Use Tables!

It’s been way too long since I posted anything here, for which I apologize. There are a couple of things that deserve mention here at the present time.

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!

Venkman 0.9.87.2 was made public by an addons.mozilla.org editor a few hours ago. It was released a few days after 0.9.87.1, which turned out to have one major regression: adding more than one watch expression through the “Watches” UI no longer worked. This regression had been present on trunk versions of Venkman since June this year. That is 5 solid months of nobody noticing major pieces of functionality being completely broken. As far as I’m concerned, there are two important lessons to be learned:

• The lack of a testing framework means we don’t catch regressions immediately. I don’t have time to fix this, as I’m a full time student whose major Mozilla commitments are elsewhere anyway. If anyone is interested in making this happen, let me know and I’ll try to get you started.
• Hardly anybody uses trunk versions of Venkman. I guess the set of users includes trunk SeaMonkey users, but that’s about it. This, too, is really really bad for quality. I’m guessing some sort of nightly update system would help alleviate this, but to my knowledge it is impossible to have more than one “update channel” for an add-on, short of changing the add-on’s ID, of course…

Finally, something I’ve said before and am saying again now: Please report problems. There’s a bug database, it’s there for a reason. If you have clear steps to reproduce, I promise to try to give the issue attention, but I need to hear about it! Too often I hear people complain that “I could never get it to work” or “It randomly breaks”. That sucks, but if things don’t get more specific than that I’m not going to be able to do anything about it. So, give the latest version a whirl, and let me know about any issues you have with it. Thanks!

So yesterday, there was a small gettogether on IRC in #venkman to discuss the future of Venkman. Right now the trunk builds are not fully functional anymore, and the last checkins were several months ago. So in fact, it’s in a pretty miserable state.

On to more positive things:

1. There is a raw log of the conversation on IRC for those interested.
2. WeirdAl and I will be going through the current list of open Venkman bugs today (2007-09-02) starting 12pm PST (noon) - and we need your help! Please drop by in #venkman on IRC if you want to help out doing triage and all that.
3. We will try to prioritize the open bugs so we get a reasonably usable trunk build back, and get a new release out ASAP. We can’t currently make promises about how long this will take, as it will depend on how easy it’ll turn out to be to fix some of the current bugs - but we are aiming for a new Venkman release on AMO within about 2 weeks.
4. We will try to make a todo list on a wiki somewhere (probably wiki.mozilla.org) to keep track of what will need to be done.
5. We will try to get the MozPad folks involved to support Venkman as it is currently one of the only reasonable debugging tools for chrome-level JavaScript (as Firebug doesn’t work there).

All in all, we hope to get Venkman back to usability and happiness very soon, and to keep it there. If you can help out, please do! Drop by in #venkman, leave a comment here, or on WeirdAl’s weblog. Any help is much appreciated!