Edit: ChatZilla 0.9.85 (released some weeks ago…) has all these fixes, and will work fine with 3.5. Oops!

First, some notes of caution:

• HG uses a character encoding specific to your machine. For my mac, that turned out to be mac-roman. You usually don’t want that, and need to tell it you want it to use utf8 instead. I could actually not convince it to do this for the author map – it stored the authors in mac-roman anyway. Check your imports carefully.
• HG’s default ConvertExtension is your friend, as long as you tell it what to do the right way.
• You probably want to create a test repo (I ended up using several, in trial and error!) at hg.mozilla.org/users. Instructions for doing that may be found here. Keep in mind that once you stick something in a Mercurial repo, it will be there forever. This means anyone pulling from your repo will have to keep downloading all those files. Be careful about what you push to the repo, because once you’ve pushed something there’s no going back (short of asking IT to delete the repo and trying again).

Alright. Down to the actual import. Here is the actual steps I ended up following. When I say “ended up” I mean “after trying N different things which didn’t work”, where N was large enough to keep me busy for a fair number of hours.

1. Check out the relevant code from CVS. In my case, this meant:

   cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/extensions/venkman

2. Enable the convert and mq extensions. Edit your ~/.hgrc file and include:

   [extensions]
   hgext.convert=
   mq =

3. Decide whether you want all the branches in CVS. If, like me, you’re importing an extension, you probably don’t care about the Firefox/Mozilla release branches. You just want trunk history. In order to do this, we ask the convert extension to split up branches. Edit your ~/.hgrc file and include:

   [convert]
   hg.usebranchnames=0
   hg.clonebranches=1

4. Now you can run convert, more or less like this:

   hg --encoding utf8 convert vnkCVS/mozilla/extensions/venkman venkman-initial

5. Inspect your handiwork: you will now end up with several directories, one for each branch. You presumably want “default”, which should correspond to trunk. We will convert from hg to hg in a bit, to obtain just that.  Go back to your ~/.hgrc file and remove the [convert] section you added in step 3. This way, the new repo we’ll convert to won’t still have the “default” directory.
6. Additionally, we still need to map authors. CVS used something like: “foo%somecompany.com”, and in Mercurial, we expect something of the form “John Doe <johndoe@mozilla.com>”. So we need to define an author map file, in which each line simply maps one set of authors to the next. For example:
   johndoe%mozilla.com = John Doe <johndoe@mozilla.com> . I uploaded the Author map for Venkman CVS to hg import that I used. It probably does not cover everyone who committed to your repo. If there are aliases that you’re not familiar with (Mozilla CVS is pretty old!) then Google and asking on IRC are easy ways of figuring out who’s who. To create a complete author map, I used some ad-hoc sed magic on:

   hg log | grep "user:" > foo.txt
   

7. You may want to unify the entries of committers who have committed using different committer IDs. Ohloh can help there.
8. Run hg convert again:

   hg --encoding utf8 convert --authors myAuthorMap.txt venkman-initial/default/ venkman-final/

9. Check hg log. If there are loads of tags in which you’re not interested, you can use the hg strip command to strip the last hg revision, which added all the tags.
10. Verify everything worked. Then add the correct “default-push” line to the .hg/hgrc file for the new repo you created, and push to your user repo. Check that everything is correct by reviewing the hgweb overview of things. If so, change the default-push line to point to the “real” repo, and push all the changesets there. You’re done!

This may not be the easiest or best way to do things, but that’s the way I managed – suggestions/improvements appreciated!

So, the rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven facts:

1. I am a Dutch national, currently doing my MSc Advanced Computer Science in Britain, and taking intermediate-level French lessons on the side. The accent of (some of) my classmates drives me insane.
2. I got into Mozilla (and eventually its development) by writing scripts in VBScript for a fansite of an MMORPG (to calculate experience gained from using certain skills), and having the website owner tell me that the result “didn’t work in Mozilla”. Very badly written JavaScript versions were published later, and I vividly remember cursing the various differences I ran into when converting my code. Everything seemed much harder in JS. I’m afraid the damning evidence of all this is now lost, as the website was taken down some time ago.
3. I once taught first-year students in highschool (when I was a fourth-year, out of 6 years) how to make websites with Frontpage. I am hopeful none ever got published somewhere remotely important. I repented before the end of highschool.
4. I had the dubious honour of working for McDonalds once, for 6 months on a temporary contract. I declined staying afterward.
5. The pronunciation of my first name (and the difficulties people have with it) is a subject of hilarity among some of my international friends that I have by now resigned to. For those who don’t know how to deal with it still, I wrote about it some time ago. For something that even people who read that post might not know, it is short for “Gijsbert” which is equivalent to the name “Gilbert” in German, English, and French. Except nobody there actually calls their kids Gilbert.
6. I have 5th cousins who live in Alberta, Canada, who randomly found me through Facebook.
7. I was robbed in my own home (student flat) at knifepoint about 2.5 years ago. Fortunately, nobody got hurt. I still have the IRC log from that day and at the time its timestamps helped me, bizarrely enough, to identify precisely how long the robbery took to the police.

Seven people who shall also have to go through this harrowing experience:

1. Nadya Peek, because she always has something to say but never blogs.
2. Aaron Leventhal, who tends to have interesting stories about his history, and certainly has more of that than me.
3. Ben Millard, who doesn’t seem to have been tagged yet.
4. Okke Formsma, who is in the states at the moment and would presumably love to share childhood memories while far away.
5. “Schrati”, because she keeps blogging in different languages and I really wonder in which she would write this.
6. Daniel Glazman, because so much of his life is public knowledge by now that I wonder what we do not yet know.
7. Shawn Wilsher, because if I remember correctly he got into the Mozilla Project after me, is now definitely in much deeper than me, and still did not respond to the previous person who tagged him.

And finally, if you were wondering, the title of this post means “Seven freaky things”, not “Seven without linge cases” as Google would like you to believe.

We would separate bottles from all other rubbish, so we could recycle the empty bottles separately. So, we needed some way to label rubbish containers which were for bottles, and containers which were for other rubbish. While worrying about this, I was told that the company providing the containers had already “taken care” of labelling the containers so that some would be used for bottles and some for other rubbish. Curious as to what they had done, I went to look.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures, but basically what they had done was taking 2 A4 papers for each container, printed “PET” on them as big as possible, and stuck them on either side of the container with one piece of doublesided tape.

There are several things wrong with this. First, and most importantly, the target audience (young people from all over Europe and in some cases the rest of the world) will largely have no idea what “PET” even means. In fact, I would guess that some part of the people reading this blog don’t. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it is a fairly common abbreviation used to indicate plastic (even if it’s not strictly speaking PET). 9,000 of the 25,000 people were Polish young people. Some of them don’t speak English very well. Even those who did would most likely have been baffled by the signs.

The other mistakes are smaller: the papers had been attached in such a way that some would be upside down on the other side if the container was opened, and in other cases they were only attached on one side, meaning people approaching from the other would have no idea they couldn’t put their rubbish there.

Finally, using one bit of double-sided tape to attach a bit of A4 paper when there are 25,000 young people coming is naive at best. The papers that we did not take off the containers ourselves had, by the end of the meeting, been taken by the young people, or fallen off.

Instead, our team improvised a different solution. We stuck signs with a big image of a bottle, and the phrase “Bottles only” in several languages on the containers, using large quantities of duct tape. We taped shut the bigger openings of the containers which had two, so only the small opening remained, through which people would have more trouble putting their normal rubbish. And finally, we taped actual empty bottles to the top and sides of the containers.

I guess the lesson I learned from all this is that it is surprisingly easy to make stupid mistakes when you don’t realize who will be using your “product”. For the Belgian rubbish collection company, “PET” was probably clear enough in the case of big expositions with reasonably well-educated Belgian people manning stands from where the rubbish would come… For large crowds of young people from diverse backgrounds, clearly it was not.

For Chrome List, every now and again people report issues they are having on its Google Code website, using the “Issues List”. This is very useful, and I would like this to continue. However, for some reason, I don’t get email for these issues that people report. I need to manually check every now and then, then star new issues so I get email for them.

Can I change this? I’ve googled around, I’ve gone through all the options in “Administer” three times, but I can’t find it. I would really like to have those emails, though, because right now sometimes I don’t check that list for a few days/weeks/months, and people’s problems don’t get solved…

Thanks!

1. Go to your Facebook inbox page, pick a random message, and start typing a reply
2. Halfway through, realize you want to read a different message before finishing this one.
3. ‘Accidentally’ left-click instead of middle-click the link at the top for the inbox.
4. Hit escape to stop the load so as to be able to still have the text you type

Expected result:

Stop loading the inbox page, get to keep your written stuff

Actual result:

This is JavaScript executing. There’s no stopping it from throwing away your text anymore by returning to the inbox – and what’s worse, the back/forward history is so confused by what’s going on (as you hit escape) that it won’t be able to take you back to the reply page and restore your message to the textbox (as back/forward generally does in Firefox). Congrats, you just lost N minutes worth of typing, and who knows what kind of brilliant ideas!

Question to the Lazyweb: whose fault is this? Can it be fixed? How? (Yes, I’d prefer to just use email all the time, too, but unfortunately that’s not always an option, and I’m sure there are webmail implementations which have similar problems, especially once you turn off automatic draft saving)

If there is something you need me to take care of urgently, please let me know. Right now my priorities are with moving out of the Netherlands for a year and possibly more (which is not trivial). In some spare time I try to work on ChatZilla accessibility (specifically, my long overdue halfway report) and some of the bug reports about Chrome List that I’ve been getting. There is also Venkman demanding some attention. If anyone would like to help out with that, please have a look at the wiki page that Alex et al. created. You can usually find either of us on IRC if you’re interested in helping out. It’s really quite necessary because in its current state it is not doing that well (several basic features are broken with Firefox 3(.0.1) and on trunk).

Second, in connection to this thesis thing:

Dear Lazyweb,

I would like a way to make LaTeX do a [citation needed] in true Wikipedia style. I often find myself thinking “if I want to write something like this, I need a reference to back it up”, but searching for a good one for minutes/hours on end breaks up my writing process, so I’d much rather make a note to self and keep writing, especially for things which I am very sure of there must be a reference for. Example: “the POSIT algorithm was conceived in the 1990s by John Doe[citation needed]“.

Yes, I know that by default, LaTeX will do a [?] if I try to reference something that doesn’t exist, but that’s (a) not obvious enough for my taste, and (b) it might be the result of a misspelled BibTeX id or such, and I’d rather not mix the usecases of “deliberately left blank” and “oops, misspelled the citation identifier and/or forgot to re-run BibTeX after adding citations”. I haven’t found an easy way to do this.

Thanks!
Gijs

SightCity

I recently got back from visiting SightCity in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The conference experience was excellent, and I had a great time with Steve, Ben and Marco, all of whom have written more pleasantly and/or extravagantly about our experiences there than I ever could. So this is all you’re getting from me, here.

ChatZilla Releases

ChatZilla 0.9.82 was released, quickly followed by ChatZilla 0.9.82.1 after a couple of nasty regressions. Almost all of the releases’ features and fixes fall squarely into the “polish” bin (eg. dragging tabs for channels named only “#” now works, and doubleclicking a user in the userlist opens a query tab, some minor accessibility and localizability fixes, etc.), except for one: CEIP, short for Customer Experience Improvement Program. Customer not being very apt, I suppose, but it’s a standard name for what is essentially a data collecting tool.

Data collecting?! Yes, data collecting. I wrote a Privacy Policy about what we do. Please read it first, before flaming me/us. Really, read it – it’s quite short! As you will have read by now, I hope, we ask first if it would be OK to collect anonymous statistics. Without consent, ChatZilla doesn’t save anything you do, nor (consequently) does anything get sent. We never collect anything personal, and both in the policy and in the UI, which is accessible from the Help menu in ChatZilla, we indicate a bunch of things we specifically won’t collect. So what can we collect, then, and how is it useful? Well, examples include the length of sessions (do people run ChatZilla for days at a time without interruption, or only five minutes?) and how tabs are handled. We can already, after just a few days, see that many people seem to be closing lots of network tabs, which may lead us to prioritize bug 249188, for instance.

So I hope that this post helps clarify that we’re not turning evil. If you disagree, and had already turned it on, you’re free to turn it off again, at your leasure. Do let us know what you think we’re doing wrong, though.

Venkman trunk issue

If you’re using Venkman with a Gecko trunk product (eg. Firefox 3 RC1, Thunderbird Shredder 3.0a1, …) you may have found that viewing source code stopped working a while ago. This happened because of a change in the way unprivileged content, like the source view itself (which is plain old HTML) is allowed to access chrome content (like the stylesheet for the source view, unfortunately). Fixing it properly is not trivial. Right now, I have suggested a more or less wallpaper fix, because I am too busy to do something nicer, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else is willing to go and fix it instead. This basically allows unprivileged content to access the chrome content again. A better solution would be to channel the stylesheet through the jsd protocol. If anyone wants to step up to the plate and fix that, that’d be awesome. In the meantime, the wallpaper patch is waiting for review. If you’re in need of a working Venkman, I uploaded an XPI to bug 428848.

Misc

I’m nearing the end of my BSc degree. I’m working on my thesis at the moment, and finishing off the two courses that remain. Perhaps I’ll write more about the thesis once I have something I can demo or screenshot in-action. For now, I’d just like to happily announce that I was conditionally accepted into the 1 year MSc Advanced Computing course at Imperial College, London. So, if you know of a good place for a grad student to live in central London (South Kensington), let me know!

Notable new features include:

• Draggable chat tabs.
• Automatically going /away when your OS indicates you’ve been idle. (the timeout for this is configurable, but unfortunately this feature is only available on newer Gecko 1.9 builds, so newer XULRunners or Firefox 3 alpha, beta, or nightly builds)
• Proper handling of WALLOPS and mode prefixed (such as op-only) messages.
• Better userlist implementation (which will no longer lose as much state when you switch tabs back and forth).
• Bugzilla comment linking (in addition to bug linking which we already did).
• Warn before doing a /list.

Notable fixed bugs include:

• Some style parsing bugs.
• A major accessibility issue in the Options/Preferences window.
• Various small polish fixes which were really annoying people.

There is a full list for the curious among you.