Apple just created another social network around music named Ping. So this morning I thought let's give it a try and see what this can bring to my weblife. I'm already using last.fm and Sptotify as social web services. Like these two to access ping you need to download some software - ie the latest version of itunes.

The first thing one needs to do, is to create an account. I already had an AppleID, but didn't remember my password. So after a quick password reset, I tried to connect to ping. But my ID wasn't fully filled according to Apple - so I updated it. This included the need to give away credit card information as the ping service is really tied to the itunes music store.

Second things I usually do when I join a social network is quickly fill in my profile. On Ping I failed to upload a picture - but I can live being faceless. Then I choosed to share everything I was doing with my friend (this includes : Things I like, review or purchase). Added a few things to my bio page relating to music. I then could choose Genres I liked, but that's limited to 3, I don't get why this is restrained to only 3.

Now that my profile was "complete", I started looking around to see how I could connect to people I know (which is what social implies). So Apple nicely promotes artist I should follow - but these don't even fall into the categories of music I had selected (so to me it looks a lot like a marketing push - to try to sell me music, more than anything else), and three users. Frankly I have no clue why three users where presented to me as possible interest in following - so I didn't try following them. I started looking for a few friend, but was unable to locate any, probably because they don't use the service yet. Then I looked into the options I usually have on social networks - ie harvest the other social networks I'm present and find people that I'm connected on these services and also use Ping. Well this is a complete failure, the only thing I can do, is send emails to friend to invite them to join - manually. I don't think my network is going to grow a lot on Ping. Too bad because I do manage my music in iTunes so apple could have done something really nice here.

I've been listening to music and rating two new tracks in order to see if it had any effect on my profile (when I see it ) and the answer is no. So I'm there but no activity is visible. And I'm not willing to buy a track to get some activity.

Then I tried to play around - but ended up way to often on the itune store :-(. I really think that Ping isn't social, because it's not centered around me, but it's more or less centered around the store and selling music.

Things I think could have been done way better :

1. Import my friend from other services


2. Import my history to have some activity - I'm not going to rate all my music again whist I think , my music ratings are very social (they define my taste and with that what I might buy)


3. Let me share my profile with the world from something else than itunes (something a bit more "open").


4. Be more centered on me than the store.

I don't think I'll use Ping as it is a lot, but will continue to use last.fm and spotify for my social music needs.

I've been using Firefox 4.0b3 for a week or so now. As always when I switch to beta, I usually loose some functionality due to some extensions not being validated with the version of Firefox that I use. I've been using delicious to manage my bookmarks for the last two or three years, because it enables me to share my bookmarks (and I don't have a lot) with other computers, other browsers and with my friends (yes I'm a web social beast).

So this morning I was clearly happy to see that the delicious team had a nice extension in beta for me to try out. I was all happy about it and installed it. My bookmarks where back in place ;-) I then noticed that I had lost mouse gesture. I disabled the extension and woot mouse gesture was back. I then send a little email as a piece of feedback to the delicious mailing list.

Two hours later I was contacted on instant messaging by the Yahoo developer. And we tried to figure out what was going on. The only thing That was left was my personas theme. So I went to getpersonas.com , I then noticed that it solved my mouse gesture issue. Restarted Firefox and yet again lost gesture until I opened getpersonas.com in one of my tabs. So I have this weird bug about an extension, a theme that will work together if I load the web site where I got the extension from, I'd love to file a bug, but I have no idea, where/why/how.

I'm now Usul instead of _Tsk_ on irc.mozilla.org. It's one character shorter. It was available, and I'm a fan so I took it. I did that while watching the Dunes series on TV. I now have a nick that people can pronounce, I sure nobody will pronounce it the same way :-)

A panda walks into a bar and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich and shoots the waiter. Then he starts to leave. The bar tender shouts where you going. The panda shouts I'm a panda; look it up in the dictionary. The bartender walks to a dictionary and looks up "panda". It said " panda-noun.-a Tree dwelling animal that eats shoots and leaves."

If you look at mozilla's crash reported and peek at the crashes Thunderbird get, you'll see that the number of crashes is very low on Linux. That's because people use the packaged version of Thunderbird on Linux which is slightly different from the official release one (so they don't give us build symbols and disable the crash reporter). So from a QA and dev perspective we are loosing a lot of crash information , because we think we have a good Linux installed base. This is about to change, as one of the Major Linux distribution (SUSE Linux and it's sister openSUSE) are about to send us all those crashes that are happening. This won't be in the 11.3 releases per-se, but it will be from any update package that user will install from now on. Thanks Wolfir for making this happen !

I came back from the Mozilla 2010 summit be more like the web edition, two days ago. I'm now still fighting jet-lag but doing way better than yesterday :-). This was a awsome great meeting. I've met a bunch of very interesting people (some of which will unfortunately get spammed on some bugs) working on plenty of position at mozilla. It was nice to finally meet some of the people I've been interacting with online in the last year and a half (Hi , Wayne, rkent, Gary, Archeopteryx, Neil ....). And I ended up having a bunch of very interesting conversations with our contributors. I probably ended up spending too much time with the French contributors (that I've known through previous events like FOSDEM), playing belote contrée. I hadn't play the game for quite a while so no regrets at all. I had setup a PGP and CAcert signing meet. PGP went well as 15 people came and participated while CAcert , only some assurers (not even all of them) showed up.

I'd like to thank all the people who did a amazing job preparing and organizing the summit - it was perfect !

Ho and yes I did make a few pictures while there :

So I've finally picked dates and time for both the CAcert event and the PGP signing party add , these to your summit agenda. Both event will be held on July 8th 2010. Both event will have the same meeting point. The hotel lobby's front desk.

• PGP signing will start at 11:30 (please add your key to the keyring before coming)


• CAcert will be at 13:45

While Yesterday I talked about the PGP signing party. I'm also organizing a CAcert signing party. I already have two signed up assurers (and I will do some assurance myself). Time and date are still uncertain but will be announced as loudly as possible a bit before the event. If you are considering participating to it as an assurer, please consider the following points :

• add yourself to the wiki page


• Print and bring some blank CA cert form

If you intend to get assurance point, print some forms in advance as this will make the assurance process faster and easier for everyone.

The talks and schedule being done, the slot I had requested to organize a Key signing party (for both CAcerts and PGP/GPG) in during a breakout session is dead. The schedule isn't published yet so it still is a bit difficult to announce a date and time to meet. In order to prepare ourselves a bit more efficiently than with pen and paper, I've setup a Keyring on biglumber.
If you want to participate to the keysigning, please consider adding you keys to the event keyring http://biglumber.com/x/web?keyring=4739. Having everybody that wants to participate on file, will help people find each other in a PGP finding buddy quest. Than you can wander the attendee and try to find the person that you haven't met or signed keys with.
When I get a better idea of the schedule I will announce date and time where people will be able to meet and sign keys either on twitter or in #moz10 on irc.

I've asked for a Breakout Session at Whistler for this - I didn't get an answer yet, but as I need to get things on the grounds, so I'll post this anyway, so people can prepare themselves and if we don't get a room we can do it more informally

What ?

From the wikipedia article : Its decentralized trust model is an alternative to the centralized trust model of a public key infrastructure (PKI), which relies exclusively on a certificate authority (or a hierarchy of such). As with computer networks, there are many independent webs of trust, and any user (through their identity certificate) can be a part of, and a link between, multiple webs.

The web of trust is in other word , you as an individual, telling the world that you trust someone else and that you've tried to verify that person's identity to your best. And publishing that information so other will have access to it.

Why ?

Having a large group of people gathering from all other the world is the perfect occasion to build a good and very decentralized web of trust ( how often will you have a chance to meet someone from say Africa when you're living in say Northen Europe at the same time you meet a north American citizen). So meeting plenty of people is good makes the chance of meeting people who care bigger.

How ?

As said above there are plenty of ways to build web of trusts - I'm organizing signing parties for the ones I use : PGP and CACert. You'll need to prepare a few things if you want to join our signing event and That's why I'm posting this now, to give you the time to read documentation and prepare the paperwork that is necessary for the signings to go smoothly. As a side note I always find it very amusing that the web of trust is something very digital that requires a lot of pen/paper work. You can participate to both web of trusts of course, but for organizational reasons, I'll split the how and what you need to prepare in two.

CACert

CACert provides certificates that can be used to either sign/encrypt emails, software, or setup a SSL protected webserver.
To participate you'll need an account on cacert.org, two valid government issued ID (one is enough but two is better - most of you will have a passport so it's just about bringing another ID (like a drivers licence etc ..)). Bringing a few filled in and printed CAcert Assurance Programme
Identity Verification Form (CAP) will help things go smoothly. The CAPs can be found pre-filled when you have an account.
Recap :

1. An account on Cacert.org


2. At least one Governement issue ID (two is better)


3. A bunch of prefilled CAcert Assurance Programme
   Identity Verification Form (CAP).
   

Note I am a CACert assurer, I'm looking for other CAcert assurers (get in touch with me, to let me know you want to be an assurer there ).

PGP/GPG

OpenPG offers digital signing for software and email. And Also offers email encryption. To be able to participate you'll need to install a OPenPG compatible manager an create a key. Make sure to publish your public key (this will make things easier for the signing part). And we'll use the informal method signing method, so be sure to bring a good number of printed fingerprints to exchange with others.

Recap:

1. Have a published PGP key


2. Valid ID(s)


3. Printout of your PGP fingerprint to hand out to other participants

If you have questions send me an email

This Friday, May 28th 2010, in Munich Germany, there will be Key signing party during the osstreffen event. So if you are in the area, please peek your head there and let's grow the web of trust.

On Saturday July the 17th at 14:00 CET, There will be a key signing event at the Open Community Camp, tha's in Leiden in The Netherlands.. A key ring as been added to biglumber for people willing to use that.

As the QA lead for Mozilla messaging I'm looking for a few users. These should be willing to spend 30 minutes to an hour reading test and entering test results in litmus, mozilla's test management software. Those test are there to make sure that we are not regressing from earlier releases there. There are a few hundred of these tests, splitting the work between participants is a very important key to a successful test run. The more testers the more coverage we get out of these tests. If you're interested in helping just drop me an email with your computer's operating system. I'll send details instructions when we have RC1 builds and that we are ready for testing.

Today I ended up trying to buy mp3's from the french amazon store. I wasn't really paying attention - but after I had added my third track to my shopping basket I realized that none of the tracks had been added to it :-( First thing I did was to install the amazon download application thinking that it would solve my issue. It didn't so I read the error message more carefully and it stated that dues to geographical locations I was unable to buy the mp3 and that I needed to read the page more carefully. I did , but on any song/mp3 page from amazon there is no clue that buying mp3 is geographically restricted.
Now I live in nl and was trying to buy from amazon.fr, so I tried amazon.nl which redirects to amazon.co.uk , and I end up with the same issue. I don't understand why the music industry is making it so difficult for me to just buy music in digital form. If I buy CDs they'll get shipped to me. Why can I buy the CD, rip the mp3 and not just buy the mp3 myself ?

So just because I don't live in the right country I can't buy a mp3 but I can buy the CD form the same store.

I'm wondering if there is a complain filled against the music industry at the European commission ? This restriction is clearly against the European goal, which state that citizen and goods should flow easily across all Europe. Is the music trying to tell me that a digital mp3 file is not a good ? so if it's not a good, it's a service right ? But what applies to goods and citizen also applies to services.
Anybody knows how to file a complain, so I can get the right to buy my mp3 on a french store while living in another european country ? I would love to get some answers to the above questions ......

These days I spend plenty of time online and use web apps here and there. It seems plenty of things are/will be moving to the cloud and that everything will happen in the clouds in the future. So I've asked myself what do I install on my machines these days :

• Soft-phone for work
• Multi-IM client
• Email client
• Web browser
• Image manipulation Program

So let's try to see what's different from when my machine was an Atari Falcon.

• I didn't have a web browser
• I didn't have a mail client
• I had a fido client
• I had a assembler
• I had games

But then again I didn't have access to the internet, the way I do today. Seeing that , well maybe I'll do most of my things in a web-browser in 10 years , but I doubt that, I don't see myself doing image manipulation in a web browser, I'm maybe just plain wrong.

Over the last year - the Thunderbird QA team, has organized almost every week a triage event - where we were asking for contributors and users to come and give us a hand. The idea is that with more manpower and more people participating, we would get better bug reports and cleaner bug reports in the hands of the developers.
Usually we are very broad in the scope of the day. The few times we haven't been broad, and that we've been very concise on what we would be working on, more people showed up. With that in mind expect bugdays to be more focus on a very small area of Thunderbird in the next few weeks. If you want to participate, this change should make it easier for you to come and give a hand. This week's bugday is about deleting Attachments. Subject of upcoming bugdays aren't defined yet - they are generally announced on the Tuesday of the week. To get notified - either follow this wikipage or read mdat, where I usually post an announcement.

This was my first attendance to OSD (the former linuxforums I believe). The event is held on a yearly basis (almost) in the beautiful city of Copenhagen. Other events of the same kind I've attended previously include Apache Con Europe and Fosdem.
I've enjoyed the opening keynote and loved the closing one by Dan Klein, who I think made a really nice point about starting things from scratch instead of always patching everything we build - and he compared software with one town in Ohio, who's name I forgot. Funny and making a very interesting point. The other talk I attended on the Saturday was the one on the peek at google's infrastructure - didn't learn much at that one - but the earth/map demo at the end about image recognition was just awesome. The announced but not organized GPG/PGP keysigning party and CACert signing went pretty well (I think I got around 10 new signatures).
On Friday I followed a talk in danish on the evolution of computing over the years, I stayed in that room just because I loved the name of the talk Sarfarissoq - the slides where a mixed of english and danish which help to follow and understand the talk. One other talk was about using google wave as a replacement for email to manage scrums and computer related projects in general. I must say I disagreed with the talker even though I think that having a few specific widgets in your wave might help to make it easier to use. But the two or three times I've tried to use wave myself it was a complete disaster.
The two Other talks I followed in the afternoon were email related. One was a presentation of a product developed in the Netherlands called Zarafa and which acts as an alternative to Exchange. It mimics perfectly the web UI of Outlook , works with outlook if you deploy a special mapi dll before using it. Of course if works with Thunderbird even if the screenshots were from the 2.x era. The second talk was way more interesting and was given by Ralf Hildebrandt & Patrick Koetter - who have been mail admins for mail.python.org. They explain the various techniques they developed and put in place in order for that server to have a good reputation. The higher the reputation the better deliverability. The interesting point in the talk was how some users would interact with their webmail ui. Some just use the spam button to remove the email from their inbox - but by doing so they also damage the reputation of the server sending the emails, solution found was to unsubscribe the user from the mailing list so he wouldn't mark messages from the mailing list as being spam. Same thing for people who can't unsubscribe to mailing lists - but a new standard is being worked on to make management of subscription to mailing list easy for users.
On top of that I got a two nice new T-shirts, one from the event the other from the OpenSolaris enthusiasts. Overall I had fun and managed to learn a few things at the same time. So I would qualify the event as being informative.

Pictures I took of the event :

So I'm traveling in Danemark this week. While I was there I've been trying to find out of print CDs from Greenlandic musicians. My reasoning behind that was that, as Greenland is still a Danish territory - and most of the young greenlanders and up studying in dk. Meaning that some of them could have sold some of their music and that I could find some of those old titles that I've been looking for, for more than a year now (In case you're not following, I'm looking for the Initial Zikaza CD, two unnuaq band CDs, and a few other rare stuff).
So I've been in Århus and Copenhagen and I visited some second hand shops carrying old CDs and old LPs - In the first I visited I found a very old CD from Rasmus Lyberth (made by Rasmus Lyberth). The second shop I visited, which had a way bigger collection of CDs, I asked the store owner - who looked at me and said : "huh, greenlandic music ?". I had a quick look and didn't find any title. In CPH I started in Accord.dk and was told no, we have nothing, but try the shop at the next corner. I went in it asked and was looked with a " Why would I have such music here", and I didn't look. I came back to that same shop the next day to have a look , but was unable to find anything. While the shop owner did recognized he knew about Sume, Julie and Rasmus Lyberth. He was very helpful. Then I ended up in another shop, whose shop keeper looked like an old grown up hippie. I started looking and then went to the shop owner and asked. Man was he nice - we started talking about music and Greenland and he gave me one website where I should contact a shop owner and then told me that back in the 60's he had participated in the making of a release of a group from Greenland called "The eskimos" and gave me a place where I could find the music. So It seems sume wasn't the first group of rock from Greenland as I though it was. Next step in my quest, get that earlier piece of Greenland music and organize a trip to Greenland to raid shop and try to find if they don't have any leftovers ....

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.

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.

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.

The people in charge of the quality of Thunderbird , are organizing on a weekly basis a quality team event. These event cover most of the area where quality is involved. This means testing new feature, testing pre-release version of the software, and maintaining the known bug database. If you come to think about it, none of these activities require to be done on a given date, so why bother with an "event" ?

First of All the event is virtual, it happens online - this is for practical reasons, it would be very difficult to have people living in Singapore, the US east coast or The Netherlands to meet and work in the same physical place. We do bother to have an event because sometimes when looking at a problem or at something new being able to ask other if they see the same thing is valuable, because they might know something you don't or might have encountered the same issue earlier etc ... The value of the event is communicating with other people doing the same thing as you do, but with a different perspective. This is specially true for people who want to join. Asking the people that have been doing quality for quite some time will be available to help new comers.

We are using a distributed chat system called IRC, which is available with dedicated clients or through a web interface. As all the people available for a chat are not always in front of the chat window, you might not get an immediate answer. Typing a name a person being in the chat room will help you get noticed and get a faster answer. And don't be afraid to ask or participate , it's not that difficult.

Now that you know how those events take place, you might be interested in figuring out the subject that is going to be going on during the event. We publish a wiki page for each event that take place, and we have an other page referencing all past and future events (well most of the future events are being announced on a weekly basis). This week for example will be focused on duplicate events. I'm also announcing the events on Thunderbird dev mailing list.

I'm wondering if going to Opensource day is worth it. They are having they Call for papers right now. Anybody willing to share how it was the previous years ?

After reading this interesting article, I decided to figure out If I needed a new key and if it was worth the trouble to start a new stronger key.
My needs are much simpler than the debian project's. I don't sign software and I don't encrypt email much. Over the last 5 years I might have sent and received maybe 4 encrypted emails. I'm not a big fan of encryption per se. I am however convinced that signing emails is a good way to fight impersonation. Something that spammer tend to over use these days. So my primary need is to sign emails. For that I don't really need a stronger key - I just need to make GnuPG's default a bit stronger.

I've edited my my gpg.conf file and added the following to it :

enable-dsa2
personal-digest-preferences SHA256 RIPEMD160 SHA1


This ensure that the signing algorithm is stronger - without going through the hassle of creating a new key.

Dear lazy web,

I'm looking for a keyboard with the following :

• Bluetooth


• Mac Keys layout


• trackpad - as I hate moving my hand to get the mouse

If I can choose a french layout that would be a +. Google isn't really helping there.

And are a Enigmail user - please update to the latest enigmail nightly. As previous versions or some previous nightlies (from a few weeks to a few month) , might crash Thunderbird. Actually we believe that our top crashers is due to incompatible versions of enigmail being installed.

From an email to the enigmail mailing list :
I am starting to prepare a new version of Enigmail for Thunderbird 3.0.
I think that after more than 8 years of development, it's about time to
finally call it "1.0"!

For this, of course I'd like to have as many translations as possible
:-) Please send your translations directly to me. In case you don't know
how to translate Enigmail, instructions can be found here:
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download/langpack.php#instruct

Attached is the diff file between v0.96.0 and the next version -- as you
can see it's really not much. In case your language wasn't updated from
v0.95.7 to v0.97.0, I have also added the previous versions' diff.

Please het in touch with patrick if you want to give a hand.

If you are crashing or having error messages while trying to send email, and that you are using a shredder nightly, and using enigmail to sign/encrypt your emails, consider updating to the latest enigmail nightlies which fixes those issues.

I'm going to start a new meme - as I find these funny and sometimes useful.

Rules :

1. Copy the rules in the beginning or at the end of your post


2. Link to the person who tagged you


3. Give the 5 websites you find useful, or that you use the most. Try to explain why !


4. Tag 5 people


5. The meme doesn't need to stay in english :-)

My Five favorite/most useful websites are :

• flickr, as photography is my passion , I couldn't share my pictures so easily without flickr.


• Le monde, a French newspaper, a good way to stay in touch with what's going on in my own country.


• upcoming , a nice service to find what's going on around , easily share it with friends.


• google - without which the internet wouldn't be what it is today I mainly use maps and search


• This website, which gives me the freedom to express myself and broadcast it to the world.

Now the fun part, people I'm tagging :
Flore , because becoming a mother doesn't imply stopping blogging.
Stéphane, because he uses the internet in a very different way than I do.
Allan , because he's moved on the other side of the pond and as been quiet since.
Smokey, because without him Camino wouldn't be in such a good shape.
Davida, for his vision.

If everything goes well By next week we should be building Thunderbird 3.0 release candidate 1. Once that version of Thunderbird is ready it needs to be tested. The testing effort is nothing but reading, doing reading and pressing buttons on a Web page. As there are good chances for that build to become the final 3.0, the Thunderbird Quality Assurance (QA) team wants to make sure that this build is tested to the maximum extend possible. For that we are organizing a week long effort to cover the Full Functional Test (FFT) suite Thunderbird has.

A FFT is made up of 45 areas of tests. Each area containing from one to thirty tests. Each test looks like the screen-shot below :

As you can see there are two columns. One containing what to do on the left. While the right column contains what to verify. The lower part of the screen being used to report how the the product behaved with regards to the test. Nothing really complicated.

As stated above there are a good amount of testing. To test Thunderbird 3.0 RC as extensively as possible the QA Team is looking for volunteers that are willing to devote from 20 minutes to an hours to do some tests. The idea is to divide work. Instead of having everybody concentrating on the Installation phase - we can have people looking at some parts of Thunderbird that are not tested so often. To Participate to this effort you will need :

• From 20 minutes to an hour.


• An account on Litmus - the tools where the test are and the result will be.


• An account on bugzilla - so you can report bugs if you find some.


• To send me an email (see below) so I can divide the work and let you know what to tests.

As you might have noticed I'm asking no more than one hour, while I said the effort would last a week. This is to give you future participants more flexibility on when you can/should do your tests. It will also let myself and a few other plenty of time to run as much test as possible. And lastly we will offer our help online.

I'm asking people to sign up so I can divide the work, and send them an individual email when the builds are ready. That email will contain precise instructions on what to test, on how to get in touch with the QA team if you have an issue while testing and don't know what to do. To sign up send me an email at ludovic@mozillamessaging.com , with the following information :

• What OS you'll be testing on (we need a few more mac users and linux users btw)


• What kind of account you have (ie. POP, NNTP, RSS, IMAP)


• Anything you would like to test in particular (your interests)

Testing now is the best way for you to enjoy the new features of Thunderbird 3.0 and to make sure the things you care about are working.

Can you introduce yourself abit to our readers :
How old are you ?

37 years old (too old I know :-( )

Where do you live ?

Calabria in southern Italy

What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?
How long have you been using it ?

Thunderbird is my default (and only) email-client since 2003.

What os/platform do you use it on ?

Windows XP

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

Now I'm interested at all areas, anyway at the beginning I was
interested in particularly .at address book component and tabs

Why do you participate in the quality effort ?

I love TB and I like to try to improve it , as I can

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

It's very funny... and instructive.

What do you think about TB3 ?
Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?

Yes a little bit... and I like it too much

How do you use Tb yourself ?
Extensions ? - Which one ?

I use TB in my environment works (I'm a developer in my real life).

My extension are:

• Bugmail 1.6.1


• Dizionario italiano 3.1


• DOM Inspector 2.0.3


• Enigmail 0.97a


• FiltaQuilla 0.2.20090223


• Lightning 1.0pre


• Lightning Nightly Updater (Unofficial) 0.9.090618


• MinimizeToTray 1.5


• Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.2


• Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate) 0.3.2


• Silvermel XT 0.1.2

Anything you would like to add ?

Thanks to Mozilla and Thunderbird QA boys.

Me:
So can you introduce yourself and gives us your age , the place you are from ,  the OS you use thunderbird on daily ?

nshopik:
my name is Nikolay Shopik, I'm 27 years old was born and grow up in Moscow, Russia. I'm on XP but have plans upgrade to Windows 7 as soon it will available

Me:
How long have you been using Thunderbird , what do you use it for (Email, Rss) ?

nshopik:
If I'm not mistaken since end of 2006 or early 2007, I only using Email. I was doing RSS in stand-alone app till 2004 and replace it with web based rss readers.

nshopik:
forgot to add I'm reading news too

Me:
Now let's get to the QA specifics part ....

Me:
How long have you participated at triaging Thunderbird MailNews bugs ?

nshopik:
I've been "signed up" in April 2008

Me:
can you described your sign-up process ? was it complicated ? was it hard to become an active member ?

nshopik:
My first bugs dates back to 2007, so I know little bit. Well it's not so difficult at all. I have done QA in my past for my own programs and friends of mine. Only problem you will face to be active member is free time

Me:
How much time do you spend helping Thunderbird quality assurance ?

nshopik:
When I was started in 2008 it took about of 8-12 hours per week. Now I have little bit lower available time and change my priorities on component specific bugs this takes no more 3 hours per week

Me:
Which components do you have special bonds with ?

nshopik:
I'm mostly interested in enterprise/universities environment specific bugs.You know every year TB is losing more and more regular users who tend to use web-based email. They already have problems understand all type of technologies and to know what IMAP or SMTP servers are and what its hostnames. People can barely remember their passwords contain 8 charters.

Me:
nshopik:  this mean Ldap, kerberos . Is it fun participating ? what do you get from helping (joy , pride) ?

nshopik:
Yeah - LDAP, Kerberos, Certeficated based auth, Autoconfiguration via MCD and core IMAP, SMTP protocols. I'm really enjoying helping resolving issues, there some of pride. I'd like to help someone to resolve issue, this encourage people to suggest such product to others instead switching app. And others could be another user or who can even help with providing patch to resolve issue. Also I...
...don't like monopoly of Microsoft email-based products in enterprise segment. But I'm not MS hater I was Microsoft ONLY IT guy in past.

Me:
So do you feel like Thunderbird 3 is something that you've helped build ? do you feel like it's a bit your baby ?

nshopik:
Definitely. Yeah little bit.

Me:
Do you use extensions ? if yes can you list them ?

nshopik:
Not much, nightly tester tools, gcontactsync, that's it.

Me:
Anything you would like to add ?

nshopik:
I wish enterprises spend more resources on open source app like TB instead of throwing it out just after they find out it doesn't support just one feature or has some imporant bug for them unfixed. They do have much more money and/or money to do this.
and/or manpower to do this

Me:
Thanks a lot for your time

nshopik:
Sure, always welcome

Just received an email from Thawte :

Dear Ludovic Hirlimann, Over the past several years, security compliance requirements have become more restrictive, while the technology infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements has expanded greatly. Despite our strong desire to continue providing the Thawte Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services, the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require. As a result, Thawte Personal E-Mail Certificates and the Web of Trust will be discontinued on November 16, 2009 and will no longer be available after that date.

Deciding to conclude these services was a difficult decision for us to bear, specifically because of the community that has been built around these products over the years.

To express our gratitude and sincere appreciation for being a part of our Thawte community, we would like to offer you up to $100.00 off the purchase price of our SSL and/or code signing certificates.

If you would like to take advantage of our offer, please forward this email to our sales department. Their contact details are listed at the foot of this message. Please note that this offer expires on November 16, 2009.

We have also made a special arrangement with VeriSign regarding replacing your personal email certificate. VeriSign's exclusive offer to you is for a FREE 1-year replacement personal email certificate - a $19.95 value. This offer will be open for 2 months after the service is discontinued and will no longer be available after January 16, 2010. Simply follow appropriate link below to request your certificate:

That email is not even signed - while the service was about digitally signing emails. But let's see the nice point in the email, they give you an alternative which is free for the first year. A good initiative, plus if you used to be involved actively in the Thawte web of trust, you get a free bonus.
I browsed quickly on the verisign website and it took me a while to locate the equivalent cert (and that page states that Apple Safari is a compliant email client).
The bad part is the lost of the community aspect of Thawte's certificates - the web of trust is gone. I was unable to find a web of trust mentioned on verisign's website.

If you are looking for other alternative - I know of Two. The first one is from Startcom, which offer the same Free certs Thawte will cease to offer. StartCom also offers Web of trust services using http://www.startssl.org/ as a website. The other good news about startcom is that the founder is involved with Thunderbird's qa process.

The other is the of course Pretty Good Privacy, Gnu Privacy Guard :-) which is based on the web of trust concept.

Next Thursday , the Thunderbird quality assurance team is conducting an online social event. The goal of that event is to migrate some volunteer users from their current 2.0.0.x Thunderbird profile, to the new 3.x series. If you are running older versions like 1.5 or 1.X series, you are welcome to join too :-)

The QA team wants to find out any issue(s) that might come up when people are upgrading, so the developers have time to fix them before we ship 3.0 final.

We are doing this on a specific date in order to provide support to the people who want to participate and figure out with them how to fix, report the issues they are having post-migration. This will happen online through a web based real time chat (the same discussion will be available on irc in #tb-qa)

So we are looking for brave souls willing to give a try to Thunderbird 3.0b4 and actually running Thunderbird 1, 1.5, 2.0 ...... so if you use any of those versions to :

• Read newsgroups


• Read Feeds


• Pop email


• Imap email


• or any combination of the above

Consider joining the event and come enjoy the new features of the Thunderbird 3.0 series (even if it's still a beta).

This event will be held on Thursday October the 15th - The team as set up a web page with more information. So write down this date on your calendars and join us next Thursday and switch from older versions of TB to the latest.

If you are wondering the team as switched a long time ago - we still have a few machines that we will migrate along side other people who come and participate.

• Alianaak! Vol. 1
  A very nice album with : Mariina Unnuaq Band Ulf Fleischer G-60 Zikaza Ole Kristiansen Century Schoolbook Taaq

  Two tracks per artist

  
  
  (tags: greenland CD music)
  
  

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Once upon a time, a long time ago I discovered something called Pretty Good Privacy (pgp in short) and tried to use it on my Atari to communicate with a friend - that really never worked.
10 years later I installed gnu-privacy guard and started using it so sign emails. The idea at that time was - that if every email was signed then we could easily filter for spam. I have encrypted a few emails - but my correspondence doesn't need to be generally encrypted. With signed emails we would come back to emails without spam - a useful tool to communicate. So I started trying to install gpg on my families computers so we could all signed our emails. That failed - they didn't see the point. And I myself got tired of having all my emails look like spam as they were all starting like :
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
So I stopped using gpg and signing emails as I didn't see the point in putting those in my emails and making them harder to read for their recipient.
I recently picked up interest in signing email again, as there are a few ways to do it that are not intrusive for the other users. Both methods are involving S/mime, one will work with certificates. The other works with pgp. So I've started signing my email again with my key. This let's me know for sure if the email I'm getting is signed and I can encrypt emails containing sensible information easily (say I need to share a password, I will then encrypt the email.).

So why do I use gpg over certificates ?

• Setting up gpg is way easier than a certificate at least for my geek mind. Certificates are the solution for big corporation where HR/IT can ensure a proper process for certificates. For my personal use or for my family domain it would be too much of a hassle.


• One feature that is provided easily with gnupg is the web of trust, which will let me know if/how I can trust the sender of that specific email (email as to be signed of course).


• Last but not least I can use my key to sign software

.

Today my ISP was down for a few hours. I work from home - so having a connection is important for me and my work.
This is very annoying when some of the work you need to accomplish happens online. It's not the first time, but last time it was over six months ago and I had kind of forgotten.
Next time I'd like to have a backup plan. I have a few options :

• Add an ADSL line (cheapest as can be.).
• Get one of those 3G dongles.
• Figure out where I can get Free Wifi in my area and move there when my line as an issue.

I'm wondering which of these solutions I should adopt. Any ideas, sharing of experience is welcome.

Last week the Mozilla Messaging Team met in Vancouver for a All-Hand. This was a good opportunity for me to take pictures of the people that work for Momo. If you want to have a look at what some of the people in #maildev look like here's your chance : (and yes it's in Flash, bash flickr for that).

Update: for planet readers the flash slideshow is not visible you'll need to come to the blog entry to see it :-(

Like me you are probably very annoyed when the application that you are using crashes. This usually means loosing work, or loosing data. When this happens, the system or the application usually launches a crash reporter - this will gather information and send it to the developers. With that developers will be able to try to figure out what is going wrong, or how you are using the application in a way that they don't.
But some time they can't figure it out for a lot of reasons. One thing you as a user can do to improve that is write a small comment before sending the bug report. That little comment should say what you where doing when the crash occurred. For you filling in that little box and telling us what happens is maybe 30 seconds , for us in qa, for the developers it can be a very good indication on how to reproduce the bug and thus fix it.

So next time your application crashes take the time to fill in a comment before sending the crash report.

Over the last few months I've been traveling a bit and I've started using website that aim at making the process easier. I've dent a few things already when I started using tripit a few months back, in the last month and a half I've been traveling quite a bit, to Thailand, Finland and Canada. I've invited my linkedin contacts to join tripit as I like the idea of sharing my work related trip with present and past co-worker. The other point that made me invite was the fabulous feature of plans@tripit.com.
This feature is the feature that will make me continue to use tripit.com. For every trip I book, I usually end-up having an email confirmation in my mailbox. If I forward this email - it's most likely going to be processed by tripit. Trip it will then create a "trip" with the dates and then write down a summary with flight numbers, hotel reservations, and phone numbers. So before boarding I can print that and have everything on one sheet of paper. I could also synch that information to my iphone (bat as I don't own an iphone, for the moment I don't). I can also export all that data to a calendar - that I can then synch to my nokia phone. You can also see where you friends are going, make sure your trips are not shared. For each destination, you'll get the wikipedia page with the best images from flickr tagged with the name of the place you are going to visit. And if you wish to figure out what is going on tripit propose a few upcoming event from the eventful website - so if you feel like attending a Jazz concert while staying on the other side of the planet, you might find where to go.

I had been using dopplr before I used tripit. My network on dopplr is smaller than on tripit, but overall dopplr offer way more features that I use and will use than tripit, and I can easily get the benefits of tripit ported to dopplr.
The first thing I get from dopplr is the ability to import calendars. The first thing I've set up is a bridge between tripit and dopplr - this let's me use the plans@tripit feature and get the trip imported and showing on dopplr. This feature also let's me import events I've subscribed to on the upcoming.yahoo.com website. So with dopplr I can aggregate some of the calendars that are exported from other websites I use. Of course it would be simpler If I could use plans@dopplr.com.
One other thing I like about dopplr is that I can use my OpenID to authenticate on the website - I don not need to give more credential and more personal information to use the website.
Besides calendar integration, the other feature that I love about dopplr, is that dopplr let's me add and publish content. I can easily add , restaurants, hotels and place to visit for any destination dopplr knows about. For some of these destination, it seems that dopplr has partnered with lonely planet and has imported some places and tips and trick from that website. One other benefits of having places is that for every place know by dopplr you can find a specific tag. That tag can be used to tag pictures for instance - and on flickr , this will add a little badge on the picture page. So people seeing your picture will be able to figure out details about it (These can be phone number, url for a website - reviews). I also like the fact That I can easily add a mini-review for a restaurant for instance. One thing I dislike in the current version of the website is that places are paginated : say that for instance you are looking at the City of Vancouver , British Columbia and looking at restaurants, if there are three pages of restaurant you need to go thru the three pages (maybe, if you are unlucky) to find it if it's on the website, it would be nice if these places (restaurants, hotels, sites to see) would be searchable from within the place I'm looking at.
Dopplr is also present on the iphone and integrates with both linkedin and Xing (tripit does linkedin only.). The social features in dopplr are richers as I can see who in my network visited the place I'm looking at - I then can fire them an email to figures a few things out. When I'm preparing a trip I use dopplr to see where to stay and eat, read reviews, ask questions - use their flickr integration to figure out what's to see and how other fellow photographer took the pictures.
As to dealing with trip details I use tripit make sure that the trip is exported in a calendar so I get it on dopplr. If I feel like attending a concert or anything else in that vein I'll have a look at both tripit and upcoming.

Yesterday while I was flying from Amsterdam to Vancouver and discovered that I could send SMS and/or Emails from within the MD-11, using the individual console that is provided to each passenger. So the process of sending an email goes like :

1. Take out the console controller
2. Navigate to the SMS / email item
3. Pass your credit card into the console
4. decide between SMS/email
5. Write your email with the virtual keyboard
6. Send it

each item sent is factured $2.5. The emails are supposed to be short like sms messages (not really clear on that). So I wrote a message to my self to see how it worked ! Using the virtual keyboard is clumsy, as you use the four direction arrows to select each letter. The virtual keyboard doesn't offer any option to support accentuated letters.

So it seems the message is first sent to a gateway and then to the users, the headers look like :

Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs623508wej;
Sun, 9 Aug 2009 10:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.151.78.19 with SMTP id f19mr1236114ybl.182.1249838547080;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from post1.aircom.aero ([57.77.136.81])
by mx.google.com with SMTP id 5si6771352gxk.115.2009.08.09.10.22.25;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:26 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) client-ip=57.77.136.81;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) smtp.mail=Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
From: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Reply-To: Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
To: me@xxxxx.net
Subject: Message from a passenger onboard a KLM flight
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2009 13:22:24 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <20090809172224.AC1D1662F@post1.aircom.aero>

Your message has been submitted for delivery.
Message delivered to Email Gateway

------- OriginalMessage -------
To: yyyy@xxxxx.net,me@xxxxx.net
From: me@xxxxx.net
CC:
Subject: depuis l'avion
Body Text: ams-yvr coucou
- Message sent on board KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. You can reply during the flight; this will be delivered directly to the sender's seat on board the aircraft


An then the headers for the full message look like :

Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs623507wej;
Sun, 9 Aug 2009 10:22:26 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.151.46.3 with SMTP id y3mr2710025ybj.133.1249838545258;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:25 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero>
Received: from mconnect.aero (mx3.gmsmail.com [57.250.220.30])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 3si5665141gxk.105.2009.08.09.10.22.23;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:24 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.250.220.30 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of 300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero) client-ip=57.250.220.30;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.250.220.30 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of 300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero) smtp.mail=300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero
X-SITA-SMTP-ID: QhhOXlML62FUQS9A+yvT2g
X-Junk-Score: 2 [X]
X-SpamCatcher-Score: 2 [X]
Received: from [10.4.143.48] (HELO sms-gw1jao.prod1.gmsmail.com)
by imail1jao.mconnect.aero (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.2.13)
with ESMTP id 37964392; Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:22:27 +0000
Message-ID: <3190310.1249838544256.JavaMail.root@192.168.220.37>
From: ludovic hirlima <300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero>
To: xxx@xxxxx.net, me@xxxxx.net
Subject: depuis l'avion
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: inflight@message.aircom.aero
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:22:27 +0000


The good news is that you don't get charged if the message is not sent before you land.

Update

As noted in the comments I had not obfuscated my email address , I'm now getting spammed - using that email that I had not obfuscated !!! here's the spam :

Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs678458wej;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:15 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.150.215.20 with SMTP id n20mr9291591ybg.135.1249943234261;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:14 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from post1.aircom.aero ([57.77.136.81])
by mx.google.com with SMTP id 4si10896287gxk.114.2009.08.10.15.27.12;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:13 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) client-ip=57.77.136.81;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) smtp.mail=Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
From: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Reply-To: mrsamkwame@gmail.com
To: me@xxxxx.net
Subject: GOOD DAY
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:27:11 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <20090810222711.E9C3E6661@post1.aircom.aero>

From Sampson Kwame Dear Friend, My name is Sampson Kwame I am the regional manager of Standard chartered bank of Ghana tarkwa branch in the western region of - Message sent on board KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. You can reply during the flight; this will be delivered directly to the sender's seat on board the aircraft

Unlike previous Years. I came of open community camp a bit more this year. I gave a talk on the Mozilla ecosystem on Monday and listened to a few others.
One nice talk was about how the sysadmins at optiver are using Django and Puppet, to do some asset management. The kind of asset management they do is geared towards unix/linux based servers. The information is gathered with templates from Puppet and feed into a custom build DB - django is used to access the data in the db and feed nagios and custom admin scripts. Very interesting way of doing asset management.

started yesterday. I'll probably be working from there most of the week. Want to talk about Thunderbird, QA, Mozilla, just drop by and I'll listen.

• Hotmail Finally Enables POP3 Worldwide - Hotmail - Lifehacker
  (tags: hotmail configuration mail thunderbird)

Build1 can be grabbed, and it needs love from Thunderbird users, in particular from pop3/Pop users.

If you take the time to download the build and find issues with it - make sure to file a bug in bugzilla and mark that bug blocking bug 489128

Like last year and the year before I'll be attending the Open Community Camp that is organized near Leiden, The Netherlands.
This year however I will be speaking about what mozilla.org is and provides , it's missions etc .....
If you are involved with Thunderbird (Mvl, MacMel, ...), I'd love to have a beer face to face with you guys, I think the Camp is a great place to meet you. What do you think.

I use Jaikoz to tags my mp3 and make sure I have a clean music collection. In the last two weeks I had issue retrieving PUID from musicip.

Musicip had a few server issue as their MusicIP Mixer was unable to analyze the new tracks I wanted to submit. That got fixed. I even used MusicIP Mixer to listen to new songs.

• While last.fm bases recommendation on what people listen, musicip does it by analyzing the music - results are different but it's another good way to discover new artists).


• Their iTunes plugins is only available on windows.


• Would also be nice to have a songbird add-on.

So back to my issue - I could not retrieve those puid that are unique to a piece of music :-(. I thought It was a bug in Jaikoz - but I updated Jaikoz twice during that time period. I then into reading the documentation to log what was going on. I then discovered that jaikoz had a local database. I removed it and Jaikoz was able to retrieve the Puid !

For those who are wondering why Thunderbird 3.0 b3 is not out yet the explanation is available at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dmose/archives/2009/05/thunderbird_3_beta_4_added_1.html

This upcoming Thursday the QA team of Thunderbird is organizing a Linux Bug day - we will try to target and add information to bugs that affect the linux platform. With the help of packages maintainers from Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu, people using these distribution will be able to install a nightly build of Thunderbird using the systems package management tools. The bugs that we would like people to comment on are in the UNCO state - meaning - they need more information (crash stats, steps to reproduce, etc ...) for to be able to be fixed by the developers.

More information on the event and how to participate is available at : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2009-05-14

So yesterday Joost released a new version of jigsaw. Jigsaw is a music box that uses last.fm to aggregate metadata - and figure out what music video you might enjoy (it find music I really like when I use my last.fm account). So now when last.fm does not play what I want I can use Jigsaw. This new version as a few more control than the previous one. Things that are still missing :

• scrobbling what I listen to via joost to last.fm


• being able to use identi.ca (identi.ca as a joost group)instead of twitter


• link to my joost account so what I listen to goes to my joost feed

Since last Friday, auto-configuration as been enabled in Thunderbird nightlies. This means that configuring an email account will just be - in most cases - your email , your password and your name and Thunderbird is going to "guess" the settings. Sometimes guessing works - sometimes it does not. When it does not we get the information from a list that we maintain. Unfortunately we can't have account for all Internet service providers all over the world - this is why I'm writing all this, you can help us by making the list bigger, adding your ISP will help (especially with security settings for authentication.) Instructions and list are editable.

So the release date for Thunderbird 3.0b3 the last beta of Thunderbird 3.0 is approaching. This means that features are landing, and that we need to make sure that everything works correctly. To do so two things need to happen, first the new features needs to be tested on a broader scale than the development team can do (more hardware combination, servers combination, more extensions etc ... ) and at the same time nothing else should regress.

To achieve the first task - we have organized a Testday. It's a day where we invite everybody to test the new features recently added to Thunderbird. Why do we do it on a specific day ? It's easy to gather people on one day. It's easier to give people interested in joining the test effort information on what's new, how to test the new features and describe them. It's also a great way to have different people testing the same part to talk to one another. We traditionally do that on irc on #bugday. I think the communication while testing is important for at least two things - it helps you get the help of other people if you are having some issues while testing. It might help you file your first bug - if you are unsure of things just ask some people will be glad to help. As a way to communicate more efficiently, mozillamessaging as setup a web base chat, if you don't want to use irc just point you browser to chat.mozillamessaging.com and talk to us there.
Thursday April the 23rd 2009 is the day where the new features are going to be tested. Information on what will be theres to be tested is visible here.

To make sure that Thunderbird 3.0b3 will be of the highest quality available we will also run a series of tests, that have been run for alpha1 and for beta2. We don't organize an event for that - because it takes much more time to do regression testing than testing the new features. To participate to this testing you will need an account on litmus, some time, and a build dated from the 28th of April 2009. To test you need to point your browser here, and decide which of the tests you want to run, read the instructions to run the test and report the results from your run. If the test is not clear - say so , so we can try to make the test clearer. If the test does not pass, meaning you have found a bug, please make sure to create a bug in bugzilla. Not creating the issue in bugzilla means that the testing you have done is going to be lost .

Thanks in advance for the time you are going to spend to make Thunderbird a great quality product.

The Thunderbird quality assurance team is most of the time available on irc, so if you have question just come and ask. As stated above the web based chat is an experiment.

So I'm building a CD collection of CDs from Greenland - because I got caught in a concert last year while I was visiting. On most of the CD covers you'll be able to find Tal/Erin or a variation of this. I've guessed that Tall was lyrics but to be sure I asked the owner of Atlantic music and the answer is :

• Taalliortoq (Taall.) means the person who's written the lyrics.
• Erinniortoq (Erinn.) means the person who's written the music.

Linux users use their distro's provided packages to install mozilla related software. These unfortunately do not send stack traces back when the program crashes. OpenSuse, Fedora and Ubuntu provide instructions on how to provide stack traces. How about gentoo or whatever linux distribution you are using ? I'm trying to collect such instructions if they exist for other distribution and have started at discussion at : http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/browse_thread/thread/0ec23dd5960f31a9. If you use one of the distribution not listed I would love to have instructions on getting stack traces for that distribution.

As some of you might have noticed last week, the Quality Team (Wayne, Gary, Joshua, Wada, Magnus, Phil, Hansen, and a few others (and I'm sorry that I forgot your names)) of Mozilla Thunderbird is celebrating one year of bugdays. Last year as been amazing as the bug database for Thunderbird as been cleaned up a lot (that database is accessible to anyone at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org).

In order to celebrate we've setup a nice deal for you, if you comment on two bugs , or change status on two bugs - The idea is to revive bugs that have not been active for some time now. Once you've done that come to the #tb-qa irc channel on irc.mozilla.org, and give us the bug number you would like us to have a better look at, and we will make our best the bug gets in the state were it can get fixed by the developers. We are providing list of bugs and hints on how to join and do it at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2009-04-02

This week marks one year of bugday for Mozilla Thunderbird. Bugdays are days where the QA team maintains and tries to clean up as much as possible the bug database for thunderbird. The result over the last year are quite impressive :

Specially what we try to achieve is get rid of old bugs, make sure bugs get the proper component and make sure they get the proper status. To celebrate we are organizing two special bug days, more information on those bug days can be found on Day1 and Day2. Feel free to join and celebrate with us on #bugday on irc.mozilla.org

The way we maintain the bug database for Thunderbird is mainly through volunteer work. People that care enough to report bugs, people that care enough to read bugs and people that care enough to follow bugs. Helping the classification of bugs - finding duplicate bugs and making sure that all the information provided is there.
Some people who would like to join can't because :

1. They think there constributions are not worth it
2. Think they are going to make mistakes
3. Don't have buzilla rights
4. Think that their english is too bad

And that's why we organize events so people that are not too comfortable or that want help can find other users that have more experience and that are willing to help new users. We call these events bug days.
We use a wiki page to announce what the focus of the day is. We also use quality.mozilla.org to announce the events and make them available in ics format.
Our next event is this Thursday. Feel Free to Join.

Interested to know before hand how the next version of Thunderbird (be that a beta release, a full release ) is going to look like ?
Interested in experimenting with new features before they are made available to a wider audience ?
Well it's possible and kind of easy, the QA team of Thunderbird as setup a low traffic [1] mailing list where we announce Test days (which are
when new features get tested by a wider audience). Those announces are made when the feature is ready, and unlike on nightly builds it should be fairly stable when the announce is made.

So how can you join this mailing list ?

• On the web by subscribing here


• by email by clicking here.

[1] can be verified here : https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/thunderbird-testers/

My name is Ludovic Hirlimann, I'm the new QA lead for Mozillamessaging. I started a bit over a week ago. My email is ludovic @ mozillamessaging.com.
I have of course an IRC nickname : _Tsk_. It's the contraction of The softkid, and the underscores were added because Tsk was never free on ircnet back in the days where I was hanging on #atari. The softkid was chosen when I started computing - trying to crack Apple ][ software. At that time one of the games that I had copied had been cracked by The softman from the solex crack band. I just loved the name of the band too much - hence my nickname.
I've been playing, using computers since 1982 - when my dad got an Apple IIe home. I've been using email for 16 years - using my dads account on a unix box. I've owned a few pieces of interesting hardware, and ran Linux, OS/2 and Beos. Beos had a crappy web browser named Netpositive, and Be decided to port Mozilla in 1999. I was only able to run mozilla on Linux and Windows at that time but I did it because I thought that bugs that I would find would benefit the browser as my OS of choice. At some point I got interest in MacOS X - and the browser situation was bad with a special version of IE for the mac - and then I got hocked into Chimera/Camino and the mozilla world.
I have a few interest online - they are available in form of a Foaf file.
My immediate goals are to make sure Thunderbird 3.0 ships as bugfree as possible. My Long term goals are to ensure that the quality of the product does not decrease over time.

So identi.ca update their XMPP support last night, which caused the contact update@identi.ca not to be visible in my list of online contact (I'm using adium 1.3.2). While looking at the contact - adium told me it was online - it only showed grey (offline) and thus did not make it to my online contact list.

the solution is simple :

1. remove identi.ca from your contact - in your jabber compatible client


2. login to identi.ca


3. go to settings/IM


4. remove your Jabber account


5. add your Jabber account


6. reply to the message send by identica

and things will get back to normal

I was tagged by flore.

The rules:

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they've been tagged.

Seven Things:

1. I use to grow cristals - I loved the blue one, that I made from Iron sulfate.
2. I wanted to be archeo-chimist when I was younger, making history and chemistry (which I loved at that time) into my work.
3. I started doing more computer stuff on My apple II e for making Character sheets for Reve de Dragon - a very good RPG.
4. I regret not staying at islandsbanki in 1998 when I was offered to.
5. I've started photography two years ago - trying not to end up like my grandpa, who takes way too many pictures and then does a montage with sound , while reading "guide bleu"
6. I made a very crappy comics strip when younger - whish i never did it.
7. I owned pigs in Madacasagar - using the http://www.zob-madagascar.org/.

Tagging:

* Allan : Great Hacker and Project lead.
* Alex : Being a great Hacker too
* Max : for using SVG.
* Hub : For standing for his ideas - even if I don't stand with all of them
* Wolfgang : For being the great build engineer he is and passionate by everything he starts.
* Danbri : for being so knowledgeable and spread this meme
* Simon : for being what he is.

I've been trying for almost a year to synch - via bluetooth my mac and my nokia n73. Tonight I tried again after having upgraded the firmware of the Nokia phone earlier in the day. It now works like a charm. So upgrading the firmware to v4.0839.42.0.1 dated 25-09-2008, RM-133 fixes the issue.

So I've been using identi.ca to microblog for the last month or so, I've even convinced a friend or to to try it or give it a second try. I still need to log on twitter to read some replies I get to my one liner posts - because identi.ca does not read twitter and only posts to it , if this gets fixed , I'll never read twitter again - well one should never say again :-)

Yesterday I attended a sales speech by some HP representative willing to sell HP quality center to us.We've been dealing with tools issue for a very long time in joost. Last year we settled on Aptest - to deal with our test cases, test reports and so on. When we bough the product we should have done two things :

1. make sure we understood how to use it


2. spend some time training to use it

We did not do that and tried to use it but eventually we failed.
So getting back at the presentation from HP- it was nicely done , they had actually tried to understand what my company does. So as most tools that deal with quality, defects etc ..., the first thing QC does is deal with requirements. Requirements is something that has never really been formalized here. I then realized that we should have involve product management into our tools, and change a bit the way our company works.Maybe our use of those tools would have been broader and better if the complete chain would have been involved : PM, developers and QA. But doing this is a big cultural change and would not happen overnight anyway.

So the first bad news about HP QC is that you need to use Internet Explorer from Microsoft to use it - it appears - but not really clear - that you can also use a client to access the application. Unfortunately the client seems to be written in .net, so exist Mac OS support and Linux support. Our company almost does not use IE, we would also need support for our developers working on Linux and Mac OS X. So while this might sound weird to some of you , it makes sense for most of HP's customers. Big Corporation - like some I've worked at (BNP, Societe Generale) maintain their desktops and they are IE only companies (some of them still deployed IE 5.5 back in 2006). So form a market and business perspective it makes sens for HP not to support anything else then IE.
The product is based on the following work flow (roughly) Requirements -> Test case -> test scripts -> execution -> reports and defects. So writing test case seems easy even If i did not really like the interface - which really looks complicated but that main impression might comes from my lack of use of the tool more than anywhere else. Most of the scripting is based on record/replay, and you can easily edit add and change a the way the scripts works. There is nothing much new here that I have not seen in other tools , like Grinder, OpenSta. It is just nicely integrated and playing with parameter is just easy , a few field and a keywords and you can easily with the same script/scenario test things like :

1. too short password


2. password with non ASCII characters


3. etc ....

Running the scripts is easy - it populates results automatically. We where also shown how to run those test cases manually, which is a bit cumbersome but way better than anything we've been doing here with our use of csv files and confluence pages, because you stay focus on testing itself.
Then the discussion drifted on load testing and performance testing where HP QC integrates with loadrunner - and you can reuse your functional test in those load/perf tests.

The product is able to do some testing on flex based flash objects - I really find that interesting. The good news is some of that flex support is provided by adobe itself. The bad news is dev need to switch to flex and they also need to plug a special agent - but it works really nicely and as more and more websites are using flash , it's really a great feature to have.

In the end I liked the presentation which was really honest - but I personally think that the product does not meet our needs for the following reasons :

• you can only test web based application


• you can test Windows application with the proper extension (ie winrunner)


• you can't do multi-browser automated testing as only IE is supported

The product is really aimed at HPs traditional customers who are big large corporations that control internal applications and eb application. For a startup it would make sense to use the product when it breaks even, or just after that, but the product would need to be way more open.

I'm very happy with my monopod - but sometimes I want to shoot from the same place and aim at the same point. With the monopod this is tedious to achieve. I'm looking for a good tripod on which I'll be able to attach my monster lens. My aim is to shoot birds and other forms of wildlife. I also need to be able to shoot at a very low level, so it needs to be able to go low and does not need the column.
My monster lens weights 5+ kg so the tripod needs to be able to support it. Last but not least I need to be able to carry it while I'm on the move. I've briefly searched a few flickr groups - and did not find the answer I am looking for.

If you've been wondering what I was working on in the past few months, have a look below:

A smaller day with an excellent keynote - very funny and very interesting. A great talk about performance by Robert Watson. I met a few interesting people. A great Day. The slides and recorded session will be available online pretty - soon check out http://2008.eurobsdcon.org. I of course took a few pictures they are available on a flickr set.

Converting File Systems to Services

Started with an introduction on how File system interact with the kernel. Only kernel solution seems to perform correctly all the time. The idea is to do that in UserSpace - because makes it way easier and expandable when written in user-space. Writing in user space using kernel interface of course. Presentation was a bit boring because it was barely audible.

UTORvpn: A BSD based VPN service for the masses

Great demand for of campus access hence why the speaker started working with vpn. Encapsuale -> encrypt-> send. PPTP is the most used protocol , the RFC was not taken into account by IETF. Many open source implementation of it. L2TP RFCs with v3. Create the tunnel and then use standard open protocol to encrypt (IPsec), tunnel easy. 100 mouse clicks doing that on Windows. Does not work for the Masses. IPsec : suite of protocols , 10 years olds, it's done at the kernel level. It's transparent to the user. Issues with Firewalls and Nat gateways. And it's native in IPv6. Many commercial clients available. Layer 4 technologies -> ssh, TLS. Open VPN uses TLS, Open SSL , certificates. For our large institution, openvpn seemed to be the solution, because it would be scalable. It's been designed as client and server are the same software. Does layer 2 and 3 encryption. UDP tunnels - TCP also supported. Very easy to configure, confs can be pushed to the client. It's been running for 4 years - initially on debian and it's now running FreeBSD, using Php+Mysql+Apache for managing - those tools are available email Russel to get them.. 9/1 users use windows, so having NSIS service was nice to use and build our installer - one package per user with your personal credentials. First time package creation is 10 seconds. No cpu issues. Ports are globally filtered except maybe for the president of the university. Then Rusell gave us a nice demonstration. 70% of the library transactions at the university of Toronto are done electronically. Very interesting presentation with demo.

Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability

Clusters using Freebsd from 6.3, 6.4 and going to go to 7.x ... Clusters needs to be shared for cost issues - but it implies risk. How to use virtualization in a cluster ? How to make the best use of the hardware in the clusters. Mostly focused on sun's grid.

Had a very interesting with Michael dexter of bsdfund.org about hardware.

eXtreme Programming: FreeBSD a case study

You first start with unit tests because they come directly from the specification. It forces developers to write them. Once written you write the code - and as time passes tests are passing. I think that I really like this concept - you of course need the time to implement that. Ha but extreme programming does not require QA :-( FreeBSD is not an XP project. FreeBSD is agile.

Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2

Most of the things are done in memory before being committed to disk. this speeds up Directory Lookups. A nice return of experience on a SOC project.

Quotes :
"NFS was nice 20 years ago"
"malloc(3) vs. malloc(9)"
"VPN are built using tunnels"
"Managing keys is the biggest problem in Cryptography"

And for obvious reasons I upgraded my machines - not all of them I still need to be able to test with older versions of flash. The upgrade went well for most of the things I use except for the pro-upload that lets you do multiple file select on flickr. I ended up being redirected to the old HTML interface, that's ok for me, because at the moment I upload pictures one by one and roughly one a day.

The conpany I work for - just pushed out all the work we've been working on for the past few months. Basically joost changed from being a client based video player to being a webbased video player. Many people back when we did the initial release complained that joost was not available for Linux nor for PowerPC Based mac, we are now using flash. This means that the content on Joost is now watcheable from Linux, and older mac powered by PowerPC - and yes I'm aware that flash on linux sucks.

One of the other complains we had in the past was that finding the content was near to impossible. This is already better - as we changed completely the way search was implemented. It will improve over time too as we have added tagging. Tags are searcheable, so for instance here is the content taggeg with dolphin.

Just in case you might be interested we have some nice documentaries, music videos, and car stuff.

Ho and for those french speakers, there ia a french group, you are welcome to join !!

Yesterday I started installing FreeBSD, on an old Mac-mini G4. The install broke just after partitioning the drive with the following error :

Error mounting /dev/ad0s3 /mnt Operation Not Permited

And I could not get past that step in the install. After fumbling a bit - I got back at reading the docs and discovering that the partitioner did not really work for the PowerPC port - and that booting directly in FreeBSD was not possible :-( That made FreeBSD/PowerPC something unusable for what I had in mind. I might If I ever get such a machine at home , and find the time try to fix that but .....

A few minutes after that I went to ask a question to a colleague about the ads network and the delivery of ads - to which he replied that I should have carefully read the email he had sent that same morning. I had read the email up to 66% of it and the information I was asking for was lying in the last 30% of the email.

When I start anything by reading the documentation I often get bored and confused - but I think that after those two "issues" in the same day I will read some stuff more carefully from now on.

I'm still playing with data and metadata - I like using last.fm ever since I discovered they knew nothing about the rock album I brought back from Greenland with me. So I've inserted the needed data into the musicbrainz database a few weeks ago, and as the band is knew I tend to listen to it's tunes a bit more than the other artists I usually listen to.
So my funny founding of the day are :
* search for "Unnuaq Band" in music or group - and no result pop up.
* there is a page for the artist which contains a picture and a bio of the band.
* the page contains a 'Top Albums' item, If you look in the album tab of that group it's empty.

I find it very funny that last.fm knows about the band - but searches fails. One album seems to be known but not completely. I think last.fm did not synch with musicbrainz yet. Or that the data I've added to musicbrainz is not available to last.fm, anyhow I find it funny that the data shown is not consitant at all from one page to another.

Nvu/Kompozer now has a successor, the name is bluegriffon or so it seems. Some source code is available, so those of you who know how to build mozilla should be able to try it.

Registrationfor EuroBSDCon 2008 in Strasbourg, is finally open .

The talks schedule is available here, the tutorials schedule is available here.

There is a 20% discount for students (use discount code Student when
registering).

If Like me you want to use MusicBrainz Picard metadata tagger, and are running Mac OS X, you'll probably encounter ticket 3532, which displays this nice little message box :
which says : "Error opening library: dlopen(libdiscid.0.dylib, 6): image not found ".

Now if you read the ticket you'll see that the issue is fixed but that a new version of Picard as not been released yet. Fixing the issue is easy.

First you need to have the developer tools installed , which you can download from connect.apple.com. Once they are installed do the following in a Terminal window "

curl -O http://users.musicbrainz.org/~matt/libdiscid-0.2.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf libdiscid-0.2.2.tar.gz
cd libdiscid-0.2.2
./configure
make
sudo make install

After the sudo command you will be prompted for a password - enter your password.
This will fix the issue, you'll need to start restart Picard - but picard was probably already closed when you started doing this.

On a side note if you are running a PowerPC machine (G4/G5 based macs) the musicbrainz folks are looking for feedback on the PPC build of picard.

I've just found out the best feature about skype's messaging system. In recent version of skype you can edit old messages using the mouse and a right click on the timestamp of the message - that's boring an slowwwwwwwwww.
Today I wanted to correct muself, as I tend to be unable to write anything properly in any chat window I'm involved in and did it irc style using :

s/lov/love/

after typing enter I did not see a new message as I expected , but my previous message was edited and the mistake corrected. That is so cool.

My rss feed is not updated anymore. Please update your bookmarks to point to http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/atom.xml.

As a flickr user I add metadata to my pictures as much as I can. There's three way to achieve that on flickr (well four when you include geotagging). Using a title, adding some description on what the picture is about, and tagging. Tagging is the easiest way to describe a picture with a few simple word. You add keywords to you pictures when you tag them. Some of these tags are a bit specila as they may link your pictures with other websites or with data that does not reside on Flickr itself. Flickr uses special tags called machine tags - with these you can link to events that are posted on the upcoming service by yahoo or with concerts that are annonced on last.fm, tagging enhances the content and makes it findable. There is probably more use with other sites but I don't know it.

While I was on vacation in greenland and ended up in a concert in a bar in Ilulissat.I took a few pictures and really liked how the guys were performing. So I asked them if I could buy a CD to which the answer I was given a small piece of paper was an URL. Url Which I ended visiting and buying the their unique album which to my surprise dates from the beginning of the 90's.

I imported the CD into my music collection and started playing it - as I'm a last.fm user I had a look at the data that last.fm maintained on "Unnuaq Band". It was quite empty so I made the first two versions of the wiki page added a scan of the group's logo that I took from the album. Actually I needed to add wiki information before the upload of the scan was taken into account by last.fm's software. Then I made sure that the group was connected with the Greenland group.

After two weeks of playing the band's song I looked at my stats on last.fm and was suprise not to see the album name in what I was playing. So I kindly ask on the forums where the data came from, and the answer was musicbrainz. From time to time, last.fm synchs it's data from Musicbrainz. So I created an account and started adding data about the album. Using the taggers provided by last.fm did not do much because the music was unavailable on musicip. So I gave musicip a look and would have done sampling with Music IP if their software supported my os :
Thank you for visiting musicip.com. A Mac version of the iTunes plug-in is
planned but not currently in development. If you sign up for our beta testing
program you can be one of the first to try out the new plug-in.

http://www.musicip.com/beta-join.jsp

Let me know if you have any further questions.

So I can't provide all the data/metadata, and need to do that by hand, at the moment but will probably do.

So I'm having fun these days figuring out how I will tag my picture when I'm going to upload it to flickr. Shall I use machine tags like lastfm:band= or should I create musixbranz:MBID=, shall I use both ? I would rather use the later, so all sites using musicbrainz's data would benefit from my tagging and could, if wanted show my flickr pictures on their website.
Now I don't mind adding more than one tag, but was wondering what the best approach would be. Ideas, comments welcome.

Continuing looking at the code which Chrome is built upon, I had a look at V8 the javascript engine that compiles js code to native code.
In particular at cpu-ia32.{h|cc} and cpu-arm.{h|cc}. So the good news here is that v8 is available for ARM on top of x86. It seems that adding PowerPC support is doable. I was looking for a cool project to work on during my free time as I have not been involved in computer stuff outside my work for quite a while now. Just unsure I have the time required to do that. I'm quite puzzled by the lack of ia-64 support too.

So yesterday I bitched about the fact that Chrome, replaced 404 pages with a input box that would let user perform google searches. I did not like the idea , that 404 where replaced by a search box.
Today I downloaded the source of Chrome and had a look inside and found this interesting comment :

// When the frame request first 404's, chrome may replace it with the alternate
// 404 page's contents. It does this using substitute data in the document
// loader, so the original response and url of the request can be preserved.
// We need to avoid replacing the current page, if it has already been
// replaced (otherwise could loop on setting alt-404 page!)
bool is_substitute_data = loader->substituteData().isValid();

// If it's a 404 page, we wait until we get 512 bytes of data before trying
// to load the document. This allows us to put up an alternate 404 page if
// there's short text.

in http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/webkit/glue/webframeloaderclient_impl.cc?view=markup&pathrev=1359 around line 252.

This simply means that if you want to keep your 404 pages they need to be 513 byte in length. If they are 513 Chrome considers that the page contains interesting bits of information for the user and does not replace it with a google crafted page.