The 10,000 Ways of Quality

Moving Site

08.30.07 - 04:08pm

I’m moving this blog over to my main blog at http://www.arcanology.com.

I originally started this here separately to have a Mozilla hosted blog for only my Mozilla stuff but it is too cumbersome to try to blog in multiple places and I wind up duplicating some content. It just feels very awkward.

I blog about a pretty wide range of things, often really of interest only to me and a few friends. I didn’t want to feel constrained about what I blog about but I now realize that this probably isn’t really an issue.

I have a Mozilla category at the site and will post Mozilla related items within that. I’ve created a feedburner feed for just that category as well. I’ll have that added to planet.mozilla.org to replace the feed for this blog. In that regard, things should look the same and my non-Mozilla posts won’t show up on Planet in order to keep things clean and orderly (not to mention on topic).

I apologize for any confusion.

Category: Misc | | Be the First to Comment »

A Little QA Work

08.29.07 - 11:25am

We’ve been having heat issues with some of our Mac Minis that are used for automation and stress testing in the QA lab here at Mozilla. We’re doing a revamp of our QA lab space right now and moving things around so Tony decided to “fix” the heat problem.

It turns out that the main problem with the older Mac Minis is caused by poor air circulation. Sometimes turning them on the side works but it wasn’t helping. Tony’s solution is up on the QA wiki.

On a plus note, the drill was actually won as a prize at the QA outing a couple of weeks ago so I’m glad that we finally found a use for it.

Category: MozQuality | | 4 Comments »

Meeting Culture

08.27.07 - 11:09pm

I caught sight of an article in the New York Times by my former boss, Dean Hachamovitch, on meeting culture and laptops. As some of you may know, Dean is the General Manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. I worked with him on both IE and MSN Explorer before leaving Microsoft in May, 2006 for greener and more fulfilling pastures.

The article caused me to reflect on the difference in meeting culture at Mozilla and Microsoft. In both instances, pretty much everyone who has a laptop brings it to meetings. Of course, at Microsoft, there were a LOT more meetings than Mozilla forces anyone but key management to enjoy.

I recall a number of instances on the IE Team during the daily war meeting or the like in which people got so exasperated with the lack of attention caused by people focusing on their laptops that people really did try to close laptops on people or make everyone in the room close. Eventually, there was a (short lived) rule that unless you needed your laptop open to take the official notes or to look up data for something of yours in the meeting agenda, the laptops had to be closed.

In comparison, most Mozilla meetings have people lounging about with laptops wide open. People are often checking bugs, logged into IRC (where we live, really) or otherwise multitasking during meetings. It’s all very casual and no one seems to make a major issue out of it. Of course, that isn’t an excuse to just goof off or not pay attention but I think that people don’t really expect everyone to drop all other tasks to sit around a table for an hour, waiting for their turn to speak. We have a lot to do and software to ship!

The overall atmosphere is just a bit more relaxed around the laptop issue and, because people are neither rude in their use nor make a big deal about it, things manage to work out. Of course, this might not be the case if we spent hours and hours in meetings every day but, like I said, we have things to get done and software to ship.

This is probably not the most insightful post in the world but the article did cause me to compare and contrast things. I certainly don’t miss the hundreds of my hours lost, never to return, every year to meetings either.

Category: Misc | | 2 Comments »

Mozilla Onsite and Silly Hats

08.15.07 - 02:26pm

We’re having a week long onsite meeting at Mozilla this week where people come from all over the world to meet in person. Usually, at least half of the Mozilla Corporation staff is spread out over the entire planet so we make a point to have gatherings to get everyone together. This allows us to get face time with people, have people present on their work, and otherwise work together in person.

A certain amount of silliness seems to come into play at times though.

This is the man who recruited me to work at Mozilla with his shiny new Zoob hat:

 

In contrast, here is a chunk of the QA organization going over automation work:

Quite a contrast!

P.S. We love ya, Bret!

Category: MozQuality | | 1 Comment »

BarCampBlock

08.13.07 - 09:21pm

A number of us at Mozilla will be attending BarCampBlock this weekend.

BarCampBlock is an example of the BarCamp series of unconferences. You can find information on a number of these occurring all over the world on the BarCamp website.

The session list is looking pretty interesting so far. So far I’m planning on attending the following ones for sure:

• Online communities, open source and the gift economy
• A web app for the whole family — How to legally engage kids and youths (under the age of 13).
• Dialogue TV — How to bring “Conversation Cafe” style dialogues to the web (podcast or video)

Mozilla is also proud to be one of the sponsors of BarCampBlock as well. Personally, I think these kinds of events are where a lot of the interesting ideas people have in their heads around the web, open source, and communication percolate out.

I hope to see at least a few members of the Mozilla community there. I’ve heard that the event is expecting at least 400 people and that it may go as high as 800. Not bad for a very loosely configured event on relatively short notice (at least for most of us).

Category: Misc | | Be the First to Comment »

Thunderbird and Encrypting E-mail

08.12.07 - 08:09pm

I originally wrote this for my main blog at Arcanology.com because of an interest in encrypting e-mail. A few friends had asked me about it and I’ve just started doing this (and signing mail). Since it is using Mozilla technology, it seemed appropriate to post here as well. It isn’t strictly related to my QA work.

---

I promised a few people the other day that I would write a post on securing your e-mail communications. This post won’t be applicable to everyone, especially webmail users. I’m going to focus on a few tools that can be used locally on machines.

These tools are:

• Thunderbird
• The Enigmail extension for Thunderbird
• GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG)

I actually use the Mac version of GnuPG available at http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/.

Thunderbird is the free e-mail program created by Mozilla, where I work. It is cross-platform and based on the same technologies as the Firefox web browser. It can connect to the IMAP and POP3 mail servers used by most providers. It can also connect with Gmail accounts but my knowledge of that is pretty weak (my gmail account forwards to my arcanology.com account).

The Enigmail extension was developed as an add-on for Thunderbird that would allow seamless integration of cryptography functionality into Thunderbird. This piece has actually been the one that was missing in years past, making the use of cryptography with e-mail a serious pain in the ass. The is under active development and the last update was just a few days ago on August 4, 2007.

GNU Privacy Guard (called “GnuPG” from here on) is an open source cryptography program made available by…you guessed it… the GNU Project. For those without a deep history on the net or open source, GNU is one of the main providers of open source tools and philosophy, historically. You may have heard of its seeming insane head, Richard Stallman, who regularly froths at the mouth on a variety of technical topics and points of law. GnuPG is an implementation of OpenPGP, which is an open standard for public/private key crypto communication.

I’m not going to give much more than a quick glossing over on cryptography here. Basically, with public/private key crypto, you generate a pair of cryptographic keys for yourself, a public one and a private one. The public ones is…shared with the public. You give it away to your friends and family. The private key (also called the “secret key”) is kept secure on your machine and shown to no one.

Messages or files can be encrypted using GnuPG or other implementations of OpenPGP using your public key. At that point, the only way to extract the original contents is to use the private key associated with the public key. So, if you lose your private key, all previous encrypted data is inaccessible to you. Likewise, if someone gets your private key, they can extract data encrypted with your private key. The only speed bump in that process is that your private key also has a passphrase (like a password but hopefully much longer) associated with it. To decrypt data, this passphrase must also be entered when the private key is used. This acts as some security but anyone having a copy of your private key has a huge leg up on cracking your data. Keep that in mind (and don’t lose your key either).

Other than actual encryption of data, the other use of a public/private key pair is that you can use your private key to “sign” data, such as files or e-mail. This allows anyone with access to your public key to verify that the source of the data, the signer, is the holder of the private key associated with the public key. This acts as an excellent way (better than a physical signature, actually) to prove that the person sending a file, for example, really is you. You can also sign the keys belonging to other people, if you can verify that it is really that person, and send it to a keyserver on the Internet that holds public keys for people to see. This allows people to validate that other people are who they say they are, helping create a network of trust (so to speak).

Enigmail adds a bunch of user interface (buttons and menus) that allows Thunderbird to easily interact with keys that you have stored on your system. It will prompt you to enter your passphrase to decrypt data e-mailed to you or to encrypt or sign data going out.
Read the rest of this entry »

Category: Misc | | 4 Comments »

A month?

08.05.07 - 08:23pm

Wow, it has been most of a month since I posted here. My apologies for anyone actually paying attention.

With getting 2.0.0.5 and then 2.0.0.6 out for Firefox and Thunderbird things have been a little… busy around here.

On the virtualization front, QA did decide to go with the solution based on VMware’s work. There were a number of reasons for this but the primary two are:

1. VMware virtual machines can run on any of the platforms we use in QA or Development (OS X, Windows, and Linux).
2. VMware is already supported for other systems in the company fore infrastructure.

It made sense to standardize around one set of tools.  The first reason is probably the most immediate since the different people in QA do their work in wildly different environments. We don’t mandate any single operating system, for example. Having virtual machines that everyone could use reduces a lot of redundancy (and redundancy means more work for yours truly).

We do still want to get the the point where we can have a pool of machines available that community members could connect to from remote and on which a QA supported virtual machine could be loaded. We don’t have an ETA for this but it is something that we are actively working on.

I still have no reliable solution for virtualizing OS X. This is one that could really bite us at some point as we can have a mix of “clean” and “dirty” environments for all of our other supported operating systems but not anything from Apple.

When we were doing 2.0.0.5 and 2.0.0.6 testing, have virtual machines available made working on update scenarios and localized installations a lot easier since we could switch operating systems very quickly in the same environment and restore them to a good state for the next set of tests.

Anyway, that’s all for now here. I’m hoping to post a bit more this month though.

Category: Misc, MozQuality | | Be the First to Comment »

Kwik-E-Mart Visit

07.12.07 - 04:42pm

As a promotion for the Simpsons Movie, the local Mountain View 7-11 about two miles from Mozilla has been converted to a Kwik-E-Mart for a while.

MoCo QA felt a need for squishees after the Test Execution Meeting this afternoon so we took a run over there in Jay’s convertible.

I uploaded a set of photos to Flickr that I took while we were there. I have a couple below:

Mmmm…donut!

 

Jay!

Category: MozNews | | 1 Comment »

Air Mozilla Preparations

07.10.07 - 04:33pm

Today, people are getting ready for Air Mozilla, which goes live tomorrow at 2:00 PM PDT. We’ll be doing live streaming with a variety of people.

Asa blogged about this the other day and was used as a test dummy as systems were calibrated and tested end to end today.

Below, you can see Reed and Asa testing out the equipment. These were such endearing shots of two geeks that I decided that I had to share them…

I encourage everyone to tune in tomorrow if you have a chance.

Category: MozNews | | 2 Comments »

More Virtualization

07.08.07 - 09:53pm

I did manage to get all but one of our virtual machines finished for MoCo QA in the last week and up to where local QA can get them. Right now, we are using both Parallels and VMWare but sooner or later we’ll have to standardize on one or the other.

Parallels has gotten a lot of good press lately and most of us are working on Apple hardware so it has been enticing to us. Since VMware Fusion is still in beta, we have not necessarily wanted to bet the farm on it. That being said, as most people in the community know if it is something they watch, we do use VMware on a lot of our servers. It would make sense for us to standardize on a VMware-based solution across the board.

If anyone has any thoughts on the pros and cons around that, I would like to hear them.

As I mentioned in my last post, we’re currently working on putting together profiles for test environments. There is a wiki page up about this effort. I’ll be importing a lot of this profile data into virtual machines that I’ve created, using the clean ones as a base. This will allow us to do quick QA on builds in environments that are a lot closer to what Firefox users actually have. Future plans beyond this are pretty open at this point.

One gaping hole in our virtualization strategy is what to do about OS X. Currently, none of the virtualization solutions allow you to work with OS X and Apple is pretty hostile to the whole idea. This makes things occasionally difficult as we sometimes have to either hunt down an appropriate Mac or run test builds on our work machines and hope something really bad doesn’t happen. There is no way to abstract things out. As it is, I’m probably safer testing on Windows XP inside of a Parallels instance if I hit a really bad build because I can always restore back to a snapshot from before the installation. I do wish that there was a supported (heck, unsupported even) virtualization solution for Macs.

Category: MozQuality | | 7 Comments »