Huh, I’m still a bit late in blogging this but I don’t wanna miss it because it’s really important…
With a bit more then a year development Firefox 3.5 has been officially released 2 days ago. It contains tons of new stunning features like native video support, a private browsing mode, a jitted JavaScript engine, and many more. See the official release notes. For a quick overview you can also watch this video.
Due to the delay of Firefox 3.5 RC1 and a further planned testday on it we decided to move the Website Testing testday. It will happen on June 19th now. That will give us some time to add more companies. If you cannot find your bank in the list, please send me an request for addition.
Since I’ve been started to work for Mozilla in January this year I lead and helped out in various projects. One of those projects where I have a leadership I was able to select on my own opinions based on which would be helpful for Mozilla and our great community. As the solution the Website Testing project was born on QMO which I will describe in detail now.
Comparing all the different ways we can get in contact with each other or searching for information on the web is definitely using a web browser to access web pages. Having several billions of web pages at the back of one’s mind it makes it really hard to get them displayed and operational as best as possible by any of those web browsers. Even with web standards set web designers can work their own way which could break some functionality of a browser. To find those issues is a hard job and sometimes it’s not possible at all because the website requests a login. In such a situation we need the help of the reporter to track the issue down or the company itself which hosts this web site. Isn’t it a tech evangelism bug we can then inform the developers to fix this bug in Firefox. But until we reach this point we need a way to get as much as possible feedback.
That’s why a small project which tracked the coverage of banking sites was already created during the Firefox 3 development cycle. But because of the usage of a Wiki page it wasn’t easy to get everything in sync for the public anonymous page and the internal page with contact information. Exactly the same feeling I had in February this year when I started to revise this project as extra work. We sent an email to all the users and asked for their help in testing the upcoming Firefox 3.5 beta3 release. As result users added their results to the public page and/or internal page and synchronizing both pages was up to me. Everybody how knows the wiki style can imagine that this work is hard. And even with a couple of reported results it was a half-day work for me. That’s not the way I wanna go for the release of Firefox 3.5 and hopefully more then 200% incoming messages daily. So we decided to move this project into a web application. This work was done by me and with the help of Murali Mnandigama in the last months. We used PHP and MySQL to setup a small web page which let us track the results very easily. After some iterations the project was released, on May 8th, on the Mozilla QA website and is open for everyone’s feedback now.
For the first time we mainly focus banking and financial sites. That means we have to create a list of major companies around the world so users can run tests against their website. Because we are not able to get all those information on our own we need the help of our great community around the globe which will supply us as much as possible different companies which we will add to the list. All of them will be displayed on the Website Testing results page.
If you find some time please join us and help this project by sharing your knowledge with us, so we can make Firefox 3.5 better as it already is right now. To get the first instructions head over to the project page itself where everything is described in detail.
And not to forget to mention one last important item: Please don’t forget our planned Website Testing testday this Friday on June 5th.
Tags: mozilla
Ok, it’s already a while back when I have updated my photoblog the last time. The reason was that the tool I used needs a lot of manual operations until a picture is visible in the blog. I don’t have time for that and simply wanna have an easy way to publish new pictures. So my decision was to switch over to Flickr. That’s the easiest way for me to publish pictures directly from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with the Flickr export plugin. It’s a one click action now and will definitely cause a lot more picture updates as ever before.
So enjoy my pictures in the photo gallery on my website or directly on Flickr. And yes, all the former pictures will be uploaded step by step.
Within the last two weeks I messed up my Mercurial queue a couple of times. Working on several patches in parallel you will forget about the currently applied patch. Doing changes and refreshing the patch will overwrite the whole content of the wrong patch! That could be really bad. To circumvent such an action Jason Orendorff posted a nice solution which integrates the name of the top patch into your prompt. So it will like like:
henrik@mbp:/mozilla/mozmill-tests[privatebrowsing.patch]$
The only thing you have to do is to enter the following entry into your .bashrc or .bash_profile:
PS1='\u@\h:\w[\[`hg qtop 2>/dev/null`\]]\$ '
That’s it!
Tags: software
Today I run into the problem where one of my Vmware guests with an installed Windows XP wasn’t able to shutdown. The only option users have via the UI is to put the machine into sleep. But that doesn’t help at all. I wanna have a running XP box again. Waking up from sleep still shows the same problem: “Windows is shutting down…”. So how someone can kill this instance to restart it like a manual hard boot?
The first thing I tried was to kill the Vmware application via the Activity Monitor of OS X. But I wasn’t successful. After I’ve started VmWare again the same screen as above was displayed for the XP machine. What a bummer! So how to process? After searching a while on Google I found the solution. You simply have to kill the process which handles this machine. Grep the output of ps to get a list of all Vmware related processes:
henrik$ ps -EF | grep vmware
0 31737 1 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.01 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.pid vmnet8
0 31745 1 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet1/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.pid vmnet1
0 31776 1 0 0:08.81 ?? 0:11.93 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vmx -E de -D h5VWrEgtEdEDLwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA= -# product=1;name=VMware Fusion;version=2.0.4;buildnumber=159196;licensename=VMware Fusion for Mac OS;licenseversion=6.0 build-159196; -@ pipe=/var/folders/w2/w2myuXRLE1q1Ex7puQAPYk+++TI/-Tmp-//vmware-henrik/vmxebfd750b90971fa0;readyEvent=6 /Volumes/data/vmware/Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm/Windows XP Professional.vmx
501 31781 153 0 0:00.72 ?? 0:04.42 /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/vmware -psn_0_14101874
501 31795 13404 0 0:00.00 ttys000 0:00.00 grep vmware
As you can see the process with the id 31776 is the one for the Windows XP guest. Run the following command to do a hard switch-off:
henrik$ sudo kill -9 31776
Now you can start the machine from scratch and it should be started as expected.
Forgot to blog about last week. So doing it right now! It’s a great feeling to stay in Dresden now. Wonderful new flat, which still needs a lot of work and new furniture, but I feel home!
It’s already a week ago since I had to flight-out to California. The time is passing really fast while working with such awesome people on the best web browser. Sorry that I wasn’t able to post about it yet. I hope that I’ll find time in the next days to give a short report.
Just in-front a picture of the Caltrain station in Mountain View. Sadly it was only one day with sunny weather. In the last week it has been raining mostly all the time. I hope for better weather over the upcoming weekend. There are plans to visit San Francisco. So lets keep the fingers crossed…
Caltrain station in Mountain View
Tags: mozilla, photography, travel, usa
Meanwhile I was getting tagged 3 times by good fellows aka Pascal, Simon, and Abdulkadir. Thanks too you all! 
Normally I don’t follow such chain letters but lets make it an exception…
The Rules:
- Link back to your original tagger and list the rules in your post.
- Share seven facts about yourself.
- Tag
71 people by leaving name and link to his blog. - Let them know they’ve been tagged
The seven things you may (or may not) know about me:
- I was born in the German Democratic Republic. During its existence my family hadn’t a telephone nor a car. We were forced to write letters and to use the train or bike to visit our family members at any time.
- It has taken a long time until I got in contact with the Internet. I was 19 years old and started my training in the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe.
- I’ve played several instruments more or less good, e.g. piccolo, accordion, guitar and bass guitar.
- In 2002 I started dancing for the first time. Now it’s one of my favorite hobbies. I do this to keep in shape and to have fun. But I don’t want to do tournaments in Standard and Latin dance.
- Photography is one of my other passions but it needs too much time, which I don’t have currently. You can see that in my photoblog. The latest entry was added a long time ago. I really have to continue in making pictures when I’ve been moving to Dresden in two month!
- I have acrophobia but it hasn’t distracted me from having an awesome skydive over the Lake Taupo in New Zealand. It was a fantastic experience I would repeat at any time
- And the best in the end: A month ago I was getting uncle for the first time in my life. I really love my sweet, and little niece!!!
There is someone who wants to write his own 7 things but hasn’t been tagged so far:
- Marco Zehe: One of our great accessibility guys from Germany
Apple seems to have some problems with the calculation of the cpu load for processes which really stress the cpu. Just open up several tabs with videos on YouTube and you will see how your cpu load will raise over 100%. Out of curiosity: Does Apple already has a patent in software-overclocking?
Update: The activity monitor sums up all the cpu usage for any thread within an existing process. Means, depending on the amount of cpu’s or cores and the amount of threads for that process, the cpu load can be higher than 100%. I hope that we don’t end-up in 8000% for a 80 core processor in the future…
