février 2010 Archives

Je suis à Ålborg dans le nord du Jutland danois. Ce soir j'ai diné à la Provence un restaurant dont une partie de la carte était en Français. J'ai constaté que trois personnes avaient pris des moules (sans frites), un couple et un jeune homme visiblement en famille.
Le couple a eut droit à un seau à champagne pour servir de poubelle de table, j'ai trouvé cela assez amusant.
Puis le jeune homme en famille qui utilise une cuillère à soupe afin de sortir la moule du coquillage .... J'ai trouvé cela hallucinant .. Pour moi les moules se mangent avec les doigts et c'est pour cela qu'il existe des rinces doigts!

Lorsque j'ai écrit mon billet sur l'objectif Canon EF 400mm F/2.8, je pensais ajouter quelques accessoires à ma panoplie de choses à transporter lorsque je veux faire des photos.

Canon EF 400mm f/1.8 with lenscoatJ'ai donc acheté une housse de camouflage lenscoat. L'idée derrière cet achat était double. En premier protéger l'objectif lorsque je me déplace en extérieur, contre les petits chocs et les éraflures. Le deuxième objectif étant bien entendu de pouvoir réaliser de meilleures photos d'animaux dans leur milieu naturel.
Lorsque j'ai reçu la housse, j'ai été surpris par le fait qu'elle ne soit pas faite d'un seul tenant mais de cinq parties distinctes. Et donc pour le montage de la housse il faut démonter le pied de l'appareil - chose pour laquelle j'ai eu quelques réticences. Une fois montée, la housse ne bouge pas, et elle protège bien contre les éraflures. L'objectif rentre toujours dans sa valise pour les déplacements en avion ou en voiture. Le premier objectif de la housse est donc atteint.

Dommage que le pied et sa bague de maintien ne soit pas couvert, ça laisse encore une grande zone bien blanche. Pour la partie camouflage je serais bien embêté si je devais me prononcer sur le fait que la housse apporte un avantage - car je n'ai toujours pas pratiqué avec intensité la photographie en affût. J'aurais tendance a penser que cela aide mais je ne puis en être certain.

We are going to release Lanikai 3.1b1. I'm looking for volunteers to work on a complete test using litmus. These are the areas that need to be tested :


  1. Install, shutdown, uninstall

  2. Folder Views

  3. Migration

  4. Updating Thunderbird

  5. Import

  6. Window configuration

  7. Toolbars and menus

  8. Account settings & Preferences (Options)

  9. IMAP accounts

  10. POP accounts (exclude Global Inbox)

  11. Gmail Accounts

  12. .Mac accounts

  13. Global inbox

  14. Mail composition

  15. Spell checker

  16. RSS account & subscriptions

  17. Newsgroups

  18. Message Aging

  19. Navigating and displaying messages

  20. Downloading and saving

  21. Image blocking

  22. Return receipts

  23. Proxies

  24. Offline, disk space

  25. Moving, copying, deleting messages

  26. Views and labeling messages

  27. Message filters

  28. Message search

  29. Address search

  30. Virtual folders

  31. Message Grouping

  32. Quicksearch

  33. Address books

  34. Junk mail

  35. Extensions

  36. Theme management

  37. Help

  38. Printing

  39. Master Passwords & password management

  40. Phishing, spoof detection

  41. Secure connections

  42. Digital signing, encrypting messages

  43. Software Update

  44. Find as you type (FAYT)/Quickfind

  45. Windows Search and Spotlight integration

Like I did in the past, can you send me a private email to ludovic@mozillamessaging.com, telling me on which os you would use to participate and three areas you would like to test ( I suggest that you make your choice in that way , 1st area something you care about and are eager to test, 2 area something you can easily test, 3rd something you never used before ) so I can organize things. The last two times this worked pretty well - except for some people ending up testing things they didn't care about. So i'm trying to make this better by letting you choose before hand. I still need to aim for 100% coverage so you still might end up testing areas you didn't ask for.

Fosdem 2010

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Like every year since 2004, this year I attended Fosdem. Like last year Fosdem was half work half fun - It's half work because I represent Mozillamessaging. I gave a talk, and the content of the talk is nicely summarized by my boss in his Thunderbird in 2010 blog post.
Then I gave a lightning talk on how to create a PGP key and sign emails - as I think signing emails is a nice feature that helps protect your identity - this was done in 5 minutes and I even made the audience laugh , when I started to generate random data by typing on the keyboard as I was running against time.
As usual I spent most of my time with Patrick the author of the enigmail add-on, and spend a lot of time in the mozilla room. I did go to some of the lightning talks (one was on certificates, the other on yet another linux distribution). I missed the very good talk about evil on the internet - but watched it since on youtube, a very interesting talk about fishing and how it works.
I attended the pgp signing party and got cold - next year I'll make sure to take my coat when attending the party:-). Of course I took many pictures around 146 but only kept only 17 to display. I met quite a few interesting people and had many interesting conversations - so on that social side it was very interesting. Plus I saw many ex-collegues and that was fun.

Flying Carpet?
Aujourd'hui J'ai réalisé un rêve de gosse , je suis devenu propriétaire d'un flipper. C'est l'une de formes de jeux d'arcade que j'adore. Cela vient sans aucun doute des séjours que j'ai effectués aux États-Unis étant petit. Je crois bien que mon ami Brian avait un flipper dans sa chambre. Ensuite lorsque nous étions à Ocean Grove, j'aimais bien aller jouer au flipper à Asbury Park sur la jetée.
Il y a un mois, comme ça sans vraiment en avoir l'intention, j'ai regardé sur un site de vente d'objets usagés s'il y avait des flippers et je me suis retrouvé sur le site de pinballpindoll.nl, de fil en aiguille j'ai demandé le prix et j'ai passé commande d'un "Tales of the Arabian Night".
Aujourd'hui j'ai été livré d'un excellent Flipper , aux couleurs un peu délavées, par un vendeur qui est lui-même collectionneur. J'ai donc pu tester le flipper avant de donner l'argent - j'ai eu un petit cours sur comment le programmer. Le tout avec 4 boutons. La première chose que nous avons faite a été de tester les contacts, la deuxième de mettre le volume sonore à 1, et même comme cela c'est assez fort, et c'est pour cette dernière raison que je plains mes voisins (voir ici pour quelques sons).
En quelques heures je l'ai déjà ouvert plusieurs fois, une fois pour chercher une bille bloquée, une fois pour tester un contact. J'ai mis mon nom dans les scores ! (bon c'est facile quand on commence par faire un remise à zéro des scores ). C'est sympa à l'intérieur, même si le flipper pue un peu :-) J'ai bien envie de de le bricoler - on peut mettre les roms à jour donc on doit pouvoir les programmer !!! (Faut juste que je trouve la doc).

Après quelques heures j'ai perdu la musique et un flipper sans musique ni effet sonore n'est pas un flipper. J'attend le SAV.

Crédit photos kentdoggydog sur flickr

Me :Hello Nathan, you've been doing a lot of triage work over the last few weeks, could you introduce yourself to our readers (age, location ... things you think a releveant) ?

Nathan :Well, I'm a 21-year-old software developer, living in sunny California - I don't specialize in C++ code, unfortunately, though. As a number of Mozillians seem to be, I'm a committed Christian.

Me :How long have you been a Thunderbird user ? What was the first version of Thunderbird that you used ?

Nathan :I've been using Thunderbird ever since I switched over from Outlook 2007 in mid 2007 - I must have gotten a pretty brand-new version of 2.0, but I didn't notice that at the time

Me :From that answer am I concluding correctly that you are a windows user ?

Nathan :Indeed so - I've been reasonably happy with Windows for half my life, though I've dabbled in Linux a good bit also. I even find Vista to be tolerable.. whether out of misplaced stubbornness, or some other reason, I don't know.

Me :As said earlier you've been giving a much appreciated help over the last few weeks, can you tell us why ?

Nathan :Well, I really started to dig into Bugzilla, finding and commenting on bugs I'd noticed, during the 3.0 release cycle, starting about b2. Then in December last year, I realized I had some extra time, so I volunteered for Litmus testing. One thing led to another, and just a couple weeks ago, I started watching my first QA contacts (only half a dozen, right now), and here I am!

Nathan :That, at any rate, is the sequence. My motive, on the other hand, is mostly that I know I can track down problems in and around Thunderbird fairly effectively, and there's definitely a need for help, so I'm trying to fill that as much as I can.

Me :Indeed , was the learning curve time consuming ? Was it difficult to get into it ?

Nathan :There's a fair amount of policy and guideline material to read first, but I actually like the formalization of it - it makes common sense and experience a lot faster to get a hold of. Filing bugs is definitely an art form, as it requires so much communication in such a small space.
That said, I don't think it took me more than a few weeks of a few hours a week to get into triaging, if even that - maybe because I'm already a developer? And it's not difficult, really, it just takes some persistence.

Me :Do you enjoy doing it ?

Nathan :Most of the time, yes, it's quite satisfying. I suppose that's because I'm taking a load off other people (developers, other QA), and also because I'm helping the reporters in most cases. On the other hand, I see some genuinely unclear and frustrated reports, and that's troubling, partly because I can't do much to fix those - maybe no one can, in fact. But it all balances out, and I'm still on the plus side of the ledger.

Me :How much time do you spend helping the QA effort , say weekly ?

Nathan :A good question. Right now, I'm probably spending maybe 5-15 hours a week on it - I'd give you more specific data, but my time-logging program seems to have gone kaput, so that's just my best guess. If I had to, I could easily reduce it just by watching fewer components - maybe down to 2 hours a week, or even less. But that'd be no fun!

Me :Any advice you would like to give to someone pondering about giving a hand ?

Nathan :Dive in. Like Wikipedia says, be bold! Any mistake can be fixed. But do read the instructions first, and spend some time looking at existing bug reports before making major changes - it'll save a lot of embarrassment later.
Oh yes, and one more thing:
Get another email account for bugmail!

Me :Lol !
Are there areas where you have more interest in than other ? if so which one(s) ?

Nathan :Right now, I'm mostly focused on the visible front end and the IMAP support - perhaps because I have nearly two dozen IMAP accounts, and am definitely a power user. (Scratching the ol' itch, you know?) Some of TB's internals and soon-to-be internals (Gloda, Jetpack, STEEL, etc) strike me as really cool, but they don't touch me as directly; maybe soon, though!

Me :Power user heh ! Do you use extensions ? If so can you lists the one you use ?

Nathan :Sure thing! But there's quite a lot..

Nathan :Add-on Compatibility Reporter, Nightly Tester Tools, Lightning Nightly Updater

Nathan :Bugmail, CompactHeader, CustomizeHeaderToolbar, Display Mail User Agent

Nathan :Mail Redirect, Signature Switch, jsLib, TagZilla, The Real Reply

Nathan :Diccionario español Argentina, Addressbooks Synchronizer, Duplicate Contact Manager, FiltaQuilla, JunQuilla, Lightning, TaQuilla, ThunderNote, ToneQuilla

Nathan :I keep trying ThunderBrowse, but for some reason, I can never quite get used to it.. I guess I'll probably never be a Suite/SM type of person. Seems a good extension, though.

Nathan :Those are just the enabled ones.

Me :What version of Thunderbird do you actually run ?

Nathan :3.0.1 mostly; I have a copy of 2.0.0.23 (re-installed just the other day, in fact) for troubleshooting, and maybe a nightly or so scattered around for the odd regression test. I'll probably start using 3.1b1 soon after it comes out, though I'll still maintain a 3.0.x install for testing.

Me :Anything you would like to add ?

Nathan :Hmm.. well, I would like to mention, on behalf of every QA person in existence, that it really helps if you follow the instructions on the Bugzilla entry form.. really really.

Nathan :I'd also like to thank the whole MoMo team for hanging in on the long road to 3.0! It's a great release.

Me :Thanks for helping and taking the time to do this. Next Time I'm in Mountain View we'll go for a drink !

At the moment If you want to run a bleeding edge version of Thunderbird, you need to choose between running 3.2x and 3.1x builds. In fact, it appears that most people willing to run bleeding edge are now running 3.2x builds.

Whilst our most dedicated testers are running 3.2x builds, the engineering team is working on bringing features and bug fixes to the 3.1x branch. There's a discrepancy here. This means that the issues that might exist in 3.1x have a greater chance to be discovered after releases rather than before. It's easy to fix that, instead of running 3.2x builds, we would like our bleeding edge user to use the 3.1x builds (you can find them at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.2/). By doing this simple switch you'll help to make the 3.1 series a great series.