Q: How do I rename a sub-directory? The only way I can find is to make a new one with the new name, copy all the files over from the old one, and then delete the original!

A: As you have found, the MS-DOS REN command doesn’t work on sub-directories. For a programmer it is a relatively trivial task to write a utility to do this job, and DR DOS 6 has a RENDIR command used in the same way as REN.

The manual for MS-DOS 5.0 advises the reader to do what you’re doing already, and indeed DR DOS 5 didn’t make provision for renaming directories. You can, however, use the DOS shell program to rename directories. If you want to stick with the command line, the best alternative is to get hold of a utility program written to do the job. Such programs are commonly found in shareware/PD catalogues.

Better think carefully before choosing that directory name…

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/vZG3ijh0M4c/

the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:

• [1157113] Argument “” isn’t numeric in numeric eq (==) at Bugzilla/Extension/TrackingFlags/Flag.pm line 406
• [1157395] CSRF in log in form
• [1149659] crash signature not linking to signature summary on socorro
• [1153102] add hooks for bug bounty display and form
• [1154026] Pre-fill Bounty Attachment form fields for e.g. date and reporter

discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.

Filed under: bmo, mozilla

https://globau.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/happy-bmo-push-day-138/

Yesterday I discussed offensive speech, especially relevant to the Texas license plate situation because the design’s being seen as “offensive” was Texas’s justification for denying Texas SCV‘s request. Today I talk a bit about oral argument.

Government speech

Texas hammered on its government-speech argument, but it generally didn’t get a very receptive audience. As Lyle Denniston observed, most of the justices’ questions and comments implicitly assumed there was a free speech issue to determine — which wouldn’t be the case if Texas SCV’s design were government speech. I doubt there’s more than a vote or two for these plates being government speech, if that.

One particularly gratifying discussion of government speech occurred when Texas’s advocate attempted to assert the specialty license plates were government speech because of the level of control, and Justice Kennedy noted the circularity of the argument. It was good to see practically the first problem I noticed in Texas’s argument, was also noticed on the bench. Chief Justice Roberts’s expression of skepticism about the program having no clear, identifiable policy being articulated, instead stating Texas was doing it for money (later joined by Justice Alito on the latter point), was also welcome.

A fair bit of time was spent discussing hypothetical “Vote Republican” and “Vote Democrat” license plates, and whether a state might approve one and deny the other. It’s not clear to me (nor was it clear to the justices) that “government speech” would directly prohibit this, but various “independent rules” were observed that would prevent such (just as such electioneering would be prohibited, somehow, in official ballots).

Forums

As I suggested earlier, Texas’s specialty plates program seems to be either a designated public forum or a limited public forum. Justice Kennedy picked up on this, asking if this was a case where Texas had opened “a new public forum in a new era”. Justice Alito posed multiple hypothetical questions involving government-established places where speech might occur, and the implication I drew from his comments suggested that he also viewed such cases as public forums. Each justice also presented hypothetical cases where the government set up a place for speech to happen (a billboard with a state message on it, with a small space for private speech to take place; officially-designated soapboxes in parks), then questioned whether it could be government speech or instead a public forum.

Justice Alito also probed the nature of the license plate forum if the state accepted only colleges, then colleges plus scenic places, and so on, gradually expanding into everyone. The point being: at what dividing line is a scheme no longer government speech? Texas SCV’s answer was that every state-designed plate would be government speech — but plates designed by private entities would be those entities’ speech.

“Offensive” speech

Various justices expressed concern that approving Texas’s denial might lead to regulation of offensiveness in other forums. Justice Ginsburg characterized the “might be offensive” standard as “nebulous” and granting too much discretion. Justice Kagan worried about approval of regulation of offense spreading into more and more forums, producing more and more regulation of speech.

The true fireworks for offensiveness, of course, arose when Texas SCV’s free-speech nut lawyer rose to defend their position. In essence he argued that once Texas extended an open invitation to anybody, they no longer could control what was said. Then, in response to successive questions, he argued Texas couldn’t prohibit license plates with swastikas, “jihad” (which he initially misheard as “vegan”, to laughter), “Make pot legal”, “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” (more laughter, and a high point of the argument), and ultimately “the most offensive racial epithet that you can imagine”. Truly it was a glorious display of zeal for freedom of speech.

Selectivity

Various justices also made comments as to Texas’s non-selectivity in approving plates. Texas approved over 400 plates and rejected only around a dozen. Clearly several justices thought that near-blanket approval weakened any argument Texas might have for the state carefully exercising discretion in every instance, and strengthened the argument that they’d opened up a public forum for speech.

Those are some of the high points of argument. If you’re interested in more detail, see the transcript.

Next time, it’s probably on to a series wrapup. But no promises yet, as I haven’t written up enough thoughts to be certain. And again, as I noted yesterday, this might end up delayed a day or two. Til next time!

http://whereswalden.com/2015/04/27/texas-license-plate-oral-argument/

The Monday Project Meeting

https://air.mozilla.org:443/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20150427/

I recently blogged about mozci and I was gladly surprised that people have curiosity about it.

I want to spend Friday fixing some issues on the tool and I wonder if you would like to join me to learn more about it and help me fix some of them.

I will be available as armenzg_mozci from 9 to 5pm EDT on IRC (#ateam channel).
I'm happy to jump on Vidyo to give you a hand understanding mozci.

I hand picked some issues that I could get a hand with.
Documentation and definition of the project in readthedocs.

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/armenzg_mozilla/~3/oKxBSu3Yf5o/mozci-hackday-friday-may-1st-2015.html

With the Mozilla Science Global Sprint coming up soon (submissions for project ideas are open until May 11), the community has been coming up with tons of awesome suggestions for projects to work on; meanwhile, new projects on everything from collaborative LaTeX to sleuthing out what references are open access on BMC to a curated bioinformatics reaction pathway database are cropping up on Collaborate, our project to highlight interesting open source and open science projects you can jump into, and learn by doing. But all of these projects have to answer the same question: how do you present an open source project in a way that appeals to people, gets them interested, and attracts collaborators who will stick around? Here are a few tips on what we’ve learned during the first six months of Collaborate:

On Collaborate

Collaborate compiles and curates open source, open science projects, in order to make those projects discoverable and connect them with potential contributors. But once someone finds their way to your project, it’s up to what you present there to convince them to jump in. A few tips for a strong listing:

• Seek out users. Prolific and long-term volunteer contributors to open-source projects are often those who see themselves as the future users of that project. When describing your project, make sure to illustrate who you think the users will be, how you think they will use the project, and what benefit they’re going to get out of it. Your goal should be for a visitor to read your project summary and say, ‘I would totally use that – let’s make it happen!’
• Offer some examples. Link to examples of the project in action, that help newcomers understand what the project is and get excited about being involved. If your project is such that it can be demoed on a website, all the better – if it’s not a web-oriented project, consider producing a blogpost that has figures or examples of your work thus far.
• Describe a roadmap. The ‘Main Deliverables’ section of a Collaborate listing is there to let you describe what sort of high-level things collaborators will get to work on on your project. Don’t worry about nitty-gritty bugs or feature descriptions – that’s what your issue tracker is for. Rather, give a bird’s eye view of the direction you’re hoping to take the work in, and give people an idea of how they could fit into that.

On GitHub

Alright! People are excited about your listing on Collaborate, so they’ve joined your project and forked your repo. How can we turn that initial excitement into enough engagement to stick around and really dig in? A few more tips:

• Talk to your collaborators. Collaborate will open an issue introducing new collaborators as they express interest in the site; try and respond to this issue within 24 hours. Making newcomers feel welcome is crucial at this stage; let them know you’re interested in working with them, and help them figure out where they can start contributing based on their skills and interests. Same goes for new issues opened – fast engagement signals a collaboration that cares about participation.
• Have a good Getting Started guide. Confusion on what to do first can kill enthusiasm to participate in a project very quickly. Make sure the README.md of your project contains complete, current and correct instructions on how to set the project up, including any dependencies it may involve.
• Use that Issue Tracker. The issue tracker is where you can start getting down to the details of what tasks need attention; use liberally, to get the plan out of your head and into a place where people can jump in. Also keep in mind, different issues are suitable for different collaborators; people new to the programming language or topic are best served by detailed, small issues that lay out an exact problem and perhaps a proposed solution, while experienced contributors will be more interested in big, open-ended problems that give them a chance to use their skills and imaginations. A good collaborative project should try to have a mix of both.

All these things point in the same direction – people participate in open projects when they see the value in them, identify personally with them, have a clear path to getting involved, and feel welcomed by the existing community. As always, we’ll help you polish your project listing and repo as it goes up on Collaborate and as we get ready for the Global Sprint. There is a huge and growing list of exciting projects to get involved with; we hope you’ll join us on June 4-5 for the Sprint, and anytime on Collaborate.

http://mozillascience.org/teaming-up-how-to-build-your-open-science-collaboration/

The Week in Review is our weekly roundup of what’s new in open science from the past week. If you have news or announcements you’d like passed on to the community, be sure to share on Twitter with @mozillascience and @billdoesphysics, or join our mailing list and get in touch there.

Blogs & Papers

• Bj"orn Brembs and F1000 Research have published what they cite as the first ‘living scientific figure'; a principle component analysis of Canton S strains that updates and re-plots itself upon receiving new data submitted by third parties. Data submitted to the living figure (fig. 4 in the paper) is stamped with a DOI and available for download, and contributors are automatically cited in the paper.
• Martin Fenner described what he calls a Scholarly Markdown Bundle, that includes not only the scholarly markdown superset, but also a git-controlled archive of research objects and a standardization of metadata similar to the Code as a Research Object project currently on Collaborate, but formatted to interface with Pandoc.
• Dan Katz reflected on the real use of research code; Katz observes that even code originally intended for ‘single-use’ has a much longer lifetime than authors often imagine, and that this has substantial implications for the time and standards worth applying to the production of research code.
• Liberian health officials reported in the NY Times the obstacles that closed-access scholarship created in combating the recent Ebola outbreak in the region; despite the presence of Ebola in the region known to the European medical establishment since the 1980s, local health services were unaware of the findings, potentially slowing their response to the lethal epidemic.
• Sabina Leonelli and Barbara Prainsack wrote an insightful piece on the commodification of the academic establishment, and the implications that that context has for the direction and purposes of open science.
• We blogged on practical code review policies that can be imposed by journals, the key observation being that while post-production code review is ineffective, policies can be implemented that encourage authors to reflect on their code, demonstrably leading to fewer bugs.
• As always, don’t miss the open science roundup from Eva Amsen over at F1000.

Government & Policy

• The European Commission released detailed findings & policy recommendations  from its survey late last year on the perceptions, expectations and challenges presented by open science, as understood by the scientific community there.
• The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has announced a series of industry partnerships intended to make their environmental data widely available.
• The NSF-funded Workshop on Supporting Scientific Discovery through Norms and Practices for Software and Data Citation and Attribution released its summary report, including recommendations and action plans surrounding the establishment of clear infrastructure and standards for citing both code and data as part of the scholarly record.

Projects & Resources

• We launched the Mozilla Study Group program last week, a meetup framework designed to help researchers regularly share skills, collaborate on projects and give space to discussions of code in research. Check out the Study Group Handbook, the Study Group Website Kit, and our growing collection of short Study Group Lessons.

http://mozillascience.org/mozilla-science-lab-week-in-review-april-20-26/

I've been bothered for quite a while with people telling me they "have nothing to hide anyhow" when the topic of Internet privacy comes up.

I guess that mostly comes from the impression that the whole story is our government watching (over) us and the worst thing that can happen is incrimination. While that might threaten some things, most people do nothing that is really interesting enough for a government to go into attack mode over it (or so they believe, and very firmly so). And I even agree that most governments (including the US and EU countries) actually actively seek out what they call "terrorist activities" (even though they often stretch that term in crazy ways) and/or child abuse and similar topics that the vast majority of citizens agree are a bad thing and are not part of - and the vast majority of politicians and government workers believe they act in the best interest of their citizens when "obviously fighting that" via their different programs of privacy-undermining surveillance. That said, most people seem to be OK with their government collecting data about them as long as it's not used to incriminate them (and when that happens, it's too late to protest the practice anyhow).

A lot has been said about that since the "Snowden leaks", but I think the more obvious short-term and direct threat is in corporate surveillance, which has been swept under the rug in most discussions recently - to the joy of Facebook, Google and other major players in that area. I have also seen that when depicting some obvious scenarios resulting of that, people start to think about it much more promptly and realize the effect on their daily lives (even if those are minor issues compared to government starting a manhunt against you with terror allegations or similar).

So what I start asking is:

• Are you OK with banks determining your credit conditions based on all his comments on Facebook and his Google searches? ("Your friends say you owe them money, and that you live beyond your means, this is gonna be difficult...")
• Are you OK with insurances changing your rates based on all that data? ("Oh, so you 'like' all those videos about dangerous sports and that deafening music, and you have some quite aggressive or even violent friends - so you see why we need to go a bit higher there, right?")
• Are you OK with prices for flights or products in online stores (Amazon etc.) being different depending on what other things you have done on the web? ("So, you already planned that vacation at that location, good, so we can give you a higher air rate as you' can't back out now anyhow.")
• And, of course, envision ads in public or half-public locations being customized for whoever is in the area. ("You recently searched for engagement rings, so we'll show ads for them wherever you go." or "Hey, this is the third time today we sat down and a screen nearby shows Viagra ads." or "My dear daughter, why do we see ads for diapers everywhere we go?")

There are probably more examples, those are the ones that came to my mind so far. Even if those are smaller things, people can relate to them as they affect things in their own life and not scenarios that feel very theoretical to them.

And, of course, they are true to a degree even now. Banks are already buying data from Facebook, probably including "private" messages, for determining credit scores, insurances base rates on anything they can find out about you, flight rates as well as prices for some Amazon and other web shop products vary based on what you searched before - and ads both on your screen and even on postal mail get tailored to a profile built on all kinds of your online behavior. My questions above just take all of those another step forward - but a pretty realistic one in my opinion.

I hope thinking about questions like that makes people realize they might actually want to evade some of that and in the end they actually have something to hide.

And then, of course, that a non-profit like Mozilla, which doesn't seek to maximize money, can believably be on their side and help them regain some privacy where they - now - want to.

http://home.kairo.at/blog/2015-04/nothing_to_hide

It has been a while since I last blogged and I had something interesting to share so I finally managed to overcome my laziness. In this post, I would like to talk about some of the projects that I have been involved with in 2015 in the A-Team at Mozilla. Before I talk about the projects, I would like to give a shout out to @jmaher, @armenzg, @kmoir, @dminor, @ahal, @gbrown, @wlach who were always there to answer my questions, help me find a way to solve problems when I was stuck and review my patches. I have worked on some exciting problems and made some great progress on the projects in the past 4 months. They are:

1) SETA – Search for Extraneous Test Automation
We run hundreds of builds and thousands of test jobs each day on our integration branches, that is , mozilla-inbound and fx-team. And as more and more platforms are added every month, the load on test machines is ever increasing. But are so many test jobs for each push required? We run the test jobs to catch failures but majority of time, the test jobs pass and the ones who indeed catch failures often have duplicate ones. SETA tries to tackle this problem by being smart about utilizing machine cycles. In SETA, we find the minimum number of jobs that are needed to find all the failures that have occurred in the last six months on integration machines. From this data, we predict that these jobs will be more likely to catch failures than others and therefore other test jobs are set to run less frequently. It is true that we will be wrong certain number of times and when we miss a failure, the sheriffs would need to backfill some jobs to find the root cause. But most of the time, it will work. Joel has done an excellent blog post giving examples and statistics that has been done in this project. This project has been deployed in Mozilla Releng production systems and we have reduced the number of jobs to roughly 150-190 jobs/push from 350-400 jobs/push per day on desktop (linux, osx, win) platforms, a 50% reduction during high load weekdays. To put this into perspective, the past week we have seen the lowest jobs per push since January 1st on both mozilla-inbound and fx-team. I see this as a huge win as it drastically reduces the load on our machines as well as reduces the time the sheriffs need to star intermittents, increasing productivity for all. And this data is for desktop platforms only, android and other platforms are yet to come, after which we should be seeing more gains.

jobs/push per week since January for mozilla-inbound. Lowest on April 20th – April 26th

Project Repo: https://github.com/dminor/ouija
Project Stats: http://alertmanager.allizom.org/dailyjobs.html
Project Information: http://alertmanager.allizom.org/seta.html

2) Mozilla CI Tools
MozCI (Mozilla CI Tools) is a python library which allows one to trigger builds and test jobs on treeherder.mozilla.org via command line. It has various use cases like triggering jobs for bisecting intermittent failures, backfilling missing jobs, and personally I use it for bisecting performance regressions. This tool is also used by sheriffs and is aimed for increasing developer productivity.
Project Repo: https://github.com/armenzg/mozilla_ci_tools
Project Documentation: https://mozilla-ci-tools.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

3) Firefox Performance Sheriffing
In late January 2015, I took up the role of a performance sheriff. In this role, I look at the performance data produced by the test jobs and find regressions, root causes and get bugs on file to track issues and bring it to the attention of patch authors.
Sheriff documentation: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/Talos/Sheriffing

I have also contributed patches to some other projects like removing android*.json from mochitests (bug 1083347), A-Team bootcamp and Mozregression. If you are looking to contribute to open source projects, I think this is a great time to start contributing to Automation and Tools team at Mozilla and make a big impact. For me, it has been one of the most productive quarters and I plan to keep contributing further. As some of you may know, this summer I will be joining as the A-Team intern at Mozilla in San Francisco with @chmanchester as my mentor, and I am looking forward to do more exciting work here!

https://vaibhavag.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/a-team-contributions-in-2015/

Yesterday I discussed First Amendment forum doctrine as it related to Texas’s specialty plate program. Today I discuss the subject where everyone learns to stop worrying and love censorship: “offensive” speech.

“Offensive” speech

Texas denied Texas SCV‘s design because “the design might be offensive to any member of the public” (emphases added). A mere possibility of offense, to a single person, allows Texas (if it wants, as a matter of even-handed objectivity and fairness) to tell the plate requester to pound sand.

What does the First Amendment say about “offensive” speech? Offensive speech particularly is strongly protected. The First Amendment lets you victim-blame soldiers at their own funerals. It lets you burn the American flag, notwithstanding that this “seriously offended” several witnesses. It lets you satirically attribute false quotations to someone implying that his first sexual experience occurred in an outhouse with his own mother…after kicking out the goat. It protects the right to wear an undoubtedly-offensive jacket bearing the words “Fuck the Draft”. It protects a student newspaper cover depicting police officers raping the Statue of Liberty. It lets you falsely claim to have received the highest and most respected of military awards, in some sense diminishing that award’s value. The list goes on and on.

The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive and unpopular speech, full stop. “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” “The fact that protected speech may be offensive to some does not justify its suppression.” As the Court stated regarding a more restrictive forum than the public sphere where license plates reside, “The mere dissemination of ideas — no matter how offensive to good taste — may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.'”

In short, Texas is horribly wrong to think it has authority to censor offensive specialty plate designs based on “levels of offensiveness” (which, we must remember, was Texas’s post hoc rationale, not anything in the law).

Could the Confederate flag be “fighting words”?

Is some offensive speech nonetheless unprotected? Yes, but it must be fighting words that “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” No one here argues Texas law is really trying to criminalize fighting words, because doing so would run into (at least) two major problems.

First, Texas concedes that Texas SCV could display a bumper sticker with identical design on vehicles. But it’s irrational to think moving a hypothetically-inciting message a few inches would change that aspect of its nature. If a plate design met that standard, then so would a bumper sticker, and both could be forbidden.

Second, Texas’s “might be offensive to any member of the public” rule goes far beyond fighting words. “Choose Life” or “Respect Choice” specialty plates (or even “All Lives Matter”, which is clearly offensive and you should check your privilege, you racist member of the patriarchy) would offend some people. But it’s inconceivable (not meant that way) these could ever be considered fighting words, rather than protected political statements.

If Texas were to argue its “offensiveness” standard addressed fighting words (and it doesn’t), the statute would be substantially overbroad in criminalizing too much speech and accordingly vulnerable to challenge. Even Texas isn’t stupid enough to try to argue this.

What about “hate speech”?

The First Amendment protects hate speech. You can burn a cross on your own property without intent to intimidate, and it’s protected speech. You can hold a Nazi parade on public streets, even if Holocaust survivors say that “seeing the swastika was like being physically attacked.” You can make various forms of pornography that “subordinat[e] women” in a variety of reprehensible ways, and laws against such will be struck down.

And the recent American kerfuffles over various fraternities’ obnoxious racist speech pretty much all constitute protected speech, for which the perpetrators have been widely judged protected from punishment by public universities. (The universities can get away with whatever punishment they want if the perpetrators won’t stand up for themselves in court. [An action which doesn’t prevent a sincere apology and work toward rehabilitation.] Fortunately, not all universities [#notalluniversities] [#butmost] have forgotten their duties under the First Amendment and their obligations to protect academic freedom even when it hurts.)

The imagined “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, and to freedom of speech more generally, doesn’t exist.

I see. So you’re a racist bigot standing in the way of progress and social justice?

No. There are plenty of horrible forms of expression that nonetheless are protected by the First Amendment, and should be protected. I don’t need to agree with anything anyone says in order to defend their right to say it. (But by all means continue with the insults! I appreciate the encouragement.)

But consider the alternative to allowing all this speech. Suppose we really did think it was okay to punish some of this speech. What neutral arbitrator is going to decide which categories of speech are okay and which are not okay? Who’s going to neutrally enforce such laws in a non-discriminatory manner? There is no neutral arbitrator: rather, the majority will. And history shows that when a majority has the power to censor, it’ll censor things according to its own interests, not according to some “neutral” perspective able to judge what speech is and isn’t permissible.

Indeed, when the standard is that “offensive” speech is prohibited, aren’t minority views precisely those most likely to be deemed offensive? Inoffensive views aren’t the ones that need protection. Rather, it’s the offensive views that need protection, because majorities often aren’t inclined to protect offensive views. Nobody’s going to complain when someone says “Stop Child Abuse”, but they might about a discussion of then-offensive homosexual marriage.

Offensiveness and correctness aren’t always in agreement

Protecting offensive speech is particularly important because because offensive views may also be right. Martin Luther opening a scholarly debate among theologians about corrupt Church practices in the Ninety-Five Theses offended Johann Tetzel and the Church. (Whether or not Luther or the Church was right, I think we can generally agree the world is a better place for that debate having taken place.) Galileo’s astronomical hypotheses offended many astronomers of the day, and notoriously the Church. John Quincy Adams’s speech in bringing petitions “about” slavery before Congress, where Southern congressmen, fearful of what petitions on the topic of slavery might say, had previously voted in a rule to immediately table any petition on the subject, offended those congressmen. Paul Robert Cohen offended many people in protesting a draft later ended, attributable to some small degree to his speech about it. Archie Bunker epitomized bigotry, yet without it All in the Family couldn’t have made the points it made. (Query whether they could make that series today without being shouted down by the congenitally-stupid.)

It’s easier to judge people who say offensive things

Additionally, offensive speech permits the observer to judge people for what they’ve said. Censorship that prohibits expression of particular views also makes it harder to determine whether a person nonetheless holds them.

(It’s not a First Amendment question, but as a matter of the broader concept of freedom of speech, and the expression and discussion of ideas, I wonder if sometimes we take stigmatization too far. That is, we take it to the point where most adherents to an odious idea adhere in silence, with no way to recognize such people when it’s most important to be able to do so — for personal physical safety, for example. The apparent absence of bigots, when everyone agrees they still exist at least sometimes, can all too easily trigger paranoia. The consequent imputation of widespread bigotry without actual proof, in an overly-broad manner, serves no useful purpose.)

Moving on…

I could write more about this, but I’m well past the length of any prior post and running out of time to write more. I leave readers with a recommendation for further reading: the brief of the Cato Institute and others (most notably including the humorist P. J. O’Rourke and former ACLU president Nadine Strossen) in this case. Its discussion and examples are truly disgusting, an awful piece of work. And this is precisely what makes it so great.

Next time, various observations on oral argument. I still have writing to do here, so this might slip a day or two. Not clear. But right now I’m still aiming for it to go live tomorrow.

http://whereswalden.com/2015/04/26/offensive-speech/

Short one this week. I must not have learned much!

http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2015/04/25/things-ive-learned-this-week-april-20-april-24-2015/

For this episode, Richard Milewski and I figured out the syncing issue I’d been having in Episode 9, so I had my head floating in the bottom right corner while I hacked. Now you can see what I do with my face while hacking, if that’s a thing you had been interested in.

I’ve also started mirroring the episodes to YouTube, if YouTube is your choice platform for video consumption.

So, like last week, I was under a bit of time pressure because of a meeting scheduled for 2:30PM (actually the meeting I was supposed to have the week before – it just got postponed), so that gave me 1.5 hours to move forward with the View Source work we’d started back in Episode 8.

I started the episode by explaining that the cache key stuff we’d figured out in Episode 9 was really important, and that a bug had been filed by the Necko team to get the issue fixed. At the time of the video, there was a patch up for review in that bug, and when we applied it, we were able to retrieve source code out of the network cache after POST requests! Success!

Now that we had verified that our technique was going to work, I spent the rest of the episode cleaning up the patches we’d written. I started by doing a brief self-code-review to smoke out any glaring problems, and then started to fix those problems.

We got a good chunk of the way before I had to cut off the camera.

I know back when I started working on this particular bug, I had said that I wanted to take you through right to the end on camera – but the truth of the matter is, the priority of the bug went up, and I was moving too slowly on it, since I was restricting myself to a few hours on Wednesdays. So unfortunately, after my meeting, I went back to hacking on the bug off-camera, and yesterday I put up a patch for review. Here’s the review request, if you’re interested in seeing where I got to!

I felt good about the continuity experiment, and I think I’ll try it again for the next few episodes – but I think I’ll choose a lower-priority bug; that way, I think it’s more likely that I can keep the work contained within the episodes.

How did you feel about the continuity between episodes? Did it help to engage you, or did it not matter? I’d love to hear your comments!

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1025146 – [e10s] Never load the source off of the network when viewing source – Notes

http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2015/04/25/the-joy-of-coding-ep-11-cleaning-up-the-view-source-patch/

Yesterday I discussed government speech, and Texas’s arguments that specialty plates are government speech that individuals can’t compel Texas to make. Today I discuss the First Amendment forum doctrine.

A reminder: yesterday’s disclaimer still holds. In fact this post is probably most likely to contain errors of all the posts in this series. Caveat lector!

Forums

The Supreme Court classifies places (physical and metaphorical) where the First Amendment applies, and freedom of speech requirements hold, in a few different ways. These places are called forums.

Not a forum

Some places aren’t forums. For example, most public television programs aren’t forums. In such places government may exclude particular viewpoints, topics, and content.

If Texas ran its specialty plate program as a contest, picking a few choices from a vast selection according to its own whims as occurs on public TV, it might not be a forum. (That might also make it government speech.) (Or maybe I’m grasping for a plausible example, and I’ve grasped wrongly. Hedge!) But Texas accepts basically anybody, so it’s a forum.

Traditional public forums

Some forums have always been open places of discussion: traditional public forums. These include public sidewalks and parks. Here, no restrictions on content or viewpoint are permitted (except a very small list). Government may impose reasonable content/viewpoint-neutral restrictions as to speech’s time, place, or manner. But in doing so it must further significant government interests, and restrictions must be narrowly written and leave open ample alternative channels for speech. For example: no use outside park hours, potentially you need a permit granted nondiscriminatorily, don’t exceed noise level limits, stay off grass being reseeded.

Specialty plate programs are a modern invention, obviously not a common-law forum historically open for discussion.

Nonpublic forums

Places that are forums that aren’t traditionally open, that government hasn’t opened to public expression, are nonpublic forums. Examples are courthouses and government buildings: generally, government property reserved for some particular use. Government can employ restrictions on content here, to further those particular interests. Otherwise, restrictions match those in traditional public forums (and particularly can’t restrict speech based on its viewpoint).

Texas invited everyone onto its license plates, opening them to public expression. So Texas’s specialty plate program is not a nonpublic forum.

Designated public forums (and limited public forums)

Finally we have locations not traditionally opened, that government has opened to some public expression: designated public forums. The restrictions applicable in traditional public forums are also applicable in designated public forums.

There’s also an additional sort of forum, sometimes viewed as a subset of the designed public forum, where the government limits speech to certain groups or topics: the limited public forum. A limited public forum may place restrictions on content, but it can’t restrict based on viewpoint.

The various forum definitions logically subdivide the set of all possible forums. (Although to be sure, there remains argument as to what subdivision the Court’s cases have actually recognized.) By process of elimination, Texas’s program must be a designated public forum, possibly a limited public forum.

Recap

Let’s check our work. License plate designs are not traditionally open to ideas, but Texas allows anyone to propose a custom plate design espousing practically any idea whatsoever. The ideas are legion: in-state and out-of-state colleges (even bitter rivals), college sports teams, and professional teams; corporations; non-profits; causes; war veteran status; the whimsical (“Rather Be Golfing”); and many others. The individual selects a specialty plate and displays it publicly. Moreover, Wooley v. Maynard indicates that individuals have First Amendment rights in what their license plates say. So Texas’s specialty plates are public expression, at the government’s invitation.

Texas’s specialty-plate program is a designated public forum, possibly a limited public forum. Hold the question as to which one — we’ll return to this later.

Tomorrow, a discussion of offensive speech.

http://whereswalden.com/2015/04/25/first-amendment-forum-doctrine/

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “diversity” recently, and have written some thoughts on the subject, called Three Forms of Diversity. (The title is a play on Three Forms of Unity.)

The piece does include, at the end, a section on the specific applicability of my analysis to the Mozilla community.

Comments, as always, are most welcome. :-)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/hF69fVUwliU/

^*with two tests suppressed due to big endian

[4484|   0|   0|   0] 100% ==========================================>|1511.7s
PASSED ALL

Yaaaaaay! It's time to get jiggy with it! First, I'll scrub the changesets to remove PPCBC/JM entirely (except for the PowerPC-specific parallel type guards in Baseline inline caches, which are an important optimization); the only other vestiges that shall remain are a couple code snippets from Ben's original work in the new MacroAssembler and the G3/G4 software square root routine from David, which may be replaced with a call to the C library; I'm going to do some profiling there first. (G5 still uses its hardware square root instruction.) After that we'll sprinkle back in gcc 4.6 compatibility, the last branch we will support with this compiler, mix with IonPower, and then try to get the browser up. If I can get the minimp3 seek routine working, MP3 support will be exposed publicly too. We will also unveil our own bespoke browser front page to avoid issues with Electrolysis, which we don't support currently.

In addition, I have some lofty but possible performance goals for IonPower. For these goals, I've selected V8 as the metric because it's a medium-weight benchmark; SunSpider is probably not representative anymore of the bloatier code many sites (especially ad networks, bleah) now foist upon their users, and it is unlikely many Power Macs are braving the really heavy processing JavaScript apps for time reasons (or support reasons: games using WebGL, for example, won't run on TenFourFox anyway) which makes Kraken and Octane less representative as well. The aim is to get the optimized IonPower faster than PPCBC on V8 in Baseline-only mode, and faster than our old JaegerMonkey backend on V8 in full Baseline/Ion mode, which it now supports. The first is definitely achievable, and the second should come awfully close. That should translate into demonstrable real-world improvements on the vast majority of sites vintage Macs still frequent and will also make pdf.js finally viable on TenFourFox.

I treat every ESR release like it's our last, but by the time 38ESR ends, that will mean Power Macs will have had a fully supported branch of Firefox for 10 years after the last Power Mac rolled out of Cupertino. Now, that's support!

ETA for the first beta is 3-4 weeks, with rollout around 38.0.2 to coincide with the end of support for 31ESR. Localizers, stand by!

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/04/achievement-unlocked-lack-of-any-social.html

Mozci (Mozilla CI tools) is a python library, scripts and package which allows you to trigger jobs on treeherder.mozilla.org.
Not all jobs can be triggered but those that are run on Release Engineering's Buildbot setup. Most (if not all) Firefox desktop and Firefox for Android jobs can be triggered. I believe some B2G jobs can still be triggered.

NOTE: Most B2G jobs are not supported yet since they run on TaskCluster. Support for it will be given on this quarter.

Using it

Once you check out the code:

git clone https://github.com/armenzg/mozilla_ci_tools.git
python setup.py develop

you can run scripts like this one (click here for other scripts):

python scripts/trigger.py \
  --buildername "Rev5 MacOSX Yosemite 10.10 fx-team talos dromaeojs" \
  --rev e16054134e12 --times 10

which would trigger a specific job 10 times.

A use case for developers

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/armenzg_mozilla/~3/v6do-bg16n0/what-mozilla-ci-tools-is-and-what-it.html

Yesterday I discussed specialty plate programs in lower courts and the parties’ arguments in Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans. Today I begin to analyze the questions in the case.

But first, a disclaimer.

Disclaimer

The following is my understanding of First Amendment law, gleaned from years of reading numerous free speech opinions, summaries, and analyses. I’m generally confident in this explanation, but I may well have made mistakes, or simply missed nuance present in the cases but not in the summaries I’ve read. Please point out mistakes in the comments.

Of course, I really have no business trying to explain First Amendment jurisprudence, if I want it explained correctly. First Amendment law is incredibly complex. My haphazard reading will miss things.

But I’m barging ahead anyway, for a few reasons. First, I want to talk about this. Second, it’s fun to talk about it! Third, you don’t learn unless you’re willing to look like a fool from time to time. Fourth, the law is not this recondite, bizarre arcana that only lawyers and judges can understand. It may require some work to correctly understand laws, terms of art, rules of statutory construction, and relevant past decisions in the common law. But any intelligent person can do it if they make the effort.

And fifth, nobody with any sense will unconditionally rely on this as authoritative, not when there are far better places to look for the finest in free Internet legal advice.

Government speech

The “recently minted” government speech doctrine occupies an uneasy place in the realm of speech. For when government speech occurs, non-governmental speech open to First Amendment challenge is reduced. There must be some government speech: otherwise we’d absurdly conclude that the government’s World War II war-bond propaganda must be accompanied by anti-bond propaganda. Government programs often have viewpoints suppressible only in the voting booth. But this mechanism is sluggish and imperfectly responsive, and government speech’s discretion can be abused. So it’s best to be careful anointing government speech.

Certainly some license plates — the state’s default designs and designs ordered by the legislature — are government speech, even if they’re also individual speech under Wooley v. Maynard. In each case the government wholly chooses what it wishes to say, and that message is government speech. The individual’s choice to assist in conveying it, under Wooley, isn’t government speech.

Circularity

But Texas’s government-speech argument, applied beyond plates it designs itself, is laughable. The linchpin of Texas’s argument is that because they control the program, that makes it government speech they can control. This argument is completely circular! By starting from their control over the program’s speech, they’ve assumed their conclusion.

This doesn’t mean Texas is wrong. But their circular central government-speech argument can prove nothing. This logical flaw is blindingly obvious. Texas’s lawyers can’t have missed this. If they made this their lead argument, they’re scrambling.

Compelling Texas to speak?

Texas’s better argument is that vehicle licenses and plates are its program, implicating its right to speak or not speak under Wooley. But the First Amendment restrains government power, not individual power. And many courts (although so far not the Supreme Court) have held that government can be compelled to “speak” in accepting advertising in government-controlled places (public transit systems, for a common example). The problem is Texas voluntarily created a specialty plate program open to all for speech. No “compulsion” derives from a voluntary act.

Texas didn’t fully control the specialty plate program, but rather opened it to anyone with money. (As Chief Justice Roberts noted in oral argument: “They’re only doing this to get the money.”) It’s possible there’s government speech in Texas SCV‘s plate, perhaps the occasionally-proposed “hybrid” speech. But once Texas opens the program to all, it loses full control over what’s said.

How then do we consider specialty plate programs? What controls may Texas exercise? Now we must decide how to classify the specialty-plate program with respect to First Amendment-protected speech. What sort of forum for speech is Texas’s specialty-plate program?

Tomorrow, First Amendment forum doctrine.

http://whereswalden.com/2015/04/24/government-speech-and-compelled-speech/

Apigee posted this lovely picture over at twitter. A curl command line on the NASDAQ tower.

http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/04/24/curl-on-the-nasdaq-tower/

We currently trigger manually UI update tests for Firefox releases. There are automated headless update verification tests but they don't test the UI of Firefox.

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/armenzg_mozilla/~3/NuvO4M2RtXo/firefox-ui-update-testing.html

Mozilla Reps as a program is full of activities. Reps around the world, do extraordinary  things everyday, promoting Mozilla’s mission and getting new contributors on board.

Moving forward, trying to identify how those activities align with top-tier initiatives, Mozilla Reps program wanted a way to visualize some Key Progress Indicators around the program.

We (the Participation Infrastructure team) sat down with the programmatic owners of Reps (Nuke & Rosana) and identified what numbers and metrics we would like to expose in a much more digestible way, so we can assess the progress of the program on many levels.

We identified 3 different KPIs:

• Number of Reps (and growth rates)
• Number of Events (and growth rates)
• Number of Reports (and growth rates)

… and also 3 different filters you can apply on those numbers:

• Country
• Functional Area (of Mozilla)
• Initiative (associated with Rep, Event or Report)

You can find the spec for this initial iteration here.

We decided to have the filters as drop-downs, applied on the whole page (in combination or one-by-one). Then for each KPI group we would have a time graph for the past 6 weeks (fixed for now) with a HUD of basic numbers and growth rates.

Technology-wise, we tied the coding of this new dashboard to the delivery of a proper API for the Reps Portal (more info on that soon). The new API enabled us to easily create custom endpoints to calculate the numbers needed for our Reps KPI graphs (based on the existing Conversion Points). Nemo and Tasos did a fantastic work to deliver the new API and the custom endpoints, while making sure that this is not heavy on our DB.

Nikos then worked on the front-end using D3.js as the visualization library to create the graphs dynamically (each time you access the page or you filter using Country, Area or Initiative).

The overall result is smooth and easily helps you assess progress of various Areas and Initiatives on specific Countries, for Reps, Events and Reports.

You can check out the dashboard here.

Next step would be to introduce a time-slider for customizing the time range you want to be displayed.

http://pierros.papadeas.gr/?p=435