Sean McArthur: hyper v0.6 |
A bunch of goodies are included in version 0.6 of hyper.
Ssl support. The Server and Client can accept any implementation of the Ssl trait. By default, hyper comes with an implementation for OpenSSL, but this can now be disabled via the ssl cargo feature.Client. As in, Client is Sync. You can share a Client over multiple threads, and make several requests simultaneously. Also, as a reminder, hyper has been following semver more closely, and so, breaking changes mean bumping the minor version (until 1.0). So, to reduce unplanned breakage, you should probably depend on a specific minor version, such as 0.6, and not *.
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The Rust Programming Language Blog: Rust 1.1 stable, the Community Subteam, and RustCamp |
We’re happy to announce the completion of the first release cycle after Rust 1.0: today we are releasing Rust 1.1 stable, as well as 1.2 beta.
Read on for details the releases, as well as some exciting new developments within the Rust community.
One of the highest priorities for Rust after its 1.0 has been improving compile times. Thanks to the hard work of a number of contributors, Rust 1.1 stable provides a 32% improvement in compilation time over Rust 1.0 (as measured by bootstrapping).
Another major focus has been improving error messages throughout the
compiler. Again thanks to a number of contributors, a large portion of compiler
errors now include extended explanations accessible using the --explain flag.
Beyond these improvements, the 1.1 release includes a number of important new features:
std::fs APIs. This release stabilizes a
large set of extensions to the
filesystem APIs, making it possible, for example, to compile Cargo on stable Rust.cargo rustc. It’s now possible to build a Cargo package while passing
arbitrary flags to the final rustc invocation.More detail is available in the release notes.
Performance improvements didn’t stop with 1.1 stable. Benchmark compilations are showing an additional 30% improvement from 1.1 stable to 1.2 beta; Cargo’s main crate compiles 18% faster.
In addition, parallel codegen is working again, and can substantially speed up large builds in debug mode; it gets another 33% speedup on bootstrapping on a 4 core machine. It’s not yet on by default, but will be in the near future.
Cargo has also seen some performance improvements, including a 10x speedup on large “no-op” builds (from 5s to 0.5s on Servo), and shared target directories that cache dependencies across multiple packages.
In addition to all of this, 1.2 beta includes our first support for MSVC (Microsoft Visual C): the compiler is able to bootstrap, and we have preliminary nightlies targeting the platform. This is a big step for our Windows support, making it much easier to link Rust code against code built using the native toolchain. Unwinding is not yet available – code aborts on panic – but the implementation is otherwise complete, and all rust-lang crates are now testing on MSVC as a first-tier platform.
Rust 1.2 stable will be released six weeks from now, together with 1.3 beta.
In addition to the above technical work, there’s some exciting news within the Rust community.
In the past few weeks, we’ve formed a new subteam explicitly devoted to supporting the Rust community. The team will have a number of responsibilities, including aggregating resources for meetups and other events, supporting diversity in the community through leadership in outreach, policies, and awareness-raising, and working with our early production users and the core team to help guide prioritization.
In addition, we’ll soon be holding the first official Rust conference: RustCamp, on August 1, 2015, in Berkeley, CA, USA. We’ve received a number of excellent talk submissions, and are expecting a great program.
As with every release, 1.1 stable is the result of work from an amazing and active community. Thanks to the 168 contributors to this release:
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Yunier Jos'e Sosa V'azquez: Disponible cuentaFox 3.1.1 |
Pocos d'ias despu'es de presentarse la versi'on que correg'ia el problema presentado con el servicio para obtener el estado de las cuotas, ya est'a aqu'i cuentaFox 3.1.1.
A partir de Firefox 41 se introducir'an algunos cambios en la gesti'on de los complementos en el navegador y solo se podr'an instalar complementos firmados por Mozilla. Que un complemento est'e firmado por Mozilla significa m'as seguridad para las usuarios ante extensiones malignas y programas de terceros que intentan instalar add-ons en Firefox.
Para estar preparados cuando llegue Firefox 41 hemos enviando cuentaFox para su revisi'on en AMO y dentro de poco lo tendremos por aqu'i.
Desde el panel estad'isticas de AMO nos hemos dado cuenta que muchas personas siguen usando versiones viejas que no funcionan y no son recomendadas. Desde aqu'i hacemos el llamado para que actualicen y difundan la noticia sobre la nueva liberaci'on.
No obstante, cuando el add-on sea aprobado, Firefox lo actualizar'a seg'un la configuraci'on del usuario. La idea que tenemos es que el complemento se actualice desde Firefoxman'ia y no desde Mozilla pero el certificado autofirmado y otros problemas impiden que lo hagamos.
Muchas personas han manifestado que al intentar obtener sus datos se muestra una alerta donde dice “El usuario no es v'alido o lo contrase~na es incorrecta” y nos piden solucionar esto pero no podemos. Nosotros no somos responsables del servicio que brinda cuotas.uci.cu y tampoco sabemos que utiliza para verificar que esos datos son correctos.
Si deseas colaborar en el desarrollo del complemento puedes acceder a GitLab (UCI) y clonar el proyecto o dejar una sugerencia.
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Matt Thompson: Updating our on-ramps for contributors |
I got to sit in on a great debrief / recap of the recent Webmaker go-to-market strategy. A key takwaway: we’re having promising early success recruiting local volunteers to help tell the story, evangelize for the product, and (crucially) feed local knowledge into making the product better. In short:
Volunteer contribution is working. But now we need to document, systematize and scale up our on-ramps.
It’s been a known issue that we need to update and improve our on-ramps for contributors across MoFo. They’re fragmented, out of date, and don’t do enough to spell out the value for contributors. Or celebrate their stories and successes.
We should prioritize this work in Q3. Our leadership development work, local user research, social marketing for Webmaker, Mozilla Club Captains and Regional Co-ordinators recruitment, the work the Participation Lab is doing — all of that is coming together at an opportune moment.
Ryan is a 15-year-old volunteer contributor to Webmaker for Android — and currently the second-most-active Java developer on the entire project.
A key learning is: we need to spell out the concrete value proposition for contributors. Particularly in terms of training and gaining relevant work experience.
Don’t assume we know in advance what contributors actually want. They will tell us.
We sometimes assume contributors want something like certification or a badge — but what if what they *really* want is a personalized letter of recommendation, on Mozilla letterhead, from an individual mentor at Mozilla that can vouch for them and help them get a job, or get into a school program? Let’s listen.
Here’s some key steps in the process the group walked through. We can document / systematize / remix these as we go forward.
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Myk Melez: Introducing PluotSorbet |
http://mykzilla.blogspot.com/2015/06/introducing-pluotsorbet.html
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About:Community: Mozilla Tech Speakers: A pilot for technical evangelism |
The six-week pilot version of the Mozilla Tech Speakers program wrapped up at the end of May. We learned a lot, made new friends on several continents, and collected valuable practical feedback on how to empower and support volunteer Mozillians who are already serving their regional communities as technical evangelists and educators. We’ve also gathered some good ideas for how to scale a speaker program that’s relevant and accessible to technical Mozillians in communities all over the world. Now we’re seeking your input and ideas as well.
During the second half of 2015, we’ll keep working with the individuals in our pilot group (our pilot pilots) to create technical workshops and presentations that increase developer awareness and adoption of Firefox, Mozilla, and the Open Web platform. We’ll keep in touch as they submit talk proposals and develop Content Kits during the second half of the year, work with them to identify relevant conferences and events, fund speaker travel as appropriate, make sure speakers have access to the latest information (and the latest swag to distribute), and offer them support and coaching to deliver and represent!
Our aim is to create a strong community-driven technical speaker development program in close collaboration with Mozilla Reps and the teams at Mozilla who focus on community education and participation. From the beginning we benefited from the wisdom of Rosana Ardila, Emma Irwin, Soumya Deb, and other Mozillian friends. We decided to stand up a “minimum viable” program with trusted, invited participants—Mozillians who are active technical speakers and are already contributing to Mozilla by writing about and presenting Mozilla technology at events around the world. We were inspired by the ongoing work of the Participation Team and Speaker Evangelism program that came before us, thanks to the efforts of @codepo8, Shezmeen Prasad, and many others.
We want this program to scale and stay sustainable, as individuals come and go, and product and platform priorities evolve. We will incorporate the feedback and learnings from the current pilot into all future iterations of the Mozilla Tech Speaker program.
Participants met together weekly on a video call to practice presentation skills and impromptu storytelling, contributed to the MDN Content Kit project for sharing presentation assets, and tried out some new tools for building informative and inspiring tech talks.
Each participant received one session of personalized one-to-one speaker coaching, using “techniques from applied improvisation and acting methods” delivered by People Rocket’s team of coaching professionals. For many participants, this was a peak experience, a chance to step out of their comfort zone, stretch their presentation skills, build their confidence, and practice new techniques.
In our weekly meetings, we worked with the StoryCraft technique, and hacked it a little to make it more geek- and tech speaker-friendly. We also worked with ThoughtBox, a presentation building tool to “organize your thoughts while developing your presentation materials, in order to maximize the effectiveness of the content.” Dietrich took ThoughtBox from printable PDF to printable web-based form, but we came to the conclusion it would be infinitely more usable if it were redesigned as an interactive web app. (Interested in building this? Talk to us on IRC. You’ll find me in #techspeakers or #devrel, with new channels for questions and communication coming soon.)
We have the idea that an intuitive portable tool like ThoughtBox could be useful for any group of Mozillians anywhere in the world who want to work together on practicing speaking and presentation skills, especially on topics of interest to developers. We’d love to see regional communities taking the idea of speaker training and designing the kind of programs and tools that work locally. Let’s talk more about this.
The pilot was ambitious, and combined several components—speaker training, content development, creating a presentation, proposing a talk—into an aggressive six-week ‘curriculum.’ The team, which included participants in eight timezones, spanning twelve+ hours, met once a week on a video call. We kicked off the program with an introduction by People Rocket and met regularly for the next six weeks.
Between scheduled meetings, participants hung out in Telegram, a secure cross-platform messaging app, sharing knowledge, swapping stickers (the virtual kind) and becoming friends. Our original ambitious plan might have been feasible if our pilots were not also university students, working developers, and involved in multiple projects and activities. But six weeks turned out to be not quite long enough to get it all done, so we focused on speaking skills—and, as it turned out, on building a global posse of talented tech speakers.
We’re still figuring this out. We collected feedback from all participants and discovered that there’s a great appetite to keep this going. We are still fine-tuning some of the ideas around Content Kits, and the first kits are becoming available for use and re-use. We continue to support Tech Speakers to present at conferences organize workshops and trainings in their communities. And create their own Mozilla Tech Speakers groups with local flavor and focus.
Stay tuned: we’ll be opening a Discourse category shortly, to expand the conversation and share new ideas.
I’d like to quickly introduce you to the Mozilla Tech Speakers pilot pilots. You’ll be hearing from them directly in the days, weeks, months ahead, but for today, huge thanks and hugs all around, for the breadth and depth of their contributions, their passion, and the friendships we’ve formed.
Adrian Crespo, Firefox Marketplace reviewer, Mozilla Rep, student, and technical presenter from Madrid, Spain, creator of the l10n.js Content Kit, for learning and teaching localization through the native JavaScript method.
Ahmed Nefzaoui, @AhmedNefzaoui, recent graduate and active Mozillian, Firefox OS contributor, Arabic Mozilla localizer, RTL (right-to-left) wizard, and web developer from Tozeur, Tunisia.
Andre Garzia, @soapdog, Mozilla Rep from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, web developer, app developer and app reviewer, who will be speaking about Web Components at Expotec at the end of this month. Also, ask him about the Webmaker team LAN Houses program just getting started now in Rio.
Andrzej Mazur, @end3r, HTML5 game developer, active Hacks blog and MDN contributor, creator of a content kit on HTML5 Game Development for Beginners, active Firefox app developer, Captain Rogers creator, and frequent tech speaker, from Warsaw, Poland.
Istv'an “Flaki” Szmozs'anszky, @slsoftworks, Mozillian and Mozilla Rep, web and mobile developer from Budapest, Hungary. Passionate about Rust, Firefox OS, the web of things. If you ask him anything “mildly related to Firefox OS, be prepared with canned food and sleeping bags, because the answer might sometimes get a bit out of hand.”
Kaustav Das Modak, @kaustavdm, Mozilla Rep from Bengalaru, India; web and app developer; open source evangelist; co-founder of Applait. Ask him about Grouphone. Or, catch his upcoming talk at the JSChannel conference in Bangalore in July.
Michaela R. Brown, @michaelarbrown, self-described “feisty little scrapper,” Internet freedom fighter, and Mozillian from Michigan. Michaela will share skills in San Francisco next week at the Library Freedom Project: Digital Rights in Libraries event.
Rabimba Karanjai, @rabimba, a “full-time graduate researcher, part-time hacker and FOSS enthusiast,” and 24/7 Mozillian. Before the month is out, Rabimba will speak about Firefox OS at OpenSourceBridge in Portland and at the Hong Kong Open Source conference.
Gracias.
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/06/23/mozilla-tech-speakers-a-pilot-for-technical-evangelism/
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Robert O'Callahan: Whistler Hike |
I'm at the Mozilla all-hands week in Whistler. Today (Monday) was a travel day, but many of us arrived yesterday, so today I had most of the day free and chose to go on a long time organized by Sebastian --- because I like hiking, but also lots of exercise outside should help me adjust to the time zone. We took a fairly new trail, the Skywalk South trail: starting in the Alpine Meadows settlement at the Rick's Roost trailhead at the end of Alpine Way, walking up to connect with the Flank trail, turning up 19 Mile Creek to wind up through forest to Iceberg lake above the treeline, then south up and over a ridge on the Skywalk South route, connecting with the Rainbow Ridge Loop route, then down through Switchback 27 to finally reach Alta Lake Rd. This took us a bit over 8 hours including stops. We generally hiked quite fast, but some of the terrain was tough, especially the climb up to and over the ridge heading south from Iceberg Lake, which was more of a rock-climb than a hike in places! We had to get through snow in several places. We had a group of eight, four of us who did the long version and four who did a slightly shorter version by returning from Iceberg Lake the way we came. Though I'm tired, I'm really glad we did this hike the way we did it; the weather was perfect, the scenery was stunning, and we had a good workout. I even went for a dip in Iceberg Lake, which was a little bit crazy and well worth it!
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Liz Henry: Trip to Whistler for Mozilla’s work week |
Our work week hasn’t started yet, but since I got to Whistler early I have had lots of adventures.
First the obligatory nostril-flaring over what it is like to travel with a wheelchair. As we started the trip to Vancouver I had an interesting experience with United Airlines as I tried to persuade them that it was OK for me to fold up my mobility scooter and put it into the overhead bin on the plane. Several gate agents and other people got involved telling me many reasons why this could not, should not, and never has or would happen:
* It would not fit
* It is illegal
* The United Airlines handbook says no
* The battery has to go into the cargo hold
* Electric wheelchairs must go in the cargo hold
* The scooter might fall out and people might be injured
* People need room for their luggage in the overhead bins
* Panic!!
The Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 says,
Assistive devices do not count against any limit on the number of pieces of carry-on baggage. Wheelchairs and other assistive devices have priority for in-cabin storage space over other passengers’ items brought on board at the same airport, if the disabled passenger chooses to preboard.
In short I boarded the airplane, and my partner Danny folded up the scooter and put it in the overhead bin. Then, the pilot came out and told me that he could not allow my battery on board. One of the gate agents had told him that I have a wet cell battery (like a car battery). It is not… it is a lithium ion battery. In fact, airlines do not allow lithium batteries in the cargo hold! The pilot, nicely, did not demand proof it is a lithium battery. He believed me, and everyone backed down.
The reason I am stubborn about this is that I specially have a very portable, foldable electric wheelchair so that I can fold it up and take it with me. Two times in the past few years, I have had my mobility scooters break in the cargo hold of a plane. That made my traveling very difficult! The airlines never reimbursed me for the damage. Another reason is that the baggage handlers may lose the scooter, or bring it to the baggage pickup area rather than to the gate of the plane.
Onward to Whistler! We took a shuttle and I was pleasantly (and in a way, sadly) surprised that the shuttle liason, and the driver, both just treated me like any other human being. What a relief! It is not so hard! This experience is so rare for me that I am going to email the shuttle company to compliment them and their employees.
The driver, Ivan, took us through Vancouver, across a bridge that is a beautiful turquoise color with stone lions at its entrance, and through Stanley Park. I particularly noticed the tiny beautiful harbor or lagoon full of boats as we got off the bridge. Then, we went up Highway 99, or the Sea to Sky Highway, to Squamish and then Whistler.
When I travel to new places I get very excited about the geology and history and all the geography! I love to read about it beforehand or during a trip.
The Sea to Sky Highway was improved in preparation for the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in 2010. Before it was rebuilt it was much twistier with more steeply graded hills and had many bottlenecks where the road was only 2 lanes. I believe it must also have been vulnerable to landslides or flooding or falling rocks in places. As part of this deal the road signs are bilingual in English and Squamish. I read a bit on the way about the ongoing work to revitalize the Squamish language.
The highway goes past Howe Sound, on your left driving up to Squamish. It is a fjord, created by retreated glaciers around 11,000 years ago. Take my geological knowledge with a grain of salt (or a cube of ice) but here is a basic narrative of the history. AT some point it was a shallow sea here but a quite muddy one, not one with much of a coral reef system, and the mountains were an archipelago of island volcanoes. So there are ocean floor sediments around, somewhat metamorphosed; a lot of shale.
There is a little cove near the beginning of the highway with some boats and tumble-down buildings, called Porteau Cove. Interesting history there. Then you will notice a giant building up the side of a hill, the Britannia Mining Museum. That was once the Britannia Mines, producing billions of dollars’ worth of copper, gold, and other metals. The entire hill behind the building is honeycombed with tunnels! While a lot of polluted groundwater has come out of this mine damaging the coast and the bay waters, it was recently plugged with concrete: the Millenium Plug, and that improved water quality a lot, so that shellfish, fish, and marine mammals are returning to the area. The creek also has trout and salmon returning. That’s encouraging!
Then you will see huge granite cliffs and Shannon Falls. The giant monolith made me think of El Capitan in Yosemite. And also of Enchanted Rock, a huge pink granite dome in central Texas. Granite weathers and erodes in very distinctive ways. Once you know them you can recognize a granite landform from far away! I haven’t had a chance to look close up at any rocks on this trip…. Anyway, there is a lot of granite and also basalt or some other igneous extrusive rock. Our shuttle driver told me that there is columnar basalt near by at a place called French Fry Hill.
The mountain is called Stawamus Chief Mountain. Squamish history tells us it was a longhouse turned to stone by the Transformer Brothers. I want to read more about that! Sounds like a good story! Rock climbers love this mountain.
There are some other good stories, I think one about two sisters turned to stone lions. Maybe that is why there are stone lions on the Vancouver bridge.
The rest of the drive brought us up into the snowy mountains! Whistler is only 2000 feet above sea level but the mountains around it are gorgeous!
The “village” where tourists stay is sort of a giant, upscale, outdoor shopping mall with fake streets in a dystopian labyrinth. It is very nice and pretty but it can also feel, well, weird and artificial! I have spent some time wandering around with maps, backtracking a lot when I come to dead ends and stairways. I am also playing Ingress (in the Resistance) so I have another geographical overlay on the map.
On Sunday I got some groceries and went down paved and then gravel trails to Lost Lake. It was about an hour long trip to get there. The lake was beautiful, cold, and full of people sunbathing, having picnics, and swimming. Lots of bikes and hikers. I ran out of battery (nearly), then realized that the lake is next to a parking lot. I got a taxi back to the Whistler Village hotel! Better for me anyway since the hour long scooter trip over gravel just about killed me (I took painkiller halfway there and then was just laid flat with pain anyway.) Too ambitious of an expedition, sadly. I had many thoughts about the things I enjoyed when I was younger (going down every trail, and the hardest trails, and swimming a lot) Now I can think of those memories, and I can look at beautiful things and also read all the information about an area which is enjoyable in a different way. This is just how life is and you will all come to it when you are old. I have this sneak preview…. at 46…. When I am actually old, I will have a lot of practice and will be really good at it. Have you thought about what kind of old person you would like to be, and how you will become that person?
Today I stayed closer to home just going out to Rebagliati Park. This was fabulous since it wasn’t far away, seriously 5 minutes away! It was very peaceful. I sat in a giant Adirondack chair in a flower garden overlooking the river and a covered bridge. Watching the clouds, butterflies, bees, birds, and a bear! And of course hacking the portals (Ingress again). How idyllic! I wish I had remembered to bring my binoculars. I have not found a shop in the Whistler Mall-Village that stocks binoculars. If I find some, I will buy them.
I also went through about 30 bugs tracked for Firefox 39, approved some for uplift, wontfixed others, emailed a lot of people for work, and started the RC build going. Releng was heroic in fixing some issues with the build infrastructure! But, we planned for coverage for all of us. Good planning! I was working Sunday and Monday while everyone else travelled to get here…. Because of our release schedule for Firefox it made good sense for me to get here early. It also helps that I am somewhat rested from the trip!
I went to the conference center, found the room that is the home base for the release management and other platform teams, and got help from a conference center setup guy to lay down blue tape on the floor of the room from the doorway to the back of the room. The tape marks off a corridor to be kept clear, not full of backpacks or people standing and talking in groups, so that everyone can freely get in and out of the room. I hope this works to make the space easy for me to get around in, in my wheelchair, and it will surely benefit other people as well.
At this work week I hope to learn more about what other teams are doing, any cool projects etc, especially in release engineering and in testing and automated tools and to catch up with the Bugzilla team too. And will be talking a bunch about the release process, how we plan and develop new Firefox features, and so on! Looking forward now to the reception and seeing everyone who I see so much online!
Related posts:http://bookmaniac.org/trip-to-whistler-for-mozillas-work-week/
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Ted Clancy: The Canadian, Day 5 |
Today I woke up on the outskirts of Greater Vancouver, judging by the signs in this industrial area. The steward has just announced we’ll be arriving in Vancouver in one hour.
Thus concludes my journey. Though the journey spanned five calendar days, I left late on Thursday night and I’m arriving early Monday morning, so it’s more like five nights and three days. (A total travelling time of 3 days and 14.5 hours.) Because I travelled over a weekend, I only lost one day of office time and gained a scenic weekend.
The trip roughly breaks down to one day in the forests of Ontario, one day across the plains of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and one day across the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia.
In retrospect, I should have done my work on the second day, when my mobile internet connection was good and the scenery was less interesting. (Sorry, Manitoba. Sorry, Saskatchewan.)
From here I take a bus to Whistler to attend what Mozilla calls a “work week” — a collection of presentations, team meetings, and planning sessions. It ends with a party on Friday night, the theme of which is “lumberjack”. (Between the bears and the hipsters, don’t I already get enough of people dressing like lumberjacks back in Toronto?)
Because I’m a giant hypocrite, I’ll be flying back to Toronto. But I heartily recommend travel by Via Rail. Their rail passes (good for visiting multiple destinations, or doing a round trip) are an especially good deal.
I wonder what Kylie Minogue has to say about rail travel.
https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/the-canadian-day-5/
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QMO: Firefox 39 Beta 7 Testday Results |
Hey Mozillians!
As you already may know, last Friday – June 19th – we held another Testday event, Firefox 39 Beta 7.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for getting involved in the proposed testing activities and in general, for helping us make Firefox better.
Many thanks go out to Bangladesh QA Community, which gets bigger and better everyday (Hossain Al Ikram, Nazir Ahmed Sabbir, Forhad Hossain, Ashickur Rahman, Meraj Kazi, Md. Ehsanul Hassan, Wahiduzzaman Hridoy, Rezaul Huque Nayeem, Towkir Ahmed, Md. Rahimul Islam, Mohammad Maruf Islam, Fahmida Noor, Sayed Mohammad Amir, Saheda reza Antora), Moin, nt, Vairus and AaronRaimist for their efforts and contributions, and to all our moderators. Thanks a bunch!
Keep an eye on QMO for the upcoming events! 
https://quality.mozilla.org/2015/06/firefox-39-beta-7-testday-results/
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Ted Clancy: The Canadian, Day 4 |
The great thing about travelling by train is that there is almost zero environmental impact.
Before you say “but what about those giant diesel engines burning diesel”, let me explain that I’m talking about marginal impact. That is, this train was going to be running regardless of whether I was on it or not. By choosing to be on it, I’m not contributing any additional environmental impact.
That’s not true for a bus or plane. If 100 people suddenly decided to travel from Toronto to Vancouver by bus, the bus company would have to schedule another couple busses. If 100 extra people decided to travel by plane, the airline would have to schedule another plane. But if 100 people decided to all take the train, Via Rail can simply add another couple of cars to their existing scheduled train, with negligible environmental impact.
(Caveat: There are reports that Via Rail no longer does this, and Elizabeth May is not happy about it. See Point 1 in her letter.)
There are downsides too. It’s more expensive than travelling by plane, though still within my company’s travel policy. (Note that I’m travelling in Economy. Note also that if you’re a member of CAA or Hostelling International, you get 10% off Via Rail tickets.) It also takes more time, but it’s not unproductive time. You can get quite a lot done on the train.
The main downside is sleeping in a seat. I was fine for the first couple nights, but after that third night (last night), I’m starting to feel a bit rough. And I have one more night to go.
The cost of the Via Rail ticket includes one stopover in any city for as long as you want. If I had more time, I might have scheduled a stopover in Winnipeg or Jasper for a couple nights to recharge.
Update: Jasper
Apparently I slept past Saskatoon and Edmonton.
Jasper is beautiful, but you already knew that.
Update: Approaching Kamloops
I can’t help wishing I was seeing this scenery in winter instead of summer. Green mountains just look like big hills.
We’re back on tracks laid by the Canadian Northern Railway. It still boggles my mind that we’re following a path chosen by someone 100 years ago. I spend so much of my life surrounded by new technology, it’s strange to be using something created even just 3 or 4 generations ago.
The 1950s and 1960s saw the decline of passenger rail in Canada. It couldn’t compete with the rise of air travel and new highways like the Trans-Canada and the 401. The federal government created Via Rail in the 1970s to take over passenger operations from CN and CP, since those services were no longer profitable.
I’m not exactly sure why the government keeps Via Rail running, but I’m glad they do. Last time I travelled by air, security confiscated my penknife.
Musical Interlude IV
[This one would have made more sense last night. I might swap them in a later edit.]
https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/the-canadian-day-4/
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Christian Heilmann: That stream of tweets at conferences… |
A few weeks ago, I wrote the That One Tweet post explaining how one tweet managed to puncture my balloon of happy and question if my work is appreciated. All of this is caused the gremlin of self-doubt living in all of us and it was mostly a reminder to tell it to mind its own business.
Currently writing event reports, I think it would be terrible of me not to mention the other side of this. I want to take this opportunity to thank deeply and thoroughly people who use twitter to report, comment and encourage presenters and organisers of events. You rock, so here’s a hedgehog wizard to tell you as much:
I was very humbled and lucky to be at a few events in the last weeks where the audience used Twitter not only to post selfies and tell the world where they are, but also to report and keep a running commentary on talks. Others delivered beyond expectation by doing sketchnotes and posting those. I am humbled by and jealous of your creativity and dedication. Having good Twitter feedback has numerous effects that inflate my happy balloon:
So, here’s to the people who give feedback on talks and events on Twitter. You make me happy like this puppy:
Keep up the great work, you can be sure that it is very appreciated by presenters and conference organisers alike
http://christianheilmann.com/2015/06/21/that-stream-of-tweets-at-conferences/
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Aki Sasaki: scriptharness 0.2.0 |
I've been getting some good feedback about scriptharness 0.1.0; thank you. I listed the 0.2.0 highlights and changes in the 0.2.0 Release Notes, but wanted to mention a few things here.
First, mozharness' config had the flexibility of accepting any arbitrary key/value pairs from various sources (initial_config, commandline options, config files...). However, it wasn't always clear what each config variable was for, or if it was required, or if the config was valid. I filed bug 699343 back in 2011, but didn't know how to tackle it then. I believe I have the solution now, with ConfigTemplates.
Second, 0.1.0 was definitely lacking a run_command() and get_output_from_command() analogs. 0.2.0 has Command for just running+logging a command, ParsedCommand for parsing the output of a command, and Output for getting the output from a command, as well as run(), parse(), get_output(), and get_text_output() shortcut functions to instantiate the objects and run them for you. (Docs are here.) Each of these supports cross-platform output_timeouts and max_timeouts in both python 2.7 and python3, thanks to the multiprocessing module. As a bonus, I was able to add context line support to the ErrorLists for ParsedCommand. This was also a want since 2011.
I fleshed out some more documentation and populated the scriptharness issues with my todo list.
I think I know what I have in mind for 0.3.0, but feedback is definitely welcome!
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Ted Clancy: The Canadian, Day 3 |
I expected to wake up in Winnipeg, but instead we’re stopped in the middle of nowhere. I can tell we’re in Manitoba, because the landscape has become flat and grassy instead of Ontario’s rocky forests and lakes, but I don’t see Winnipeg anywhere. Still no internet connection.
The train is moving again. We just passed a farm that seems to be raising cows and abandoned trucks.
Update: Winnipeg
Our train has a layover of about 3 hours in Winnipeg. The Via Rail station is located beside The Forks, a historic part of Winnipeg of significance to First Nations people. This site has been used as a meeting place for at least 6000 years. It’s especially active today because today is Aboriginal Day.
The site also hosts the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (which was still under construction last time I was here), a farmer’s market that is open today, and a couple historic rail cars. A pedestrian bridge (the Esplanade Riel) links it to Winnipeg’s French quarter, St Boniface, across the river. (Until 1971, St Boniface was its own predominantly-francophone city, a rarity in Western Canada.)
I didn’t spend much time looking about, however. I went straight to the Assiniboine Athletic Club, just two short blocks from the Via Rail station’s main entrance, to take a shower. This is the only opportunity to shower between Toronto and Vancouver. It’s $11 for a day pass to the gym. I would have had a workout too, but I didn’t pack any shorts.
The rail car in the above picture used to belong to the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, later known as the Ontario Northland Railway. Owned by the Ontario government, it’s one of the few railways in Canada which isn’t privately owned. Unfortunately, the Ontario government shut down ONR’s passenger services last year. It now only provides freight service and occasional tourist service.
Update: Somewhere in Manitoba
Manitoba is more scenic than you’d think. We’re currently in a rather pleasant-looking valley.
We’re now on tracks that were built by Grand Trunk Pacific. These tracks go from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert in northern BC. Together, Grand Trunk Pacific (which operated west of Winnipeg) and National Transcontinental Railway (which operated east of Winnipeg) were the third and final transcontinental rail route across Canada.
Like most Canadian railways, they eventually went bankrupt and were nationalized by the Canadian government, becoming part of the government-owned Canadian National Railway. The only major railway to escape this fate was Canadian Pacific Railway, leading to today’s situation where CNR and CPR (usually now called CN and CP) dominate Canada’s rail industry as a duopoly. CN was privatized in 1995. Apparently the largest shareholder is now Bill Gates.
The GTP tracks are still well used. Prince Rupert is a popular port for shipments from China. Due to the shape of the Earth, Prince Rupert is closer to China than Vancouver is. It’s easier to see on a globe.
Musical Interlude III
https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/the-canadian-day-3/
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About:Community: Bringing Participation to Whistler |
Mozilla at Whistler 2010
The Participation Team is heading to Whistler this week where we’ll be running an innovative series of discussions, presentations, and workshops all centered around creating an approach to participation that is massive and diverse, local and global, strategic and impactful.
Whether you will be joining us in person or following along online. Here’s an overview of what we’ll be up to this week and how you can get involved:
Skills Building: Human Centered Design
Tuesday July 23rd 3:30pm-5pm
The Participation Team will be participation in an open session about design thinking and problem solving both generally and as they relate to specific projects. Please arrive promptly at 3:30pm if you’d like to participate!
Join in person: 3:30pm in the Participation Room in the Delta Whistler Village Suites hotel.
Join remotely: Follow us on discourse and Twitter using the hashtag #MozParticipation to find out what we’re learning during this session.
TED Style Talks: Exploring Radical Participation at Whistler
Wednesday June 24th at 4:30pm
A series of invited experts on participation will challenge us in short TED-style talks, bringing thought-provoking ideas on Radical Participation. Then join over one hundred Mozillians who care about participation as we come up with some rough designs for what radical participation could look like at Mozilla in the years ahead. Confirmed speakers include:
Join in person: Wednesday June 24th at 4:30pm in Sea to Sky Ballroom C at the Whistler Conference Center
Join remotely: Watch live on AirMozilla at 11:30pm UTC on June 24th, join the discussion on discourse and read the blog afterwards for a synthesis of the most poignant ideas.
Personalized Design: 26 Participation Lab Sessions
Wednesday June 24th – Thursday June 25 9:30am – 9:00pm
We’re hosting customized sessions throughout the work week to help teams solve problems and capture opportunities related to contributor or volunteer engagement, user/supporter/contributor participation, and many other topics related to participation. With over 26 projects registered we’ll be meeting with teams throughout the week.
View the full schedule and the description of each project below.
Join us in person: Registration is now closed for customized Lab sessions, however the Participation Room (Raven A + B at Delta Whistler Village Suites hotel) will be open to all throughout the week.
Join remotely: What do you think of the sessions? Send us your thoughts and questions on discourse.
Participation Moving Forward – Strategy Session
Friday July 26th 8:30am-10am
On the last day of Whistler the Participation Team will be gathering with volunteers, staff, and experts to think about what participation might look like at Mozilla 10, 15, 20 years in the future.
Join in person: Participation Room (Raven A + B) at Delta Whistler Village Suites. Please arrive promptly at 8:30am if you’d like to participate.
Join remotely: Share your thoughts/visions for the future of participation at Mozilla on discourse here.
Read more about the Lab and what we’ve been up to in Emma Irwin’s post “Participation Lab, What We’re Learning”.
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/06/20/bringing-participation-to-whistler/
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Jeff Walden: New changes to make SpiderMonkey’s (and Firefox’s) parsing of destructuring patterns more spec-compliant |
One new feature in JavaScript, introduced in ECMAScript 6 (formally ECMAScript 2015, but it’ll always be ES6 in our hearts), is destructuring. Destructuring is syntactic sugar for assigning sub-values within a single value — nested properties, iteration results, &c., to arbitrary depths — to a set of locations (names, properties, &c.).
// Declarations
var [a, b] = [1, 2]; // a = 1, b = 2
var { x: c, y: d } = { x: 42, y: 17 }; // c = 42, d = 17
function f([z]) { return z; }
print(f([8675309])); // 8675309
// Assignments
[b, f.prop] = [3, 15]; // b = 3, f.prop = 15
({ p: d } = { p: 33 }); // d = 33
function Point(x, y) { this.x = x; this.y = y; }
// Nesting's copacetic, too.
// a = 2, b = 4, c = 8, d = 16
[{ x: a, y: b }, [c, d]] = [new Point(2, 4), [8, 16]];
One wrinkle to destructuring is its ambiguity: reading start to finish, is a “destructuring pattern” instead a literal? Until any succeeding = is observed, it’s impossible to know. And for object destructuring patterns, could the “pattern” just be a block statement? (A block statement is a list of statements inside {}, e.g. many loop bodies.)
ES6 says an apparent “pattern” could be any of these possibilities: the only way to know is to completely parse the expression/statement. There are more elegant and less elegant ways to do this, although in the end they amount to the same thing.
Object destructuring patterns present somewhat less ambiguity than array patterns. In expression context, { may begin an object literal or an object destructuring pattern (just as [ does for arrays, mutatis mutandis). But in statement context, { since the dawn of JavaScript only begins a block statement, never an object literal — and now, never an object destructuring pattern.
How then to write object destructuring pattern assignments not in expression context? For some time SpiderMonkey has allowed destructuring patterns to be parenthesized, incidentally eliminating this ambiguity. But ES6 chose another path. In ES6 destructuring patterns must not be parenthesized, at any level of nesting within the pattern. And in declarative destructuring patterns (but not in destructuring assignments), declaration names also must not be parenthesized.
As of several hours ago on mozilla-inbound, SpiderMonkey conforms to ES6’s parsing requirements for destructuring, with respect to parenthesization. These examples are all now syntax errors:
// Declarations
var [(a)] = [1]; // BAD, a parenthesized
var { x: (c) } = {}; // BAD, c parenthesized
var { o: ({ p: p }) } = { o: { p: 2 } }; // BAD, nested pattern parenthesized
function f([(z)]) { return z; } // BAD, z parenthesized
// Top level
({ p: a }) = { p: 42 }; // BAD, pattern parenthesized
([a]) = [5]; // BAD, pattern parenthesized
// Nested
[({ p: a }), { x: c }] = [{}, {}]; // BAD, nested pattern parenthesized
Non-array/object patterns in destructuring assignments, outside of declarations, can still be parenthesized:
// Assignments
[(b)] = [3]; // OK: parentheses allowed around non-pattern in a non-declaration assignment
({ p: (d) } = {}); // OK: ditto
[(parseInt.prop)] = [3]; // OK: parseInt.prop not a pattern, assigns parseInt.prop = 3
These changes shouldn’t much disrupt anyone writing JS. Parentheses around array patterns are unnecessary and are easily removed. For object patterns, instead of parenthesizing the object pattern, parenthesize the whole assignment. No big deal!
// Assignments
([b]) = [3]; // BAD: parentheses around array pattern
[b] = [3]; // GOOD
({ p: d }) = { p: 2 }; // BAD: parentheses around object pattern
({ p: d } = { p: 2 }); // GOOD
One step forward for SpiderMonkey standards compliance!
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About:Community: Participation Lab, What We’re Learning |
In recent months the Participation Lab has been tracking multiple experiments across the project that demonstrate fresh approaches to participation. To really understand and bring strategic value to Mozilla, our focus in these experiments has been to encourage human centered design and a deliberate setting of ‘milestones for learning ‘ and measuring success.
Learning milestones are places in a project’s execution where we stop and evaluate the initial hypothesis about participation: do these goals still make sense? Are we still on track to learn about participation? What are we already learning? Where can we help?
What we’re finding is that ‘learning check-ins’ are a critical opportunity to recalibrate, and advance the depth and success of project and contributor success. Participation shifts, and evolves with the project, it only makes sense to pay attention to those subtle changes. As a result of these conversations, and analysis we’re starting to see a shift towards a new innovative approaches.
The lab has also observed a number of trends in terms of what people struggle with most in establishing and measuring their participation experiments, and themes in how we’re trying to solve for better participation. All of this is leading to more insightful prototyping and execution of participation goals, and in the spirit of the virtuous circle : amplifying impact on contributor success and sense of value, and project goals.
Education & Training, Evangelism and Representation, and Market Research were identified as our top three themes in the nearly fifty projects we’re following. Learn more about these themes and how they’re being implemented below.
Community Education was at the heart of many initiatives we’re following. Many working hypothesis include education and training as a connective tissue for community building and development of future leaders. Almost all had a working theory, that through education and training we can build content and generate meaningful outcomes to project as part of learning outcomes.
By building and training a community of core contributors in Market Research, Marketpulse aims to collect data about phone sales in target markets. This project encourages contribution through a series of participation steps, each with complementary training. Marketpulse also recently completed a four-week online course “Interviewing Users for Mozilla” which taught contributors this qualitative research skill in user research. As a result of this project, Mozilla has gained user research on the “Large Screen Experience”.
By “Interviewing Users for Mozilla” course participant: Sukanta Pal
The Developer Fellowship program provides a model for Mozilla and advanced developers to work together more extensively, allowing Mozilla to gain outside expertise and influence to help build our curriculum, shape our products and evangelize our programs.
Is a volunteer-lend series of workshops for students and security enthusiasts. During the workshop, participants are trained in ways to detect the threats by performing security attacks using the ZAP security tool. At it’s core this project is about teaching people about security by contributing to Zap. Each week focuses on a different method of contribution: source code, creating extensions and addons, documentation and localization. Hypothesis is that by teaching participation as part of curriculum we can gain a greater base of contributors as a result. Very cool!
Sumath’s Hypothesis is that by embedding contribution opportunities in education & training we can improve the number of, and quality of contributions, and help spread Mozilla’s mission to more people.
Mozilla’s community reaches around the globe, with diversity so great it’s an exciting to imagine the potential of volunteers empowered to share, speak and advocate for Mozilla’s mission. It makes a lot of sense to work on mechanisms for this type participation. Common hypothesis are that word of mouth marketing is an extremely valuable tool for promotion and that empowering community members with more skills and avenues to share their passion for Mozilla will help raise awareness of Mozilla and Firefox.
Firefox Friends a program that take advantage of the existing passion of the Mozilla community to make it easier for people to share their love of Mozilla and Firefox within their social networks. Firefox Friends is exploring the hypothesis that providing the community with a tool for collecting and sharing Firefox oriented content will increase awareness and growth of Firefox. To make it easier for community members to spread the word about Firefox and Firefox initiative,
Tech Speakers was a six week program combining group speaking practice and technical content development. A fantastic curriculum, combined with live mentorship opportunities is resulting in a growing base of high-quality volunteer speakers.
Mozilla serves users in markets all over the world. To deliver useful insights and research that will help product and functional teams be successful we’re seeing deep investment in Mozilla’s global community to bring a competitive edge.
With Fx OS launching in 21 African countries in 2015 , there is an opportunity to test a new approach to building new relationships and new communities of supporters/volunteers across the continent. A series of experiments. Goals have been to build out programs that to get new contributors involved in Firefox OS activities to increase awareness on the product and make an impact on product goals
By creating a launch playbook modeled after Firefox OS we will be able to create launch teams in target markets, this will result in a number of new users. Supporting local content leads we will be able to generate original content and learn from local communities in order to deliver and build a more effective localized product and content.
The Firefox OS team has embarked on many different initiatives and campaigns to bring Firefox OS to market without always having sufficient understanding and knowledge of the reality on the ground, due to a lack of local market data. This local market data is extremely difficult to obtain, let alone, update regularly if you’re not actually on the ground. Leveraging the Marketpulse tool, community regularly collects price and user data for Firefox OS phones in their local market and web stores providing this much needed data.
You can see there’s a lot going on, and that even within each of these projects multiple experiments are taking place. There’s a lot to be excited about in the coming months for participation at Mozilla. You can track the this and other Participation Team activity through our Heartbeat tool, or by reaching out to us directly. In the near future, we’ll surface more concrete examples of what we’re learning, and we expect, celebrating the new successes in participation at Mozilla.
We’re in Whistler next week, check out for Lucy’s post on what we’ll be up to there!
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/06/19/participation-lab-what-were-learning/
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Air Mozilla: Webdev Beer and Tell: June 2015 |
Once a month web developers across the Mozilla community get together (in person and virtually) to share what cool stuff we've been working on in...
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Chris Cooper: Releng & Relops weekly highlights - June 19, 2015 |
Happy Friday once again, releng enthusiasts!
The release engineering and operations teams are heads-down this week trying to get quarterly deliverables done *before* heading off to Whistler for a Mozilla-wide work week. There’s lots of work in-flight, although getting updates has occasionally been like pulling teeth.
Because almost everyone will be in Whistler next week, next week’s update will focus less on completed or in-progress work and more on what releng team members took away from their time together in Whistler.
Taskcluster: Morgan got 32-bit Linux builds working! Rail reports that funsize update generation is ready to go, pending an AWS whitelist update by IT. Ted reproduced mshal’s previous work to get OS X builds cross-compiling in one of Morgan’s existing desktop build containers.
Puppetized Windows in AWS: Jake and Rob are working on additional puppet modules for Windows. Q is running performance tests on jobs in AWS after the networking modifications mentioned last week.
Operational: MozillaBuild 2.0 is out! Mark deployed NSIS 3.0b1 to our windows build/try pools. Kim and Netops have finished up the SCL3 switch upgrades. Jake rolled out changes to enable statsd on our POSIX systems. Dustin’s talk on fwuint was accepted to LISA 15. Dustin merged all of the relengapi blueprints into a single repository and released relengapi 3.0.0.
Whistler: There’s been a bunch of planning around Whistler, and props to catlee, naveed, and davidb for getting our stuff into the sched site (the tag for releng/relops/ateam/relman is platform-ops). Be sure to take a look and pick some planning, presentation, and hacking sessions to go attend! http://juneworkweekwhistler2015.sched.org/type/platform-ops
Thank you all!
…
And here are all the details:
See you next week!
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Mozilla Addons Blog: New add-on community forum |
For a few years we have been running a forum for add-on developers. It’s linked to from the Developer Hub on AMO and has been a good place for discussions about add-ons, particularly add-on development. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the time or resources to keep it properly running and up to date. The software it runs on (phpBB) is notoriously unstable and difficult to manage. It’s time for a change.
We’ve set up an Add-ons category in the Mozilla Community forum. This is the new official home for discussions about add-ons. Its main benefits are better integration with the larger Mozilla community, authentication with Persona (also used on Bugzilla, MDN, and others), reliable maintenance by Community IT, and running on a more modern forum platform called Discourse. With Discourse you can subscribe to posts or entire categories and interact with them like you would with a mailing list, which great for those who (like me) prefer a more old school approach.
This is the current plan for the forum move:
There are more details about the move in this announcement.
We’re very excited to join the rest of the Mozilla community in the new Discourse forum. Please give it a try and join the discussion!
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/06/19/new-add-on-community-forum/
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