Part of the problem (and there are oh so many parts!) is that Firefox::General serves two very different purposes. One is as the default bucket for bugs from new users, or for when someone’s not sure where to file a bug. This is a real firehose. I don’t know how to get exact numbers from Bugzilla, but it’s easily thousands of bugmails per month (including the initial report, and following discussion to determine the problem and proper component). The second purpose is as a catch-all component for code without its own dedicated bugzilla components. The volume of bugs around this purpose is far more sedate, though it’s again hard to get numbers. It’s like trying to find a leak in a firehose by peeking into it. :)

So it’s time for a simple experiment.

We’re creating a new Firefox::Untriaged component (see bug 713163), which will serve as the new “inbox” for bugs from new or unsure users. Firefox::General will remain, and focus on being a good home for bugs without a more suitable component. (There is currently no plan to move the existing backlog of 6000+ open Firefox::General bugs over to Firefox::Untriaged. Maybe we should?)

The idea is that bugs filed into Firefox::Untriaged should end up moving elsewhere (or be closed, if appropriate), lingering only long enough for gathering enough info to move/close it. Firefox::General then becomes manageable as place for real bugs, just as any other component should be.

There are still many problems with our inability to effectively triage all incoming bugs (as fine contributors like Tyler Downer have often blogged about), and this won’t solve that. But it is a small step towards better stewardship of one piece of the problem.

This morning someone new dropped into #fx-team on IRC, asking about a reproducible problem and how to submit a patch. Normally #fx-team is a fairly busy channel, but since we were all at the Mozilla All-Hands last week, people were traveling and recovering… So it was 12 hours of dead silence before anyone replied. Not great, but also pretty rare. :-(

Anyway, the awesome part was that in that time this person managed to grab the source code, diagnose the problem with gdb, fix the problem, and then blog about it — check it out. That’s pretty awesome! (Oops, I already said awesome once. Still deserving of a 2nd ‘awesome’. :-)

The timing couldn’t have been better. At the All Hands, I went to one of the talks by Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon on Growing and Maintaining Community. It was pretty awesome (3rd time, yes I know). Obviously Ubuntu has a large community, but I was hadn’t realized just how much thoughtful effort has gone into improving it… TONS of fantastic ideas and practices that I hope Mozilla can also make use of. The one downside, though, was that I came away feeling a little bummed at how much work need to do to reach the high level of wide-ranging, effective engagement Bacon et al have developed. So it was really splendid timing to have a new community member pop out and have a good experience.

Today was a good day.

Now that’s out of the way, let me refer you to this post by Notch, creator of the wildly-successful indy game Minecraft.

Someone tweeted me about a joking campaign to add 3d modeled snouts to the pigs in Minecraft, so I did.

I think this is one of my favorite parts of working on Firefox. “Hey, let’s fix that” … “*bam* Fixed”. That’s not to say every community suggestion or known bug is simple to fix, but when it is it’s super satisfying.

The correct answer, of course, is Firefox Mobile. :-) But what _other_ apps are must-have for Android?

Some context: I got a Motorola Atrix phone a few months ago, it was my first Android device. I’ll probably blog more about it sometime, but the short version is that the hardware is good-to-ok, Android (currently Gingerbread) is a disaster, and I (honestly) really really really like Firefox Mobile on it. It’s my first mobile device (iPhone included) that I actually enjoy browsing on. Even for an extended period, as opposed to “let me look up X real quick.”

I’ve now got a Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet, and am giving it a whirl. I will _definitely_ have things to say about it soon. But in the interim, I’m wondering what other excellent Android apps are worthy to try out?

My current — and rather short — list includes:

• Firefox Mobile (duh)
• Angry Birds (who doesn’t)
• Twitter (also mandatory, official client or not)
• Evernote (really liking the desktop app, so a natural fit)

Johnath was raving about Tasker, which I’ll install as soon as I figure out how to enable the “Buy” button in Android Market.

*drumroll*

TOP SEVEN THINGS ABOUT JUSTIN DOLSKE!

7. Has a cat!

Hmm. Kinda off to a bland start, but then I never found Letterman to be very funny.

Anyway, yes. I haz a cat. I saw her hanging around as a stray, and began to leave some cat food outside for her. Then, after a couple rainy nights of her stopping by to eat (as well as look sad and lonely), I opened up my door to put out new food… She ran inside (!) and I realized I had just been adopted. :-3 She’s a fairly small cat (and was starved when she found me), so I named her “Munchkin”. We’re snuggle buddies, and she’s so sweet and well-behaved it’s ridiculous. _Ridiculous._

I have pictures from when I first got her, as well as some more recent shots. Oh, and she’s Kind Of A Big Deal, as the header on the URL-shortening side icanhas.com.

6. Built a Firefox logo from LEGO!

I’ve previously blogged about this. It’s awesome enough to mention again, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

5. Is a hueg space history nerd!

I’m keenly interested in NASA’s (and other countries’) space programs, both past and present. I first got hooked after reading an article in the newspaper on the 25th anniversary of the Apollo Program, when I read that we had landed (men) on the moon not just once, but actually 6 times. I was stunned that that I had never learned that before, and was determined to know more.

I particularly enjoy the nitty-gritty, engineering details of programs. It can be hard to find — mass market books don’t want to get too technical, and NASA’s own outreach is mainly for school kids — but there are gems like this book, and NASA’s Apollo Surface Journal, or Apollo Flight Journal. NASA now has lots of very high-res photos from recent Shuttle and ISS missions, which you’ll see as wallpapers on my desktop at work. They’re fun to zoom into and examine for little details.

4. Can do software _and_ hardware!

I do software for a living, but I also love to dabble with simple electronics on the side. I can fairly claim geek points for knowing how to solder (fine-pitch SMT, at that!), doing design and etching of my own boards, reading datasheets for fun, and hoarding components that will be “useful someday”. All self-taught, but also not very good at it. :-( They say software guys shouldn’t do hardware, and vice-versa — it’s probably true. But it pleases me, and I think it’s more about the journey than the destination.

My first serious interest came after reading about a neat “forever flasher” project on alt.hackers, back in the day… It was just a little LED blinking circuit (solar powered, with supercap for storage), but the clever part was that it was hooked up with fine magnet wire and permanently cast in the center of a clear acrylic block. From there I graduated to building a beer-keg monitoring system with a DalSemi TINI kit. My hardware was flaky, but it did have a web interface. And I get bonus points for writing a GIF encoder in Java, mostly from scratch.These days I’ve been tinkering with an Arduino board I got from SparkFun’s first Free Day promo, as well as TI’s nice little MSP430 LaunchPad kit (just $4.30!).

3. Loves Beer!

Did I just mention beer? I think I did. Yes, I’m a bit of a beer snob… Ok, ok, I’m a big beer snob and huge hop-head. I’m in heaven with the amazing beer variety available on the west coast. If someone could please move Belgium over here too, I’d appreciate it.

Instead of a long monologue on how much I enjoy all things brewed, I’ll just plug BeerAdvocate here. Subscribe, it’s just $15 cheap!

2. He’s an international fugitive from the CIA and NSA!

I miiiight be stretching the truth here slightly. :-) But back in 1997, I helped out with the DESCHALL Project, a massive, distributed effort to brute-force a message encrypted with DES. (Purely white-hat, it was a contest sponsored by RSA Security.) After 3 months and tens of thousands of participating systems, a 200Mhz Pentium-90 owned by some guy in Utah stumbled across the correct key, and we won. (The secret message was “Strong cryptography makes the world a safer place.”)

This was the first known successful brute-force attack against DES. We got some press (page A3 of the Wall Street Journal!), I later cowrote a USENIX article, and overall it felt good to play a tiny role in the crypto wars of the 1990s… Back when the government considered cryptography to be munition and still tried to tightly control its export. Coincidentally, we won just days before the US Government gave Netscape permission to export 128-bit crypto (instead of the ridiculously limited 40-bit limitation it required before).

I didn’t write any of the crypto code for DESCHALL, but I did help with organizing the project, wrote a proxy to tunnel its UDP client/server control traffic over TCP, made a graph server for people to track their progress, and (most fun of all) made an export-control download page that did a reverse-IP lookup of the user, then a WHOIS lookup on that domain, and finally scraped out an address to see if they were likely in the US. Oh, and I ran the DESCHALL client on about 200 systems at Ohio State University… Over the 3 months, they tested an 100 trillion DES keys — or about 0.1% of the problem space. One year later, the EFF built Deep Crack, which could crack a DES key in just a couple of days.

Eventually I should file a FOIA request to see what the US Government knew about the project and us. :-)

1. Starting his 6th year at Mozilla!

Last but not least.

My first day working for Mozilla was August 7th, 2006. 5 full years ago, nearly to the day. Wow. Looking back, I am concurrently full of things to say and speechless. I’ll just say it’s been an amazing experience that never gets old — every day, when the office elevator doors slide open and I see “Mozilla” on the wall, I feel awed and humbled.

I can’t wait for what the next 5 years will bring!

And that’s tonight’s Top 7 list!

*throws card through fake window*

Good night, ladies and gentlemen!

I just wanted to point this out, and I hope it will help reduce people’s stress.

In short — it’s still a pain to use the web without Flash. :-(

I’m probably a lighter-than-average Flash consumer… The vast majority of things I hit that used Flash were videos, and I occasionally ran across sites that were entirely built in Flash. I’m not really into online games at the moment, so the lack of certain addicting games didn’t bother me a bit. I can see how that would be a complete deal-breaker for some people, though.

Things are looking up, though. HTML5 video is here, so there’s a clear path for replacing Flash when just used for video. Unfortunately, Youtube still seems to default to requiring Flash unless you opt-in to their HTML5 Trial. And even that’s a mixed bag, because while most (all?) new videos are available in the WebM format, lots of older ones have yet to be reencoded (the exact pattern eludes me; some 4+ year old videos work fine, while some < 1 year old videos do not).

And then there’s Vimeo, which displays this particularly-aggravating error for all videos:

Is Firefox 4 not an “HTML5 compliant browser”?! Sigh.

While sites will take time to move away from Flash, there are some things in the browser we can start working on to help make living without Flash less painful.

1) We should implement click-to-play plugins — basically, build in the Flashblock add-on. This is good for a number of other reasons, but it would also let early unadopters choose to enable Flash selectively.

2) We need to make this infobar less OMG IN YOUR FACE.

And, ideally, some way of letting users indicate when they’re not interested in installing the plugin and to please stop nagging. (We already have the plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin pref, but that’s not per-plugin, and there’s no UI for it.)

3) Similarly, the “unknown plugin” placeholder UI should stop being pushy about offering to download plugins when you don’t want them. (And not even offer this in the first place if we don’t actually have a download available for that plugin type!)

Any other suggestions for ways to make a Flash-less browser more palatable to use?

So, then, here I am. Blogging. Just between you and I, ok? Great.

I had an… idea… pop into my head a while back. Probably shortly after reading Roc’s post on paint servers, and sometime before Marcus blogged about implementing it. The new CSS -moz-element() function is a delightful little tool that can enable all kinds of clever Hacks. Like mine.

Two words suffice to describe my idea. (Apologies for drawing this out.) Video. Personas. Yes, why settle for static images in your browser chrome when you could have colorful, swirling motion instead? Well… Ahem. There are actually all kinds of reasons why you should settle for static images instead of video chrome. And that’s why I’m a little embarrassed about having implemented this. It’s a delightful hack, but I’m horrified to think someone might actually USE it.

Thus, without further ado — Video Personas. Install the addon linked there, and try out the examples on the page.

Then uninstall it and let us never speak of this again.

Six months ago, something got me thinking about making a Lego mosaic. Maybe it was an example of one on Reddit, or just inspiration from popular 8-bit “pixel art”. But the end result was an itch that I knew I’d have to scratch eventually. I figured the Firefox logo would be a good thing to start with — it’s colorful, has been optimized for low resolutions, and all around seemed like a fun piece of art to do. (I also considered the Mozilla dinohead, but it’s not as colorful and didn’t seem to scale down as nice.)

Here’s the finished result:

I discovered a few surprising parallels to Firefox (the project) in the course of building this. Most importantly, the Lego community was absolutely essential. The Lego company has a neat “Pick-A-Brick” service, which lets you order a custom assortment of parts, but the selection is limited to what they currently manufacture. So I turned to the Lego community’s BrickLink site — essentially an EBay for Lego. A huge variety of parts are available, including older shapes and colors which are no longer made. By the time I completed the mosaic, I bought over 700 pieces through Bricklink, from sellers in the US, Europe, and the Far East. These comprise a large portion of the finished work.

[At this point I should also apologize to the Lego community. I bought out the world's supply of 1x2 Light Orange plates, which were already rare and expensive at $1.00 a piece. But fear not, I ended up not using them all and will place the extras back into the marketplace! :-)]

A bit of background on how I went about building this…

First thing I did was to create a color palette. I wanted to see how the limited variety of colors worked together, so I ordered (via Pick-A-Brick and BrickLink) a few of every color available in 1×1 or 1×2 plates.

I was happy with the colors, so ordered my first batch from Pick-a-Brick ($50 of little Lego pieces in one pile!):

First assembly pass…

More assembly. The black plates are used to give a subtle 3D effect to the fox. (The scattered pieces were just to give me an idea of how things would look.)

Mostly complete… I thought. Turns out the hardest part to get looking good was the tail, and there was a lot more fiddling to be done!

Yes, like any fine Thanksgiving meal, there were leftovers. Mostly because I didn’t want to pay shipping for additional tiny orders, but also because it was hard to preplan the exact design and I knew I would be adjusting it.

The actual design / layout of the mosaic was the most time-consuming work. I started off by using PicToBrick, a free-software program (again, Lego community!) that converts photos to quantized Lego layouts and makes part lists. Here’s the layout it generated:

This was a useful guide, but also flawed. Some of the colors it chose might make sense mathematically, but wouldn’t look good in reality (eg, the lime green squares in the Firefox tail). Also, some of those colors it used were never made (or are unavailable anywhere) in 1×1 or 1×2 plates. So I used it as a basic map, but most of the detail work was done by zooming in on a official 48×48 Firefox logo, and selecting placement and color by eye.

I’m quite pleased with the final result; I just hope the Firefox logo doesn’t change again or I’ll have to build another!

For those not familiar with Bugzilla, you can get bugmail for essentially all changes in specific components by “watching” the fake email address for the default QA Contact of the component. For example, going to your Bugzilla user preferences and adding “video.audio@core.bugs” to the user watching list will send you email for changes for bugs in the Core :: Video/Audio component.

Component watching is where the majority of my bugmail comes from, plus a chunk of other mail from bugs I’ve filed or CC’d myself on.

Filtering bugmail is the obvious first step; I’ve used the built-in filtering capabilities of Thunderbird for a long time. Since getting an iPhone, I’ve switched to using the server-side filters on our Zimbra mailserver, so that things get filtered even when Thunderbird isn’t running. Bugmail (anything from bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org) defaults to a “Bugs” folder. Components I watch are sent to per-component subfolders (by using the X-Bugzilla-Component and X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason mail headers). I also keep a special “Requests” folder (messages with “X-Bugzilla-Type: request”) that gets review requests, as well as reviews granted/denied.

This generally works fine, but I’ve noticed a few inefficiencies…

• I don’t read review _requests_, and should just delete those automatically. Instead, I deal with requests from Bugzilla’s “My Requests” header/footer link, and just check that often. But I do use the review granted/rejected emails to help ensure I don’t forget to check in my patches, or submit fixed patches for re-review.
• Some components I watch only loosely — I’ll skim through interesting threads and just delete the rest. I belatedly realized that this might make me miss comments that were specifically directed at me, so I’ve added a filter to tag messages that have “dolske” in the body (these show up a different color in Thunderbird).
• Bugmails that I read and then need to followup on get starred, or sometimes just marked unread again. Which sometimes leads to me rereading and remarking-unread multiple times, or forgetting about starred messages buried in a glut of other bugs. I don’t have a better solution for this yet.
• I disabled bugmail for dependency changes. It was just too much volume with too little value (especially for when dependencies are added, and the bugmail doesn’t even list the new bug’s title!). I assume if it’s important to me, I’m either already watching the component or someone has CC’d me to the new bug.

I’m also still using my Thunzilla extension (for making exposing useful info in Thunderbird’s folder view). I hear good things about sdwilsh’s Bugzilla Helper addon too, but haven’t got around to using it.

So, what’s your favorite bugmail tip/trick?