After some especially intense weeks at work (leading up to this week’s Firefox 66 release) we then had to respond to the Pwn2own exploits. It went pretty much like last year when we also released in under a day; everyone worked hard and some people worked long hours to make it happen. I’m so proud to be part of Mozilla and get to work with such smart and dedicated people.
Between the release on Tuesday and the security-driven release on Thurs/Fri I spent a bunch of time going over and summarizing the various problems & uncertainties. It is very interesting to try and judge importance, impact, and “risk” in a software release. On the one hand you are offering a lot of improvements and fixes but you will inevitably also break something else for some other population of users. Is it an overall improvement for most users? Is some particular population (that may not be a majority) impacted by a new problem? All users of a particular site will crash with the new version, but with the old version, everyone editing a document with a Korean keyboard can’t use their backspace key. The different issues don’t cancel each other out, but still have to be compared and weighed. You start out reading bug and crash reports, and end up pondering epistemology and trying to steer a course in decision making through rocky waters — the geography of operating systems, hardware, web sites, and standards where nothing ever stands still. In the end the pattern seems to remain the same: cautiously release, pause and fix the worst new problems as best we can, then go full throttle. It will never be rock solid, like how you’d have to be releasing software for NASA, though, amazingly, that seems to be what people expect.
By the way, my boots came out great! I stripped off the glaze and brown dye with acetone, dyed them with Angelus red and wine-red and a bit of black, mink-oiled them, put on a Resolene sealant coat, then a coat of neutral polish. Now, I can look down at my boots and think YAY! RED! rather than seeing a sort of yucky ochre.
Ended my work day early (after pulling long hours for a while) and headed out to my sister’s house for the afternoon. BART continues to entertain me. I had a nice look at Oakland 19th street station and its beautiful deep varigated blue tiling. At first I thought they were bricks, but they’re actually thick tiles laid over a wire mesh. I may make this station the “Water” artifact puzzle for the game in honor of the lovely tiles. (Originally that was going to be Lake Merritt, but it needs to be a station on the Red line.)
Realized on the way that I hadn’t had lunch and barely had breakfast – I stopped at Mama’s Royal Cafe & had a biscuit sandwich and endless cups of decaf. The waiter spotted me playing Ingress and turned out to be a long time player on my same team (the Resistance or blue team)! I tried to work on my game a bit, but didn’t get far, too fried to really think things through. This is a great cafe — relaxing, gorgeous, cozy, good food.
At Laura’s I helped my nephew make gingerbread for his school bake sale (5 cakes’ worth so we mixed it all up in a huge pot.) I then ate like half a pan of gingerbread (for dinner I guess). Laura and I worked on our wordpress sites – I needed to change the theme of mine and she was just setting up a new one. Also, a couple of years ago I migrated in some way that broke all my images from past posts. That is now fixed! Huzzah! I also ended up minorly hacking this new theme to force it not to do post excerpts, which I fucking hate. Just let me scroll forever and read other people’s long posts! But no… the fashion is so heavily for showing excerpts and making people click a zillion times and load new pages. Bah. I don’t CARE if you’re on your phone – you can scroll! It’s been a long time since I even looked at php but, reassuringly, it all came back to me.
It was my son’s 19th birthday on Friday as well and he had a final and then was heading off to a weekend camping LARP with his dad. I’ll see him next week! But, I have to admit I went and looked at pics of him from babyhood on in a sentimental way. He’s so grown up and wonderful, and I’m so so proud of him.
Omg! He is! He’s so grown up!!