Bugs and sheriffs in London

Posted on by Liz

Travelling Bugmaster update! I am in London with a bunch of the automation tools team for a work week. Ed, jeads, Chris, Ryan, dave, and mauro have been neck deep in making decisions about the structure of a new version of TBPL. By eavesdropping in their conference room I have learned a bit about how Ed and RyanVM and others watch the tree (sheriffing). Also, dkl and gerv and I met up to talk about bugzilla.mozilla.org and I got to bounce some ideas off them about possible ways to tweak the incoming bug triage workflow.

The London office is right between Trafalgar Square, Chinatown, and Covent Garden. It’s very accessible. If you come to Mozilla London offices and are a wheelchair user, you should know that the Tube stations near the office are not accessible. Give up and take the Heathrow Express to Paddington and then a taxi.

Lanterns sky

The BMO and IT teams (glob, dkl, and fox2mike, mostly) are planning to upgrade bugzilla.mozilla.org on March 8th. You can give it a test drive here: bugzilla-dev.allizom.org. This brings Mozilla’s implementation in line with the upstream version of Bugzilla 4.2. In theory, the new server hardware and architecture will also make BMO much faster.

I’m mostly excited about the user and product dashboards in this release. They look extremely cool — great for people who are doing bugmaster and triaging work. Someone who wants to drop in to triage Firefox bugs, or to get a mental image of what’s happening with bugs of interest to them, will be able to do so easily, without having set up a sort of pachinko palace labyrinth of bugmail and filters.

Bugzilla user dashboard 500

So if you would like a sneak preview of the user and product dashboards, take a look on bugzilla-dev.allizom.org and poke around! You can talk to us on #bmo or #bugmasters on irc.mozilla.org if you have feedback. And do please help us by filing bugs!

Besides the upgrade and move, and the archictecture of bzAPI current and possible future — gerv, dkl and I discussed the re-framing of early bug triage as “Bugmaster” or bug management work. We kicked around some ideas and it was very helpful to me to get their advice.

I am adding links to current wiki docs into the show_components.cgi descriptions and dkl has promised to expose those descriptions in show_bug.cgi views of individual bugs. My thought is that within the bug itself, the reporter and triagers, or an aspiring new developer, will have multiple ways to dive deeper into the bug.

We talked about adding common reply templates, which I am collecting in the Bugmaster Guide but which would work well, I think, built into Bugzilla. It turns out that dkl already has an extension started, canned comments, to do exactly this. Very intriguing!

Another thing I’d like to see is something that invites extra information when a bug is filed. This can be context sensitive, so that, if you file a bug in Firefox for Android in a particular component, there can be a link to relevant support forums, wiki pages, the irc channel, and the module owner information. This landing screen could also invite the bug reporter to add bits of information they have not included. If they haven’t attached a screenshot or included a url there could be an attempt to elicit them, or a few “next steps to help make this bug more reproducible” suggestions.

I am still thinking about the READY status flag and other ways to mark “early triaging is happening, or should be happening” vs. “in the hands of dev team”. That is a fuzzy boundary and different conditions would lead to it for different products/components. In this discussion we looked at Gerv’s and Jesse Ruderman‘s proposals for BMO workflow:
* Workflow Proposal 1 which simplifies the status chain.
* Workflow Proposal 2 which more radically changes the flow and statuses to a “next action” framing.

I can see benefits and drawbacks to both models.

It would be helpful from a triaging point of view to be able to declare, in an obvious-to-all way, that a bug is as triaged as we can get it for the moment and it either is ready for a developer to look at or is in some sort of Bug Limbo waiting for later re-assessment. We can do that with some assortment of existing tags and keywords but it may lack clarity and ease of use.

We brought up the idea that if I am doing some triage on a bug but don’t feel it is “ready” yet — for example perhaps I have identified its component, but not reproduced it, or vice versa — I can list myself as the QA contact. What would that indicate, though? Would it keep away other triagers? That is not what I’d want, of course. We could end up with some sort of “needstriage” checkbox, or make a tagging taxonomy that is well documented and evangelize it.

On Sunday I spent some time wandering around in a rented mobility scooter. It is possible now in London to hire a scooter for 70 pounds a week. Very much worth it not to have to push myself over thousands of cobblestones. I have only run over one person’s foot so far in the swarms of tourists, theater-goers, schoolchildren going to museums, and Londoners purposefully striding around in overcoats staring at their mobile phones. Though the scooter delivered is bigger than most cars in this country. It is like an enormous Mecha Gundam Wing suit on wheels so my adventures in the London streets are reminiscent of the Pacific Rim movie trailer.

Lion unicorn palace

In London, when confronted with a giant wheeled exoskeleton, people generally give a tiny gasp and start (theatrically), mutter apologies, and make a show of getting out of the way while looking bewildered. They are relatively good at not acting shocked that I exist. That’s kind of pleasant really. Some buildings and restaurants are somewhat accessible. I get along here as long as I don’t think too hard about how I can’t use the Tube at all and I can afford the glorious taxis.

In Vienna, I used my manual chair. Almost nowhere is accessible even when it is declared to be. People there would loudly gasp, almost a little shriek, and leap forward to grab me, which reminded me of how people act in Beijing when they see an independent person using a wheelchair. They scream, and they leap, like kzinti. More details on hilarious wheelie adventures in the Hofburg, coming soon. Travel is lovely but I’ll be glad to be back in San Francisco at the end of the week.

To Vindobona! and beyond

Posted on by Liz

I am leaving tomorrow for Vienna where I will be speaking at the OSCE Internet 2013 conference. They had asked me to write a chapter for their 2013 book on Internet freedom — on the Amina hoax, identity on the Internet, and journalism. For the conference, I’ll be on the Social News panel along with Christian Möller, Anna Kachkaeva, Leonard Novy, and Filip Wallberg. I’m looking forward to meeting people at the conference! I’ve never been to Vienna. In preparation I read some histories on the net and a very boring book called Vienna: A Cultural History, and also I raced through Man Without Qualities and Young Torless to give me some atmosphere.

The only interesting facts I got from the Cultural History were that Marcus Aurelius probably died in Vindobona and that Austria’s first writer was Ava of Melk. I have found better book recommendations now! The conference will take up most of my time but it would be nice to wander around the Inner Stadt and find the Museum of the Romans on Marc-Aurelstrasse. It was completely engrossing to study maps of the city and try to orient myself before getting there. I am trying to practice useful phrases like “Wo ist die Fahrstühl?” and “Eine Melange, bitte, danke schon”. My other ambitions for Vienna are to go to Metalab (the hackerspace) and the Frauen Cafe (the feminist cafe and I think bookstore). Metalab is not very accessible sounding but they have written me lovely email basically promising to haul me up there.

I will keep the glories of the Austrian Year firmly in mind as my hands freeze in my manual wheelchair rims and I cough my lunghs out with asthma from the cigarette smoke that will surely be everywhere. At least this way (languishing in Vienna) I’ll be in solidarity with Marcus Aurelius.

vindobona_map.jpg

Next Friday I will be heading to London and working there for a week with other people on the Automated Tools team and dkl who does a lot of work on Bugzilla. Probably will meet up with my friend Bryony, Danny’s niece Ro, cdent who I used to work with at Socialtext, and other friends. I would like to have tea at the National Portrait Gallery, go to Forbidden Planet and some interesting sounding political bookstores along with Foyles which seems to have eaten the feminist Silver Moon bookstore. Then will go to the Cafe in the Crypt at St. Martin’s in the Field which I think sounds hilarious and amazing. It sounds wheelchair accessible and plus it is described thusly:

Once inside the Crypt there is a warm welcome awaiting you with beautiful 18th century architecture brick-vaulted ceilings, historic tombstones beneath your feet and delicious home-cooked food to feast your eyes and stomach on.

That sentence is so wrong; so perfectly wrong. The warmth, the brick, the tombstones, and the mention of several body parts in conjunction with the word “feast” make it sound like a sort of Zombie Pizzeria. All this and Bach fugues too for 26 quid. It really can’t fail.

I am vowing to slink off at lunchtimes to take virtuous naps while my coworkers from Mozilla go to fascinating pubs, but am not sure that will ever really happen. In London it will be super tempting to go lots of places because I’m renting a mobility scooter and it won’t be hurting my hands and shoulders to push my chair around town.

This is going to be fun though I’m worried about being in pain especially on the plane trip, but then also in pain and alone much of the time, which can be a little hard to take. So I really need to slow that mustang down and be patient, rather than trying to do all the things I would like to do. Luckily I really enjoy reading and learning about places so that it is like I get to do that much more, just by reading later about where I’ve been.

This weekend we went to Tom’s house for a Ping Pong Deathmatch and I sat watching the kids and other lively people playing. The garage with the ping pong table was cold so I was huddled in my huge woollen scarf/shawl. At one point I began imagining how things would go if we were in a Three Stooges skit. I could see the old fashioned font with a title like “Ping Pong Gone Wrong” or “Kings of the Ping”. Larry, Curly, and Moe would be in the garage to do some menial job and in the garage there would be a new invention of an automatic ping-pong ball launcher. Milo and I started describing all the things that could happen as the garage came apart catastrophically, with a really good bit where Larry goes head first into the washing machine which spins his legs around and around like a drill. Someone would be folded into the ping pong table and the whole skit might end with the garage door opening and the table (with all 3 on it, plus the automatic launcher) racing uncontrollably down a hill. Again I felt lucky that I can enjoy things without leaping around. I am like Des Esseintes except (usually) not filled with loathing. Also, how lucky that my son loves to go on these imaginary voyages too!

Then we played an excellent and clever resource management/politics board game called Chicken Caesar, which we didn’t fully get into the swing of because we needed to get home, but I might like to buy it and play it for real!

Other than that the kids played Minecraft *all weekend*. They are completely obsessed.

The bottom of my ramblin' shoes

Posted on by Liz

I had ambitions today to be intellectually productive but am still convalescing from this annoying cold. Since I don’t have a fever and am getting better, I went back on immunosuppressants. This weekend I had a fantastic time with friends including Els from Vancouver who is on a book tour for Purim Superhero and who has regaled us with her children’s librarian ukelele songs!

Nate loves aliens and he really wants to wear an alien costume for Purim, but his friends are all dressing as superheroes and he wants to fit in. What will he do? With the help of his two dads he makes a surprising decision.

Els brought me several books: Greengage Summer, The Mystery of the Whistling Caves, Tink, (all of which I read last night while waking up to cough ) and The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s which she explained as a fabulous feminist sf classic and which I am saving as best-for-last. Greengage Summer was fantastic… Anyway it is lovely to have her here!!! We know each other from early blogging days, back to 2002 or maybe before.

Yatima picked me and Moomin up yesterday to give us a ride, which meant we could go to Hazelbroom’s son’s 10th birthday party. Fabulous. It was odd and beautiful after a week alone and much of it with laryngitis not able to talk at all (writing notes for bus drivers and pharmacists) to have so many people come over or take me out.

I felt very grateful this weekend as I thought about things I can and cannot do. These days I can pick up a teapot full of tea with one hand and pour the tea. It still hurts, but I’m able to do it. Voltaren gel gets me through most days.

Things that especially hurt my hands, that I still do anyway:
* washing dishes
* getting wet laundry out of the washer
* shaking hands with people
* bumping my fingers into anything
* doorknobs
* holding hands
* holding a book
* typing (BOO.)

I mean to celebrate feeling better or adapting rather than complain. It is all still there but seems less forbidding than everything was last year.

Last year at this time I could barely shuffle in inch-long steps, was terrified of getting in the shower, and was just beginning the most intensive period of strapping and unstrapping my ankles endlessly from night-boots to walking boots. I think it was October before I was really walking around the house without the wedges and boots – barefoot! And in December I finally started to wear shoes outside of the house. The feeling of coming out of REI with these furry boots (3 sizes too big, so they don’t rub into the backs of my ankles) was indescribable. It was good to have real shoes. It still gets me down to be in pain every day and that I can’t go out and participate in things around town that I’d like to go to. In the mornings it is just crushing pain and sometimes for hours before i wake up. Moving very slowly and stretching, drinking coffee, Voltarening my knees, ankles, and hands, doing very slow light housework or tidying up as a warmup, till I unstiffen. My mid-back is increasingly hard to unstiffen so I can be really straight backed but I can usually get it within an hour or so. This sounds like complaining (and half-way is), but I mean it as part of a package of gratitude that my ankles are good enough that I can walk around the house and move enough to limber up!

This week I also read Melina Marchetta’s fantasy trilogy The Lumatere Chronicles, and am in the middle of another Hugh Howey book I somehow missed on the first go-round — Halfway Home. It’s completely great. Though — I do wonder that the vat-grown blastocyst colonist boys on the ship are specially taught to police each others’ gender roles and sexuality. Howey’s exploration of that is pretty interesting.

I also started (for the 2nd time) to read Daina Chaviano’s Fábulas de una abuela extraterrestre. I read literary prose very slowly in Spanish but I get along decently. Am inspired in this by how my dad re-reads Don Quixote over and over and has now tackled Walter Moers City of Dreaming Books in German!

Moomin and I had an unexpectedly intense conversation as we contemplated what books we would recommend to Els while she came to visit. We both were commenting on how amazing it is that you can be in a book and it is like you are in it, in another universe entirely and then you don’t want to finish the book, and after, are homesick for the book, actually feeling pangs of loss. And that it is miraculous that other people have all this stuff going on in their heads even as we have very boring conversations about it being a nice day or what we had for dinner, and that some people manage to whoosh a whole universe of a story *out* of their heads into a book which then magically comes into our head. We don’t even need magic or telepathy because books already do this. It’s amazing. We both embarrassingly teared up a little.

Listened to Bach cello concertos and Hank Williams a lot as they are soothing when I’m sick. Jimmie Rodgers is also good but mostly it was Bach on repeat. When I was a teenager I used to rig up my record player to play Switched-On Bach on repeat all night — still the most comforting thing I call to mind when at the dentist or having an MRI or something tedious like that.

It is comforting that everyone else in this town is sick too not because of weird disabled person schadenfreude but just so that my own dropping off the face of the earth from a head cold does not make me look completely wimpy. All I ask is not to lose a month out of my life to yet another round of bronchitis. In my head everyone is judging me for not being tougher. They probably aren’t. Pain has worn me down a lot. I wish it hadn’t. I hope I get more mojo back with these new meds. While it is nice to hope for that I don’t count on it and realize (this is so cheerful!!!) that we are all getting older anyway so it’s not reasonable to expect everything to be “fixed” and I have to think fondly on my past selves, what I was capable of and not at different times.

I feel super appreciative of my friends and everyone awesome in my life.

Walking through early bug triage

Posted on by Liz

Here is a good example of a bug that went through several stages of triaging:
Scrolling a page up leaves residue in GTK slider. I would like to walk through what happens in triaging this bug. Blow by blow report!

The bug reporter, Przemek, was new to Bugzilla, so their report was automatically put into the UNCONFIRMED status. The bug summary (the title) was originally “artifacts on scrollbar in seamonkey 2.15” and it was put into the product Seamonkey and component General. (Here is a list of Seamonkey components, if you’re curious.) Przemek attached a screenshot of the problem. At the bottom right corner of the screenshot you can see the scrollbar has some weird stripes on it.

Scrollbar bug screenshot

Matti suggested a possible duplicate bug. That shows us a related problem and which product and component it might belong to. It also can reveal some people who work on this type of issue.

Another commenter, Slim, relatively new to Bugzilla, chimes in to say they have exactly the same issue, in Linux and that it may be a GTK problem. They include the information from about:buildconfig .

A fourth person, Philip, asks if someone who sees the problem (either the reporter or Slim) can try toggling a preference. Slim tries it but it doesn’t fix the issue. He speculates it is related to Bug 297508. Philip uses the NEEDINFO flag to ask Przemek a question (this emails Przemek with particular Bugzilla mail headers). Przemek replies, which
automatically clears the needinfo flag. Philip then decides to move the bug from the product Seamonkey to “Core”. component General to Widget: Gtk. That shows up as General -> Widget:Gtk in the comments.

Cotton Harlequin Bugs

One week later, Karl shows up in Comment 10. If we look at the list of module owners and peers for Mozilla, we can see that he is the owner for Core::Widget:GTK. I figure he was probably was looking at bugs in that area, or reading his bugmail backlog. There are 328 bugs UNCONFIRMED or NEW for Core::Widget:GTK, which you can see if you do an Advanced Search. Anyway, Karl reproduces the bug and moves its status from UNCONFIRMED to NEW. He added the keyword, “regressionwindow-wanted”. The next day he comes back and adds some info about the regression window and removes the “regressionwindow-wanted” keyword. narrows that window even further. He then moves the bug to
Core:: Layout and adds the keyword “regression”. It is probably out of his hands now. But whose it it in?

There are over 2300 open bugs in Core::Layout, 1809 of them new and not assigned to any particular person. If I look to see how many of them have the keyword “regression” there are only 140, most of them assigned to “nobody”. So if I wanted to fix something in Core, that might be a good place to look for a bug that needs attention.

All the commenters described here were doing bug triage or what I am now calling bugmastering. Five people, two weeks. I think all their efforts and comments were useful in moving the bug along and adding new information to it. It is also instructive (and for me, reassuring) that not everything was “right”, right away. Actually, I think it’s beautiful to see how well everyone communicates, much of the time in Bugzilla.

At this point, if Bugzilla had the READY status implemented, I would call it READY. Not just to signal to developers that it is ready to be worked on, but to signal to other triagers that it may be done and they don’t need to keep looking at it. That is part of why having a clear demarcation point will be useful. Even though there is more than could be done, this is probably enough for someone knowledgeable to take it and work on it. I would consider its “early triage” life to be over and for it to be in the hands of engineering, QA, and rel-eng, who have their own models for triaging internally for their stages of handling the bug.

Now, that doesn’t mean that as your Mozilla Bugmaster, I can blithely ignore all bugs once they are done with early triage. Yet since this is a minor layout bug that does not seem to affect function I think I can let it go and hope that someday it is fixed.

It is possible that we could make some cruft-killer searches, reports, or other views that could pick up this sort of bug 6 months from its first reporting, and do anohter check to see if it still exists. If it’s been cleared up in the meantime, make a comment mark it RESOLVED WORKSFORME. Right now I’m sure some people have figured out good systems to do this, but I think most people stay focused on what’s incoming or what is especially brought to their attention. Re-assessing old bugs, or bugs within a particular time window (6 months to a year old, but not 10 years old) may be a good way for beginning bugmasters to start chipping away at some of the cruft in the system.

Bug history and conversations

Posted on by Liz

David Baron wrote an interesting post recently, Moving bug history out of the primary display of a bug report. I have noticed this problem in Bugzilla, that even if a bug is “ready to be fixed” or has patches submitted it is necessary to read through 5, 10, or 50 comments to understand what is supposed to happen next (if anything). dbaron proposes that the main page of a bug report should show its current state. What is true about it? And what is to be done next? This would be obviously awesome for some bugs, but not for others for which there isn’t a clear state of truth. My first instinct is to question dbaron’s idea, as there might be bugs for which the conversation is the most important aspect.

For example Bug 130835 – Make Bugzilla’s index.cgi (home page) useful for logged-in users has over 150 comments, stretching back 10 years. Here the problem may actually be that the bug (or enhancement request) was not well defined in scope, so had no clear end. It might be worth untangling the useful ends of these 150 comments to close this bug, and open several new and more specific ones for which “current state” *could* be summarized as dbaron suggests.

But what about a bug like Bug 83192184 – Make the plugin click-to-play UI look less like ‘plugin broken/crashed’ UI , where there is a useful active conversation? In that case trying to synthesize the conversation at every step of the way, each time someone comments, is probably not useful.

Day 32: Cats

So in some cases there is clear “current state” or content, as there is on a Wikipedia page, but in some, the conversation is the content. I don’t want to have (or read) conversations in a Bugzilla equivalent of Wikipedia talk pages and am not sure that would be an improvement on the current state of Bugzilla comments. For bugs with a long history, especially ones which have mutated significantly since their beginning, the “current state” field might be an easy way to untangle the mess.

Book roundup: Bitterblue, Simoqin, Three Felonies a Day

Posted on by Liz

Quick notes on some books I’ve read recently. I have laryngitis (still!!!) and it seems to be worsening rather than getting better. So I will write rather than talk.

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore, which I picked up from a tip in SF writer Claire Light’s blog. Third in an excellent fantasy trilogy (Graceling, Fire), this is the heaviest and most awesome of the lot. Bitterblue dove into murky waters as its young queen realizes all the ways she (and the kingdom as a whole) are being gaslighted as they try to heal from the former and very abusive, tyrannical king. She becomes obsessed with history, stories, and truth.

I am thinking of this book in conjunction with others that address how we as a society (and individually) face history. How much of the past do we want or need to know? What is worth teaching? What culture are we constructing? I think of epics like Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and Dune in opposition to Bitterblue and many other feminist sf/f works. In Wolfe and Herbert, individual enlightenment is attainable by Knowing Everything, by becoming/eating/consuming the past. Once you have it, you become ruler and god. There can be only one. I saw Lois McMaster Bujold take a fairly complicated stance on this in Hallowed Hunt and there are tons of other examples of the rejection of “know everything, truth absolute, be god” model of culture. The Marq’ssan Trilogy addresses this beautifully of course. Bitterblue fits right into that feminist sf political picture for me. I also found it resonated well with my ethical and political framework of acknowledging atrocities and calling out abuses of power in personal life.

Cashore really packed a punch and I admired how her earlier works in the trilogy hinted at this, reaching for it while coming off as much more light or escapist fantasy reading. She matured as a writer and thinker maybe but also lured readers in. A big old “Trigger Warning” on this book if you are an abuse survivor. I would also say that a pre-teen or younger teenager might be okay with the first book, maybe less so with the 2nd, and boy howdy the 3rd may not be for the younger ones. Depending of course.

I will be reading all of Cashore’s books forever more!

The Gameworld Trilogy – The Simoqin Prophecies, The Manticore’s Secret, The Unwaba Revelations by Samit Basu. These are just great. I am not sure I can do them justice but they’re a fantasy trilogy set in a world that is India-centric in its mythological background, its geographical perspective, and in its rambly structure that explores hero-tales and philosophy, life and death, free will and religion.

As a huge fan of the Mahabharata and Ramayana I especially loved this series and all its hilarious jokes and references. But I don’t think you need background knowledge culturally or from reading to love these books. In any case you will likely at least get the Tolkien and Harry Potter jokes. I love the city of Kol and its vroomsticks, its spellcaster university, the fabulous bar, the Chief Civilian, Spikes, the unwaba, and the underground tunnels… The Dark Lord, the very silly magic movie industry, and the angsty, loose-woven romantic drama of the huge cast of primary characters. While I do not really like Terry Pratchett (I *know*… just move along … there is no convincing me… I am allergic… I am not judging you) I think that people who do like Pratchett would probably adore The Gameworld books.

I am going to mark down all of Basu’s books for future reading – there is a new one out called Turbulence that I have my eye on. WTF that I have never read these before! And that the U.S. Amazon.com entries don’t have any reviews yet. When U.S. fantasy readers get wise to Basu he will be a huge hit.

Basu reminds me a bit of Minister Faust, the depth of exploring tropes with charming wit & detail – basically this is for fantasy what From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain is for superhero comics. Okay, not exactly, but the playful humor was similar.

samit-basu-simoqin

I read Harvesting Color: How to Find Plants and Make Natural Dyes by Rebecca Burgess, on the recommendation of my friend Rose White who is a textile and yarn and spinning expert. We were talking about Burgess’s Fibershed project and I expressed the desire to learn to spin. Burgess’s book reminds me of one of my favorite nature-lover books, Margit Roos-Collins The Flavors of Home. I want to run out and harvest wild plants and make giant pots of steaming dye and feel like an earth mama eco- mad scientist. I would bond with the land! Yay! This will not happen, because I don’t really have the time or energy, and my hands hurt too much to screw around with giant pots and wet things. But it was nice to think about and maybe I will recognize some new weeds or pick a pocketful of toyon berries and half-assed-ly try to dye something someday.

I also plowed through Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey silverglate. This was an impulse buy based on some random internet person’s recommendation (Like much of my reading) in a discussion of Aaron’s federal prosecution. The title sounded promising. But I don’t recommend this book at all unless you feel that hedge fund managers and the heads of Enron are inherently very innocent people who suffer unfair persecution. Things started out kind of okay and then I realized I was reading a book by a crazed-ass libertarian. Then I had the equivalent of political anaphylactic shock somewhere in the middle of the Enron chapter. There were interesting bits and I especially liked the stories of Governor White’s case and how federal prosecutors try to “ladder up”.

There was a particular sentence that crystallized the whole book’s loathsomeness for me. While I like to think that even filthy rich criminals deserve a fair trial Silverglate went a million miles over the line in the bit where he was bemoaning how some dude’s bazillion dollars of assets got seized because someone made a federal case of whatever it was he allegedly did. And so…. and so…. that was super bad because… “he couldn’t get a fair trial”. Sums up right wing libertarians doesn’t it? A fair trial is one that you can use all of your gajillionty dollars to buy. without all those millions a fair trial is just impossssssible. (But we don’t bother to mention all the people who dno’t have the millions in the first place; it’s just normal I guess that we expect them not to get a fair trial? Or maybe “fair” means something different to Silverglate.)

I would like to read a book that lives up to the “Three Felonies a Day” title, or the premise that we are all committing crimes that we could be federally prosecuted for, daily. This is not that book. It was very annoying.

Reality Sandwiches by Allen Ginsberg. Every so often I take out the books that are on the tiny shelf in the bathroom and put in a new batch of very small books that fit there and seem suitable for reading on the can or while in the bath. I remembered that I don’t love the poems in this book except for most of The Green Automobile.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. Never read it before. I have not read much Scalzi other than his blog when he says something that jibes with my politics that I get linked to a bunch by my friends. I was initially annoyed that he could write about things that the rest of us regularly write about and be hailed as a motherfucking genius for summing up oppression like racism or sexism or whatever in the context of science fiction books or gaming in a way that is palatable to the vaguely liberal nerdy white dude masses. Then he did it again. Then so many times that I began to appreciate and like him as an excellent ally. Then I read some book of his that starred a teenage girl in a space colony and I gave him kudos for writing a teenage girl character that didn’t make me want to slap him. I know, my bar is set low. Anyway, Old Man’s War. It was okay space opera and I got what it was doing and referencing but it didn’t light me up in flames. I wanted to know what happened. I will probably read more of his books especially if someone recs me a good one. Thumbs up Scalzi!

The First Shift and The Second Shift by Hugh Howey. Holy shit! Now these books floated my boat much more. Awesome density and moving things along. Sabroso! I loved Wool very much and have been telling everyone to read it! In fact I also went heads down and read every other thing by Howey I could find. I recommend them all. This short blog post has gotten long so maybe I will talk about Howey, Wool, the Silo books, zombies and 9/11, Hurricane and coming of age books, and so on, later…

Read Wool! And the Silo books too!

Must also go into Jan Morris’ Hav books, Mieville, Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side (amazing! read it if you like Au Rebors and things Gothick) Sherwood Smith “A Posse of Princesses” and various other poetry books.

My job, told with Up-Goer Five text editor

Posted on by Liz

Today I had fun reading xkcd’s Up Goer Five cartoon and then playing with the Up Goer Five text editor.

peoplebox.png

I tried describing my new job:

Many people at my job work together to make free things that go on computers to make it so everyone can see the words and pictures on other computers in the world. Everyone can see the words that make these free things. The biggest thing we make is named after an an animal and fire. Fire Animal Computer thing can go on a a computer, or a phone. It can even start a phone and make it go. That is new!

There are other computer things too, like Rain Noise Flying Animal and Water Tree Animal. They have new parts all the time. When the Fire Animal Computer Thing or the other computer things have a problem, people tell us about the problem. That problem goes in a very big computer box place together with all the other problems. That very big computer box place is named Big Pretend Long Ago Problem Animal.

My new job is to watch all the almost hundred hundred hundred problems in Big Pretend Long Ago Problem Animal. I will remind everyone in the world to work together on a big big team to fix the problems. I have to know many things to help them do it. On this team we will all tell the people to talk to each other. I look at the words and put other words on the computer to tell about the problems. I work with many other people that help put more words on the problems to help fix them.

Some day I will know many more things and many more people who fix the problems, especially with Fire Animal Computer Thing. I will help make ways to make the work easier. There will be more computer things that work almost by themselves to do the work. Then, all the Big Pretend Problem Animal work people like me will tell the computer thing making people some more things to help them fix the problems. We do it in a way that everyone can see!

We will work together so all the people in the world can talk with each other and see pictures with no problems, free, on a computer and on a phone. They can make many more things. We think everyone can help the world this way. Some day, everyone can know all the things. That will be very good.

A few words on Aaron's death, and sadness

Posted on by Liz

I am very sad about Aaron Swartz’s death. We spent last weekend just devastated and in shock, then went to his funeral in Chicago. The shared sadness united us all. I feel for his family and his partner Taren. Aaron’s father spoke at his funeral, and his defense lawyer, one of his brothers, and many friends and colleagues. Larry Lessig’s words about feeling protective especially brought me to tears. I wish I could remember everything he said as it resonated with many things I felt but didn’t have coherently expressed even to myself.

I did not know Aaron well on the level of having the intense intellectual conversations that many people had with him, though I enjoyed reading his blog and supported his projects. I mostly knew him as my partner Danny’s daughter Ada’s kind and loving friend, as he was close to her mom for years and they lived with him or stayed with him often. She talked about him often and their games and how he would take her swimming. He was the grownup who would play with her the most instead of doing grownup things like making you do your homework. I would see Aaron at family events like Ada’s nursery school graduation, holidays and birthdays, or, ubiquitously on Skype while Ada talked with her mom and Aaron would pop up clowning around to make her laugh with all their running jokes. They made movies together and had a great relationship. Of course, I love anyone who loves Ada so dearly, appreciates and cares for her. As Aaron did.

And I felt towards him how I feel as a 43 year old intellectual feels toward brilliant creative people in their 20s or younger. Fond and and a little protective from a distance, admiring of their daring, their bright energetic path, and looking forward so much to what they will do and will become. Respectful of their maturity while waiting to see how it deepens. I don’t mean to make too much of generational differences, but as I hit middle age I am aware of those differences in a complex way.

I did not plan to do anything at his grave but then was gripped with the feeling that if I participated in putting earth on the grave I would be acknowledging everything and that it would be right. His death wasn’t right. Despite being there I can’t grasp that it really happened and he is not going to be around.

So many vivid moments from the funeral and afterwards. I will never forget Seth at lunch as we ate grilled cheese sandwiches, kindly turning to me in his deliberate and quiet way saying, as if remembering each word from a foreign language or trying to eliminate all the letter E from a sentence, “I always try to remember, when I cry a lot, it’s important to drink water.” I obediently drank my glass of water. A funny little detail. I would wish for no one to cry so much as we did. But when we do, it’s good that we take care of ourselves and others. Thank you Seth.

We are all reeling from Aaron’s loss. There will be a memorial for him at the Internet Archive next week and I believe also a hackathon in his memory at some point. While I feel the sadness many people do, supporting Danny’s daughter is one of my top priorities right now just keeping things going in a normal way and food on the table, appreciating her funny dances and fantastic stories, writing in runes, just listening to her, bringing over her friends to play. It is beautiful, and heartening, to have children livening things up like an overflowing fountain, and we all watch them and press each others’ hands in desperate appreciation of their beauty. Life goes on, and we are happy. In the middle of the happiness we are crying a lot and will be for quite some time.

Aaron’s loss is a loss to the entire world. I feel the surge of determination and fierceness surge through my friends who are geeks and activists. This helps me deal with the sadness on an abstract level, but not on the personal level. Of course Danny and I have read pretty much everything everyone wrote about Aaron and his work and his death over the last week. I don’t feel like I have to say something clever or do a giant link round up of it. I think we are all trying to transmute grief into hope, belief, and action. Where that will lead, I don’t know.

Bugzilla quicksearch, or else!

Posted on by Liz

Here is a fabulous tip if you are messing around in bugzilla.mozilla.org and are searching for bugs. As, by now, as a reader of my blog, you should be.

You can search Bugzilla right from the location bar. I cannot quite bring myself to say “Awesome bar” as people do at Mozilla because I’ve said “location bar” for many years, and it feels silly.

First you will need to be logged in to a Bugzilla account!

Right(command)-click in the Search box. Choose “Add a keyword for this Search”.

Pick something short that you will remember, like “b” or “bug”. I added both since they both seem intuitive enough to me that I’ll probably forget choosing one or the other.

Command-L is the keystroke on a Mac to move to the location bar.

So, type Command-L, type bug 831552 and you will be whooshed directly to that bug.

Command-L, bug retina will result in a fairly quick list of around 18 bugs (as of right now.)

Here are a bunch of quicksearch tips for bugzilla.mozilla.org!

Take a look at the tips and see what quicksearch looks at by default. There is lots of useful info there and it is worth going through and trying some of the options and noting which field names might be specially useful.

The Advanced Shortcuts are the best thing about quicksearch for me so far. For example, Command-L, bug UNCO retina returns all the unconfirmed bugs with the keyword “retina”. (About 4, currently). Though keywords aren’t case-sensitive, the Advanced shortcut “Status” search terms are. So you have to type bug UNCO retina, not bug unco retina.

At the moment, quicksearch look in comments and various other bug metadata. After January 24th that will change — comments will be excluded by default from quicksearch. That should make it actually quicksearch instead of kinda_slow_search. Or at least quickersearch. Until then, you can type bug --comments retina and your search about retina-related bugs will be a bit faster.

Here is the “or else” part from the title of this post: If you have been calling yourself “The Bugmaster for Mozilla” for several weeks, and you slowly mouse over to a search box to type something, and you do this in front of some kick ass developer, instead of using quicksearch in the location bar, you will be embarrassed. So take it from me and don’t do that.

cats in hats

Thrills, chills, filters, and bugmail

Posted on by Liz

Any bugmail at all is probably way too much bugmail. That means you will need to set up some structures to filter it!

This explanation may be useful for anyone interested in contributing to Mozilla — especially bugmasters, triagers, and developers. Even if you don’t use the same email setup, there’s some good tips.

Byron (aka glob) explained how I could set up my Bugzilla email, or bugmail. Within Bugzilla, in the Email preferences tab, there are a complicated set of checkboxes to control what conditions in Bugzilla trigger your bugmail. Right now, my email notifications are set to fire off email to me whenever anything happens to a bug I may be interested in.

Bugzilla email prefs

I then set up some users to watch, at the bottom of the Email preferences screen. Whenever Matti, Tyler, or Benjamin do anything with a bug, Bugzilla emails me about it. I can also see that Josh is watching my Bugzilla activity. People often refer to this as “stalking” in Bugzilla, without any creepy connotation intended. It is basically TMI about someone else’s bugs (or what bugs they poke at.)

Bugzilla user watching

“If you watch a user, it is as if you are standing in their shoes for the purposes of getting email. Email is sent or not according to your preferences for their relationship to the bug (e.g. Assignee).” The meaning of that takes a while to work out, much like Bilbo Baggins’ famous statement at his eleventy-first birthday party… “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

I have picked two components to watch. Bugs in BMO (bugzilla.mozilla.org) are organized first by Product, such as Firefox, Firefox for Android, Thunderbird, and so on; then by Component, which seems to be a division by who is working on a particular area or project. You can’t pick a Component, or even see it, till you figure out what Product your bug belongs to. Here is a helpful guide from the Mozilla Developer Network with a list of Mozilla Products and their Components, handily all on one page, so it is easily searchable. I have also been using the list of Modules and their owners from the Mozilla.org wiki.

Bugzilla component watching

We don’t even have any bugmail yet, and see how much we have learned about the structure of a giant complicated FLOSS ecosystem! Hurray!!!! *waves pom poms*

Cheerleader cat

At this point, I made some folders in Zimbra inside a general Bugmail folder. While I’m still not sure how I’ll settle on bugmail organization, right now I have separate folders for my watched components and people. Then, in Zimbra preferences,there is a sidebar option for “Filters”.

Bugzilla filters

Create a new filter, then for users you’re watching, filter on header, and set the header name to X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason. (For other filters, check the full headers and see what X-Bugzilla header info will work best.)

Bugzilla x headers

Since the X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason filter contains the person’s email, if they change their own bugzilla email address, my filter will break.

Bugzilla user watching

Onward to Thunderbird, which I have set up with IMAP to check my Zimbra account.

Right-click (or command-click for a mac) on your account name in the Thunderbird sidebar, and choose “Subscribe”. This shows you the folders on your IMAP-connected account. Expand the folders and check the tickybox next to the new folders you just created in Zimbra (or whatever else you use). This will create a copy of that folder in Thunderbird.

Bugzilla thunderbird subscribe

One more step. In the Thunderbird sidebar, right-click one of the new folders that was just copied over from your IMAP account. Choose “Properties”. Then check the tickybox labelled “When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder.”

Now your bugmail will nicely filter itself — in both email clients.

That was non-obvious enough that I really wanted to document all the steps. Maybe some other new hire at Mozilla will be helped!

If anyone has bugmail tips for me, I would appreciate that!

Bonus points to anyone reading this who notices my PretendOffice filter and has a good laugh.