|
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
gerv
Summer of Code[0] 2013 is on! The Mozilla Project is hoping to be involved again, so in the next five weeks we need to produce a list of suitable projects to support our application. Can you think of an 8-week task you might be able to guide
... [More]
a student through? It doesn’t matter where in Mozilla you contribute. We are collecting project ideas for every part of the project – Firefox, Firefox OS, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Bugzilla, L10n, NSS, IT, Documentation and many more.
If you have an idea, put it on the Brainstorming page, which is our idea development scratchpad. Please read the instructions at the top – following them vastly increases your chances of your idea getting added to the formal Ideas page.
[0] For those who are not familiar with it, Summer of Code is where Google pays students to work on free software projects – as long as those projects can provide support and a mentor for the particular task the student is undertaking. This is a great opportunity for us as a project to introduce new people to Mozilla, and for you as an individual to get new people involved in your team :-) In the past, it has been the source of major features of our flagship products. For example, the 3D web page debugging tool Tilt started life as a SoC project. [Less]
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
gerv
The secret to being an effective community leader is to genuinely care about the health and well-being of your project, your community members, and your fellow human beings.
– Leslie Hawthorn, from her FOSDEM 2013 closing keynote
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
JoeStagner
Today Zend announces Zend Server 6 and Zend Studio 10 ! Both are SIGNIFICANT new versions. Check out www.Zend.com to learn about all the new features but there are a couple things I want to point out here. Zend Server 6
... [More]
FREE EDITION. Not only will you immediately see the improvements in the user interface of Zend Server 6 but Zend is making a free version available. Yes I know that Zend previously offered a “Community Edition” but this is different. The Free version is not a different edition but a version of the same product as all the other Zend Server. You’ll see the features in the FREE edition and you can upgrade when you want the extended versions of those features. Example: The free version saves one hour of event monitoring data.
Zend Studio 10 is HUGE for Mobile development and natively understands cloud deployment.
To celebrate we are offering Zend Studio at 50% off !!!! [Less]
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
Nukeador
In the last months a lot of work has been done on the Mozilla.org contribute page to improve its functionality in terms of localization. Localization: Having the content in your language was the first step. (You can ask support for your
... [More]
locales filling a bug under mozilla.org L10n blocking bug 755351)
Local email: The information filled in the form was sent to the contributor engagement team and also to the person in charge of volunteer involvement in each functional area. Obviously they handle requests in English, so for localized inquiries we needed this emails to be sent to local communities, we can now define an email where to get these inquiries, in our case is the Mozilla Hispano mentors.
Auto-responses: Some areas in English had auto-responses defined when a new person sends the form. Having this localized is super import because you can define you own template based on your procedures to on-board volunteers, and you can handle much more people this way giving them important information on how to get involved in a particular area right away.
Embeddable form: The last piece was being able to embed the form on external sites using an iframe, so we can offer a consistent way to get involved in mozilla not matter where people get to us (Thanks Ricky!). We have already implemented it on our contribute page at Mozilla Hispano.
Why all of this is important?
Providing a central way to get people involved with Mozilla in their language is very important, keep in mind that for Spanish we are getting more than 100 inquiries per week. We should be able to track and answer everyone.
How does it work for you?
The process for Mozilla Hispano is the following:
Someone uses the form in Spanish (from mozilla.org/contribute or our contribute page)
We get a notification at our mentor’s email alias.
The person gets an auto-response, with different links (all with information in Spanish) depending on the area of interest. Here it’s important to note that this email tells people to read a few links with information about how to get involved (area description, link to contribute forum…) and to answer when they are ready to start (reply-to header is defined to our mentor’s alias).
It’s impossible to handle more than 100 inquiries per week if you have to manually answer everyone, so we wait till the person reads the initial information and answer the auto-response email to assign him a mentor.
Keep in mind that we tell people in the template they can contribute to mozilla even if they don’t have a lot of time, we observed that most people didn’t answer this first auto-response because they were not sure if they were going to be able to handle it.
If the person answers, a mentor is assigned and he follows our procedure for on boarding new contributors.
Next steps
In the future we will be able to track inquiries directly from a tracking system at mozilla.org, so we won’t have to deal with a lot of emails and shared spreadsheets to track new contributors progress.
Now we are able to embed the form in our language in more places, event pages, reps portal…
We need to get more awareness about how important on-boarding volunteers is for the future of mozilla, currently we have to literally beg most of the times for resources to improve and help community builders or wait till someone has free time to help.
Volunteers are the fuel for moving the project forward, give the some love please! [Less]
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
Mike Kaply
Recently in response to this post about integrating add-ons into Firefox, I was asked why some add-ons don't work properly in the distribution directory. That's a great question and it deserves its own post. The answer is that add-ons in the
... [More]
distribution directory are not loaded like normal add-ons. All that happens is that their chrome.manifest file is loaded and read. They are never integrated into Firefox's add-on manager. That means that if the add-on uses tries to use the AddonManager API, it will fail.
So if you search through the add-on and see that it depends on APIs like getResourceURI and hasResource, it will probably not work in the distribution directory. Keep in mind, though, that just because you see a reference to these APIs doesn't mean that the add-on will break; the CCK uses this API, but has code around it just in case it fails.
If you find an add-on that doesn't work in the distribution directory, the best course of action is to put it in the extensions diretory where the executable is located. Those are loaded like normal add-ons.
As a side note, I'm going to try to use this post to kick off a Q&A series to try to encourage me to blog. If you have ANY questions about customizing Firefox, send them my way. [Less]
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
nore...@blogger.com (Alex Surkov)
In short, what's new in upcoming Firefox 20. You might need to know During a document loading we may create a temporary document (about:blank) for a short time and then create the requested document. The temporary document is a normal
... [More]
document and behaves as any other document (in particular we fire document load complete event on it). But since it doesn't exist for a long time then it shouldn't get a focus (at least there's no percedence). If the temporary document existence is likely a problem for your application then please contact us.
Apparently this behavior was introduced in Firefox 20, at least that's the first time when we caught it (refer to bug for details).
ARIA
ARIA role combobox exposes an accessible value computed from the content of selected item.
<div role="combobox"> <div role="textbox"></div> <div role="listbox"> <div role="option">1</div> <div role="option" aria-selected="true">2</div> <div role="option">3</div> </div></div> In this example the accessible value of combobox equals "2". I'm not sure whether this feature has any good effect on ARIA evolution in the web since underlying textbox and listbox are supposed to handle all user input. It was done rather for consistence between HTML and ARIA widgets (see bug).
HTML
We started to build context dependent trees in more cases (refer to bug for details). In particular we don't create list item accessibles for HTML li, dl and etc if they are children of presentational list. For example:
<ul role="presentation">
<li>item</li>
</ul>
We don't create an accessible for HTML li element in this case.
Also we reject to create HTML table cells if they don't have a table row as a parent. This behavior caused a certain problem. I hope we will be able to backport the fix into Firefox 20.
SVG
We introduced basic SVG accessibility. SVG graphic elements like circle or rect are mapped to accessibility API as graphic role accessibles (see bug). Accessible name and description for these elements are computed from child SVG desc and title elements (see bug for more info).
XUL
We stopped to create accessibles for XUL deck element itself and its child elements if they don't belong to the selected panel. Basically we rolled back to the behavior we had prior Firefox 16. We did that because we were reported that the behavior can be a problem for existing code. In particular, it didn't make a good job for AddBlock+ and JAWS users (see bug).
ISimpleDOMNode
As I wrote before ISimpleDOMNode was implemented as tear off. Let us know if this hits you.
Bug fixes
Windowless/inaccessible plugins don't expose NULL child in MSAA tree anymore (see bug).
Also we fixed an intermittent bug that made us to ignore ARIA role on the body of the document (see bug).
We fixed the case when caret offset was misreported. [Less]
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
robcee
Yup. That’s right. Anton’s a peer now. Send him your review requests!
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
John
#checkins-per-month: We had 6,247 checkins in January 2013. This exceeds our previous all-time record of 5,893 in October2012. As usual, we handled this load with >95% of all builds consistently being started within 15mins. Sadly, our test
... [More]
pools continue to have a hard time, both with the increased rate of checkins, and the ever-increasing number of test suites being run per checkin. Some test jobs are now runnable on AWS, and are now running there. Some *should* run on AWS, but fail for some reason – work continues. And some tests *need* hardware, so we’re continuing work to buy and power up more test machines to build out capacity there; please continue to bear with us. Oh, and of course, if you know of any test suites that no longer need to be run per-checkin, please let us know so we can immediately reduce the load a little. Every little helps put scarce test CPU to better use.
#checkins-per-day: During January, 18-of-31 days had over 200 checkins-per-day, and 2-of-31 days had over 300 checkins-per-day (06jan had 307 checkins; 10jan had 302 checkins). The pattern is to be expected as both of these days were during our first full week back after holidays – typically our busiest week of the year…and this year coincided with a B2G workweek!
#checkins-per-hour: Checkins are still mostly mid-day PT/afternoon ET, but the load has increased across the day. For 33% of every day (8 of every 24 hours), we sustained over 10 checkins per hour. Heaviest load times this month were 1-2pm PT (13 checkins-per-hour) and 2-3pm PT (13.36 checkins-per-hour – which matched our previous record of 13.36checkins-per-hour set in November2012!).
mozilla-inbound, mozilla-central, fx-team:
Ratios of checkins across these branches remain fairly consistent. mozilla-inbound continues to be heavily used as an integration branch, with 29% of all checkins, consistently far more then the other integration branches combined (fx-team has 1% of checkins, mozilla-central has 2.3% of checkins). As usual, very few people land directly on mozilla-central these days.
mozilla-aurora, mozilla-beta, mozilla-b2g18:
3.1% of our total monthly checkins landed into mozilla-aurora. This is back down to normal aurora levels. This is expected since b2g changes are no longer being landed into aurora and beta.
1.6% of our total monthly checkins landed into mozilla-beta. This is back down to normal beta levels (maybe even slightly lower). This is expected since b2g changes are no longer being landed into aurora and beta.
4.6% of our total monthly checkins landed into mozilla-b2g18. These are all fixes *only* for the B2G releases, so important enough to be worth calling out here, like the aurora and beta branches.
misc other details:
Pushes per day
You can clearly see weekends through the month… and which week was the “first-week-after-holidays-combined-with-B2G-workweek”.
Pushes by hour of day
Mid-morning PT is consistently the biggest spike of checkins, although this month the checkin load stayed high throughout the entire PT working day. [Less]
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
Chris
Hello and welcome. You might have come here from my Twitter profile or because of a tweet I sent you. Here I will quickly say and retain for re-use what my Twitter usage is about and how both you and I can enjoy what I do here. You could call it my
... [More]
Twitter manifesto, but that sounds too hoity-toity. So here goes:
What I do on Twitter
1) I use Twitter as a channel out. I find something, I send a link/picture to share.
2) This is me, so it is unfiltered. About 70% is technical web stuff (great resources, talks, videos, conference coverage), 25% is fluffy or awesome things on the web (hedgehogs, kittens, puppies…) and 5% is me doing stuff (trying restaurants, telling people I am meeting IRL where I am, wondering about things). I use naughty words, I find it hypocritical to add a * where an i or a u should be. I try to use them less though, but there might be things that make you blush.
3) I tweet a lot – I know quite a few people who keep unfollowing and following me because of that reason.
4) If you do not want the noise and just the meat, there is a way – I linked my Twitter to pinboard, so all the links I send out are here.
5) I monitor Twitter for great things and see how you come across on it, too. This resulted in the past in people I liked becoming my colleagues or them starting to write for blogs I am editor at. It also resulted in people speaking at events. I like introducing people to each other. If you come across too aggressive, demanding or simply out of line, I will also take note of that and answer accordingly when people ask me about you.
What I don’t do on Twitter
1) Advertise. I work for Mozilla, but I am not the marketing channel for Mozilla, there are other places for that. When I tweet about Mozilla stuff then it is because I think it is great, same way I tweet about Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Twitter, Facebook and many many more.
2) Fix your problems. If you have an issue with a Mozilla product, the only – and let me repeat this – the only, best and fastest way to get something fixed is to file a bug in bugzilla about it. I don’t have a magic power over our engineers to fix things faster or force them to do things. In Mozilla we all are equal, doesn’t matter if you work in the company or you are from the outside. If your problem is a real, fixable issue and you are explaining the issue and what needs fixing, things happen. If you shout “this sucks, no wonder your competition is winning” then it is no wonder when busy engineers don’t really listen to you. You want your problem fixed, talk to the fixer. I will not fight your fights for you as I don’t feel your pain and can only guess the details.
3) Plan and automate my tweets. This is all raw, nothing here is automated and yes it is only me. So when I am not in, I will not answer. Mostly this means I am on a plane.
4) Retweet things you beg me to retweet. I have quite some reach and I will retweet things I like and consider useful. If you tell me about something I might retweet it, I might not. This could mean I don’t like it but in many cases it just means I am too busy to do so. Nudge me again reminding me why something is cool. Begging or threatening to call me stuck-up and not helping struggling new people on the web will not get you anything though. If you look at what I do, you know that I am not the kind of guy to not support a great new thing or cause.
5) Spread personal things. I have a real life and I will never share all the boring or sordid details about it. Both you and me are busy.
6) Follow much and favourite. Both of these things are random in my case. My faves do not mean much – I found people favourite to read later. I never do that. I keep the tab open, read and then tweet about it. I have a full inbox, no need to also have a full faves list. Following is also not a sign of how much I like you or that I don’t appreciate you. I use Twitter mostly as a channel out. My information I get from RSS - I am oldschool like that.
Shit that can happen
1) If you tell me once about something, I might miss it – this is a fast paced medium with a terrible search functionality. So email me about important things, too.
2) I can be out of line – if you feel annoyed about something, please tell me. I am happy to follow you so you can DM me – I am always happy to improve. [Less]
|
|
Posted
3 months
ago
by
pas...@finette.com (Pascal Finette)
Let me set the stage first: On day 86 of a 3-month trek to and from the South Pole, adventurer Aleksander Gamme discovered something he'd stashed under the ice at the start of his trip. He wasn't expecting such a rush of happiness in that
... [More]
cold, hungry instant, but he hit the bliss jackpot.
It's a moment of pure bliss. Try to watch this without a massive grin on your face:
These are the moments worth chasing. [Less]
|
Copyright
©
2013
Black Duck Software, Inc.
and its contributors, Some Rights Reserved. Unless otherwise marked, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
. Ohloh
®
and the Ohloh logo are trademarks of
Black Duck Software, Inc.
in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.