessory of their own get in touch with the folks at Barbie's Basement Jewelry. I hope you enjoy flashing the Firefox logo around in new and fashionable ways - it's always a conversation starter.

Mozilla Service Week - making a difference in your community

Mozilla just announced Mozilla Service Week which will be held September 14 - 21, 2009. This week is a push to connect people who can help make the web work better for someone in the community with people and organization who need that help.

Coming from the non-profit arts sector prior to my job at Mozilla, I will be spreading the word with many arts organizations in Toronto who would be wise to sign up for help from such a talented pool of volunteers. Of course I will also donate my time that week even though it's the kind of work I do all the time already. I can't even count the amount of time I've spent setting up routers and networks for less technical folks in my life, or helping them set up their new computers and teaching them basic skills (all teaching sessions include installing and setting up the latest Firefox of course).

The best part of this week, in my opinion, is that it's an opportunity to get hands-on with local users in the community. The library is a great place to start. It wasn't that long ago (around 2003) when I was using the library computers as my primary access to the internet. I'd love to go in now and make sure that their computers are up to date, and write up how-to manuals and helpful hints for beginners. Even better, get some folks to translate those manuals or tip sheets. At my local library I'm certain that there are many folks who would appreciate localized information sheets.

Two areas that are of particular interest to me with regards to the organizations I know in Toronto:

1. Bring their websites over to an open-source CMS like Drupal. Many of the sites are hand-coded php (or god forbid Dreamweaver-created sites) with no administrative back-end and keeping the site's information up to date is a difficult/dangerous task for non-technical staff.


2. Take their FileMaker Pro databases over to MySQL or PostgreSQL so that they are no longer locked in to expensive, proprietary database software that requires additional hosting costs. Three organizations I have worked with are on three different versions of FMP and none of them the latest. Upgrading is painful for them and their hosting costs are ridiculous (especially the ones who are on older versions).

If you're technically inclined, go to the site and sign up. If you've got an organization in mind, tell them to sign up. Let's make this event a success so it will inspire more weeks like this in the future.

iPhone tethering - how to restore after updating to 3.0b5 and iTunes8.2b10(13)

Breaking my extended blog silence (I've been busy, you know, starting my full time job at Mozilla!) to tell you about the quagmire I went into when I tried to set up tethering on my iPhone.

So here's the story - with links that will help you avoid what happened to me.

I purchased and ADC membership so I could download and install the iPhone 3.0 SDK and OS. When Beta 5 came out I eagerly updated since my phone had been crashing regularly and went into restore mode. As soon as the 3.0b5 update went live on my phone, iTunes said it needed 8.2 to work so I downloaded the most recent version from ADC. This turned out to be 8.2b10(13) which disables the ability to change carrier settings and thus, to enable tethering if you didn't already do it before the update.

So - after many (failed!) attempts to go back to 3.0b3 and 3.0b4 so that I could use iTunes 8.1 - I did eventually (10 hours and many blog tips later) work out my tethering issues with this extremely simple set of steps:

Simple Steps to restoring tethering:
Download: http://www.adammcnamara.com/CanadianCarriersTetheringPatch.zip
Download: iTunes 8.2b7(10) http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4874487/

* Delete iTunes 8.2b10(13) from your computer, install the older version - as the torrent description points out, it says that it installs as an 8.1.1 but it is in fact 8.2.

* When you connect your phone in iTunes, Option-click the “Check for Updates” and pick the.ipcc file for your carrier (from the carriers patch you downloaded). It will update the carrier settings.

* Reboot (NOT RESPRING) the phone. You can now tether over USB or BlueTooth (unless you have a new Mac Unibody Mac where apparently the Bluetooth stack is broken and so you're relegated to only sharing via USB).

To activate tethering, go to “Settings->General->Network->Internet Tethering”. The first time you do so it may say “Contact Rogers to enable this feature”, but a few second later it should allow you to enable it. If not, restart the phone again.

Thanks to many blogs out there but more specifically to Adam Mcnamara where the bulk of the steps are from.

Tryserver now has unittests on all 3 platforms

Bug 445611 is now resolved fixed, you can see the unittest results on all three platforms here: MozillaTry.

There are hopefully more machines coming that will be allotted to tryserver, with the likelihood that more developers will now use the tryserver. I'm also hoping to start working on setting up the web interface to allow for the selection of which platforms you want to try your patch on and whether you want unittests run or not since at the moment they are turned on for all patch submissions by default.

This patch also required the landing of a patch for bug 479225 where we now call the reftest/crashtest suites and the mochitest suites with make from the top level directory which helped us get rid of a bunch of extra workarounds we had to do for Mac OS since it needed to know which .app file to look for and we're changing that name so often (Minefield, Shiretoko, etc). Now all three platforms are even closer to being alike. Many thanks to Ted for making this possible.

No More Passwords Please

This is the tentative title for my upcoming white paper, which is the major deliverable for the btr820 course on Research Methodologies and Writing. I'm excited to be doing this paper because a) I love writing and b) I'm looking forward to learning more about my topic which is essentially looking at solutions for the future of authentication on the web.

As users of web sites and applications, we are now subject to having to authenticate ourselves multiple times a day - I read somewhere than an average is 13 but for some of us who spend more time online it's probably twice that. Having your passwords remembered for you by the site or by your browser helps, but that is not a great solution for folks who are on multiple computers. Besides our passwords aren't even that safe to begin with (my bank won't let me use more than alpha numeric characters) and some sites make you change them regularly for extra security (a lie) and so as users we are caught up in a game of constantly trying to stay on top of the latest password for which site and please stop the web now, I want to get off.

What I want to look at is open, decentralized authentication identifiers that go beyond passwords with regards to actual security, that could be in your browser itself, and that would move with you easily no matter what computer you are on.

So I have some questions.

What are the implications of a web browser incorporating an open authentication protocol out of the box where the identifier is the browser itself?

What other options are coming down the pipe in terms of built-in browser features that help users deal with authentication? Is there something better than a decentralized open authentication protocol?

Do browser providers have to stay neutral and leave it up to web application providers to decide how users authenticate on the web or can they step in and lead the charge towards a certain protocol and influence sites instead?

While Weave is an excellent way of syncing your profile across various computers - is it really scalable? What other options are there for having an easy, portable profile which would be able to contain your identity as you move between computers, countries, even to your mobile device?

Thanks for reading this, I look forward to your thoughts on this issue.