In case you don’t know what Fluent is, it’s a localization system designed and developed by Mozilla to overcome the limitations of the existing localization technologies. If you have been around Mozilla Localization for a while, and you’re wondering what happened to L20n, you can read this explanation about the relation between these two projects.
With Firefox 58 we started moving Firefox Preferences to Fluent, and today we’re migrating the last pane (Firefox Account – Sync) in Firefox Nightly (61). The work is not done yet, there are still edge cases to migrate in the existing panes, and subdialogs, but we’re on track. If you’re interested in the details, you can read the full journey in two blog posts from Zibi (2017 and 2018), covering not only Fluent, but also the huge amount of work done on the Gecko platform to improve multilingual support.
At this point, you might be wondering: do we really need another localization system? What’s wrong with what we have?
The truth is that there is a lot wrong with the current systems. In Gecko alone, we support 4 different file formats to localize content: .dtd, .properties, .inc, .inc. And since none of them support plural forms, we built hacks on top of .properties to support pluralization.
Here are a few practical examples of why Fluent is a huge improvement over existing technologies, and will allow us to improve the quality of the localizations we ship.
DTDs and Concatenations
You want to localize this simple fragment of XUL code without using JavaScript.
Please sign in to reconnect
This turns into 2 separate strings in a DTD file, and a long localization comment:
Why the empty string at the end? Because, while English doesn’t need it, other languages might need to change the structure of the sentence, adding content after the email address. On top of that, some localization tools don’t support empty strings correctly, not allowing localizers to mark an empty translation as a “translated” string.
In Fluent, this is simply:
sync-signedin-login-failure = Please sign in to reconnect { $email }
One single string, full visibility on the context, flexibility to move around the email address.
Plural Forms
Plural forms are supported in Gecko only for .properties files. Fluent supports plural forms natively, and with a lot of additional flexibility.
First of all, if you’re not familiar with the complexity of plurals across languages (limiting the discussion to cardinal integer numbers):
- English, like many other European languages, only has 2 plural forms: n=1 uses one form (“1 page”), all other numbers (n!=1) use a different form (“2 pages”). Sadly, this makes a lot of people think about plural in terms of “1 vs many”, while that’s not really the case for most languages.
- French still has 2 plural forms, but uses the same form for both 0 and 1.
- Other languages can only have one form (e.g. Chinese), or have up to 6 different plural forms (e.g. Arabic). Fluent uses the CLDR categories (zero, one, two, few, many, other) to match a number to the correct plural form. For example, in Russian 1 and 21 will use the form “one”, but 11 will use “other”.
- The behavior might change if the actual number is present or not. For example, Turkic languages don’t need to pluralize a noun after a number (“1 page”), but need plural forms in sentences referencing to one or more elements (“this” vs “them”).
Consider for example this use case: in Firefox, the button to set the home page changes from “Use Current Page” to “Use Current Pages”, depending on the number of open tabs.
If you want to use a proper plural form, you need to add the number of tabs to the string. In .properties, it would look like this (plural forms are separated by a semicolon):
use-current-pages = Use Current Page;Use Current #1 Pages
This will force languages to create all plural forms for their
Sometimes you want to issue a curl command against a server, but you don't really want curl to resolve the host name in the given URL and use that, you want to tell it to go elsewhere. To the "wrong" host, which in this case of course happens to be the right host. Because you know better.
Don't worry. curl covers this as well, in several different ways...
Fake the host header
The classic and and easy to understand way to send a request to the wrong HTTP host is to simply send a different Host: header so that the server will provide a response for that given server.
If you run your "example.com" HTTP test site on localhost and want to verify that it works:
curl --header "Host: example.com" http://127.0.0.1/
curl will also make cookies work for example.com in this case, but it will fail miserably if the page redirects to another host and you enable redirect-following (--location) since curl will send the fake Host: header in all further requests too.
The --header option cleverly cancels the built-in provided Host: header when a custom one is provided so only the one passed in from the user gets sent in the request.
Fake the host header better
We're using HTTPS everywhere these days and just faking the Host: header is not enough then. An HTTPS server also needs to get the server name provided already in the TLS handshake so that it knows which cert etc to use. The name is provided in the SNI field. curl also needs to know the correct host name to verify the server certificate against (server certificates are rarely registered for an IP address). curl extracts the name to use in both those case from the provided URL.
As we can't just put the IP address in the URL for this to work, we reverse the approach and instead give curl the proper URL but with a custom IP address to use for the host name we set. The --resolve command line option is our friend:
curl --resolve example.com:443:127.0.0.1 https://example.com/
Under the hood this option populates curl's DNS cache with a custom entry for "example.com" port 443 with the address 127.0.0.1, so when curl wants to connect to this host name, it finds your crafted address and connects to that instead of the IP address a "real" name resolve would otherwise return.
This method also works perfectly when following redirects since any further use of the same host name will still resolve to the same IP address and redirecting to another host name will then resolve properly. You can even use this option multiple times on the command line to add custom addresses for several names. You can also add multiple IP addresses for each name if you want to.
Connect to another host by name
As shown above, --resolve is awesome if you want to point curl to a specific known IP address. But sometimes that's not exactly what you want either.
Imagine you have a host name that resolves to a number of different host names, possibly a number of front end servers for the same site/service. Not completely unheard of. Now imagine you want to issue your curl command to one specific server out of the front end servers. It's a server that serves "example.com" but the individual server is called "host-47.example.com".
You could resolve the host name in a first step before curl is used and use --resolve as shown above.
Or you can use --connect-to, which instead works on a host name basis. Using this, you can make curl replace a specific host name + port number pair with another host name + port number pair before the name is resolved!
curl --connect-to example.com:443:host-47.example.com:443 https://example.com/
Crazy combos
Most options in curl are individually controlled which means that there's rarely logic that prevents you from using them in the awesome combinations that you can think of.
-- resolve, -- connect-to and -- header can all be used in the same command line!
Connect to a HTTPS host running on localhost, use the correct name for SNI and certificate verification, but then still ask for a separate host in the Host: header? Sure, no problem:
curl --resolve example.com:443:127.0.0.1 https://example.com/ --header "Host: diff.example.com"
All the above with libcurl?
When you're done playing with the curl options as described above and want to convert
Pick of the Month: Passbolt
by Passbolt
A password manager made for secure team collaboration. Great for safekeeping wifi and admin passwords, or login credentials for your company’s social media accounts.
“The interface is user-friendly, installation is explained step by step.”
Featured: FoxClocks
by Andy McDonald
Display times from locations all over the world in a tidy spot at the bottom of your browser.
“This is one of the best extensions for people who work with globally distributed teams.”
Featured: Video DownloadHelper
by mig
A simple but powerful tool for downloading video. Works well with the web’s most popular video sharing sites, like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and others.
“Without a doubt the best completely trouble-free add-on which does exactly what it claims to do without fuss, complicated settings, or preferences. It just works.”
Nominate your favorite add-ons
Featured extensions are selected by a community board made up of developers, users, and fans. Board members change every six months. Here’s further information on AMO’s featured content policies.
If you’d like to nominate an add-on for featuring, please send it to amo-featured [at] mozilla [dot] org for the board’s consideration. We welcome you to submit your own add-on!
The post April’s Featured Extensions appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Blog.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/04/aprils-featured-extensions/
The Bugzilla Project Developers meeting.
This is the SUMO weekly call
Summary
Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro collects and saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.
Over the last year and a half, we've been working on a new infrastructure for Socorro and migrating the project to it. It was a massive undertaking and involved changing a lot of code and some architecture and then redoing all the infrastructure scripts and deploy pipelines.
On Thursday, March 28th, we pushed the button and switched to the new infrastructure. The transition was super smooth. Now we're on new infra!
This blog post talks a little about the old and new infrastructures and the work we did to migrate.
Read more… (13 mins to read)
http://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/mozilla/socorro_migration_2018.html
Q: I intend to upgrade from MS-DOS v3.3 to either DR DOS 6 or MS-DOS 5, both of which will allow me to have my 40MB hard disk configured as a single drive instead of being partitioned into twin 20MB drives. Am I right in thinking that to do this I will re-format my hard disk, and that I must first back up all the data? I dread doing this since I have almost 30MB on there.
A: First the bad news: yes, you will need to re-format your disk to take advantage of the ability to work with partitions greater than 32MB. However, backing up needn’t be as nasty a job as you think. But your question does beg another[0]: since backing up is going to be such a large job, it sounds as though you haven’t done it before.
… The most basic approach … would be to copy important data to a floppy disk, perhaps with the aid of a file compression utility such as LHA. If the worst happens, you simply reinstall applications from their original disks (or, much better still, back-ups of them) and copy your data back from floppy. [Or, you could use] a dedicated backup utility. My current favourite is Fastbak Plus (lb110)[1].
32Mb ought to be enough for everyone? How did that work out – 512 byte sectors and a 16-bit index?
[0] No, it doesn’t – Ed.
[1] lb210 in today’s money. For a backup program!
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/jXWMvnNDGuM/
TenFourFox 45.6.0 final is available (downloads, hashes, release notes), with everything in the release notes including the crash fix for 45.5.1 and that layout performance patch Mozilla added as part of another fix. Please test on your systems, with the expectation it will go live late Monday Pacific time as usual.
45.7 will not have substantial changes and I don't anticipate doing a beta. However, one change I do intend to make is to mirror Mozilla's work on updating default settings, starting with layout paint delay. The rationale for delaying layout painting specifically was to wait for sufficient data to come through rather than guessing an incorrect layout with incomplete data that then has to be invalidated: without the delay, although the screen would be busier, the browser often would end up taking more total wall-clock time on wasted work. Now that data arrives faster on most people's systems today than in the days of dialup and low-speed DSL, it's time for these older settings from another age to be re-examined, and paint delay is probably the most visible one of those settings.
Stuff like that has long been part of the various unofficial Firefox "optimization guides" that circulate, including Erik's set for TenFourFox. I have generally avoided comment on his recommendations (except for a couple that I knew would be net negative for most users) because as far as I'm concerned, it's your computer and you can tune it as you like -- just don't file bug reports if you muck it up because some of those settings have undesirable side effects in edge cases. For that reason I have declined to move too far from the Firefox base settings because the browser out-of-the-box has to work for as many systems as possible in as many situations as possible, and one thing unique to us is we still do have a substantial minority of users using Power Macs on dialup networks. One user sticks out in my mind who is a missionary in the mountains north of Myanmar and completely reliant on the modem in his G4 mini. We don't want to unnecessarily tank these users with settings that are overly optimistic about bandwidth availability, so whatever setting Mozilla determines for Firefox users at large may not be the best fit for our legacy population.
In bug 1283302, Mozilla settled on 5ms for desktop users and left Firefox Android at 250ms (which is actually smaller than a refresh tick, so near as I can determine it might as well be zero). Since we're not in the same processing class as current machines by a long shot and we do need to still support users with limited bandwidth, I think a safer setting will be 100ms, which as an otherwise arbitrary number seemed not to regress anything on the local machines. If you want to try this, go into about:config, create a numeric pref nglayout.initialpaint.delay if it does not already exist, and enter a value of 100. Optimally it might be nice to have such settings specific to each architecture build and tuned accordingly, but that's something to consider at a later time. If you have other reasonable recommendations for this setting, do post them in the comments, along with the specifications of the system and network you tried it on. I will consider other changes in future versions as Mozilla re-examines them internally.
Meanwhile, I'll be on a plane to Australia next week on what may be my last Spaceseat flight on Air New Zealand, which I loved. Before I do, however, I'll be stopping by the parents' house to look at the dual 2.5GHz G5 they use for uploading their church videos. My suspicion is the liquid cooling system blew. Currently I am sad.
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/12/4560-final-available.html
On the 1st of December, the STIX Fonts project announced the release of STIX 2. If you never heard about this project, it is described as follows:
The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats.
This sounds a very exciting goal but the way it has been achieved has made the STIX project infamous for its numerous delays, for its poor or confusing packaging, for delivering math fonts with too many bugs to be usable, for its lack of openness & communication, for its bad handling of third-party feedback & contribution…
Because of these laborious travels towards unsatisfactory releases, some snarky people claim that the project was actually named after Styx (
Just because.
Day One: Waikoloa to Ocean View
I couldn't figure out a ride for the first day that was a decent distance, not too short and not too long without making the other days harder. In the end I decided to just go for a long ride. That was probably a bad idea.
It started out wet and rainy with flood warnings. But as I got to Kona it stopped raining. Had a chance to stop at wonderful beach for a snack.
By the afternoon as I was getting near Captain Cook it got hot and I hit the steep hill and that was horrible. It floored me and I struggled at the end. Had to seriously recuperate at the top.
The views past Captain Cook of the island stretching out was fabulous and then next 30km cruised by.
But after 90km I started to hit a wall and slowed down and took frequent breaks. Arriving at Ocean View at 4pm, I was absolutely exhausted and dehydrated. Add in jet lag and it was quite a day.
Day Two: Ocean View to Volcano
I figured out I'd strained my achilles yesterday. It was raining. Really raining. There were flash flood warnings and the road was about to be closed. But my plan was to get Volcano. So I did.
The first hour or two were the worst, heavy pounding rain that formed rivers on the road. Brakes basically became useless and visibility was terrible. And my ankle hurt.
After about 2 hours I got to a police road block, due to flooding they were about to shut the road. They said "well you can probably make it" through a deep puddle stretching the road. So I did, while cars were turning back.
It let up a bit, but it did not stop for 6 hours and as I climbed above 2,500ft in elevation it started to get colder. This was a long day.
Day Three: Volcano to Hilo
Short ride downhill into Hilo and then a rest day. I needed that to get some drugs, a support strap for my ankle and some relaxation. Oh and it rained insanely hard all my ride, so this was a chance to dry out my clothes.
Day Four: Hilo to Waimea
Hands down the best day. After my rest I was feeling better and the support strap was helping my ankle. I left Hilo early in the morning and rode along the sea front. The road winds over gulchs, waterfalls and has fabulous views. After 60km+ it turns left and climbs up the volcano towards Waimea.
What was then a fabulous ride become more better as it went to a winding back road past farms lined with trees. After a climb you break out of the trees into wide green fields with the snowcapped volcanoes towering in the distance. Just amazing.
As it turns out, for me right now about 90km is just about the right distance for me.
Day Five: Waimea to Waikoloa
You could do this straight downhill to Waikoloa (25km), but that would be boring. So instead I looped up to Hawi. Boy was I glad I did, this was another highlight. A nice climb up a hill with fabulous views across Hawaii. Followed by a wonderful roller coaster of slow downhill past lovely tree lined roads, views of Maui in the distance. A wonderful last day.
The remaining 40km back around to Waikoloa was boring and tiring.
And that's it. Five days, over 427km, around two volcanoes, one really sore achilles tendon and one flash flood. Would do again.
Thanks to Mozilla for being crazy enough to run a company meeting in Hawaii.
This post was originally posted on the Mozilla.org website.
Helen Turvey, new Mozilla Foundation Board member
Today, we’re welcoming Helen Turvey as a new member of the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors. Helen is the CEO of the Shuttleworth Foundation. Her focus on philanthropy and openness throughout her career makes her a great addition to our Board.
Throughout 2016, we have been focused on board development for both the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation boards of directors. Our recruiting efforts for board members has been geared towards building a diverse group of people who embody the values and mission that bring Mozilla to life. After extensive conversations, it is clear that Helen brings the experience, expertise and approach that we seek for the Mozilla Foundation Board.
Helen has spent the past two decades working to make philanthropy better, over half of that time working with the Shuttleworth Foundation, an organization that provides funding for people engaged in social change and helping them have a sustained impact. During her time with the Shuttleworth Foundation, Helen has driven the evolution from traditional funder to the current co-investment Fellowship model.
Helen was educated in Europe, South America and the Middle East and has 15 years of experience working with international NGOs and agencies. She is driven by the belief that openness has benefits beyond the obvious. That openness offers huge value to education, economies and communities in both the developed and developing worlds.
Helen’s contribution to Mozilla has a long history: Helen chaired the digital literacy alliance that we ran in UK in 2013 and 2014; she’s played a key role in re-imagining MozFest; and she’s been an active advisor to the Mozilla Foundation executive team during the development of the Mozilla Foundation ‘Fuel the Movement’ 3 year plan.
Please join me in welcoming Helen Turvey to the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors.
Mitchell
You can read Helen’s message about why she’s joining Mozilla here.
Background:
Twitter: @helenturvey
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.
This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.
Updates from Rust Community
News & Blog Posts
- Redox released its first ISO image.
- Starting a new Rust project right, with error-chain.
- Reflections on rusting trust.
- Zero-cost abstractions in Rust.
- Building native macOS applications with Rust.
- ripgrep code review with focus on its design decisions and interesting implementation solutions.
- Taking TRust-DNS IntoFuture.
- WebVR coming to Servo: Architecture and latency optimizations.
- Three bytes and a space: or, Rust bugs, non-compliance, and how I learned to love IRC.
- I used to use pointers - now what? Common C pointer patterns, and what to do in Rust instead.
- Russian dolls and clean Rust code. Replacing nested pattern matching with
and_then. - 24 days of Rust - cargo subcommands.
- 24 days of Rust - structured logging.
- 24 days of Rust - environment variables.
- [survey] Crate evaluation user research survey.
Other Weeklies from Rust Community
- This week in Rust docs 33. Updates from the Rust documentation team.
- This week in TiKV 2016-12-05. TiKV is a distributed Key-Value database.
- This week in Ruma 2016-12-04. Ruma is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust.
Crate of the Week
This week's Crate of the Week is seahash, a statistically well-tested fast hash. Thanks to Vikrant Chaudhary for the suggestion! Submit your suggestions and votes for next week!
Call for Participation
Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn't know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!
Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.
- [less easy] unicode-reverse: Fuzz testing. unicode-reverse is a Unicode-aware in-place string reverse function in Rust.
- [easy] tera: Use 64 bits for int/float. Tera is a template engine for Rust based on Jinja2/Django.
- [easy]
Again if you missed it, IronFunctions is open-source, lambda compatible, on-premise, language agnostic, server-less compute service.
While AWS Lambda only supports Java, Python and Node.js, Iron Functions allows you to use any language you desire by running your code in containers.
With Microsoft being one of the biggest players in open source and .NET going cross-platform it was only right to add support for it in the IronFunctions's fn tool.
TL;DR:
The following demos a .NET function that takes in a URL for an image and generates a MD5 checksum hash for it:
Using dotnet with functions
Make sure you downloaded and installed dotnet. Now create an empty dotnet project in the directory of your function:
dotnet new
By default dotnet creates a Program.cs file with a main method. To make it work with IronFunction's fn tool please rename it to func.cs.
mv Program.cs func.cs
Now change the code as you desire to do whatever magic you need it to do. In our case the code takes in a URL for an image and generates a MD5 checksum hash for it. The code is the following:
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.IO;
namespace ConsoleApplication
{
public class Program
{
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
// if nothing is being piped in, then exit
if (!IsPipedInput())
return;
var input = Console.In.ReadToEnd();
var stream = DownloadRemoteImageFile(input);
var hash = CreateChecksum(stream);
Console.WriteLine(hash);
}
private static bool IsPipedInput()
{
try
{
bool isKey = Console.KeyAvailable;
return false;
}
catch
{
return true;
}
}
private static byte[] DownloadRemoteImageFile(string uri)
{
var request = System.Net.WebRequest.CreateHttp(uri);
var response = request.GetResponseAsync().Result;
var stream = response.GetResponseStream();
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
stream.CopyTo(ms);
return ms.ToArray();
}
}
private static string CreateChecksum(byte[] stream)
{
using (var md5 = MD5.Create())
{
var hash = md5.ComputeHash(stream);
var sBuilder = new StringBuilder();
// Loop through each byte of the hashed data
// and format each one as a hexadecimal string.
for (int i = 0; i < hash.Length; i++)
{
sBuilder.Append(hash[i].ToString("x2"));
}
// Return the hexadecimal string.
return sBuilder.ToString();
}
}
}
}
Note: IO with an IronFunction is done via stdin and stdout. This code
Using with IronFunctions
Let's first init our code to become IronFunctions deployable:
fn init /
Since IronFunctions relies on Docker to work (we will add rkt support soon) the
In our case we will use dotnethash as the
fn init seiflotfy/dotnethash
When running the command it will create the func.yaml file required by functions, which can be built by running:
Push to docker
fn push
This will create a docker image and push the image to docker.
Publishing to IronFunctions
To publish to IronFunctions run ...
fn routes create
where is (no surprise here) the name of the app, which can encompass many functions.
This creates a full path in the form of http://
In my case, I will call the app myapp:
fn routes create myapp
Calling
Now you can
fn call Today, I’m very honored to join Mozilla’s Board.
Firefox is how I first got in contact with Mozilla. The browser was my first interaction with free and open source software. I downloaded it in 2004, not with any principled stance in mind, but because it was better, faster, more secure and allowed me to determine how I used it, with add-ons and so forth.
Helen Turvey joins the Mozilla Foundation Board
My love of open began, seeing the direct implications for philanthropy, for diversity, moving from a scarcity to abundance model in terms of the information and data we need to make decisions in our lives. The web as a public resource is precious, and we need to fight to keep it an open platform, decentralised, interoperable, secure and accessible to everyone.
Mozilla is community driven, and it is my belief that it makes a more robust organisation, one that bends and evolves instead of crumbles when facing the challenges set before it. Whilst we need to keep working towards a healthy internet, we also need to learn to behave in a responsible manner. Bringing a culture of creating, not just consuming, questioning, not just believing, respecting and learning, to the citizens of the web remains front and centre.
I am passionate about people, and creating spaces for them to evolve, grow and lead in the roles they feel driven to effect change in. I am interested in all aspects of Mozilla’s work, but helping to think through how Mozilla can strategically and tactically support leaders, what value we can bring to the community who is working to protect and evolve the web is where I will focus in my new role as a Mozilla Foundation Board member.
For the last decade I have run the Shuttleworth Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that looks to drive change through open models. The FOSS movement has created widely used software and million dollar businesses, using collaborative development approaches and open licences. This model is well established for software, it is not the case for education, philanthropy, hardware or social development.
We try to understand whether, and how, applying the ethos, processes and licences of the free and open source software world to areas outside of software can add value. Can openness help provide key building blocks for further innovation? Can it encourage more collaboration, or help good ideas spread faster? It is by asking these questions that I have learnt about effectiveness and change and hope to bring that along to the Mozilla Foundation Board.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/12/05/why-im-joining-mozillas-board-by-helen-turvey/
Today, we’re welcoming Helen Turvey as a new member of the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors. Helen is the CEO of the Shuttleworth Foundation. Her focus on philanthropy and openness throughout her career makes her a great addition to our Board.
Throughout 2016, we have been focused on board development for both the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation boards of directors. Our recruiting efforts for board members has been geared towards building a diverse group of people who embody the values and mission that bring Mozilla to life. After extensive conversations, it is clear that Helen brings the experience, expertise and approach that we seek for the Mozilla Foundation Board.
Helen has spent the past two decades working to make philanthropy better, over half of that time working with the Shuttleworth Foundation, an organization that provides funding for people engaged in social change and helping them have a sustained impact. During her time with the Shuttleworth Foundation, Helen has driven the evolution from traditional funder to the current co-investment Fellowship model.
Helen was educated in Europe, South America and the Middle East and has 15 years of experience working with international NGOs and agencies. She is driven by the belief that openness has benefits beyond the obvious. That openness offers huge value to education, economies and communities in both the developed and developing worlds.
Helen’s contribution to Mozilla has a long history: Helen chaired the digital literacy alliance that we ran in UK in 2013 and 2014; she’s played a key role in re-imagining MozFest; and she’s been an active advisor to the Mozilla Foundation executive team during the development of the Mozilla Foundation ‘Fuel the Movement’ 3 year plan.
Please join me in welcoming Helen Turvey to the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors.
Mitchell
You can read Helen’s message about why she’s joining Mozilla here.
Background:
Twitter: @helenturvey
I’ve mentioned before that I use TaskWarrior to organize my life. Mostly for work, but for personal stuff too (buy this, fix that thing around the house, etc.)
At Mozilla, at least in the circles I run in, the central work queue is Bugzilla. I have bugs assigned to me, suggesting I should be working on them. And I have reviews or “NEEDINFO” requests that I should respond to. Ideally, instead of serving two masters, I could just find all of these tasks represented in TaskWarrior.
Fortunately, there is an integration called BugWarrior that can do just this! It can be a little tricky to set up, though. So in hopes of helping the next person, here’s my configuration:
[general]
targets = bugzilla_mozilla, bugzilla_mozilla_respond
annotation_links = True
log.level = WARNING
legacy_matching = False
[bugzilla_mozilla]
service = bugzilla
bugzilla.base_uri = bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.ignore_cc = True
# assigned
bugzilla.query_url = https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?list_id=13320987&resolution=---&emailtype1=exact&query_format=advanced&emailassigned_to1=1&email1=dustin%40mozilla.com&product=Taskcluster
add_tags = bugzilla
project_template = moz
description_template = http://bugzil.la/
bugzilla.username = USERNAME
bugzilla.password = PASSWORD
[bugzilla_mozilla_respond]
service = bugzilla
bugzilla.base_uri = bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.ignore_cc = True
# ni?, f?, r?, not assigned
bugzilla.query_url = https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?j_top=OR&list_id=13320900&emailtype1=notequals&emailassigned_to1=1&o4=equals&email1=dustin%40mozilla.com&v4=dustin%40mozilla.com&o7=equals&v6=review%3F&f8=flagtypes.name&j5=OR&o6=equals&v7=needinfo%3F&f4=requestees.login_name&query_format=advanced&f3=OP&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&f5=OP&v8=feedback%3F&f6=flagtypes.name&f7=flagtypes.name&o8=equals
add_tags = bugzilla, respond
project_template = moz
description_template = http://bugzil.la/
bugzilla.username = USERNAME
bugzilla.password = PASSWORD
Out of the box, this tries to do some default things, but they are not very fine-grained.
The bugzilla_query_url option overrides those default things (along with bugzilla_ignore_cc) to just sync the bugs matching the query.
Sadly, this does, indeed, require me to include my Bugzilla password in the configuration file. API token support would be nice but it’s not there yet – and anyway, that token allows everything the password does, so not a great benefit.
The query URLs are easy to build if you follow this one simple trick:
Use the Bugzilla search form to create the query you want.
You will end up with a URL containing buglist.cgi.
Change that to query.cgi and put the whole URL in BugWarrior’s bugzilla_query_url parameter.
I have two stanzas so that I can assign the respond tag to bugs for wihch I am being asked for review or needinfo.
When I first set this up, I got a lot of errors about duplicate tasks from BugWarrior, because there were bugs matching both stanzas.
Write your queries carefully so that no two stanzas will match the same bug.
In this case, I’ve excluded bugs assigned to me from the second stanza – why would I be reviewing my own bug, anyway?
I have a nice little moz report that I use in TaskWarrior.
Its output looks like this:
ID Pri Urg Due Description
98 M 7.09 2016-12-04 add a docs page or blog post
58 H 18.2 http://bugzil.la/1309716 Create a framework for displaying team dashboards
96 H 7.95 http://bugzil.la/1252948 cron.yml for periodic in-tree tasks
91 M 6.87 blog about bugwarrior config
111 M 6.71 guide to microservices, to help folks find the services they need to read th
59 M 6.08 update label-matching in taskcluster/taskgraph/transforms/signing.py to use
78 M 6.02 http://bugzil.la/1316877 Allow `test-sets` in `test-platforms.yml`
92 M 5.97 http://bugzil.la/1302192 Merge android-test and desktop-test into a "test" k
94 M 5.96 http://bugzil.la/1302804 Ensure that tasks in a taskgraph do not have duplic
http://code.v.igoro.us/posts/2016/12/taskwarrior-bugwarrior.html
Test builds for TenFourFox 45.6.0 are available (downloads, hashes, release notes). The release notes indicate the definitive crash fix in Mozilla bug 1321357 (i.e., the definitive fix for the issue mitigated in 45.5.1) is in this build; it is not, but it will be in the final release candidate. 45.6.0 includes the removal of HiDPI support, which also allowed some graphical optimizations the iMac G4 particularly improved with, the expansion of the JavaScript JIT non-volatile general purpose register file, an image-heavy scrolling optimization too late for the 45ESR cut that I pulled down, the removal of telemetry from user-facing chrome JS and various minor fixes to the file requester code. An additional performance improvement will be landed in 45ESR by Mozilla as a needed prerequisite for another fix; that will also appear in the final release. Look for the release candidate next week sometime with release to the public late December 12 as usual, but for now, please test the new improvements so far.
There is now apparently a potential workaround for those of you still having trouble getting the default search engine to stick. I still don't have a good theory for what's going on, however, so if you want to try the workaround please read my information request and post the requested information about your profile before and after to see if the suggested workaround affects that.
I will be in Australia for Christmas and New Years' visiting my wife's family, so additional development is likely to slow over the holidays. Higher priority items coming up will be implementing user agent support in the TenFourFox prefpane, adding some additional HTML5 features and possibly excising telemetry from garbage and cycle collection, but probably for 45.8 instead of 45.7. I'm also looking at adding some PowerPC-specialized code sections to the platform-independent Ion code generator to see if I can crank up JavaScript performance some more, and possibly some additional work to the AltiVec VP9 codec for VMX-accelerated intraframe prediction. I'm also considering adding AltiVec support to the Theora (VP3) decoder; even though its much lighter processing requirements yield adequate performance on most supported systems it could be a way to get higher resolution video workable on lower-spec G4s.
One of the problems with our use of a substantially later toolchain is that (in particular) debugging symbols from later compilers are often gibberish to older profiling and analysis tools. This is why, for example, we have a customized gdb, or debugging at even a basic level wouldn't be possible. If you're really a masochist, go ahead and compile TenFourFox with the debug profile and then try to use a tool like sample or vmmap, or even Shark, to analyze it. If you're lucky, the tool will just freeze. If you're unlucky, your entire computer will freeze or go haywire. I can do performance analysis on a stripped release build, but this yields sample backtraces which are too general to be of any use. We need some way of getting samples off a debug build but not converting the addresses in the backtrace to function names until we can transfer the samples to our own tools that do understand these later debugging symbols.
Apple's open source policy is problematic -- they'll open source the stuff they have to, and you can get at some components like the kernel this way, but many deep dark corners are not documented and one of those is how tools like /usr/bin/sample and Shark get backtraces from other processes. I suspect this is so that they can keep the interfaces unstable and avoid abetting the development of applications that depend on any one particular implementation. But no one said I couldn't disassemble the damn thing. So let's go.
(NB: the below analysis is based on Tiger 10.4.11. It is possible, and even likely, the interface changed in Leopard 10.5.)
With Depeche Mode blaring on the G5, because Dave Gahan is good for debugging, let's look at /usr/bin/sample since it's a much smaller nut to crack than Shark.
% otool -L /usr/bin/sample
/usr/bin/sample:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Versions/C/Foundation (compatibility version 300.0.0, current version
Lately I started a new thing: watching “behind the scenes” features of movies I didn’t like. At first this happened by chance (YouTube autoplay, to be precise), but now I do it deliberately and it is fascinating.
Van Helsing to me bordered on the unwatchable, but as you can see there are a lot of reasons for that.
When doing that, one thing becomes clear: even if you don’t like something — *it was done by people*. People who had fun doing it. People who put a lot of work into it. People who — for a short period of time at least — thought they were part of something great.
That the end product us flawed or lamentable might not even be their fault. Many a good movie was ruined in the cutting room or hindered by censorship.
Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho almost didn’t make it to the screen because you see the flushing of a toilet. Other movies are watered down to get a rating that is more suitable for those who spend the most in cinemas: teenagers. Sometimes it is about keeping the running time of the movie to one that allows for just the right amount of ads to be shown when aired on television.
Take for example Halle Berry as Storm in X-Men. Her “What happens to a toad when it gets struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.” in her battle with Toad is generally seen as one of the cheesiest and most pointless lines:
This was a problem with cutting. Originally this is a comeback for Toad using this as his tagline throughout the movie:
However, as it turns out, that was meant to be the punch line to a running joke in the movie. Apparently, Toad had this thing that multiple times throughout the movie, he would use the line ‘Do you know what happens when a Toad…’ and whatever was relevant at the time. It was meant to happen several times throughout the movie and Storm using the line against him would have actually seemed really witty. If only we had been granted the context.
In many cases this extra knowledge doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like the movie. But it makes me feel different about it. It makes my criticism more nuanced. It makes me realise that a final product is a result of many changes and voices and power being yielded and it isn’t the fault of the actors or sometimes even the director.
And it is arrogant and hurtful of me to viciously criticise a product without knowing what went into it. It is easy to do. It is sometimes fun to do. It makes you look like someone who knows their stuff and is berating bad quality products. But it is prudent to remember that people are behind things you criticise.
Let’s take this back to the web for a moment. Yesterday I had a quick exchange on Twitter that reminded me of this approach of mine.
- Somebody said people write native apps because a certain part of the web stack is broken.
- Somebody else answered that if you want to write apps that work you shouldn’t even bother with JavaScript in the first place
- I replied that this makes no sense and is not helping the conversation about the broken technology. And that it is overly dismissive and hurtful
- The person then admitted knowing nothing about app creation, but was pretty taken aback by me saying what he did was hurtful instead of just dismissive.
But it was. And it is hurtful. Right now JavaScript is hot. JavaScript is relatively easy to learn and the development environment you need for it is free and in many cases a browser is enough. This makes it a great opportunity for someone new to enter our market. Matter of fact, I know people who do exactly that right now and get paid JavaScript courses by the unemployment office to up their value in the market and find a job.
Now imagine this person seeing this exchange. Hearing a developer relations person who worked for the largest and coolest companies flat out stating that what you’re trying to get your head around right now is shit. Do you think you’ll feel empowered? I wouldn’t.
I’m not saying we can’t and shouldn’t criticise. I’m just saying knowing the context helps. And realising that being dismissive is always hurtful, especially when you have no idea how much work went into a product or an idea that you just don’t like.
There is a simple way to make this better. Ask questions. Ask why somebody did something the way they did it. And if you see that it is lack of experience or flat out wrong use of something, help them. It is pretty exciting. Often you will find that your first gut feeling of “this person is so wrong” is not correct, but
I'm going through some difficult times right now, for various reasons I'm not going into here. It's harder than usual to hold onto my hopes and dreams and the optimism for what's to come that fuels my life and powers me with energy. Unfortunately, there's also not a lot of support for those things in the world around me right now. Be it projects that I shared a vision with being shut down, be it hateful statements coming from and being thrown at a president elect in the US, politicians in many other countries, including e.g. the presidential candidates right here in Austria, or even organizations and members of communities I'm part of. It looks like the world is going through difficult times, and having an issue with holding on to hopes, dreams, and optimism. And it feels like even those that usually are beacons of light and preach hope are falling into the trap of preaching the fear of darkness - and as soon as fear enters our minds, it's starting a vicious cycle.
Some awesome person or group of people wrote a great dialog into Star Wars Episode I, peaking in Yoda's "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." - And so true this is. Think about it.
People fear about securing their well-being, about being able to live the life they find worth living (including their jobs(, and about knowing what to expect of today and tomorrow. When this fear is nurtured, it grows, leads to anger about anything that seems to threaten it. They react hatefully to anyone just seeming to support those perceived threats. And those targeted by that hate hurt and suffer, start to fear the "haters", and go through the cycle from the other side. And and in that climate, the basic human uneasy feeling of "life for me is mostly OK, so any change and anything different is something to fear" falls onto fertile ground and grows into massive metathesiophobia (fear of change) and things like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, hate of other religions, and all kinds of other demons rise up.
Those are all deeply rooted in sincere, common human emotions (maybe even instincts) that we can live with, overcome and even turn around into e.g. embracing infinite diversity in infinite combinations like e.g. Star Trek, or we can go and shove them away into a corner of our existence, not decomposing them at their basic stage, and letting them grow until they are large enough that they drive our thinking, our personality - and make us easy to influence by people talking to them. And that works well both for the fears that e.g. some politicians spread and play with and the same for the fears of their opponents. Even the fear of hate and fear taking over is not excluded from this - on the contrary, it can fire up otherwise loving humans into going fully against what the actually want to be.
That said, when a human stands across another human and looks in his or her face, looks into their eyes, as long as we still realize there is a feeling, caring other person on the receiving end of whatever we communicate, it's often harder to start into this circle - if we are already deep into the fear and hate, and in some other circumstances this may not be always true, but in a lot of cases it is.
On the Internet, not so much. We interact with and through a machine, see an "account" on the other end, remove all the context of what was said before and after, of the tone of voice and body language, of what surroundings others are in, we reduce to a few words that are convenient to type or what the communication system limits us to - and we go for whatever gives us the most attention. Because we don't actually feel like we interact with other real humans, it's mostly about what we get out of it. A lot of likes, reshares, replies, interactions. It helps that the services we use maximize whatever their KPI are and not optimize for what people actually want - after all, they want to earn money and that means having a lot of activity, and making people happy is not an actual goal, at best a wishful side effect.
We need to change that. We need to make social media actually social again (this talk by Chris Heilmann is really worth watching). We need to spread love ("make Trek, not Wars" in a tounge-in-cheek kind of way, no meaning negativity towards any franchise, but thinking about meanings and how we can make things better for our neighbors, our community, our world), not even hate the fear or fear the hate (which leads back into the circle), but analyze it, take it seriously and break it down. If we understand it, know how to deal with it, but not
From William Gibson’s “Spook Country”:
She stood beneath Archie’s tail, enjoying the flood of images rushing from the arrowhead fluke toward the tips of the two long hunting tentacles. Something about Victorian girls in their underwear had just passed, and she wondered if that was part of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film which Inchmale had been fond of sampling on DVD for preshow inspiration. Someone had cooked a beautifully lumpy porridge of imagery for Bobby, and she hadn’t noticed it loop yet. It just kept coming.
And standing under it, head conveniently stuck in the wireless helmet, let her pretend she wasn’t hearing Bobby hissing irritably at Alberto for having brought her here.
It seemed almost to jump, now, with a flowering rush of silent explosions, bombs blasting against black night. She reached up to steady the helmet, tipping her head back at a particularly bright burst of flame, and accidentally encountered a control surface mounted to the left of the visor, over her cheekbone. The Shinjuku squid and its swarming skin vanished.
Beyond where it had been, as if its tail had been a directional arrow, hung a translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp yet insubstantial. It was large, long enough to park a car or two in, and easily tall enough to walk into, and something about these dimensions seemed familiar and banal. Within it, too, there seemed to be another form, or forms, but because everything was wireframed it all ran together visually, becoming difficult to read.
She was turning, to ask Bobby what this work in progress might become, when he tore the helmet from her head so roughly that she nearly fell over.
This left them frozen there, the helmet between them. Bobby’s blue eyes loomed owl-wide behind diagonal blondness, reminding her powerfully of one particular photograph of Kurt Cobain. Then Alberto took the helmet from them both. “Bobby,” he said, “you’ve really got to calm down. This is important. She’s writing an article about locative art. For Node.”
“Node?”
“Node.”
“The fuck is Node?”
I just finished building that. A poor man’s version of that, at least – there’s more to do, but you can stand it up in a couple of seconds and it works; a Node-based Flyweb discovery service that serves up a discoverable VR environment.
It was harder than I expected – NPM and WebVR are pretty uneven experiences from a novice web-developer’s perspective, and I have exciting opinions about the state of the web development ecosystem right now – but putting that aside: I just pushed the first working prototype up to Github a few minutes ago. It’s crude, the code’s ugly but it works; a 3D locative virtual art gallery. If you’ve got the right tools and you’re standing in the right place, you can look through the glass and see another world entirely.
Maybe the good parts of William Gibson’s visions of the future deserve a shot at existing too.
http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2016/12/02/william-gibson-overdrive/