Last Friday I had my presentation about the MozMill crowd extension. It was part of the breakout sessions during the Mozilla Summit 2010 in Whistler. For everyone who wasn’t able to make it to my presentation I have uploaded the slides to slideshare:
If you have further ideas or proposals you want to tell us about, please use the following EtherPad document. We would appreciate it.
Update:I should mention that the extension is still under development and we target a release for September. If you want to follow the process, check the Mozmill Crowd project page.
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Loading ...Tags: event, firefox, mozilla, mozmill, mozqa, slides, testing
Before the Firefox Summit starts on Wednesday this week, Clint and I have decided to take 3 days off for vacation. We want to enjoy the stunning area around Whistler, which is about 100km in the north of Vancouver. British Columbia is really a beautiful area and absolutely invites you to have hiking or biking tours in the nature.
Our first hiking tour yesterday was a short planned one. We bought a map of the whole area in the morning and decided which trip we wanted to do. Goal was to reach the Wedgemont Lake. We haven’t really checked the elevation up to that lake and given the fact that we started a bit too late, we weren’t able to make it. But finally it was a 28km hike with about 700m elevation gain:
It was great to be back in the hotel and to be able to relax. It was a great experience even we haven’t seen any bear – or thanksfully. 
Here some pictures from the hike:
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Linux! Linux is great. Linux is Open Source. Any nerd wants to run Linux. But is any part of Linux really that great? This was a good question I wasn’t really able to answer until yesterday. Now I have mixed feelings but understanding the following problem better, gives even a bit more safety, also for my personal life.
During the whole last year I had a lot of situations when one of my virtual machines on the server died due to an OOM killer process. Those crashes were not predictable and happened randomly. Sometimes it didn’t happen for weeks but there were also situations when it crashed after 1 day again. Given that a good list of customers are hosting their websites on it, raises a lot of trouble for me. I did a lot of work in trying to fix particular running services on that host, but nothing helped to stop those crashes. Recently I have even doubled the memory for that machine but without success. It always ran into an out of memory crash.
Given all my former research and attempts to fix the problem, I wasn’t sure what else I could do. But thankfully I have found a website which has the explanation and even offered steps to solve the problem.
So what’s happened? The reason can be explained shortly: The Linux kernel likes to always allocate memory if applications asking for it. Per default it doesn’t really check if there is enough memory available. Given that behavior applications can allocate more memory as really is available. At some point it can definitely cause an out of memory situation. As result the OOM killer will be invoked and will kill that process:
Jun 11 11:35:21 vsrv03 kernel: [378878.356858] php-cgi invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x1280d2, order=0, oomkilladj=0
Jun 11 11:36:11 vsrv03 kernel: [378878.356880] Pid: 8490, comm: php-cgi Not tainted 2.6.26-2-xen-amd64 #1
The downside of this action is that all other running processes are also affected. As result the complete VM didn’t work and needed a restart.
To fix this problem the behavior of the kernel has to be changed, so it will no longer overcommit the memory for application requests. Finally I have included those mentioned values into the /etc/sysctl.conf file, so they get automatically applied on start-up:
vm.overcommit_memory = 2
vm.overcommit_ratio = 80
The results look good so far and I hope it will stay that way. The lesson I have learned is to not trust any default setting of the Linux kernel. It really can result in a crappy and unstable behavior.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Last Friday, June the 11th, we had our second testday for exploratory testing the new Add-ons Manager. It was again well attended and we had a couple of fantastic discussions across its whole duration. If you weren’t able to attend but interested in details about the discussions, you can read through the chat transcription which lists any specific detail.
Given our last testday end of April, I have continued my idea to see the testday covering more than only the PDT timezone. That means this time it has also been started 8am UTC and ended 5pm PDT. At the beginning we had lesser action but after lunch time in Europe more and more people joined and participated in discussions. The most active people in the channel were aaronmt, aleksej, dark_skeleton, gabe2300, kbrosnan, kinger, mossop, smaug, tchung, tobbi, tonymec, unfocused, wx24, and myself.
After all we were able to identify 11 new bugs which is much lesser than the last time. But I think it speaks for the work which happened in that area the last one and a half month.
We thank everyone who has participated in that testday and made it a success again. Now with the new themes approaching in the near future, another testday has to be targeted. Stay tuned and check for updates regularly.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...This Friday, June 11th, Mozilla QA is holding the second testday about the new Add-ons Manager for Firefox 4.0. Looking back to the fantastic results we got from the last testday we hope to have a similar attendance this time.
We will concentrate on exploratory testing mostly the complete user interface and the back-end. You will find detailed information in our testday event page.
Please join and help us to make sure we will have the best Add-ons Manager ever in Firefox 4.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Within the last two weeks we had to push two maintenance releases for jsbridge and mozrunner which now fix two major issues:
Bug 570790: Due to a broken pyPI package of jsbridge the extension wasn’t working properly on all platforms. At least on Windows the files which have been accidentally added to the tar.gz file, caused an error when loading files from the components and chrome folder of the extension. We have removed all those instances to make sure the extension will work again.
Bug 568839: Installing binary extensions with Mozmill was broken in version 2.4.2. All files which have been extracted from the XPI were handled as ASCII files. With this fix Mozmill is now able to install any version of extensions successfully.
If you still notice any other problems please get in contact with us.
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Mozmill is not only able to execute functional and unit tests against applications, which are build on top of the Gecko platform, but can also be used to run those type of tests against extensions.
If you are an extension author and interested to see your extension tested in a daily fashion by our automated test-runs in the QA-lab, you should definitely join the testday on Friday, May 28th. We really want to encourage you to think about the implementation of automated functional tests for your own extension. And it’s not only helpful for the extension itself, but can also help us to identify regression in the Firefox development cycle as early as possible.
To have an introduction available, we were working closely together with Google to have example tests in our mozmill-tests repository. Learn how Mozmill tests will be written and how they can be run in Firefox. The Mozmill team will be around the whole day to assist you wherever possible.
If you are interested in the testday, you should read through the following documentation about the creation of testscripts for extensions.
You can also attend when you have general questions about Mozmill or when you want to help in fixing or creating Mozmill tests for Firefox. Get ready and join us in #testday next Friday.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...A couple of minutes ago I have branched the mozmill-test repository for our upcoming Firefox 3.7 work. With that addition we can start to update our tests on the default
branch to make them compatible with current Developer Preview releases and Minefield builds.
That means we have the following correlations now:
default => Firefox 3.7
mozilla1.9.2 => Firefox 3.6.x
mozilla1.9.1 => Firefox 3.5.x
More details about branch handling for our Mozmill tests can be found on MDC.
The Mozmill test repository is available under the following two locations:
http://hg.mozilla.org/qa/mozmill-tests/
http://github.com/whimboo/mozmill-tests
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...As you have probably already read about in a couple of blog post from Jennifer Boriss, Dave Townsend, and Blair McBride, the next major version of Firefox will contain a shiny new Add-ons Manager. If you wanna know more details, you should check out the design documents.
Even with the development for this feature still in progress, Mozilla QA will hold a testday for exploratory testing the new user interface on Friday, April 30th. For this time we will not use any Litmus test but running tests based on the current test plan.
If you are interested in getting your fingers wet and to help us in making it a helpful and less buggy feature, read through the test day documentation and join us next Friday on IRC.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Today was the first day in this year when I had time for a biking tour. The weather was stunning. The complete day we had sunshine, nearly no clouds, and about 20 degrees Celsius outside. Together with a former colleague we used the chance and met for a relaxing biking tour. We had no plans, but just wanted to follow the river Elbe for some kilometers.
This time I used my Garmin etrex GPS device to track the ride and imported it into Garmin Connect. It’s the first time I’m using this service and I’m impressed about the possibilities you have in managing all your activities. Also the exporting feature which let me integrate it into my website is fantastic. I’m sure that I will also upload upcoming biking and hiking tours.
Here the tour details:
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