https://wiki.mozilla.org/De/Meetings

https://air.mozilla.org/german-speaking-community-bi-weekly-meeting-20150716/

Highlights

The Details

• Ability to schedule Linux64 tests on try (tests not running yet due to a couple blockers) – bug 1171033

• Support has been added to mozregression for downloading inbound builds from S3 – bug 1177923.  More work is needed on both mozregression and mozdownload to fully adapt them to the migration of builds off the netapp.
• Work is underway to allow the Python mozillapulse client to consume from multiple exchanges – bug 1180897.
• mozregression 0.37 has been released.
• mozci 0.8.2 now allows you to use Treeherder as a source of job data.

https://jagriffin.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/automation-and-tools-team-update-july-16-2015/

This is our weekly gathering of Mozilla'a Web QA team filled with discussion on our current and future projects, ideas, demos, and fun facts.

https://air.mozilla.org/web-qa-weekly-meeting-20150716/

Did an interview with George Hulme about Devops and Security

http://devops.com/2015/07/16/the-myth-of-devops-as-a-catalyst-to-improve-security/

snip…

Muntner: Thinking security testing through and automating as much as possible will yield results, but that can happen with or without devops. I’m not saying devops is invalid, rather that it alone is not responsible for good outcomes. Thinking that an approach delivers more than it really does is only a false sense of security, arguably worse than awareness of insufficient security.

Secure systems and software development practices like command-safe APIs, network-layer features in TLS, HTTP layer features like CSP, improvements in application and protocol layer firewalls, developers learning to do proper encoding for the appropriate output context, automated testing with tools like OWASP ZAP or commercial equivalents as appropriate for the type of application are all high-impact but have nothing to do with devops.

DevOps.com: Security should be part of the flow, an integral

https://adammuntner.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/the-myth-of-devops-as-a-catalyst-to-improve-security/

Weekly Mozilla Reps call

https://air.mozilla.org/reps-weekly-20150716/

In spite of being a programmer, I’m not much of a DIY person when it comes to computer hardware. For example, I’ve never built a computer from parts, or performed maintenance more complicated than a RAM or hard drive upgrade.

One thing I’ve been doing that has a DIY air to it, though, is cleaning the dust from the inside of my desktop computer using a can of compressed air – a habit I picked up from one of my first-year university roommates.

The first time I did this, I was very hesitant, afraid that I would break something. It went smoothly, though, and I continued cleaning my computer this way regularly (about once a year) without any trouble.

Until last weekend, that is.

After last weekend’s cleaning, my computer booted up fine, and everything seemed OK, but a short while after booting it up, I stepped away from it to talk on the phone, and returned to find it mysteriously powered off.

Powering it back on led to more strangeness: the computer itself powered on fine, but the monitors were receiving no signal, just as if the computer were off.

I powered it off again, and opened the case back up to inspect the internals, thinking that perhaps the cleaning loosened or dislodged a connector; however, everything seemed to be in order.

Powering it on one more time, the monitors were working again, and everything seemed fine. I was ready to write down the mysterious symptoms as a fluke and move on to other things, but within 20 or so minutes, the computer suddenly powered off again.

This time, though, I was sitting in front of it when it did, and I got a fraction-of-a-second glimpse of a Windows dialog opening up before the power-off. I didn’t get a chance to read what it said, but it made me realize that rather than the power-off being a pure hardware failure, it could be something triggered by the OS for some reason.

So I powered on again (monitors working fine this time), and took a look at the Windows system event log, and indeed, there were “Error” entries whose times matched the sudden shutdowns. Most of the event information was pretty cryptic, but once I realized you can double-click on the event to get more details, there was a descriptive message: “System shutdown due to graphics card overheating”.

That explained why the computer was shutting down after running for a short while, and also why the monitors weren’t engaging that one time I powered it back on (the graphics card must not have had a chance to cool down enough). It also gave me a direction to continue investigating in.

I researched the problem of graphics cards overheating a bit, and found that the problem was commonly caused by a fan malfunctioning, or airflow being obstructed by dust.

So I powered off again, opened up the case, and inspected the fans. I saw two, a case fan, and a CPU fan (and possibly one inside the PSU but that was enclosed so I wasn’t sure); the graphics card didn’t appear to have its own fan. The fans seemed to be in order; to be sure, I powered the computer on with the case open and verified that the fans were spinning fine. Nor did I detect any obstruction to airflow.

Nonetheless, the overheating and subsequent shutdown recurred.

I downloaded a program to monitor the internal temperatures of the computer, and verified that the graphics card did indeed get very hot – while the CPU temperatures remained around 40-45oC, the graphics card’s temperature would slowly rise over time, reaching close to 110oC, which seemed to be the point where the shutdown was triggered.

Determined to get to the bottom of the issue, I opened the case again and decided to try to remove the graphics card and inspect it more closely; I never got around to removing it, though, because in the process I discovered the cause of the problem.

It turns out the graphics card did have its own fan: a small one, oriented horizontally, built into the bottom of the platform that held the card. You had to be looking at it from underneath, which I didn’t do before, to see it.

This fan wasn’t spinning, and it was readily apparent why: there were large clumps of dust in it, that were too clumped together to have been disloged by the compressed air. In fact, most likely the compressed air treatment caused additional dust from further above to collect there, pushing the fan over the edge to the point where it couldn’t spin any more.

Cleaning out the dust with some tweezers, the fan started working again, the graphics card stayed cool, and all was well.

This sort of problem and diagnosis is probably very trivial for a lot of tinkerers, but for me it was exploring new ground. I’m glad that I persisted in fixing the problem myself and didn’t resort to bringing my computer in to a repair shop.

https://botondballo.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/adventures-in-diy-computer-repair/

As of today, ~15.6% of commits landing in Firefox in July have gone through MozReview or have been produced on machines that have used MozReview. This is still a small percentage of overall commits. But, signs are that the percentage is going up. Last month, about half as many commits exhibited the same signature. It's only July 16 and we've already passed the total from June.

What I find interesting is the differences between commits that have gone through MozReview versus the rest. When you look at the diff statistics (a quick proxy of change size), we find that MozReview commits tend to be smaller. The median adds as reported by diff stat (basically lines that were changed) is 12 for MozReview versus 17 elsewhere. The average is 58 for MozReview versus 100 elsewhere. For number of files modified, MozReview averages 2.59 versus elsewhere's 2.71. (These numbers exclude some specific large commits that appeared to be bulk imports of external projects and drove up the non-MozReview figures.)

It's entirely possible the root cause behind the discrepancy is a side-effect of the population of MozReview users: perhaps MozReview users just write smaller commits. However, I'd like to think it's because MozReview makes it easier to manage multiple commits and people are taking advantage of that (this is an explicit design goal of MozReview). Whatever the root cause, I'm glad diffs are smaller. As I've written about before, smaller commits are easier to review and land, thus enabling projects to move faster.

I have a quarterly goal to remove the requirement for a Mozilla LDAP account to push to MozReview. That will allow first time contributors to use MozReview. This will be a huge win, as we can do much more magic in the MozReview world than we can from vanilla Bugzilla (automatic bug filing, automatic reviewer assignment, etc). Unofficially, I'd like to have more than 50% of Firefox commits go through MozReview by the end of the year.

http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2015/07/16/mozreview-statistics-july-2015

I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series

I’ve been reading the Early History Of Smalltalk, notes by Alan Kay, and this small note jumped out at me:

Another late-binding scheme that is already necessary is to get away from direct protocol matching when a new object shows up in a system of objects. In other words, if someone sends you an object from halfway around the world it will be unusual if it conforms to your local protocols. At some point it will be easier to have it carry even more information about itself–enough so its specifications can be “understood” and its configuration into your mix done by the more subtle matching of inference.

[…]

This higher computational finesse will be needed as the next paradigm shift–that of pervasive networking–takes place over the next five years. Objects will gradually become active agents and will travel the networks in search of useful information and tools for their managers. Objects brought back into a computational environment from halfway around the world will not be able to configure themselves by direct protocol matching as do objects today. Instead, the objects will carry much more information about themselves in a form that permits inferential docking. Some of the ongoing work in specification can be turned to this task.

An object, sent over the network; it does not exactly have a common protocol, class, or API, but enough information so it can be understood, matched up with some function or purpose according to inference. We could also assume given this is from Alan Kay that the vision here is that code, not just data, is part of the object and information (though to consider code to be information: that is quite a challenge to our modern sensibilities).

When I read this, it struck me that we have these objects all around us. The web page: remote, transferable, transformable, embodying functionality and data, with rich information suitable for inference.

The web page has a kind of minimal protocol, though nothing is entirely forbidden in how it is interpreted. For instance the page is named in its

http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2015/07/product-journal-objects.html

Bug 1175934 – [B2G] Add support to build blobfree images

has landed and is now available on task cluster :

https://tools.taskcluster.net/index/artifacts/#gecko.v1.mozilla-central.latest.linux.aries-blobfree/gecko.v1.mozilla-central.latest.linux.aries-blobfree.opt

What is Blob free?  see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Building#Building_a_blob_free_full_system_zip

That’s right.  if you follow Bug 1166276 – (b2g-addon) [meta] Getting a B2G Installer Addon, you will see that there’s an addon to the desktop firefox version that will allow you to flash your device, and these blobfree images are to be available to the public.

\o/ Dev team!

https://shizen008.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/blob-free-now-on-task-cluster/

Last year, we introduced the Mozilla Winter of Security (MWoS) to invite students to work on security projects with members of Mozilla’s security teams. Ten projects were proposed, and dozens of teams applied. A winter later, MWoS 2014 gave birth to exciting new technologies such as the SeaSponge Threat Modeling platform, the Masche memory scanning Go library, a Linux Audit plugin written in Go for integration in Heka, and a TLS Observatory.

The first edition of MWoS was a success, and a lot of fun for students and mentors, so we decided to run it again this year. For the 2015 edition, we are proposing six projects that directly contribute to our most impactful security tools. Students will be able to work on digital forensics with MIG, SSL/TLS configurations with Menagerie, certificate management with LetsEncrypt, security visualization with MozDef, and web security scanning with OWASP ZAP.

The feedback from last year taught us that students work better when their mentors are more available to support them. But time is a scarce resource, and mentors can be hard to reach. This year we decided to reduce the number of projects and give each project two mentors: a primary and a secondary. Mentors also have a maximum of one project as primary, which will help dedicate more attention to the students. Our goal is to provide as much support as we can and help the teams succeed.

For students the requirements are unchanged: teams must be engaged in a university program and their professor must agree to give them credits for their MWoS project. Based on last year’s feedback, this formula works very well to ensure students have the time and motivation to work on their project.

Head over to the wiki for the detailed list of projects and application details: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Automation/Winter_Of_Security_2015

Applications open today and will close on August 15th, in just one month! If you are a professor, tell your students about MWoS today. If you are a student, start assembling your team, and fill up the application form before August 15th. We will take about two weeks after the applications close to contact the teams and let them know if they have been selected.

Questions about the MWoS program or the projects can be directed to the mentors directly by email or on the #security IRC channel.

Come join us, we have t-shirts!

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/07/15/mozilla-winter-of-security-is-back/

Duration: 10 minutes This is a weekly status meeting, every Wednesday, that helps coordinate the shipping of our products (across 4 release channels) in order...

https://air.mozilla.org/product-coordination-meeting-20150715/

The popular QuickText addon has not been updated for Thunderbird 38 and no longer works. As a user of that addon, I wanted to make it work again. This post provides instructions on how to do that.

The addon has no license mentioned, and unfortunately that defaults to “all rights reserved”. That means that I cannot provide the modified source to download, but I can under “Fair Use” describe the needed changes, that you can do yourself. They are trivial (at least for my use case). I will describe the changes for the non-Pro version but presumably they are the same for the Pro version. The only problem is that the template file is written in one format, but is read in a different format so that it does not work.

To edit the source, first you need to uncompress it. The QuickText .xpi file is just a renamed .zip file, so extract this file with your favorite zip utility (I use 7-zip). Find the file named components/wzQuicktext.js Find the line (near line 570) that looks like this:

if (bomheader == "\xFF\xFE" || bomheader == "\xFE\xFF")

Modify that line by adding an additional condition to be this:

if (bomheader == "\xFF\xFE" || bomheader == "\xFE\xFF" || bomheader.length == 1)

That’s it! Now you just have to select all of the files in the addon, and put them back into a ZIP archive re-named as .xpi

I changed a few other meta details such as the version number and compatibility, so here is a link to the actual patch that I use:

http://mesquilla.net/releases/quicktext.patch

I’ll keep contacting the author trying to either get the official version modified, or a release that allows me to modify it. But you should be able to do this yourself and run a modified version.

http://mesquilla.com/2015/07/15/fixing-quicktext-addon-for-thunderbird/

Watch mconley livehack on Firefox Desktop bugs!

https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-mconley-livehacks-on-firefox-episode-21/

http://www.ncalexander.net/blog/2015/07/15/nalexander-community-update-part-the-second/

Q: Ever since I moved up from my old Amstrad 1512 to a 386 I have been annoyed by the way Num Lock comes on when the PC is started up or re-booted. I still use the numeric keypad in preference to the additional cursor key block. Is there any way Num Lock can be turned off automatically?

A: As far as I know, not even the latest version of DOS allows you to set the state of Num Lock on start-up. However, there is a short program you can create which, when run from AUTOEXEC.BAT, turns Num Lock off. Depending on whether you use MS-DOS or DR DOS, type one of the listings shown here into a text editor and save it as a plain ASCII file called NUMOFF.LST.

MS-DOS (Debug) version:

a100
XOR AX,AX
MOV DS,AX
MOV AL,BYTE PTR (417)
AND AL,DF
MOV BYTE PTR (417),AL
XOR AH,AH
INT 21

rcx
10
nNUMOFF.COM
w
q

Then type:

DEBUG < NUMOFF.LST

All being well, you will now have a program called NUMOFF.COM. Test it by pressing Num Lock to bring the keyboard light on, and type NUMOFF. The light should go off.

30 years later, this still isn’t trivial in GNOME… But the book authors get kudos for creativity in finding out how to send someone a working and useful binary via the medium of dead trees.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/rYXoGtkK4S0/

TCPSocket implemented in Javascript is a DOM technology providing web pages a direct access to TCP network sockets.  We support both outgoing connections and listening to incoming connections via a server socket.

I’m constantly requested to review changes under this code in /dom/network where TCPSocket et al resides.  And I’m always lost in the mess of all classes and objects involved in the IPC bridging.

As a side result of the last review request I’ve dived into the jungle and crated a “UML” flow chart that helps me understand – and not forget again – the complicated flow of IPC’ing in both TCPSocket and TCPServerSocket.

Here they are.

Not perfect, I’m no UML expert, but I think one can understand and make a picture that may be helpful

The post TCPSocket.js/TCPServerSocket.js IPC mess captured appeared first on mayhemer's blog.

http://www.janbambas.cz/tcpsocket-tcpserversocket-js-ipc-mess-captured/

We’ve been talking about ‘leadership development’ since early on in the Mozilla Learning (aka Academy) planning process. Basically, the idea is to get more people to teach and advocate for web literacy. If we can create a global network of these people — and help them be great at what they do — our whole web literacy agenda moves faster and is more likely to succeed.

This sort of leadership development is something we’ve been doing through Hive and fellowships for years. What’s become increasingly clear over the last month or so is: a) this has become one of our core strengths and b) it is one of the biggest places we could have impact going forward. This has lead us to the conclusion that leadership development should be one of the core elements of our overall learning strategy. With this in mind, I want to lay out some initial thinking about what we mean by ‘leadership’, describe the kind of impact we’re trying to have and pose some questions we need to answer.

The basics

Let’s start with some basic definitions. For discussion purposes, the kind of ‘leaders’ we want to find and develop are:

Leaders = people who in one way or another are helping others to read, write and participate on the web (aka ‘web literacy‘).

These leaders could be helping others through teaching or mentoring. Or through organizational change or learning projects. Or by explicitly designing and organizing programs to promote web literacy. I consider all of these to be acts of leadership that advance our cause.

When we talk about ‘leadership development’, we are describing the process of:

Leadership development = helping these people become more skilled, self aware and networked by getting them working on concrete projects.

The approach that we’ve been using — and will continue to develop — borrows from the field of service learning. We focus on hands-on, experiential learning where people develop skills by working on a project in service of a bigger goal aligned with Mozilla’s mission. These experiences simultaneously: a) help people become better at hard skills (e.g. coding or research); b) provide opportunities to learn soft skills (e.g. teamwork or mentoring); and c) contribute concretely to the work of Mozilla or a partner organization.

Impact

Ultimately, there are two core places where we hope this part of our strategy will have an impact:

Global = more people teach and advocate for web literacy.
Personal = individuals have more skills, confidence and opportunity.

Combined, these things create both a talent pool and motivational economics that will build momentum. And, ultimately, they make it more likely that we will succeed with our overall agenda of universal web literacy.

On the global level, we are already having a meaningful impact. Hive, Mozilla Clubs and our fellowships are already resulting in:

• University students sharing web skills with friends. (Maker Party)
• Educators weaving web literacy into their teaching. (Hive)
• Scientists teaching other scientists about open data. (Science Lab)
• Coders helping activist organizations adopt open tools and thinking. (Advocacy Fellows)
• Organizers bringing together others to teach web literacy. (Mozilla Clubs)

The question we have to answer at this stage isn’t ‘can we get more people doing this stuff?’ but rather ‘how many people? and with what sort of downstream impact?’

Which brings us to the second point about giving people more skills, confidence and opportunity. We do this on some level already through our existing programs, but not systematically. I believe we need:

Learning experiences and curriculum that help people a) develop strong open source leadership skills that b) make them more effective and c) open up new personal or career opportunities.

In some sense, this is simply about helping people hone certain aspects of their web literacy skills on a very deep level. One person might want to develop better research (read), open data management (write) and knowledge sharing (participate) skills so they can mentor their peers. Another might want to develop better content harvesting (read), web design (write) and online community management (participate) skills to create a piece of interactive online curriculum. And so on.

In both examples, these are skills that are a) useful in the kind of web literacy work we want people doing and b) highly valued in the job market. A key part of creating a robust leadership development strategy is implementing a method to consistently help people hone these skills and find opportunities to use them both in our work and on the job market. This is a part of the process that Mozilla is not yet skilled at as an organization.

Questions

We’re nearing the end of phase one of our Mozilla Learning (aka Academy) planning process. I’ll post an update on this later next week.

In the meantime, I can say with confidence: leadership development will be one of the key strategies Mozilla invests in to advance web literacy.

I’ve outlined the ‘why?’ (more people teaching and advocating) and the ‘what?’ (service learning programs that develop leaders) above. What we need to do in the next phase is map the ‘what?’ to the ‘how?’. Key questions about leadership development programs will be:

• What specific impact do we want to have here? By when?
• What skills and mindsets do we need to develop to have this impact?
• What skills and experiences do emerging leaders want? Partners?
• What curriculum and experiences are needed to develop these skills?
• Pragmatically, how do we align and integrate our existing programs?

The good news is that the existing Hive, Mozilla Clubs, Science Lab and Advocacy Fellows teams have already started to dig into these questions at our recent retreat in Whistler. For example, the Science Lab team created an initial outline of a basic ‘working in the open’ on-boarding curriculum for leaders. And the Hive / Clubs (aka Mozilla Learning Networks) teams started to develop a quite advanced operating model that integrates many of the existing activities that we have in place across these programs.

Over the next couple of months, these teams will take a next step in answering these questions and coming up with a more detailed theory of how our leadership development program will work. As I noted above, I’ll post more about the overall process next week.

https://commonspace.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/web-literacy-and-leadership/

For a few months now,   I’ve been slowly identifying, and compiling a set of Participation Personas to help me, and hopefully others build quality contribution experiences for people, representing various stages in their Participation journey at Mozilla. In addition to the Persona ‘stories’, I’m insisting that  a number of ‘lenses’ need  be applied if we are serious about improving dimension and diversity.

Dimension & Diversity ‘Lenses’

• Age
• Gender Identity
• Accessibility
• Communication Skills
• Geography/Regional Identity
• Language
• Active/Inactive Status
• Project Association
• Skill level
• Primary Motivation {Personal or Mission}
• Skill-set
• Aggression/Toxic Rating

First Version of Seven Personas

• Lurking Lucinda
• Stanley Student
• Ned the New
• Sea-Legs Sangeeta
• Coasting Cora
• Dynamite Daphne
• Mentor Mel

Each Persona has the attributes:

• Persona Name
• Description (which includes ‘Participation’ Style)
• Participation Characteristics
• Sense of Belonging
• Opportunity for Participant
• Opportunity for Project
• Risk for Participant
• Risk for Project

These Personas were created with love and feedback of a number of people – you can see the ‘raw’ version here.

This really the first draft, and would be interested in what Personas you feel are missing, and especially how to dig into, and help people apply ‘diversity and dimension’ lenses.  Yes you can suggest ‘name changes’, I know they’re a bit odd but it helped me start.

There’s  probably a bit too much ‘story’ in each Persona, but I hoped that by making each a web-based  it would be easier to digest, and also easier to give feedback.  If you do have feedback, which I would LOVE,  you can leave comments here or create an issue on the associated Github account.

http://tiptoes.ca/personas-for-participation/

I’ve dogfooded Firefox OS since its early beginnings and have some of the early hardware  (hamachi, unagi, One Touch Fire, ZTE Open, Geeksphone Keon, Flame and ZTE Open C). It was good to hear some of the plans for Firefox OS 2.5 that were discussed at Whistler, but I wanted to take the time and model of this post and remix it for Firefox OS. Firefox OS you are great and free but you are not perfect and you can be the mobile OS that I need.

#1  Voice Control

Just like Apple has Siri and Google has Ok Google, Firefox OS too needs a voice command system that will let me search the web, send a text, open apps, navigate to places. Not only is this good for a smartphone, but when I buy a TV running Firefox OS, voice commands will be very useful.

#2 Notifications

Let’s face it: notifications on Firefox OS are not a world class experience. Most of the big apps (Facebook, Twitter etc) do not integrate with Firefox OS so when someone messages you or tags you in a photo, you won’t know unless you open the app. There is a bug for this to fix this in Facebook app but the developer left Facebook so it got abandoned. There was never any progress on this for Twitter. In order for Firefox OS to be able to be sustainable and see good adoption, people will need to have notifications this is not negotiable.

#3 LTE

While Firefox OS has never shipped in the U.S. yet plenty of Firefox OS developers do live here and so do a good portion of Mozilla Developers. LTE needs to be supported in the stack but also needs to be a requirement for reference devices going forward in the Foxfooding program.

#4  App Ecosystem

There is much talk about how Mozilla is going to invest big into Firefox OS and that is great and very exciting but one of the biggest things Mozilla could invest in for Firefox OS that would increase adoption is expanding the app ecosystem. Without apps, a platform fails and this is obvious. Right now as things stand, even Ubuntu Phone is ahead of Firefox OS in the app ecosystem race. If Mozilla has to pay companies to port their apps to Firefox OS, well that would be a good investment because random low-quality apps are not going to fill the gap.

#5 U2F (Universal 2nd Factor)

I believe Fido Alliance’s U2F is the future of strong authentication on the desktop and mobile so it would be nice to see support for this.

#6 Local / Contextual Results

Firefox OS needs to have a foot in the producing local results game since Firefox OS does not have an equivalent of Google Now or a Yelp app. I need something to help me find local businesses and places and ratings. This should be a smart feature that uses my actual location.

#7 Weather

We need a WeatherUnderground App or something really slick that delivers the most accurate weather forecasting available.

#8 Transit

We need a transit app, not a bunch of local ones that can use my location and tell me available transit options like when trains and buses arrive. The data is out there and most of it is open so let’s build this into the OS or maybe Mozilla should make an app for that.

#9 Better OEM Update Expectations

The updates offered by OEM partners has been deplorable mostly with many devices left behind on versions which leaves users with bugs and stability issues. Mozilla should set the bar high and take OEM’s out of the updates equation much like Ubuntu has done with their Mobile OS. OEM’s cannot be trusted to give regular OS updates and when they don’t the reputation of the platform is blamed for this not the OEM.

#10 Uber or Lyft

Firefox OS will need a Uber or Lyft app to get any kind of non-niche foothold in more westernized countries. I don’t really care if Uber or Lyft is offered as both will work. Uber already allows booking through their website so perhaps a little nudge could get them to package that into an app.

This summarizes ten things I would love to see happen for Firefox OS not all are hard requirements for me but consider this a wish list. Do you have a wish list of 10 things you want in Firefox OS? If so I encourage you to blog about it and dream big!

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BenjaminKerensaDotComMozilla/~3/KkeYixkoqh4/10-things-i-want-firefox-os-to-do-for-me

Haven’t been doing enough blogging about Perfherder (our project to make Talos and other per-checkin performance data more useful) recently. Let’s fix that. We’ve been making some good progress, helped in part by a group of new contributors that joined us through an experimental “summer of contribution” program.

Comparison mode

Inspired by Compare Talos, we’ve designed something similar which hooks into the perfherder backend. This has already gotten some interest: see this post on dev.tree-management and this one on dev.platform. We’re working towards building something that will be really useful both for (1) illustrating that the performance regressions we detect are real and (2) helping developers figure out the impact of their changes before they land them.

Most of the initial work was done by Joel Maher with lots of review for aesthetics and correctness by me. Avi Halmachi from the Performance Team also helped out with the t-test model for detecting the confidence that we have that a difference in performance was real. Lately myself and Mike Ling (one of our summer of contribution members) have been working on further improving the interface for usability — I’m hopeful that we’ll soon have something implemented that’s broadly usable and comprehensible to the Mozilla Firefox and Platform developer community.

Graphs improvements

Although it’s received slightly less attention lately than the comparison view above, we’ve been making steady progress on the graphs view of performance series. Aside from demonstrations and presentations, the primary use case for this is being able to detect visually sustained changes in the result distribution for talos tests, which is often necessary to be able to confirm regressions. Notable recent changes include a much easier way of selecting tests to add to the graph from Mike Ling and more readable/parseable urls from Akhilesh Pillai (another summer of contribution participant).

Performance alerts

I’ve also been steadily working on making Perfherder generate alerts when there is a significant discontinuity in the performance numbers, similar to what GraphServer does now. Currently we have an option to generate a static CSV file of these alerts, but the eventual plan is to insert these things into a peristent database. After that’s done, we can actually work on creating a UI inside Perfherder to replace alertmanager (which currently uses GraphServer data) and start using this thing to sheriff performance regressions — putting the herder into perfherder.

As part of this, I’ve converted the graphserver alert generation code into a standalone python library, which has already proven useful as a component in the Raptor project for FirefoxOS. Yay modularity and reusability.

Python API

I’ve also been working on creating and improving a python API to access Treeherder data, which includes Perfherder. This lets you do interesting things, like dynamically run various types of statistical analysis on the data stored in the production instance of Perfherder (no need to ask me for a database dump or other credentials). I’ve been using this to perform validation of the data we’re storing and debug various tricky problems. For example, I found out last week that we were storing up to duplicate 200 entries in each performance series due to double data ingestion — oops.

You can also use this API to dynamically create interesting graphs and visualizations using ipython notebook, here’s a simple example of me plotting the last 7 days of youtube.com pageload data inline in a notebook:

[original]

http://wrla.ch/blog/2015/07/perfherder-update/