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Another community test day, Friday, June 8
Here’s a message from Tomcat about Testday this Friday. I participated last time and it was definitely a good use of time. Hope you can join in if you have a moment.
Calling all Vista-Community Testers!
Please join the Mozilla QA community for Testday on Friday, June 8th, 2007. This week, we will be testing the new Gran Paradiso Alpha 5 Build and also at Thunderbird 2.0.0.4
The event will run Friday, June 8th, 2007, from 7am – 5pm PDT
Please visit http://quality.mozilla.org/events/test-days for all the info regarding the event.
You can also find also more information about the Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 testing on http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Current_QA_TestDay
Jump into the #testday channel on irc.mozilla.org on Friday to participate. We hope to see you there!
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Camino 1.5
I wanted to give a shout out to Camino 1.5, which was released this week.
Sam Sidler and Mike Pinkerton have already blogged a bunch about it, but I wanted to also weigh in.
It’s more great work by the community. If you’re a Mac user, check it out. Camino 1.5 includes some awesome new features like spell checking (using the OS X dictionaries), feed detection and hand-off, sessions saving and recovery, and some improvements to our tabs. The team even set up migration documentation for users where the site identifies which browser you are using and then direct you to the correct migration instruction. …Excellent stuff here and driven completely by the community.
I blogged about this earlier this week, but on June 16 and 17, the Camino volunteers will be having a meet-up at Mozilla. If you’re interested in participating, please contact me and I will get you in touch with the right people.
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new theme on my blog
Graphicsguru, Jamey Boje, sent me a theme redesign for my blog. It was a total surprise, but so well done I had to change the header in my style sheet. (errr…well…because of the WordPress multi-user software, I don’t have access to the style sheets and actually had to get Jeremy Orem to replace the header…thanks Jeremy.)
The redesigned header has the same color scheme, but Jamey created a nice abstract image that is a two-toned circle with an “S” cut out of it. It reminds me a lot of the circular nature of all the Mozilla logos, and might look most similarly to the Minimo logo.
Jamey has been a long-standing contributor to Mozilla and is one of the artists who does a lot of the nice cover art for places like SpreadFirefox and FirefoxFlicks. If you’ve seen some cool art that is very Mozilla, Jamey probably had some involvement. Because of that, we got him a copy of Adobe’s most recent release of Creative Suite a while back. Thanks, Jamey!
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I am digging Thunderbird & Lightning
Presently, I use Thunderbird (2.0.0.0) with the Lightning extension (0.5 RC1) for my calendar option, making a pretty clean version of a unified mail/calendar client. Yeah…both have a few bugs, but for me, it has been working really well. A lot of new features have gone into the calendar project, making Lightning a very convenient and extensible application that can sit inside Thunderbird. Here is a little bit of background on my experience:
I have done my best to file new bugs about the tricky things I was experiencing when using both Thunderbird and Lightning. In each case, the developers have responded very quickly with suggestions on how to fix my problems or questions about my experience to verify that it was a new bug. A lot of answers to questions can be found at places like the Thunderbird knowledge base on mozillaZine, so I always check there first. At times, I think I find a bug and do my best to file it.
Until yesterday, I was running Lightning 0.3.1. But, after filing this bug, ssitter suggested I upgrade to 0.5 RC1. What a blessing! The new version of Lightning is great. Nice work guys. I also use the Provider for Google Calendar (developed by Philipp Kewisch) extension that allows Lightning to read and write to the Google Calendar. I now read and write to three different Google Calendars (all the calendars are being used as scheduling tools for specific Mozilla-related projects), and to my work calendar, which is a web-based Zimba app. As a first test, I invited a new Mozilla colleague from China to a meeting with me. The invitation came from my Zimbra calendar through Lightning, inside the Thunderbird interface. Lo and behold, Li accepted and the meeting appeared on both the Lightning app and the web-based version of my Zimbra calendar. Google calendar is working the same way.
Awesomely (is that a word?), I have a unified and tight email/calendar client. Please check it out and email me if you are having trouble setting it up. I can at least tell you what I’ve done.
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Support update
Last Thursday (5/31/2007), another team was assembled to evaluate new proposals for empowering the Mozilla community. We are moving forward on the following ideas:
1) On the weekend of June 16 and 17, 2007, Mozilla will open up Building K for the Camino team to gather and for a developer/community day. Building K is one of two buildings here in Mountain View where Mozilla Corp employees work. We will provide lunches on both days for the developers, give them access to the wireless here, and let everyone use the building for the weekend. Sam Sidler, Mozilla employee and long-time Camino contributor, will be on hand both days to help out.
2) We will also be helping our lead localizer in Italy who has been one of the centers of the community there for some time. He is administrator of the support forum (which he helped grow from about 200 to almost 16,000 users), manages the press, coordinates our QA activities, founded Babelzilla and is an administrator of the Extenzilla project. He is doing a whole lot more and we are so grateful to have his leadership in Italy. Please check out the Italian Mozilla effort at Mozilla Italia. We’ll be providing him with a new laptop because he is currently sharing his computer with his girlfriend. This will help him a lot.
3) In our attempt to relieve some of the burden that localizers face, Pascal Chevrel and I have been working on providing some level of monetary support to cover very basic costs for tools often paid for by the localizers starting communities in new locales (i.e. paying for hosting costs and domain name registrations). We are hammering out the details, but it looks like somewhere around Euro 300 could be enough to offset basic costs that localizers and community members are facing to get a new community in smaller locales up and running. It will help relieve the work of localizers because we can now help cover costs of tools provided by them for the community to use. Hopefully, community forums and discussions will be able to thrive by providing this small level of support.
Questions? You know how to contact me, so please do. I look forward to hearing from you.
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