I wasn’t really planning on giving a session, but I was pleased to see it well attended. It was nice to meet Wayne (whose recently picked up the Thunderbird QA torch from Gary), Henrik who has been very active in Bugzilla as of late, and Emily, who has been doing fantastic work testing for Mozilla while working for Sun China over the last few years.

It’s also probably a good time to mention that I’m going to be phasing out my involvement with Litmus over the next few months. I’ve officially been a member of the release team for the better part of a year now, and Litmus support and development has suffered as a result, especially since Zach has also been busy with school. I’m pleased to announce that the Mozilla Webdev team will be taking over Litmus development in my stead.

This is bittersweet for me. I’ve been involved with Litmus since it’s inception — we borrowed the name from Zach’s WIP tool, but it really bears no resemblance to that original Testrunner-derivative — and it was one of the prime reasons for my joining Mozilla 3 years ago. However, nothing is worse than a stagnant tool. These days I’m full up with release duties (2.0.0.17 anyone?), unittest work, and now graph server bugs, and don’t have any time to make forward progress on bug fixes, much less features. Despite heavy personal and professional investiture in the code, I’m glad to have Litmus move under the auspices of the Webdev team where it will finally see some development love. If only we’d had a Webdev team 3 years ago!

To properly set expectations here, nothing much will change with Litmus in the near-term. The Webdev team is very busy, and likely won’t have time to pickup Litmus bugs for a few months. In the meantime, I’ll continue to address critical and blocker bugs, but the Mozilla QA team (specifically Marcia) is going to take over Litmus bug triage, effective immediately.

She’ll be using a different set of criteria than I was for triage, namely what features would actually be useful for the QA team, rather than what changes are actually possible for me to fix with very limited time. If you’ve been holding off on filing a Litmus bug due to lack of forward progress, it might be a good time to revisit those requests so that the Webdev team can get a better picture of what people need once they are ready to take on that work.

Kev, Tracy, and I took a little break from the Firefox Summit and squeezed in a “quick” 27 holes before/during dinner last night. Having not played since…last fall?, I had a fantastic round, putting very well and scoring -1 over 27 holes.

…

Despite the rock slide and other unrelated snafus, the Summit itself is going very well. You can follow along using our stream of consciousness mash-up. If nothing else, it’s fun to witness the varying degrees of aplomb that people are exhibiting in the face of adversity.

Neil Patrick Harris steals the show so far, but Nathan Fillion never fails to entertain, going from comically over-archetypal superhero to penis…erm, dick at the drop of a hat. Does Nathan remind anyone else of a young Elvis, or is it just me and my man-crush?

The cottage is working out well so far. Internet access is solid, which facilitates actual work. My favorite part so far: all the fireflies that come out at dusk.

Despite all that, something must have clicked. Since high school, I’ve had the pleasure of working with him at four (!) separate companies. I owe my professional existence to Mr. Shaver, so I’m thrilled today to see him get a little back.

I raise my glass to you tonight, Mike. The handlebars are firmly attached to the bike now, my friend.

[Sat Jun 14 13:39:18 2008] [notice] child pid 31570 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Normally, this issue would have landed squarely on Mozilla IT’s plate, but they were a little busy last week. As you can see in the bug, I tried just about everything to diagnose (and then fix) the segfaults. I eventually caught a coredump from one of the failures and tracked the problem to mysql_ping() as called by the DBD::mysql perl module:

#0 0x057d8e5b in mysql_ping () from /usr/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15
#1 0×0082a8c1 in XS_DBD__mysql__db_ping (my_perl=0×8504ba0, cv=0×8a3bff0) at mysql.xs:516

The full trace is in the bug.

That gave me a little more to work with. After some searching, I eventually found this article in Portuguese that Google was able to trans-massacre-late just enough for it to implicate the most recent version of the DBD::mysql module (4.007). This is the version that ships with RHEL5 (or can be installed via yum install at any rate). It works just fine with a local database like in our staging setup, but repeatedly segfaults for us when connecting to our remote database pool in production.

As suggested in the Portuguese article, downgrading the version of DBD::mysql to 4.006 fixed the problem. We haven’t had another segfault since. My hope is that this will help the next non-Portuguese person that goes looking for this information.

If you need something to watch once you download Firefox 3 later today, I’ve uploaded a few videos of the action. Sadly, there was no Truckasaurus.

A new version of Firefox is coming out on Tuesday. Casual internet users may be asking themselves, “I already have a web browser. Why should I update to Firefox 3?” There’s lots of great stuff in Firefox 3, but several of the new features bear special highlighting for casual users:

• AwesomeBar, aka the Smart Location Bar:

  Can’t remember the address of that web site you visited last week? Start typing some search terms into the location bar and Firefox 3 will automatically search through your history and present you with a list of potential matches. Couple this with a new tagging/bookmarking system, and you got an incredibly powerful system that makes things much easier and friendlier to use, but it’s better to see it for yourself.

  It’s hard to overstate just how awesome the AwesomeBar is, especially for casual users. Like tabbed browsing, the AwesomeBar represents a sea change in how web browsers are used. I think any future browser that doesn’t ship with something like the AwesomeBar out-of-the-box will ship broken. Deb has more information in her post, AwesomeBar is awesome.

• Security:

  I saw weird stuff in that place last night. Weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil stuff! And I want in.
  – Homer Simpson

  There are a lot of mean, evil people on the internet these days, but that knowledge alone doesn’t seem to stop us from from repeatedly putting ourselves in harm’s way by clicking random links in email, downloading dubious files, and such. Those of us who spend (seemingly) all day, every day in front of computers should know better, but casual users rarely have the tools or experience to make these kinds of judgment calls.

  Well, the people who *do* spend all day, every day in front of computers are coming to the rescue. Firefox 3 contains greatly improved site identification, as well as marked improvements to phishing and malware protection. These features don’t replace common sense, but they make it easier for users to make informed choices about resources on the internet.

• Performance and memory usage:

  It’s no secret that Firefox 2 had some “issues” with memory usage. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise — for us, at least. Those of you who suffered through bloated browser experiences may not agree — because it forced us to develop tools to detect and measure the problems, and then get them fixed.

  And fixed them we have. Simply put, Firefox 3 kicks ass in the performance department. Whether you’re like me and have a million applications and tabs open at once, or just use your web browser to check out the latest pictures of your grandchildren, Firefox 3 is going to play nice.

There’s more, so much more, but at some point, I’m just repeating what Deb has already presented much more eloquently and succinctly in her Field Guide to Firefox 3, which is *THE* post on the subject.

Give Firefox 3 a try on Tuesday, or I’ll install it for you next time I’m over.

In the past, testing with Selenium has entailed firing up Firefox 2 because the Selenium IDE had not yet been updated to work with the Firefox 3 betas/release candidates. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to find a new version 1.0 beta 2 available for download that has been updated to support Firefox 3. Not a moment too soon either!

Aside from minimizing my need to switch between major revs of my favorite browser, the 1.0 betas of the IDE have introduced a wealth of new functionality that make my webdev testing life easier. Of key importance to me are two features:

1. Dynamic/automatic addition of test commands to the right-click context menu as I use them. I’m likely to use the same commands again and again based on the way I write tests, and this may not be the same as other people, so not having a static list is great.
2. Ability to edit/run test suites directly. No more firing up selenium-core or switching between the IDE and a browser tab. This is a HUGE win for me.

Thanks to the Selenium team for your hard work on a great tool. I’m very interested to see how Bromine shapes up.