septembre 2009 Archives

Ici aux Pays-bas les postes ont été privatisées il y a quelques années déjà. Je n'ai pas mes comptes bancaire à la poste - mon interaction avec elle est donc réduite à de temps en temps l'achat de timbres - et comme la plupart des lettre que je timbre ont pour destination de la France, je ne peux pas vraiment acheter de timbre à l'avance. La livraison des produits que je commande sur le net - se fait à domicile. Quand je ne suis pas chez moi ce sont mes voisins qui réceptionnent les colis. Les rares fois où je me rends à la Poste, c'est comme en France , pas assez de guichet ouvert, et une longue file d'attente.

Il se trouve que je n'ai pas envoyé de courrier timbré depuis quelques mois, et mon assurance vie (que j'ai depuis mon service militaire) arrive à échéance - j'ai donc besoin de leur envoyer un TIP. Les deux agences postales que je connaissait dans mon quartier sont fermées :-( L'une se transforme en agence bancaire, pour l'autre je ne sais. Je me suis donc retrouvé dans un supermarché pour faire timbrer ma lettre. Pas de queue - service rapide etc ... Mais je ne suis pas sur que cela aurait été la même histoire un Samedi , ou un peut plus tard dans la journée quand la caissière doit d'abord faire payer le contenu des courses des gens présent dans la queue devant moi.

• Today is a special Thunderbird Bug day - with quick rewarding actions to make new comers feel directly useful and at home. All the gory details are at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2009-09-24. If you liked beta 4 it's surely because we have those events on a weekly basis.
• One week left to enroll to the Moz Eu camp key signing party.

• CNN's Rick Sanchez Calls FOX News Liars
  (tags: cnn foxnews politics)

I wonder why ludovic.news@gmail.com never receives any email.

The first test builds of Thunderbird 3.0b4 are available here (hint for windows users they are in the unsigned directory.)
Along many bug fixes and improvements the major new feature is the way Thunderbird handles search and search results :

For a full list of what's new, please take a look at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird_3_for_users

We need our users to give it a try. Any bugs found with these builds should be marked blocking bug 515237.

If Thunderbird crashes, make sure to send the crash report and make sure to add a comment (as those comments really help).

If you could monitor Thunderbird's memory usage and report if it looks ok or not. For report please make sure to monitor Real+Virtual+ ... not just real memory.

OpenSuse users can fetch it from the mozilla:beta repository.

Vendredi ma ligne internet est tombée, plus de connectivité. C'est assez embêtant lorsque l'on travaille de chez soi exclusivement en utilisant Internet. Je me suis donc rendu chez T-mobile pour prendre leur solution mobile internet - Pour environ 20 € par mois 1Gib a pleine vitesse puis la vitesse divisée par deux.
Je rentre a la maison et j'ouvre le capot en plastique sur la tranche de la grosse clef USB qui va me servir de modem - impossible d'y mettre la carte SIM fournie :-( en regardant un peut plus les instructions je découvre l'endroit et y insère la carte. Puis j'installe les logiciels fournis - ça fonctionne tout seul - faut juste rebooter car un nouveau driver s'installe dans le noyau.
Le soft commence par se connecter - puis recherche des lise à jour et se met à jour tout en mettant à jour le firmware du dongle 3G. C'est rapide - dommage que cela se fasse sur le 3G et que l'on ne me propose pas de le faire sur mon wifi (mais bon il ne fonctionne pas - c'est juste pour consommer moins de bande passante).

Après la mise à jour - je vois des stats qui me font peur je consomme entre 20 mega et 50 mega de l'heure. L'équivalent de beaucoup de disquette 1,44 Mega. Et c'est là que je me suis rendu compte que 1Gib n'était pas grand chose. Mais bon comme dit c'est une solution de backup - donc pas trop de soucis.

J'aime bien la vitesse - c'est pas rapide rapide mais ça permet de travailler. J'aime bien le fait de passer en ligne / hors ligne comme avec un modem ça me rappelle ma jeunesse. J'aime moins la limitation - mais bon ça pousse à moins consommer. résultat je n'ai pas été en ligne durant tout le week-end. C'est pratique. Je vais pouvoir aller bosser à l'extérieur.

Pour l'instant je suis content de ma solution. Je reviendrais sans doute dessus si je suis mécontent - ou si je deviens très content dans un futur proche.

Interview conducted over email with Gary Kwong.

Can you introduce yourself a bit to our readers :

Hi! I'm Gary Kwong, now a 3rd year college student at National University of Singapore. I come from Hong Kong, and I love traveling around the world to meet people and visit new places.

What age you are ?

I'm 23 this year, I started touching Mozilla stuff in-depth when I just started high school, back when Thunderbird just branched out from the old Suite in 2003.

Where do you live ?

Singapore for school, Hong Kong for summer (usually).

What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?

I started off creating Thunderbird installers in 2003, then started The Rumbling Edge in 2004. QA gradually increased since then, and there's nothing more fun than squishin' bugs. :)

How long have you been using it ?

4-5 years - Thunderbird taught me more about the email stuff (POP, IMAP, SMTP, eml format, etc.) way more than school did, wrt. the practical usage aspect. Even the QA process came out of Thunderbird too - it makes sense when generalizing and applying to other products in the IT industry (with some modifications, of course).

What os/platform do you use it on ?

Usually on the Mac Leopard, but recently on Ubuntu Linux too. I've touched Thunderbird on WinXP and Gentoo Linux as well.

What are your area's of interest when doing Quality assurance ?

Squishin' bugs - and especially being able to help others triage and resolve bugs too, so we have more manpower. Second opinions are sometimes needed.

Why do you participate in the quality effort ?

It's part of the grand open source crusade - my development skills aren't as professional as some others, so I found my calling in QA.

Why ? What do you get from it ? Is it fun ?

I find it exciting when I get a crash. No, seriously, it shows that anybody, as long as "If you put your mind into it, you can accomplish anything." (-quote from Back to the Future)

I learn a lot from the QA process, the bug filing procedure(s) and subsequent remedial action (be it a patch by others, or otherwise). I hope others can learn through QA too - it opens up doors to their lives, as they interact with people around the world working towards a common goal. One might become a better person, learn more skills, meet more people, etc.

(yeah, this sounds very philosophical but that's the way it is)

What do you think about TB3 ?

It's a long time comin'. There's more coming after that, I'm sure, so it's not like TB3's the end of the world. However, our route to TB3 has been long and hard, so I hope it won't have to go through the same large obstacles again.

Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?

Sure - being part of a vision that other people around the world also have, is a satisfying experience. :)

How do you use Tb yourself ?

Shredder - feel free to shred my bugmail (it has only eaten up some mail once, that was a few months back), else stable with many Gbs of data in various mailboxes. I use Archive often, but seldom touch Filters / Spam filtering.

Extensions ? - Which one ?

Bugmail, DOMi, Gloda Plugin: Bugzilla, Lightning, MozMill (it's the future in automated QA UI testing, folks!), Google Calendar provider, ViewAbout.

Anything you would like to add ?

Yeah! Thunderbird QA welcomes contributors from all walks of life, with all sorts of skills. As long as you have the passion and the willingness to learn, there's sure to be something available for you to be a part of.

• Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins
  An interesting plugin for photoshop. Makes some pictures really look nice.
  (tags: plugin photographie hdr photoshop)

• nerd-venn-diagram-9420-1252236207-2.jpg (JPEG Image, 434x407 pixels)
  A nice way to explain a bit what I am :-)
  (tags: geek humor visualization picture)

In heaven, the police are British,
The cooks are French,
The engineers are German
The administrators are Swiss
And the lovers Italian.

In hell, the police are German
The cooks are British
The engineers are Italian
The administrators are French
And the lovers Swiss.

Je viens de tomber sur une publicité sous forme de vidéo pour me vendre une BD. Je trouve que c'est une forme assez intelligente d'utilisation de la vidéo. Elle me permet de voir ce que je vais retrouver dans l'album, tout en me rappelant les albums précédant :

La fait que j'ai bien aimé les albums déjà paru, aide sans doute beaucoup au fait que cette vidéo ma donné envie de découvrir la nouvelle série.

As I explained a some days ago, emails can be signed and/or encrypted. To build your web of trust it's nice to participate to Key signing parties. In order to make this efficient for the people attending Eu mozcamp 2009, I've decided to organize a Key-signing party during the event. We will sign keys Saturday October 3rd during the afternoon coffe break at 15:00 CET.
You will need a few things to participate :

• a key of course


• an ID (passport is prefered)


• a pen


• a printed version of the keyring (see below on how to get it)


• Follow the instructions given when the event will take place.

Getting a key is explained in gnupg's manual and all over the web.
You'll probably already have an ID with you as you'll be traveling to Praha (Prague) to attend the mozilla event.

To create the list of keys and participant we will use the biglumber service. I've chosen to use it both to try it and experiment with it as a key-signing service.
You'll need to register with the service this is achieved by uploading you public key there. Uploading the public key will create an account tied to the main email of your key. Once your account is created you will need to add your key to the event keyring. As other participant will do that the information needed to do the party will grow on it's own.
Keys submitted after October 1st 12:00 CET (Central European Time) - might not end up being signed by some participants. I'm setting this deadline so people have reasonable time to add their key, and time to print the keyring before coming to Prague.

Before leaving for Prague, you'll need to print the keyring and bring it with you. We will use keyring listings for the signing party.

As you can see the keyring already has my key, and the author of enigmail's key. Enigmail is the extension used by Thunderbird and Seamonkey to sign/encrypt emails.

Hier j'ai pris le TGV, pour faire l'aller-retour entre La haye et Paris (C'est donc le thalys que j'ai emprunté). J'ai voyagé en première classe et ait donc eut gratuitement accès à Thalysnet.

Il faut commencer par créer un compte - puis se connecter. La différence étant qu'il faut sans doute payer en seconde classe - je testerais la prochaine fois que je prendrais le TGV en seconde. Une fois identifié, le web fonctionne correctement, même si c'est parfois assez long.
Les protocoles de mails fonctionnent eux aussi très bien. Skype un peut moins bien - mais c'est sans doute du à la perte de quelques packets UDP. En étant sur internet le temps est passé beaucoup plus vite :-) Mon seul soucis a été la durée de vie de ma batterie. A l'aller la voiture n'était pas équipée de prise de courant , au retour, il y avait bien une prise , mais pas de courant dedans :-(

Les personnes qui gèrent musicbrainz, ont réécrit une bonne partie du moteur de recherche, qui permet de trouver les artistes, les labels et les CDs. Ce nouveau moteur n'est pas encore déployé, il a d'abord besoin d'être testé, comme expliqué ici. Si vous avez 5 ou dix minutes je suis sur qu'ils apprécieront vos idées ou mieux encore vos bugs.

Wayne as been dealing with many aspects of QA, he organized events and structured qa for a long time. His irc nickname is wsmwk, mine is _Tsk_, the interview was conducted over irc. I'll present other community members here in the next coming weeks and month.

_Tsk_:
Hi wsmwk , can you present yourself a little bit and tell us :

• Your age


• The Main OS you use


• And How long you've been a Thunderbird user

wsmwk:

• age 50 - on top of the hill!


• currently using win XP and Vista

_Tsk_:
How long have you been involved with Bugzilla and Thunderbird ?

wsmwk:
Thunderbird user since 2004 and before that the Suite and Netscape and it's ancestors.
Filed first bug in 2001. But became more active in 2005 when seeking an address book sync solution for Thunderbird.

_Tsk_:
How much time do you spend doing some triage per week ?

wsmwk:
It doesn't seem like much because it's a fun challenge. But probably 20-30 hours average per week

_Tsk_:
How big is your mailboxe(s) ? do you also use Thunderbird for News/RSS ?

wsmwk:
urk - TB crash
I have about 20,000 bugmail messages of bugmail, about 100meg of space of all mail related to mozilla. Total message store is ~1.5 gig, not including news.

wsmwk:
I do use Thunderbird news, preferring reading via news to google groups. (But I do miss my tin news reader)

_Tsk_:
I was a slrn user :-)

wsmwk:
RSS only for a few essentials. And worth noting, I use filtering on both news and RSS.

_Tsk_:
What do you find funny in the challenge of doing qa for Thunderbird ?

wsmwk:
The fun in the challenge is the satisfaction of ultimately helping someone (or the product) by getting a resolution to a problem, and of course the process of getting to the resolution - both the intellectual/sleuthing challenge of the detective work, and working with others all over the world.

_Tsk_:
are you still running 2.x are only running thunderbird nightlies at the moment ? Besides achieving a great work in cleaning up bugzilla last year - what is your best memory involving QA and Thunderbird ?

wsmwk:
Until mid 2008 I ran both version 2 and nightlies (on a controlled basis, not auto update) - on different machines. But for a year now I have used trunk builds exclusively.
A few great memories:

1. helping QA a release of bugzilla a few years back with the great folks that drive bugzilla,


2. helping to get palmsync working for Thunderbird 2


3. managing QA for TB alpha 2 release which was led by Mark Banner - building off of Gary's work in alpha 1

And various odd fun a few years back with things like threadmanager, and timer problems affecting chatzilla

_Tsk_:
Do you feel that the upcoming Thunderbird 3 is like one of your creation/baby ?

wsmwk:
Yes indeed. Much like creating and performing great music with other people (a challenging but rewarding process), improving Thunderbird with other people to build a substantially improved and more stable product is quite stimulating. And I am anxious to see many other people get to use it.

_Tsk_:
Do you consider yourself like an advanced Thunderbird user ? or more like a normal average user ?

wsmwk:
Advanced, yes. Although I don't use or understand all aspects of the product, I do tend to push products I use to their limit. In doing so, and through helping other people, I know more tricks and bugs than I care to think about.

_Tsk_:
Are you a extension user ?

wsmwk:
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that's an problematic story. As a tester, and trunk user one prefers to run with no extensions, or as few as possible both for ones own stability and to be assured that when you see a problem you know it's the product and not an extension. But running trunk as production basically makes it impossible to not run extensions.

_Tsk_:
can you list the extensions you use ?

wsmwk:
The ones I run are all highly stable ones (even though many are force enabled using tester tools): Addressbooks Synchronizer, Bugmail, Bugzilla Link Grabber, Clippings, Console², Crash Me Now!, FiltaQuilla, glodaquilla, JunQuilla, MozMill, Nightly Tester Tools, ProfileSwitcher, Restart Thunderbird, STEEL, TaQuilla, TEBE, ViewAbout.

_Tsk_:
Do you report a lot of bugs yourself ?

wsmwk:
Honorable mentions that I've also run in the past year: Display Mail User Agent, JS Console output redirector, Show InOut, and ThreadBubble,
Roughly 450 bugs since 2001, almost all of them in the last 4 years.

_Tsk_:
I think I don't have no more question, anything you would like to add ?

wsmwk:
Two things to add.
I wish more people understood how easy and fun it is to be involved.
And I'm looking forward to a great Thunderbird 3 release, and then address book syncing capability in Thunderbird.next
I missed an important extension - quotecollapse

I formatted a bit to make this chat readable