Mozilla Community Ops Team: Weekly Status Update 2015-08-12 |
This week we are trying out a new format for our project meeting, with our top priority being to produce a weekly status update. The update is broken down into the smaller projects we’re currently working on (think sprints or heartbeats). They include a brief description of why we’re working on the project, and the current status of the project. If you’d like a more complete background on a project please ask! In the future these will be linked.
We’ve also included some suggested contribution opportunities in the status updates. These are recapped at the bottom. If you would like to help with a project, but there isn’t a contribution opportunity listed for it, that’s ok, just ask. The main contact for each project is listed next to it.
Originally posted on Discourse.
There are some changes to Discourse that should be made to make it more suitable to Mozillian’s needs
To make Discourse more user friendly for Mozillians, we need some good documentation on how to use it
Putting all Discourse instances on one infrastructure, automated with Ansible and CloudFormation
This will help us keep the many Discourse instances we have secure, up to date and running common plugins easily. At scale. AT SCALE. also saves us $$$ while allowing all of our instances to be HA.
Status [In Progress]: Currently can bootstrap a single instance, working on templating out configuration so we can bootstrap multiple instances with a single file. Help needed with creating the Ansible playbooks.
#ConfigManagement – Makes it 100x easier to set up servers
https://jira.mozilla-community.org/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?projectKey=ANS&rapidView=15
Status [In progress]: Right now, it creates users for the core team, adds their ssh keys, creates a “core-team” group, adds the core team to “core-team”, and sets “core-team” to have access to passwordless sudo in /etc/sudoers.d/core-team
Not using Icinga because it’s no longer a fork of Nagios, more or less its own thing – Nagios isn’t exactly great, but it’s an (the?) industry standard so generally well-supported and well-documented.
Status [In progress]: Currently working on setting up Nagios, looking into best way to handle authentication. Considering ldap, because it would mean only storing passwords once rather than several times (Jenkins, Nagios, etc.). Nagios expertise/mentorship very welcome.
We need to understand which sites are being actively used and which no longer need hosting, or need different hosting than they currently have
We will be moving away from OVH to simplify community hosting and save money
(see above)
Our wiki pages our out of date, and shouldn’t be under IT anymore
Links to JIRA, will use it to help with project management, decision tracking.
Recap of contribution opportunities from status updates:
http://ops.mozilla-community.org/weekly-status-update-2015-08-12/
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Air Mozilla: The Joy of Coding (mconley livehacks on Firefox) - Episode 25 |
Watch mconley livehack on Firefox Desktop bugs!
https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-mconley-livehacks-on-firefox-episode-25/
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Daniel Pocock: Recording live events like a pro (part 2: video) |
In the first blog in this series, we looked at how to capture audio effectively for a range of different events. While recording audio appears less complicated than video, it remains fundamental to a good recording. For some types of event, like a speech or a debate, you can have quite a bad video with poor lighting and other defects but people will still be able to watch it if the audio is good. Therefore, if you haven't already looked at the previous blog, please do so now.
As mentioned in the earlier blog, many people now have high quality equipment for recording both audio and video and a wide range of opportunities to use it, whether it is a talk at a conference, a wedding or making a Kickstarter video.
The fundamental piece of equipment is the camera itself. You may have a DSLR camera that can record video or maybe you have a proper handheld video camera. The leading DSLR cameras, combined with a good lens, make higher quality recordings than many handheld video cameras.
Unfortunately, although you pay good money to buy a very well engineered DSLR that could easily record many hours of video, most DSLRs are crippled to record a maximum of 30 minutes in one recording. This issue and some workarounds are discussed later in this blog.
If you don't have any camera at all you need to think carefully about which type to buy. If you are only going to use it once you may want to consider renting or borrowing or asking for other people attending the event to bring whatever cameras they have to help make multiple recordings (the crowdsourcing solution). If you are a very keen photographer then you will probably have a preference for a DSLR.
Don't just look at the cost of your camera and conclude that is all the budget you need. For professional quality video recording, you will almost certainly need some accessories. You may find they are overpriced at the retail store where you bought your camera, but you still need some of them, so have a look online.
Recording a talk at a free software event with a Nikon D800 on a very basic tripod with Rode VideoMic Pro, headphones (white cable) and external power (black cable)
If you want to capture audio with the camera and record it in the video file (discussed in more detail below), you will need to purchase a microphone that mounts on the camera. The built-in microphones on cameras are often quite bad, even on the most expensive cameras. If you are just using the built-in microphone for reference audio (to help with time synchronization when you combine different audio files with the video later) then the built-in microphone may be acceptable. Camera audio is discussed in more detail below.
If your camera has a headphone socket, get some headphones for listening to the audio.
Make sure you have multiple memory cards. Look carefully at the speed of the memory cards, slow ones are cheaper but they can't keep up with the speed of writing 1080p video. At a minimum, you should aim to buy memory cards that can handle one or two days worth of data for whatever it is you do.
A tripod is essential for most types of video. If you use a particularly heavy camera or lens or if you are outdoors and it may be windy you will need a heavier tripod for stability. For video, it is very useful to have a tripod with a handle for panning left and right but if the camera will be stationary for the whole recording then the handle is not essential.
Carrying at least one spare battery is another smart move. On one visit to the Inca Trail in Peru, we observed another member of our group hiking up and down the Andes with a brand new DSLR that they couldn't use because the battery was flat.
For extended periods of recording, batteries will not be sufficient and you will need to purchase a mains power supply (PSU). These are available for most types of DSLR and video camera. The camera vendors typically design cameras with unusual power sockets so that you can only use a very specific and heavily overpriced PSU from the same company. Don't forget a surge protector too.
There are various smartphone apps that allow you to remotely control the camera from the screen of your phone, such as the qDslrDashboard app. These often give a better preview than the screen built-in to the camera and may even allow you to use the touch screen to focus more quickly on a specific part of the picture. A regular USB cable is not suitable for this type of app, you need to buy a USB On-The-Go (OTG) cable.
Screenshot of qDslrDashboard app on a smartphone, controlling a DSLR camera
If you plan to copy the video from the camera to a computer at the event, you will need to make sure you have a fast memory card reader. The memory card readers in some laptops are quite slow and others can be quite fast so you may not need to buy an extra card reader.
Most cameras, including DSLRs, have a built-in microphone and a socket for connecting an external microphone.
The built-in microphones obtain very poor quality sound. For many events, it is much better to have independent microphones, such as a lapel microphone attached to a smartphone or wireless transmitter. Those solutions are described in part one of this blog series.
Nonetheless, there are still some benefits of capturing audio in the camera. The biggest benefit is the time synchronization: if you have audio recordings in other devices, you will need to align them with the video using post-production software. If the camera recorded an audio stream too, even if the quality is not very good, you can visualize the waveform on screen and use it to align the other audio recordings much more easily and precisely.
If the camera will be very close to the people speaking then it may be acceptable to use a microphone mounted on the camera. This will be convenient for post-production because the audio will be synchronized with the video. It may still not be as good as a lapel microphone though, but the quality of these camera-mounted microphones is still far higher than the built-in microphones. I've been trying the Rode VideoMic Pro, it is definitely better than recording with the built-in microphone on the camera and also better than the built-in microphone on my phone.
One problem that most people encounter is the sound of the lens autofocus mechanism being detected by the microphone. This occurs with both the built-in microphone and any other microphone you mount on the camera. A microphone mounted on top of the camera doesn't detect this noise with the same intensity as the built-in microphone but it is still present in the recordings.
If using a camera-mounted microphone to detect the audio from an audience, you may need to have an omnidirectional microphone. Many camera-mounted microphones are directional and will not detect very much sound from the sides or behind the camera.
When using any type of external microphone with the camera, it is recommend to disable automatic gain control (AGC) in the camera settings and then manually adjust the microphone sensitivity/volume level.
A final word on audio - most good cameras have an audio output socket. Connect headphones and wear them, to make sure you are always capturing audio. Otherwise, if the microphone's battery goes flat or if a wireless microphone goes out of range you may not notice.
The more light you get, the better. Bigger and more expensive lenses allow more light into the camera. Many of the normal lenses sold with a DSLR camera are acceptable but if it is a special occasion you may want to rent a more expensive lens for the day.
If you already have a lens, it is a very good idea to test it in conditions similar to those you expect for the event you want to record.
Most DSLR cameras with video capability impose a 30 minute maximum recording duration
This is basically the result of a friendly arrangement between movie studios and politicians to charge an extra tax on video recording technology and potentially make the movie studio bosses richer, supposedly justified by the fact that a tiny but exaggerated number of people use their cameras to record movies at the cinema. As a consequence, most DSLR manufacturers limit the duration of video recording so their product won't be subject to the tax, ensuring the retail price is lower and more attractive.
On top of this, many DSLR cameras also have a 4GB file size limit if they use the FAT filesystem. Recording 1080p video at a high frame rate may hit the file size limit in 10 minutes, well before you encounter the 30 minute maximum recording duration.
To deal with the file size issue, you can record at 720p instead of 1080p and use the frame rate 24fps.
For events longer than 30 minutes or where you really want 1080p or a higher frame rate, there are some other options you can consider:
There are many online tutorials and demonstration videos on YouTube that will help you optimize the camera settings for video.
You may have already made recordings using the automatic mode. Adjusting some or all of the settings manually may help you create a more optimal recording. You will need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the settings first.
The first thing to check is white balance. This tells the camera the type of lighting in the location. If you set this incorrectly then the colours will be distorted. Many cameras have the ability to automatically set the white balance.
For video, you may be able to change one or more settings that control the recording quality. These settings control the file compression ratio and image size. Typical image size settings are 720p and 1080p. Compression ratio may be controlled by a high/medium/low quality setting. Choosing the highest quality and biggest picture requires more space on the memory card and also means you reach the 4GB file size limit more quickly. A higher quality setting also implies a faster memory card is required, because the rate of megabytes per second written to the memory card is higher.
Next you need to think about the frame rate. Events that involve fast moving subjects, such as sports, typically benefit from a higher frame rate. For other events it is quite acceptable to use 24 frames per second (fps). Higher frame rates also imply bigger file size and a requirement for a faster memory card.
Once you have decided on the frame rate, the next thing to do is set the shutter speed. Use a shutter speed that is double the frame rate. For example, if using 24fps or 25fps, use a 1/50 shutter speed.
The final two settings you need to adjust are the ISO and aperture. Set these based on the lighting conditions and extent to which the subjects are moving. For example, if the setting is dark or if you are trying to record fast moving subjects like athletes, vehicles or animals, use an ISO value of 800 or higher. Once you have chosen ISO, adjust the aperture to ensure the picture is sufficiently illuminated. Aperture also has a significant impact on the depth of field.
Many people use zoom lenses. It is not always necessary to change the zoom while recording a video, you can use software to zoom in and out on individual parts of the picture when editing it in post-production. If you do change the zoom while recording, it may be more difficult to maintain focus.
Almost all lenses support manual focus (turning the focus ring by hand) and many support automatic focus.
When shooting photographs with a DSLR, the mirror is down and the camera can use dedicated sensors for focus and light sensing.
When shooting video, the mirror is up and the camera can not use the same focus sensors that are used in photography. Video recording uses a digital focussing algorithm based on contrast in the picture. If you take a lot of photos you are probably quite accustomed to the fast and precise autofocus for photography and you will notice that keeping a video in focus is more challenging.
As mentioned already, one of the first things you can do to keep focus simple is to avoid zooming while recording. Record in a higher resolution than you require and then zoom with software later. Some people record using 4k resolution even when they only want to produce a 720p video, as they can digitally zoom in to different parts of the 4k recording without losing detail.
If the subject is very stationary (people sitting at a desk for an interview is a typical example), you may be able to set the camera to manual focus and not change it at all while recording.
If you choose to enable autofocus while recording, any built-in camera microphone or microphone mounted on the camera is likely to detect sounds from the motorized focus system.
Ultimately, the autofocus mechanism is not accurate for all subjects and you may be unable to stop them moving around so you will need to change the focus manually while recording. It requires some practice to be able to do this quickly without overshooting the right focus. To make life more tricky, Nikon and Canon focus rings rotate in the opposite direction, so if you are proficient using one brand you may feel awkward if you ever have to use the other. A good way to practice this skill is to practice while in the car or on the train, pointing at different subjects outside the window and trying to stay in focus as you move from one subject to the next.
Many events, from weddings right up to the Olympic Games opening ceremony, have a trial run the day before. One reason for that is to test the locations and settings of all the recording and broadcasting equipment.
If a trial run isn't possible for your event, you may find some similar event to practice recording and test your equipment. For example, if you are planning to record a wedding, you could try and record a Sunday mass in the same church.
If you only have one copy of the recordings and the equipment is stolen or damaged you may be very disappointed. Before your event, make a plan to duplicate the raw audio and video recordings so that several people can take copies away with them. Decide in advance who will be responsible for this, ensure there will be several portable hard disks and estimate how much time it will take to prepare the copies and factor this into the schedule.
All the products described can be easily purchased from online retailers. You may not need every accessory that is mentioned as it depends on the type of event you record. The total cost of buying or renting the necessary accessories may be as much as the cost of the camera itself so if you are new to this you may need to think carefully about making a budget with a spreadsheet to do it correctly.
Becoming familiar with the camera controls and practicing the techniques for manual focus and zoom can take weeks or months. If you enjoy photography this can be time well spent but if you don't enjoy it then you may not want to commit the time necessary to make good quality video.
Don't rule out options like renting equipment instead of buying it or crowdsourcing, asking several participants or friends to help make recordings with their own equipment.
For many events, audio is far more indispensable than video and as emphasizing at the beginning of this article, it is recommended that you should be one hundred percent confident in your strategy for recording audio before you start planning to record video.
http://danielpocock.com/recording-live-events-like-a-pro-part-two-video
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Daniel Pocock: UK wakes up to airport tax and data grab |
The UK has just woken up to the fact that retailers at airports have been playing the VAT system.
The focus of the media coverage has been on the VAT money, failing to give much emphasis to the fact this is also a sophisticated and coordinated attack on personal privacy.
This situation has been obvious to me for years and it doesn't just occur in the UK. Whenever one of these retailers asks me for a boarding pass, I always refuse. Sometimes they lie to me and tell me that it is mandatory to let them scan my boarding pass: I tell them that a travel companion has the boarding passes and at this point they usually find some way to complete the transaction without further comment.
With the rise of payment cards, people seem to be forgetting that you can pay for things in cash. If I have the right change to pay for something in this scenario, I typically put it on the counter and walk away. Why should I have to waste my time helping a poorly trained cashier understand VAT? I already deal with enough computer problems in the job I'm paid to do, why should I lose my time when on vacation explaining to a cashier that their computer is failing to correctly deduct 20% VAT?
It is far too common for people to try and scan or copy documents these days. When somebody in an airport shop or hotel asks to see a document, I don't let it out of my hands. It is not hard to cover the barcode with your fingers too. This prevents them making an unauthorized copy or using a barcode scanner to extract personal data. Some of these staff literally try to snatch the documents out of people's hands and drop them onto a scanner next to their till. In some countries hotels are obliged to look at your passport and make a record of the name but they often have no obligation to photocopy or scan it and it is often a huge risk if they do.
If the airports are genuinely concerned about the security of passengers, they would be just as thorough in protecting data as they are in the hunt for terrorists. For example, they could give VAT-free passengers colour-coded boarding passes or some other vouchers without any personal information on them.
Shops pocket an extra 20% of the price of a product and they condition everybody, staff and customers, to having all customer data expropriated from the boarding pass at the point of sale, even the customers not eligible for a tax refund are unnecessarily having their data hoovered up in this way. The VAT money diverted away from both the tax man and the customer is rolled back into the system to fund the data grab. UK law promises customers significant protection from unlawful use of personal data, so how can these retailers lie to passengers and tell them that scanning the boarding pass is mandatory? Why not ask the Information Commission's Office to check up on this?
It is not hard for people to add up the amount of VAT included in a price, deduct it themselves, give the correct and exact amount of cash to the cashier and walk away. Just type the price into your smart phone, divide by 1.2 and you can see the amount to pay. For example, if a product costs lb24.95, just type 24.95 : 1.2 into the calculator on your phone and you find that you have to pay lb20.79.
It may only be necessary to show a boarding pass or ID for purchasing duty-free alcohol or tobacco.
Carrying a correct amount of cash doesn't just help navigate the data grab in airports. Consider some of the other scenarios:
http://danielpocock.com/uk-wakes-up-to-airport-tax-and-data-grab
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Matthew Noorenberghe: Firefox Password Manager Update: 2015-Q2 |
Continuing from the Q1 update, here's a summary of the password manager progress made in the second quarter of 2015 (in no particular order):
event.preventDefault(); for the submit event.
signon.ui.experimental in about:config.
http://matthew.noorenberghe.com/blog/2015/08/firefox-password-manager-update-2015-Q2
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Air Mozilla: Mike Nolan: Going the Extra 10%: The Next Generation Video Editor on the Web |
3:15 pm Mike Nolan: "Going the Extra 10%: The Next Generation Video Editor on the Web" Since the dawn of YouTube and smart phones, video...
https://air.mozilla.org/mike-nolan-going-the-extra-10-the-next-generation-video-editor-on-the-web/
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Air Mozilla: Julian Hector: "FirefoxOS: From politics to SELinux and Kernel" |
3:00 pm Julian Hector: "FirefoxOS: From politics to SELinux and Kernel" Description: I will be talking about my projects and challenges faced, during my summer...
https://air.mozilla.org/julian-hector-firefoxos-from-politics-to-selinux-and-kernel/
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Air Mozilla: Bryan Munar: A Swift Release: Firefox for iOS V1 |
3:40 pm Bryan Munar: "A Swift Release: Firefox for iOS V1" Description: The long-awaited release for Firefox on iOS is finally (almost) here! See what...
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Air Mozilla: Rithesh Shenthar: "Steeplechase: An automated framework for testing WebRTC" |
2:40 pm Rithesh Shenthar: "Steeplechase: An automated framework for testing WebRTC" Description: I will be presenting my summer internship project at Mozilla Mountainview, where I...
https://air.mozilla.org/rithesh-shenthar-steeplechase-an-automated-framework-for-testing-webrtc/
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Air Mozilla: Intern Presentations |
3 Interns will be presenting what they worked on over the summer. Sam Fang - Effective Product Management: Stubborn on Vision, Flexible on Details The...
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Monty Montgomery: Cisco introduces the Thor video codec |
I want to mention this on its own, because it's a big deal, and so that other news items don't steal its thunder: Cisco has begun blogging about their own FOSS video codec project, also being submitted as an initial input to the IETF NetVC video codec working group effort:
"World, Meet Thor – a Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec"
Heh. Even an appropriate almost-us-like nutty headline for the post. I approve :-)
In a bit, I'll write more about what's been going on in the video codec realm in general. Folks have especially been asking lots of questions about HEVCAdvance licensing recently. But it's not their moment right now. Bask in the glow of more open development goodness, we'll get to talking about the 'other side' in a bit.
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Gervase Markham: Microsoft Account Creation Password Fail |
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The Mozilla Blog: Firefox Brings Fresh new Look to Windows 10 and Makes Add-ons Safer |
Today, we are proud to bring all the features you love about Firefox to Windows 10, along with a fresh new look and a way to preserve your search engine choice.
Firefox Has a New Look for Windows 10
You can now download or update to the latest Firefox to see a fresh new look in Windows 10. We’ve made thoughtful tweaks to the interface to give Firefox a streamlined feel. You’ll also notice bigger, bolder design elements as well as more space for viewing the Web. We had a lot of fun building this version of Firefox and we hope you’ll enjoy the new look.
If you upgrade to Windows 10 or get a device that already has it installed, your default browser is set to Microsoft Edge by Windows, so we created support materials to show you how to restore or choose Firefox as your default browser in Windows 10.
Firefox also helps you preserve your choice when using the search field on the Windows 10 taskbar to search the Web. When using this search field, Windows 10 launches your default browser but only shows search results in Microsoft Bing. When you have Firefox set as your default browser on Windows 10, all your Web searches from the taskbar search field will show results in the default search engine you choose in Firefox.
Making Third Party Add-ons Safer in Firefox
Add-ons are another important aspect of how you control and customize Firefox. Add-ons will continue to provide limitless possibilities for customizing the look and functionality of Firefox, but today we’re also taking steps to ensure that using add-ons is a safe and secure experience for our users. We’ve announced a process to certify add-ons based on guidelines we have provided to add-on developers.
In future releases of Firefox, any third-party add-on that has not been certified will be disabled by default. Today, you will start seeing warnings next to unsigned add-ons in Firefox, but no add-ons will be automatically disabled. These warnings will inform you about add-ons that have not been certified by Mozilla and we’re working with add-on developers to help them meet our standards and make add-ons safer for you.
For more information:
Release Notes for Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
Release Notes for Android
Download Firefox
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Henrik Skupin: Firefox Automation report – Q2 2015 |
It’s been a while since I wrote my last Firefox automation report, so lets do another one to wrap up everything happened in Q2 this year. As you may remember from my last report the team has been cut down to only myself, and beside that I was away the whole April. Means only 2 months worth of work will be covered this time.
In general it was a tough quarter for me. Working alone and having to maintain all of our infrastructure and keeping both of our tests (Mozmill and Marionette) green was more work as expected. But it still gave me enough time to finish my two deliverables:
With the transition of Mozmill tests to Marionette we no longer needed the mozmill-dashboard. Especially not since nearly no job in our Mozmill CI is running Mozmill anymore. Given that we also weren’t happy with the dashboard solution and the usage of couchdb under the hood, I was happy that a great replacement exist and our Marionette tests can make use of.
Treeherder is the new reporting system for tests being run in buildbot continuous integration. Because of that it covers all products and their appropriate supported branches. That’s why it it’s kinda perfect for us.
Before I was able to get started a bit of investigation had to be done, and I also checked some other projects which make use of treeherder reporting. That information was kinda helpful even with lots of undocumented code. Given that our tests are located outside of the development tree in its own Github repository some integration can be handled more loosely compared to in-tree tests. With that respect we do not appear as Tier-1 or Tier-2 but results are listed under the Tier-3 level, which is hidden by default. But that’s fine given that our goal was to bring up reports to treeherder first. Going into details will be a follow-up task.
For reporting results to Treeherder the Python package treeherder-client can be used. It’s a collection of different classes which help with authentication, collecting job details, and finally uploading the data to the server. It’s documentation can be found on readthedocs and meanwhile contains a good number of example code which makes it easier to get your code implemented.
Before you can actually upload reports the names and symbols of the groups and jobs have to be defined. For our tests I have chosen the three group symbols “Fu”, “Ff”, and “Fr”. Each of those stays for “(F)irefox UI Tests” and the first letter of the testrun name. We currently have “updates”, “functional”, and “remote”. As job name the locale of Firefox will be used. That results in an output like the following:
Whether jobs are passing or failing it is recommended to always add the log files as generated by running the tests to the report. It will not happen via data URLs but as artifacts with a link to an upload location. In our case we make use of Amazon S3 as storage service.
With all the pieces implemented we can now report to treeherder and covering Nightly, Aurora (Developer Edition), Beta, and Release builds. As of now reporting only happens against the staging instance of Treeherder, but soon we will be able to report to production. If you want to have a sneak peak how it works, just follow this link for Nightly builds.
More details about Treeherder reporting I will do later this quarter when the next pieces have been implemented.
My second deliverable was to assist Armen Zambrano in getting the Firefox UI Update tests run for beta and release builds on Release Engineering infrastructure. This was a kinda important goal for us given that until now it was a manually triggered process with lots of human errors on our own infrastructure. That means lots of failures if you do not correctly setup the configuration for the tests, and a slower processing of builds due to our limited available infrastructure. So moving this out of our area made total sense.
Given that Armen had already done a fair amount of work when I came back from my PTO, I majorly fixed issues for the tests and the libraries as pointed out by him. All that allowed us to finally run our tests on Release Engineering infrastructure even with a couple of failures at the beginning for the first beta. But those were smaller issues and got fixed quickly. Since then we seem to have good results. If you want to have a look in how that works, you should check the Marionette update tests wiki page.
Sadly some of the requirements haven’t been completely finished yet. So the Quality Engineering team cannot stop running the tests themselves. But that will happen once bug 1182796 has been fixed and deployed to production.
Oh, and if you wonder where the results are located… Those are not getting sent to Treeherder but to an internal mailing list as used for every other automation results.
Beside the deliverables I got some more work done. Mainly for the firefox-ui-tests and mozmill-ci.
While the test coverage has not really been increased, I had a couple of regressions to fix as caused by changes in Firefox. But we also landed some new features thankfully as contributed by community members. Once all that was done and we agreed to have kinda stable tests, new branches have been created in the repository. That was necessary to add support for each supported version of Firefox down to ESR 38.0, and to be able to run the tests in our Mozmill CI via Jenkins. More about that you will find below. The only task I still haven’t had time for yet was the creation of proper documentation about our tests. I hope that I will find the time in Q3.
Mozmill CI got the most changes in Q2 compared to all the former quarters. This is related to the transition from Mozmill tests to Marionette tests. More details why we got rid of Mozmill tests can be found in this post. With that we decided to get rid of most of the tests and mainly start from scratch by only porting the security and update tests over to Marionette. The complete replacement in Mozmill and all its jobs can be seen on issue 576 on Github. In detail we have the following major changes:
All changes in Mozmill CI can be seen on Github.
Last but not least we also had two releases of mozdownload in Q2. Both had a good amount of features included. For details you can check the changelog.
I hope that gave you a good quick read on the stuff I was working on last quarter. Maybe in Q3 I will find the time to blog more often and in more detail. Lets see.
http://www.hskupin.info/2015/08/11/firefox-automation-report-q2-2015/
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Mozilla Security Blog: Expanded Malware Protection in Firefox |
As part of our commitment to help Firefox users stay safe online, we have recently expanded the malware detection features in Firefox. Thanks to new developments in Google’s Safe Browsing service we are now able to identify malware downloads in all of our supported platforms as well as warn users about potentially unwanted software.
The first of these changes, introduced in Firefox 39, consists of extending the monitoring of malicious file downloads to the Mac and Linux versions of Firefox.
When downloading a file of a type that usually contains Windows or Mac executable code (for example, .com, .exe, .msi, .app, .dmg) Firefox asks Google’s Safe Browsing service if the file is safe by sending it some of the download’s metadata (file type, name, size, hash, URL, locale). If the file is flagged as harmful by this service, the download manager will block access to the file until the user performs a right-click, and unblocks it manually.
In addition to this, Firefox 40 now issues a warning if you visit a page known to contain deceptive software that can make undesirable changes to your computer. You will be presented with the following warning if you encounter such a page:
While we believe that malware protection is in the best interest of all of our users, we recognize that some will prefer not to send any data about downloaded files to Google and hence provide an easy way to disable this feature.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/08/11/expanded-malware-protection-in-firefox/
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Christian Heilmann: The ES6 conundrum – new article on SitePoint |
I just released an article over on Sitepoint called The ES6 conundrum. In it, I am discussing the current issues we’re facing with using ES6:
All in all, we need to have a good think about ES6, and – to me – it feels we are at a turning point in web development. I will talk in more detail about this in my BrazilJS keynote in two weeks.
Read “The ES6 conundrum” on Sitepoint
http://christianheilmann.com/2015/08/11/the-es6-conundrum-new-article-on-sitepoint/
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Byron Jones: happy bmo push day! |
the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:
discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.
https://globau.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/happy-bmo-push-day-154/
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Planet Mozilla Interns: Willie Cheong: How is everyone feeling? |
Are stock investors bearish on Facebook?
Will the Australian dollar ever regain its strength?
How do Canadians feel about the upcoming elections?
What do Americans think about Donald Trump running for president?
What is the latest social trend amongst kids these days?
What about pop culture?
These questions are all about feelings of the population as a whole. But even though we live in this age where everyone has opinions on the internet, it is still really hard to find answers to higher level questions about sentiment. Individuals make posts on Twitter, communities have discussions on isolated forums, influencers are writing up articles for their blogs and thoughts from all over are constantly being uploaded into this online soup. But nobody ever gets a real taste of this online soup, because it’s so hard to get a complete picture.
Of course there’s the best search engine ever. We want to know how the Facebook stock will perform in the next month. Here are some articles that might answer the question. But wait, those articles are written by individuals, who either formed opinions of their own or did some research to gather as much information as humanly possible to write those articles.
Regardless of how many articles we might read on a subject involving the population’s sentiment, we can only get a vague picture at best. If lucky, that vague picture extrapolates well into the actual picture and we make good decisions. If not so lucky, then we’ll just have to deal with it. No matter the outcome, to make any kind of decision based on population sentiment is nothing more than an educated gamble. This is of course, assuming that only technologies available today are used to survey the population.
Many companies employ market research teams. They want to make better decisions based on real data, so employees gather information from all over and do analysis to build a nice report. The same problem about population sentiment still exists if the question follows along the lines of “how many customers are we losing because we do not have a healthy salad option on our menu?”. But giant corporations like McDonald’s have less of a problem here since they have a nice big team researching that question. Not everyone that needs market intelligence can afford one.
We live in a world full of everyone elses’ opinions. If we as individuals, groups, or organizations can get a good grasp of what all these opinions point toward, then we’ll start making more informed decisions and less gambles. Idea for my next project? I’ll try to prototype some kind of sentiment engine, starting in stocks and finance.
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About:Community: Firefox 40 new contributors |
With the release of Firefox 40, we are pleased to welcome the 55 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 49 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/08/10/firefox-40-new-contributors/
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting |
The Monday Project Meeting
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20150810-2/
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