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.

In other news, I will be away until January 2nd, I’m off to Taizé’s European Meeting in Geneva.

• 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 most eyes these days seem to be firmly focused on that other operating system release, but I want to talk about Gutsy for a bit. A few nights ago I updated my machine to it, and there are quite a few new problems, and also quite a few old ones that are still not fixed.

Update 2007-10-31: Most of the below is now fixed. For explanations, see the comments at the bottom of this post.

• [FIXED] Somehow whenever I boot, my system believes it’s necessary to make my harddisk churn continuously. It didn’t use to do this on Feisty, I have a gig of RAM on this machine and am only running a webbrowser and Gnome Terminal, so I doubt my ‘extreme use’ is the cause of it all. System Monitor manages to tell me that udevd is eating CPU, at least (I can’t figure out how to monitor harddisk activity). “man udevd” seems to be telling me “it could be anything telling me what to do, I’m just a humble event daemon”. So no clue where that’s coming from.
• [FIXED] I can’t mount my other partitions anymore. Windows has no trouble finding them though, and Feisty had always been fine with them. The three partitions in question are formatted using NTFS (1) and FAT32 (2). Running “sudo mount /winC” manually gets me:
  
fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy
FUSE mount point creation failed
Unmounting /dev/sda1 ()
• [FIXED] Somehow I now have a huuuge submenu “Other” in my Applications menu, containing things varying from “Browser Identification” to “Zeroconf Service Detection” to “Fonts” (twice) to “AdBlocK Filters” (To my knowledge, I’ve never installed this) to “Joystick” (I don’t have a joystick). This didn’t use to be there on Feisty, either. It doesn’t seem to serve any purpose whatsoever. Why did it pop up?
• [PROBABLY FIXED] It seems to believe that, if there is still a cd(-rom) left in the drive, using the Eject button on my cd/dvd-rom drive really means I want it to show me how fast it can open and close the drive in succession. I’ve almost lost a cd like this, and have no clue where to look for info on why it behaves like this. It shouldn’t have any reason to keep the disk in there - it’s not writable, so there are no writes left so unmounting should be quick and painless (and even if it weren’t, it should keep the drive shut tight, instead of being all weird about it).
• [POSSIBLY FIXED] GRUB sucks, or Ubuntu’s use of it sucks. Whenever I update this machine, it adds two boot entries for the new kernel (one is ‘normal’, one is “Recovery Mode”). It doesn’t remove old entries. If I remove entries manually, they reappear the next time the kernel is updated. I have edited menu.lst to boot my windows install by default. Whenever these two entries get added, the default boot index is off-by-two, causing it to start memtest86 if I’m not at the machine to correct it. Why is it smart enough to remember the value I set it to, but not smart enough to update it when it changes the list?
• This machine is slightly over two years old. Ubuntu is still not able to shut it down correctly - I always have to press and hold the power button for five seconds after I hear the harddrive shut off (without Ubuntu telling me “you can now turn your machine off” - it seems to think this will happen automagically). Back when I just got this machine, I installed debian stable on it (I believe that was Sarge, back then, but I’m not sure). It never had a problem with this (nor does Windows). So clearly it’s not just that it’s not possible, but that Ubuntu somehow isn’t using the right version/type of acpi or whatever. This machine has an ASUS P5AD2-E motherboard, if that is any help.

All in all this means I really don’t want to use Ubuntu anymore, as it’s downright painful to get anything done (without access to my windows partitions, most of my documents, patches, photos and other personal things are out of reach, and with my computer busy with some invisible SomeThing, getting other work done becomes painfully slow, too). Solutions appreciated.

I would be most interested in any (semi-)official documentation on this particular icon overlay, and when it is used by Mac OS X. I was unable to unearth anything - possibly because I don’t know what to look for.

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!

[en]

After 7 weeks of absence, I’m back. Being away was great, for all those who were/are wondering.

Catching up on bugmail and other boring things will happen this week. If there’s anything urgent you need me to look at, poke me using Mail/Google Talk/Skype.

Zondag 1 Juli a.s. neem ik om even voor 9 de Thalys naar Parijs, en vandaar om 14.38 de TGV naar Macon. Vandaar ga ik met een bus verder naar Taizé. Daar blijf ik hopelijk ongeveer zeven weken. Ik verwacht om 6 over 7 ’s avonds op zondag 19 Augustus weer in Amsterdam terug te komen, maar weet niet of dat daadwerkelijk gebeurt. Dat hangt af van wat er in Taizé gebeurt. Wees gerust, ik ben niet van plan daar de rest van mijn leven te blijven, maar het zou kunnen dat ik een (paar) weken korter of langer blijf, al naar gelang ik en/of de broeders dat nodig vinden.

Ik hoop veel van jullie daar te zien - de groep van de 3 ranken komt de 15e (Juli) aan, mijn ouders en een aantal oude vrienden uit Polen die ik al lang niet meer gezien heb komen een week later. Verder zal ik ongetwijfeld veel nieuwe mensen ontmoeten, en wie weet nog wat oude bekenden onverwachts terugzien.

Opschrijven wat me beweegt daar zo lang te blijven is moeilijk, vind ik. Daarnaar eerder gevraagd schreef ik een paar maanden terug:

Ik wil graag een keer langer blijven om rust te vinden, denk ik. Om een langere periode niet iedere dag met studie of werk geconfronteerd te worden, en meer tijd te hebben om na te denken over belangrijke(re?) dingen, zoals wat ik nu eigenlijk wil (of kan) met mijn/het geloof, en wat ik (daarmee) voor anderen kan betekenen. Om tijd door te brengen met andere jongeren die dat ook belangrijk vinden, en van hen hun mening over zulke onderwerpen te horen.

Wat betreft praktische zaken: hoewel er een kleine internetkiosk is op het terrein ben ik niet van plan daar naar binnen te gaan. Dit betekent dat ik ongeveer 7 weken mijn e-mail niet zal lezen. Ik neem geen mobiel mee. De gemeenschap heeft openbare telefoonnummers, maar bel deze alsjeblieft NIET tenzij het ontzettend dringend is. Als je gewoon wilt weten hoe het met me is, stuur dan een ouderwets postkaartje, ik zal proberen terug te schrijven

Als je me nu gedurende die periode dat ik weg ben mailt, en je hebt nog niks teruggehoord nadat ik al een maand of zo terug ben, laat het me dan alsjeblieft even weten - het kan zijn dat ik je mail gemist heb of dat deze in de spam terecht is gekomen. Die kijk ik normaal gesproken door, maar nu ik er zo lang niet ben zullen er dingen ongezien in de prullenbak verdwijnen. Ditzelfde geldt voor commentaar op dit weblog.

Ik wens jullie allemaal een fijne vakantie.

Sab - bat - i - cal
noun
any extended period of leave from one’s customary work, esp. for rest, to acquire new skills or training, etc.

Just before 9 am on the morning of Sunday July 1st, I’m taking the Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris. At 14.38, I will take the TGV to Macon, and from there I will take a bus to Taizé (Wikipedia Article). I will stay there for seven weeks. I hope to be back in Amsterdam at 7pm or so on Sunday August 19th, but I’m not completely sure this will happen. I may ask or be asked to stay for a longer or shorter period of time, which may delay or hasten my return.

I will meet up with some good friends of mine, notably a group from my church (site in Dutch), my parents, some Polish friends of mine who I know will be there - but probably also a whole bunch of others who I’ve met there the other times I’ve gone.

Putting the purpose of my “sabbatical” in writing is hard for me, but I suppose it involves learning more about (my) faith, the Bible, life in general. It also (especially, perhaps) means sharing and living with other young people who struggle with the same or similar issues.

On the practical side, there are several consequences. While there is a small internet kiosk on the community grounds, I have no intention whatsoever of using it. I will not check my email for 7 weeks. I’m not taking a mobile phone. If you very, very, very urgently need to contact me, the community has a landline phone which you could call. If you just want to know how I am doing, send me an old-fashioned postcard (there’s an address on that page) and I’ll try to write back.

If you happen to e-mail me during these 7 weeks, and even a month after I come back you haven’t heard back from me, chances are your e-mail ended in GMail’s spam filter - please bug me about it and we’ll see what happened. The same issue applies to comments to this weblog - AKismet is wonderful, but might just hurt your comments.

I hope everyone has a great holiday, and see you all on the other side.