Daniel Stenberg: One year and 6.76 million key-presses later |
I’ve been running a keylogger on my main Linux box for exactly one year now. The keylogger logs every key-press – its scan code together with a time stamp. This now allows me to do some analyses and statistics of what a year worth of using a keyboard means.
This keyboard being logged is attached to my primary work machine as well as it being my primary spare time code input device. Sometimes I travel and sometimes I take time-off (so called vacation) and then I usually carry my laptop with me instead which I don’t log and which uses a different keyboard layout anyway so merging a log from such a different machine would probably skew the results a bit too much.
What did I learn?
A full year of use meant 6.76 million keys were pressed. I’ve used the keyboard 8.4% on weekends. I used the keyboard at least once on 298 days during the year.
When I’m active, I average on 2186 keys pressed per hour (active meaning that at least one key was pressed during that hour), but the most fierce keyboard-bashing I’ve done during a whole hour was when I recorded 8842 key-presses on June 9th 2015 between 23:00 and 24:00! That day was actually also the most active single day during the year with 63757 keys used.
In total, I was active on the keyboard 35% of the time (looking at active hours). 35% of the time equals about 59 hours per week, on average. I logged 19% keyboard active minutes, minutes in which I hit at least one key. I’m pretty amazed by that number as it equals almost 32 hours a week with really active keyboard action.
Zooming in and looking at single minutes, the most active minute occurred 15:48 on November 10th 2014 when I managed to hit 405 keys. Average minutes when I am active I type 65 keys/minute.
Looking at usage distribution over week days: Tuesday is my most active day with 19.7% of all keys. Followed by Thursday (19.1%), Monday (18.7%), Wednesday (17.4%) and Friday (16.6%). I already mentioned weekends, and I use the keyboard 4.8% on Sundays and a mere 3.6% on Saturdays.
Separating the time-stamps over the hours of the day, the winning hour is quite surprising the 23-00 hour with 11.9% followed by the more expected 09-10 (10.0%), 10-11 and 14-15. Counting the most active minutes over the day shows an even more interesting table. All the top 10 most active minutes are between 23-00!
The most commonly pressed keys are: space (10%) and backspace (6.5%) followed by e, t, a, s, left control, i, cursor down, o, cursor up, n, r. 29 keys were pressed more than 1% of the times. 30 keys were pressed less than 0.01%. I used 99 different keys over the year (I believe my keyboard has 105 keys).
Never pressed keys? All 6 of the never touched keys are in the numpad: 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 and the comma/del key.
I’ll let the keylogger run and see what else I’ll learn over time…
http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/08/19/one-year-and-6-76-million-key-presses-later/
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Air Mozilla: SuMo Accessibility Meeting August 2015 |
This will be a meeting to discuss all things related to SuMo accessibility within the Support Mozilla Community
https://air.mozilla.org/sumo-accessibility-meeting-august-2015/
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Gregory Szorc: JSON APIs on hg.mozilla.org |
I added a feature to Mercurial 3.4 that exposes JSON from Mercurial's various web APIs. Unfortunately, due to the presence of legacy code on hg.mozilla.org providing similar functionality, we weren't able to deploy this feature to hg.mozilla.org when we deployed Mercurial 3.4 several weeks ago.
I'm pleased to announce that as of today, JSON is now exposed from hg.mozilla.org!
To access JSON output, simply add json- to the command name in URLs. e.g. instead of https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/de7aa6b08234 use https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/json-rev/de7aa6b08234. The full list of web commands, URL patterns, and their parameters are documented in the hgweb help topic.
Not all web commands support JSON output yet. Not all web commands expose all data available to them. If there is data you need but isn't exposed, please file a bug and I'll see what I can do.
Thanks go to Steven MacLeod for reviewing the rather large series it took to make this happen.
http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2015/08/18/json-apis-on-hg.mozilla.org
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Air Mozilla: Martes mozilleros |
Reuni'on bi-semanal para hablar sobre el estado de Mozilla, la comunidad y sus proyectos.
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Gervase Markham: The Intersection of Non-Empiricism and Optimism |
An excellent moment from “Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security“:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/3fmD4teVIwA/
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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/2015/08/18/happy-bmo-push-day-156/
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Geoff Lankow: Can you imagine… |
… an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie?
Just over two years ago, I posted about localizing Mozilla extensions. I'd made a website for translators, which automatically created GitHub pull requests. Well, I'm not here to say it's been an overwhelming success, but I think it did achieve my aim of simplifying the translation process.
Over the past month or so, I've rebuilt the website from scratch, to be much simpler, and much less fragile. Instead of having a Git clone on the webserver, and a working copy for every translation (which caused big headaches when it came time to update the clone), the website now stores translation data in a database, and when ready, creates files, commits, branches, and pull requests directly on GitHub. It also updates itself every time the original repo updates, by watching a particular branch. From a translator's point-of-view, not much has changed, although if they use GitHub to register, pull requests will be made using their account for better communication.
For reasons even I'm not really sure of, I called the original "Zoo". Now in a perfect storm of inspiration and originality, I've called this new website "Zoo2". Genius.
It's a little rough-around-the-edges, but it's ready to go. I'm looking for people to translate my extensions, obviously, but now I'm also looking for other extension writers willing to try things out. I have a few criteria, mostly around things I've yet to implement, but if your extension is on GitHub, open an issue and we'll talk. I'm also often in #developers on Mozilla IRC in the US evening/Asian day/European morning.
Edit: I'm hosting this thing on a free Heroku account, which means it must sleep for 6 hours a day (I'd get so much more done if I slept that little) and today's seen a lot of activity so it might be sleeping. I guess you get what you pay for, and I haven't paid anything yet.
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting |
The Monday Project Meeting
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20150810/
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting |
The Monday Project Meeting
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20150817/
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The Mozilla Blog: Mozilla Webmaker, Meet the World |
Mozilla is excited to announce that Webmaker for Android emerges from beta today. You can download the new version of our free, open source app from Google Play at mzl.la/webmaker.
Mozilla built Webmaker to empower first-time smartphone users and mobile-first Web users as active participants on the Web. Too often, individuals around the world experience a “read-only” mobile Web, passively consuming content and unable to actively contribute. But when consumers become creators, they’re introduced to social and economic opportunity. And when everyone can contribute equally, the Web becomes a better place.
Webmaker is Mozilla’s way of addressing the lack of local content in mobile-first markets. Initially available in four languages (Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, English and Indonesian) and with more coming soon, the app allows individuals across the globe to create original content in their language and relevant to their community. We built Webmaker after extensive research around the world, and it’s informed by hundreds of volunteers. Webmaker belongs as much to these communities as it does Mozilla.
Webmaker’s hallmark is simplicity: there’s no know-how required, no steep learning curve, and no complex toolbars. Users can create a range of content in minutes — from scrapbooks and art portfolios to games and memes. The intuitive design lets users iterate on the Web’s basic building blocks: text, images and links. With these three fundamentals, our community has already built wonderful creations: how-to manuals, photo albums, digital sketchbooks and wardrobes, exercise handbooks and more. Users are also free to remix and tinker with each other’s Webmaker projects in order to start slowly and steadily expand their creative potential.
Teenagers in Bangladesh using Webmaker
How is this version different from the Webmaker beta we released in June? In addition to better performance and a more optimal user experience, shared projects can now be viewed on any platform (mobile or desktop), and users with poor connectivity will experience better performance while offline. Also, content discovery is now location-based — you can see what others in your community are creating and remixing.
Ready to discover, create and share local content, and learn the basics of the Web along the way? Download Webmaker today at mzl.la/webmaker. You can find ideas for your first project here.
We’re looking forward to seeing what you make! You can reach us anytime @Webmaker or at help-webmaker@mozilla.com.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/08/17/mozilla-webmaker-meet-the-world-2/
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Christian Heilmann: How about we make ES6 the new baseline? |
Yesterday night, far too late, I wrote a long article here about making ES6 the new baseline of the web. It wasn’t a good article. It made a lot of assumptions, and it wasn’t thought through. That’s why I removed it.
I am right now writing my keynote for BrazilJS on this same topic and put more thought into that. So stay tuned for that :)
http://christianheilmann.com/2015/08/17/how-about-we-make-es6-the-new-baseline/
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Arky: Developing Firefox Add-ons Video Tutorials |
Do you want to develop add-on's for Firefox? Mozilla's Add-on SDK let's you create Firefox add-ons using standard Web technologies: JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Recently I stumbled across Alexander Saladrigas's videos tutorials that teach Firefox add-ons development with Add-on SDK. The videos introduce you to the tools for creating, running, testing and packaging add-ons and working with buttons, panels and tabs.
Thank you Alexander for making these videos. Hope to see more from you in future.
http://playingwithsid.blogspot.com/2015/08/develping-firefox-add-ons-video-tutorial.html
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Tantek Celik: Alaska Cruise Log Day 4: Skagway |
ISO date 2015-08-04. Having left the curtains open the night before, I awoke on my own at 5:04 despite having gone to bed after midnight. The four page folded newsletter for the day said sunrise would be at 4:52 (no need to guess apparently), yet when I looked outside, the sun was just starting shine on the tops of nearby mountain peaks.
My roommate stirred, I asked him if he wanted to see the sunrise, he said no. Should I close the curtains? No. I let him keep sleeping. I got dressed and went up to see what was blocking the sun.
We had docked right next to a giant mountain, just the pier, a broad boardwalk with minimal vehicle access, and train tracks between us and the mountain’s sheer vertical face.
A forklift on the boardwalk carefully lifted and lowered gangplanks into place. I went outside and up to the Star Deck (19) to take more photos.
Another cruise ship was docking behind us, it had a giant helipad on its bow. Sunlight continued to descend down the sides of the mountains in front and to our port side.
An older gentleman powerwalked with walking poles on the official jogging track, a small loop on this highest deck. I descended back down to the Sun Deck, and took photos of Skagway from the bow, still lit only by dawn’s refracted light above.
The buffet finally opened at 6am and I was too hungry to wait for anyone else. Smoked salmon, a small premade veggie omelette, scrambled eggs with mushrooms & swiss cheese with salsa on top, diced roasted potatoes with ketchup on top.
An hour later I had caught up with my personal journal, and finished writing most of day 2’s log. Just as I got up to return to our rooms, I saw my mother approaching and saved my table for her. A few more of our crowd drifted in, sat down with their full buffet plates, and we tossed around ideas for our day onshore in Skagway.
With hours remaining before disembarkation, I returned to my room to nap a bit, and read some more MATM. Mom came by our balcony and we quickly summarized Skagway plans. I succumbed to connecting, tethered via her iPhone6. I found out later that media (like video) sent over a tethered connection is heavily down-sampled, until the grainy result is barely identifiable. I took another video of helicopters taking off and returning to the cruise ship across the way, an upsell tour option no doubt.
Got to about 1/3 of the way through MATM and finally cleaned up to get ready for shore. The kids had finally woken up, a good time to grab second breakfast and blog a bit more while they grabbed their first.
The entire process took long enough that I was hungry again, with only a few minutes to wait until the first cheese slices of the day were ready. My dad waited with me while I grabbed a couple of slices and we found a couple of lounge chairs, now finally illuminated by the mid-day sun. We eventually returned to the rooms to collect everyone to disembark together.
Skagway appears to be the northernmost stop for these massive Alaska cruises (it was certainly ours). By the time we walked into downtown Skagway, it was quite warm, and the tiny town looked like it was being overwhelmed with awkward tourists. The town itself had only one major street (“Broadway”) and certainly seemed to be deliberately presenting itself for tourist shopping.
While everyone else shopped, my younger sister and I found a semi-independent local coffee shop (they “served Starbucks coffee”) and picked up cold drinks. It was far warmer than usual in Skagway according to the locals. There was fairly universal acknowledgment of global warming being a real thing, despite the perhaps dominant conservative attitudes.
Being from a city that has its own far too touristy parts, I’m not a fan of such areas in other towns, especially when the town appears to have reorganized itself around as much. I photographed a few moments of cute small town design. After sampling some fudge from the “Alaskan Fudge Company”, I bought a 3-pack for my mom, and started walking back toward the ship with my dad. Everyone had their own idea of what they wanted to explore on the little touristy strip. I was done.
We made it back to the ship less than three hours after we had stepped foot in Skagway. It felt like it had been longer.
The poolside grill had a halibut steak special, so of course I ordered one instead of the usual buffet fare. It was the perfect substantive snack before afternoon tea.
There was just enough time after tea yet before dinner to read some more MATM in the cool air-conditioned quiet of my stateroom. We dressed for dinner, and took the steps down to the “Da Vinci” restaurant for seated service. I sat between nephew2 and my dad.
I had noticed that the impulse to check my readers/notifications had returned even though I was offgrid. I think it took 12-24 hours of being off the grid the first time before I stopped checking my mobile for activity. Yesterday’s connectivity in Juneau seemed to refresh bad habits.
I asked nephew2 what was today’s ISO date. He got it after a couple of tries. When I asked him for the ISO ordinal date, it was trivial for him once he’d gotten the Gregorian ISO date right: 2015-216.
The kid’s placemat had an origami exercise, and a suggestion to start with a 5" on a side square sheet of paper, along with a printed ruler. Noting that all we needed was a square piece of paper, I taught nephew2 how to make a square piece from any rectangular piece by folding the corners over to make a square, then folding that crease back & forth repeatedly to weaken the paper to the point where it would tear cleanly in a straight line.
I pointed out that we had done so purely with the power of knowledge and our bare hands, without any tools. This seemed to please nephew2.
We proceeded to fold up origami seagulls one by one — a shape I hadn’t folded before, so I talked it through out loud with him, as I was figuring out each step myself, and he kept up. There were a few folds where he needed some help, however he’d apparently done some origami before, so he picked up the rest very quickly.
Triumphantly placing our seagulls on the table we talked about what to try next. Both of us have short attention spans so we tend to get along quite well, not being content to just sit and wait for whatever is supposed to happen next at a grown-up’s dinner table. We decided more math instead.
He easily reviewed 1 through 10 squared. I pointed out that cubes were merely those same squares, multipled by their square factor again, and we started from 1.
1 was obvious. 2 he guessed without thinking so I made him talk it through. 3 he had to think through. We got to 4 cubed and the appetizers finally arrived. Caesar salad for me, a shrimp cocktail for him.
I walked him through 4 cubed with hints, and how the result was also a square! We broke it down to how many 2s it took. And how many 2s it took to multiple into an 8. Eventually he put it all together and got the right result: 64.
5 cubed was easy for him. 6 cubed took a bit more work, but once he got it he was super happy: 216.
I asked him if he remembered what the ISO ordinal date was that he had just figured out. He paused a moment, recalled, repeated 2015-216 from memory, his eyes lit up and he roared with laughter. He had just connected why I had chosen to drill him on cubes. (It being the 216th day of the year, 216 also being 6 cubed).
My dad the retired mathematician (math professor even), decided to keep quizzing him on cubes, and asked him about 7. Nephew2 figured it out as 7 time 50 minus 7. He knew 7 squared was 49, and that he could more easily figure out 7*50 = 350, and then subtract 7 = 343. Neither of us had taught him that explicitly. Interestingly, his older brother figured it out the more traditional way, 7*40 = 280 + (7*9 = 63) = 343. He went on to state 8 cubed and 9 cubed. They nephews challenged each other to 10 cubed which they both remarked was easy: 1000.
We finished dinner (I had a baked Alaskan salmon special, coffee, bites of others' desserts), and returned to our rooms.
I gathered my reading & writing things and went back outside to the Lido deck, grabbed a reclining chair by the pool under the big screen, caught up on my personal journal, and finished writing up day 2’s log.
The outdoors movie happened to be “The Longest Ride”, seemingly a classic Hollywood romance clich'e, with an unrealistic and deceptive narrative as usual.
Removing myself from such reinforcements, I noticed the sky had turned into a swirling blend of blue, purple, pink, orange, and yellow (featured photo at top). We were on our way and the natural beauty around us snapped me back to reality.
I took it in and a few photos too, then returned to my room and got in bed. I read more MATM under the glow of my iPod’s backlight until I was halfway through the book.
I’ll take bittersweet but real triumphs & failures any day over deceptive cheery narratives that set unhealthy expectations.
My iPod lockscreen clock read 0:04. I put everything down and seconds later fell asleep.
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Mark Finkle: Random Management: Unblocking Technical Leadership |
I’m an Engineering Manager, previously a Senior Developer. I have done a lot of coding. I still try to do a little coding every now and then. Because of my past, I could be oppressive to senior developers on my teams. When making decisions, I found myself providing both the management viewpoint and the technical viewpoint. This usually means I was keeping a perfectly qualified technical person from participating at a higher level of responsibility. This creates an unhealthy technical organization with limited career growth opportunities.
As a manager with a technical background, I found it difficult to separate the two roles, but admitting there was a problem was a good first step. Over the last few years, I have been trying to get better at creating more room for technical people to grow on my teams. It seems to be more about focusing on outcomes for them to target, finding opportunities for them to tackle, listening to what they are telling me, and generally staying out of the way.
Another thing to keep in mind, it’s not just an issue with management. The technical growth track is a lot like a ladder: Keep developers climbing or everyone can get stalled. We need to make sure Senior Developers are working on suitable challenges or they end up taking work away from Junior Developers.
I mentioned this previously, but it’s important to create a path for technical leadership. With that in mind, I’m really happy about the recently announced Firefox Technical Architects Group. Creating challenges for our technical leadership, and roles with more responsibility and visibility. I’m also interested to see if we get more developers climbing the ladder.
http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2015/08/random-management-unblocking-technical-leadership/
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fantasai: Open Letter on the Iran Nuclear Deal |
http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/weblog/2015/iran-deal-letter/
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Fr'ed'eric Wang: MathML Accessibility (part II) |
As announced in a previous blog post, I was invited to two Mozilla Work Weeks in Toronto and Whistler during the month of June. Before these work weeks, the only assistive technology able to read MathML in Gecko-based browsers was NVDA, via the help of the third-party MathPlayer plugin developed by Design Science, as shown in the following video:
Thanks to the effort done during these work weeks plus some additional days, we have made good progress to expose MathML via accessibility APIs on other platforms: Mac OS X, Linux, Android and Firefox OS. Note that Firefox for iOS uses WebKit, so MathML should already be exposed and handled via Apple's WebKit/VoiceOver. If you are not familiar with accessibility APIs (and actually even if you are), I recommend you to read Marco Zehe's excellent blog post about why accessibility APIs matter.
Apple was the first company to rely on accessibility APIs to make MathML accessible: WebKit exposes MathML via its NSAccessibility protocol and it can then be handled by the VoiceOver assistive technology. One of the obvious consequence of working with open standards and open accessibility APIs is that it was then relatively easy for us to make MathML accessible on Mac OS X: We basically just read the WebKit source code to verify how MathML is exposed and did the same for Gecko. The following video shows VoiceOver reading a Wikipedia page with MathML mode enabled in Gecko 41:
Of course, one of the disadvantage is that VoiceOver is proprietary and so we are dependent on what Apple actually implements for MathML and we can not easily propose patches to fix bugs or add support for new languages. This is however still more convenient for users than the proprietary MathPlayer plugin used by NVDA: at least VoiceOver is installed by default on Apple's products and well-integrated into their user & accessibility interfaces. For instance, I was able to use the standard user interface to select the French language in VoiceOver and it worked immediately. For NVDA+MathPlayer, there are several configuration menus (one for the Windows system, one for NVDA and one for MathPlayer) and even after selecting French everywhere and rebooting, the math formulas were still read in English...
The next desktop platform we worked on was Linux. We continued to improve how Gecko expose the MathML via the ATK interface but the most important work was done by Joanmarie Diggs: making Orca able to handle the exposed MathML accessibility tree. Compared to the previous solutions, this one is 100% open and I was happy to be able to submit a couple of patches to Orca and to work with the Gnome Translation Team to keep the French translation up-to-date. By the way, if you are willing to contribute to the localization of Orca into your language feel free to join the Gnome Translation Project, help will be much appreciated! The following video shows how Orca reads the previous Wikipedia page in Nightly builds:
On mobile platforms (Android and Firefox OS) we use a common Javascript layer called AccessFu to handle Gecko's internal accessibility tree. So all of this is handled by Mozilla and hence is also 100% open. As I said in my previous blog post, I was not really aware of the internal details before the Work Weeks so it was good to get more explanations and help from Yura Zenevich. Although we were able to do some preliminary work to add MathML support to AccessFu in bug 1163374, this will definitely need further improvements. So I will not provide any demo for now :-)
To conclude this overview, you can check the status of accessibility on the Mozilla MathML Project page. This page also contains a table of MathML tests and how they are handled on the various platforms. At the end of September, I will travel to Toronto to participate to the Mozilla and FOSS Assistive Technology Meetup. In particular, I hope to continue improvements to MathML Accessibility in Mozilla products... Stay tuned!
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Vladan Djeric: New policy: 24-hour backouts for major Talos regressions |
Now that I’ve caught your attention with a sufficiently provocative title, please check out this new Talos regression policy that we* will be trying out starting next week 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/QHdn-ogf8kQ
tl;dr: Perf sheriffs will back out any Talos regression of 10% or more if it affects a reliable test on Windows. We’ll give the patch author 24 hours to explain why the regression is acceptable and shouldn’t be backed out. Perf sheriffs will aim to have such regressions backed out within 48 hours of landing.
I promise this policy is much more nuanced and thought-through than the title or summary might suggest But I really want to hear developers’ opinions.
* I’m taking point on publicizing this new policy and answering any questions, but Joel Maher, William Lachance and Vaibhav Agarwal of the A-Team did all the heavy lifting. They built the tools for detecting & investigating Talos regressions and they’re the perf sheriffs.
Avi Halachmi from my team is helping to check the tools for correctness. I just participate in Talos policy decisions and occasionally act as an (unintentional) spokesperson
https://blog.mozilla.org/vdjeric/2015/08/14/new-policy-24-hour-backouts-for-major-talos-regressions/
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David Weir (satdav): Mozilla now has supports en-gb on sites |
Mozilla is now supporting en-gb (English Great Britain
Marketplace and Add Ons and Mozillians will have this enabled within the next couple of weeks
Webmaker will be going live on Monday 17th August 2015
Websites what have this at present
https://satdavmozilla.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/mozilla-now-has-supports-en-gb-on-sites/
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David Weir (satdav): Windows 10 testday |
Hello fellow Mozillians I am arranging a windows testday for the users of windows 10
I understand what this might be a issue with some users so if you dont have windows 10 I am happy for you to test on an other operating systen
It will be the best build of Firefox we are going to be testing
Full details of the event can be seen here
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Add-on Compatibility for Firefox 41 |
Firefox 41 will be released on September 22nd. Here’s the list of changes that went into this version that can affect add-on compatibility. There is more information available in Firefox 41 for Developers, so you should also give it a look.
Please let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 41, I’d like to know.
The automatic compatibility validation and upgrade for add-ons on AMO will happen in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on your email if you have an add-on listed on our site with its compatibility set to Firefox 40.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/14/compatibility-for-firefox-41/
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