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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

A list of fixes, which have been made it into this release, can be found on Bugzilla. Lets give an explanation for some of those:

• Bug 542000: With former Mozmill releases there were needs to install the Python for Windows extensions (pywin32). If you have used the MozillaBuild environment, changes to the registry were needed. All that work hasn’t to be done from now on. Installing MozillaBuild is enough to prepare the system for Mozmill. A big thanks goes to Atul Varma who removed that dependency and made our life more compelling.
• Bug 543501: One of our upcoming projects is the execution of Mozmill tests against add-ons. Therefore we have to make sure that the usage of Mozmill will be as easy as possible. That’s why the misleading –plugin command line option has been changed to –addons. Make sure to use this option from now on.
• Bug 548446: Mozmill had problems with installing some of the existing extensions because it was not able to find the extension id. Thanks goes to Jonathan!
• Bug 544896: If you have long test-runs it was possible that the software update dialog came up and removed the focus from the window currently under test. That’s why the automatic update for the application has been disabled. If you want to run tests against that feature make sure to enable the preference app.update.enabled before.
• Bug 558404 and Bug 559152: Some controller functions have been updated which missed some details about failures. Now we always have a stacktrace with full information available.

The new version of the add-on can be found on addons.mozilla.org. It’s under review right now but can already be installed. For all the others who are using the command line client of Mozmill, you can simply run the “easy_install -U mozmill” command to update to the new 1.4.1 release.

If you have questions don’t hesitate to send your feedback to the mozmill-dev mailing list or directly contact us on IRC in the #qa channel.

Back in San Francisco we had a bit of time to drive up the hill in the north of the Golden Gate Bridge. We got a bit higher with the car as Martijn and myself were able the day before with the bikes. You will have a wonderful view from there down to San Francisco. By taking some animal pictures we ended that Sunday with a couple of nice pictures. But see yourself:

About 2 weeks ago I got my new Nokia N900 device for testing purposes. During the next couple of months I will have to run some dogfooding against the mobile Firefox aka. Fennec. To have it handy all the time I will have to use it as my mobile phone. Therefore it’s necessary to synchronize all the relevant information, e.g. Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks, between OS X and the N900.

There is no official plug-in yet which will allow the synchronization with iSync. But after a quick check I have found a plug-in which is still in a beta state but works quiet well for all of my data, and that in both directions. You can download the software from this website. The installation is fast and you will be able to start the first sync process nearly immediately.

To stimulate add-on authors to create their own Mozmill tests, Mozilla QA is holding a testday on Friday, March 5th, which is fully devoted to Mozmill testscripting for your add-on. 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 creating Mozmill tests for Firefox. Get ready and join us in #testday next Friday.