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1 year ago
in A Little QA Work on In Pursuit of Mysteries
One of our QA guys uses it for performance tests so it gets pretty stressed out. I don't know the details other than that it runs a bunch of automation and we have to reboot it a lot...
As to the images, it turns out that they were taken with the isight camera on a Macbook Pro. Beyond that, I'm not the authority on why things look a certain way. :-)
You could always come into IRC and ask tchung about it.
As to the images, it turns out that they were taken with the isight camera on a Macbook Pro. Beyond that, I'm not the authority on why things look a certain way. :-)
You could always come into IRC and ask tchung about it.
1 year ago
in A Little QA Work on In Pursuit of Mysteries
I have no idea. Perhaps Tony is better with the drill than with the camera. :-)
1 year ago
in Thunderbird and Encrypting E-mail on In Pursuit of Mysteries
I don't think that I'd call PGP/GPG a "toy" but ok. :-)
Can you write up a post telling the average Thunderbird user how to use S/MIME and X.509 certificate management then? If there is a better way to do things, I'm all ears.
The things about using GPG and Enigmail is that it is easy and doesn't need a supporting hierarchy. I have public keys from most of my friends and they have mine. It's rather simple of us to sign or encrypt our mail to each other.
I know nothing about X.509 but I'd be happy to hear more if you have a blog or want to post about it here.
Can you write up a post telling the average Thunderbird user how to use S/MIME and X.509 certificate management then? If there is a better way to do things, I'm all ears.
The things about using GPG and Enigmail is that it is easy and doesn't need a supporting hierarchy. I have public keys from most of my friends and they have mine. It's rather simple of us to sign or encrypt our mail to each other.
I know nothing about X.509 but I'd be happy to hear more if you have a blog or want to post about it here.
2 years ago
in More Virtualization on In Pursuit of Mysteries
Preed, I just received a notification that RC1 went out the door today and is now available.
2 years ago
in More Virtualization on In Pursuit of Mysteries
Thanks. Those are good points. I think that the standardization with Build/IT is one of the stronger arguments to be made. Consistency across all of the work being done on Mozilla projects is going to be important in the long run.
2 years ago
in More Virtualization on In Pursuit of Mysteries
Oh, it is definitely a possibility that we may miss bugs but you can say that about lots of configurations, virtual or otherwise. The bug you gave as an example is unlikely to be found by QA, as a specific bug, because it requires a specific version of Microsoft Visual Studio, if I'm reading it correctly (or at least msvcr80.dll).
Virtualization isn't really the issue in this instance as much as there is no real way to emulate the variety of environments that the millions of Firefox users have. It is always going to be a trade off.
If you have any suggestions on good ways to approach this, I'd love to hear them. None of this is set in stone by any means.
Virtualization isn't really the issue in this instance as much as there is no real way to emulate the variety of environments that the millions of Firefox users have. It is always going to be a trade off.
If you have any suggestions on good ways to approach this, I'd love to hear them. None of this is set in stone by any means.
2 years ago
in Virtualization and QA on In Pursuit of Mysteries
Thanks! I may do that. I've just been happy to find out that they compress down well when zipped. I was afraid of eating up too much disk space storing these.
2 years ago
in Self-Introduction on In Pursuit of Mysteries
Well, as always, you are welcome to your opinion. I disagree with it and I'm pretty sure that the people I'm working with now do as well. I'd be happy to have a constructive conversation about any of this if it could be kept civil and not become some kind of personal thing.
I've been working at MobiTV, a Bay Area startup, for the last year on a web-based TV project. The work was fun but I found that I wanted to work on browsers again as the web has been so much of what I've done since the 1994 and Spry. I've been running open source software on and off for years (I run Ubuntu about half the time on my main system and do a bunch of stuff with your typical LAMP installations for my web projects) and I've also been supporting Firefox for projects that I've been on for a while. It seemed like a good fit with my background in the browser space and I've been happy to be given the opportunity.
I'm not sure where the vitriol directed at me personally comes from. There isn't much point in making things personal when they don't have to be. Seriously, I do understand why people don't like Microsoft and, really, I had my own issues with many many aspects of what the company does and is. I decided to go work for them because it was a good opportunity career-wise when I was in my mid-20's and I was a Seattle native. Questions about what the company's effects on software and goals are part of why I eventually left, moved away, and found other work. I didn't want to support it anymore and I wanted to do something a bit more interesting with my life. Working at a startup proved not to really be it either. I think that Mozilla has a continuing opportunity to continue to make a difference on the web and that's part of why I came here.
I'd much rather chat with people in the community and if people have questions about me or my background, have it occur in a respectful manner rather than just exchange rants with people. That really doesn't serve anyone, does it?
I'm hardly a trojan horse though. I've been gone from Microsoft for more than a year and I'm an individual just like anyone else. You can read my main blog at http://www.arcanology.com if you want to delve into my non-work interests but a lot of it centers around finishing my Master's degree and various Buddhist things.
As to the "disgusting" IE Blog, I'm not sure that I follow. Was it "disgusting" simply because it was attached to IE or was there something about it specifically that you didn't like? I'm fairly happy with the work that I did while I was there and my attempt (and it was an attempt) to get IE to have an open bug database.
That blog was and probably still is very popular and was one of the first continuing windows where people in the larger world could interact with members of the IE team. There are no specific propaganda to it other than showing that the project had a human face and to make it a bit less of a black box. Microsoft has gotten a lot better about that over time, even if it is a huge monster of a corporation.
The way that the IE Blog worked and probably still works is that the person running it would solicit posts from the members of the team for things that they were working on or ongoing issues. With a few exceptions when marketing people came around and wanted to try to make sure there were posts mentioning upcoming conferences or releases, it was driven by the desires of individual members of the IE team without a huge amount of oversight. I and the others were given a lot of rope to potentially hang ourselves with.
Mozilla is way ahead in that sort of space and in openness in communication. That is also part of what drew me to come work here. Where else can you work on a pretty cool set of projects in such an open atmostphere and without it being driven simply by the desire of people to make it rich through an IPO or the like? I've found that everyone here really cares about the project and the web. As someone who has worked on three web browsers now at three different companies (four browsers if you want to count MSN Explorer but I generally don't) and who has been building websites since 1994, I really do find that to be of value.
Al
I've been working at MobiTV, a Bay Area startup, for the last year on a web-based TV project. The work was fun but I found that I wanted to work on browsers again as the web has been so much of what I've done since the 1994 and Spry. I've been running open source software on and off for years (I run Ubuntu about half the time on my main system and do a bunch of stuff with your typical LAMP installations for my web projects) and I've also been supporting Firefox for projects that I've been on for a while. It seemed like a good fit with my background in the browser space and I've been happy to be given the opportunity.
I'm not sure where the vitriol directed at me personally comes from. There isn't much point in making things personal when they don't have to be. Seriously, I do understand why people don't like Microsoft and, really, I had my own issues with many many aspects of what the company does and is. I decided to go work for them because it was a good opportunity career-wise when I was in my mid-20's and I was a Seattle native. Questions about what the company's effects on software and goals are part of why I eventually left, moved away, and found other work. I didn't want to support it anymore and I wanted to do something a bit more interesting with my life. Working at a startup proved not to really be it either. I think that Mozilla has a continuing opportunity to continue to make a difference on the web and that's part of why I came here.
I'd much rather chat with people in the community and if people have questions about me or my background, have it occur in a respectful manner rather than just exchange rants with people. That really doesn't serve anyone, does it?
I'm hardly a trojan horse though. I've been gone from Microsoft for more than a year and I'm an individual just like anyone else. You can read my main blog at http://www.arcanology.com if you want to delve into my non-work interests but a lot of it centers around finishing my Master's degree and various Buddhist things.
As to the "disgusting" IE Blog, I'm not sure that I follow. Was it "disgusting" simply because it was attached to IE or was there something about it specifically that you didn't like? I'm fairly happy with the work that I did while I was there and my attempt (and it was an attempt) to get IE to have an open bug database.
That blog was and probably still is very popular and was one of the first continuing windows where people in the larger world could interact with members of the IE team. There are no specific propaganda to it other than showing that the project had a human face and to make it a bit less of a black box. Microsoft has gotten a lot better about that over time, even if it is a huge monster of a corporation.
The way that the IE Blog worked and probably still works is that the person running it would solicit posts from the members of the team for things that they were working on or ongoing issues. With a few exceptions when marketing people came around and wanted to try to make sure there were posts mentioning upcoming conferences or releases, it was driven by the desires of individual members of the IE team without a huge amount of oversight. I and the others were given a lot of rope to potentially hang ourselves with.
Mozilla is way ahead in that sort of space and in openness in communication. That is also part of what drew me to come work here. Where else can you work on a pretty cool set of projects in such an open atmostphere and without it being driven simply by the desire of people to make it rich through an IPO or the like? I've found that everyone here really cares about the project and the web. As someone who has worked on three web browsers now at three different companies (four browsers if you want to count MSN Explorer but I generally don't) and who has been building websites since 1994, I really do find that to be of value.
Al
