Back in November we had a Community Meetup. The goal was to get a current status on the Community and define plans and goals for 2016. To do that, we started with a SWOT-Analysis. You can find it here.

With these remarks in mind, we started to define goals for 2016. Since there are a lot of changes within one year, the goals will currently only focus on the first part of the year. Then we can evaluate them, shift metrics if needed, and define new goals. This allows us to be more flexible.

The goals are highly influenced by the OKR (Objective – Key Results) Framework. To document open issues that support this goal, I have created a repository in our MozillaCH GitHub organization. The goal is to assign the “overall goal” label to each issue. You can find a good documentation on GitHub issues in their documentation. There is a template you can use for new issues.

• Objective 1: The community is vibrant and active due to structured contribution areas
• Objective 2: MozillaCH is a valuable partner for privacy in Switzerland
• Objective 3: There is a vibrant community in the “Romandie” which is part of the overall community
• Objective 4: The MozillaCH website is the place to link to for community topics
• Objective 5: With talks and events we increase our reach and provide a valuable information source regarding the Open Web
• Objective 6: Social Media is a crucial part of our activities providing valuable information about Mozilla and the Open Web

We know that not all of those goals are easily achievable, but this gives us a good way to be ambitious. To a successful first half of 2016, let’s bring our community further and keep rocking the Open Web!

https://michaelkohler.info/2016/mozilla-switzerland-goals-h1-2016

... and with a 12-core POWER8 workstation, it's easy if you try. Reported to me by a user is the Raptor Engineering Talos Secure Workstation, the first POWER workstation I've seen in years since the last of the PowerPC Intellistations. You can sign up for preorders so they know you're interested. (I did, of course. Seriously. In fact, I'm actually considering buying two, one as a workstation and the second as a new home server.) Since it's an ATX board, you can just stick it in any case you like with whatever power supply and options you want and configure to taste.

Before you start hyperventilating over the $3100 estimated price (which includes the entry-level 8-core CPU), remember that the Quad G5, probably the last major RISC workstation, cost $3300 new and this monster would drive it into the ground. Plus, at "only" 130 watts TDP, it certainly won't run anywhere near as hot as the G5 did either. Likely it will run some sort of Linux, though I can't imagine with its open architecture that the *BSDs wouldn't be on it like a toupee on William Shatner. Let's hope they get enough interest to produce a few, because I'd love to have an excuse to buy one and I don't need much of an excuse.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/02/imagine-theres-no-intel-transition.html

You may have wondered who this “Scott DeVaney” is who posted February’s featured add-ons. Well it’s me. I just recently joined AMO as your new Editorial & Campaign Manager. But I’m not new to Mozilla; I’ve spent the past couple years managing editorial for Firefox Marketplace.

This is an exciting deal, because my job will be to not only maintain the community-driven editorial processes we have in place today, but to grow the program and build new endeavors designed to introduce even more Firefox users to the wonders of add-ons.

In terms of background, I’ve been editorializing digital content since 1999 when I got my first internet job as a video game editor for the now-dead CheckOut.com. That led to other editorial gigs at DailyRadar, AtomFilms, Shockwave, Comedy Central, and iTunes (before all that I spent a couple years working as a TV production grunt where my claim to fame is breaking up a cast brawl on the set of Saved by the Bell—The New Class; but that’s a story for a different blog.)

I’m sdevaney on IRC, so don’t be a stranger.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/02/05/hi-im-your-new-amo-editor/

Firefox 45 will be released on March 8th. Here’s the list of changes that went into this version that can affect add-on compatibility. There is more information available in Firefox 45 for Developers, so you should also give it a look.

General

• JavaScript expression closures (shorthand function syntax) are deprecated. From the bug report, this is an example of the deprecated syntax: var x = function() 1;
• Disallow calling WebIDL constructors as functions for system callers. Constructors should always be called using the new keyword.
• Drop support for jar: URIs by default. This only affects web content being loaded with the jar: protocol.

UI

• Remove Panorama / Tab Groups. There are a couple of add-ons that are already taking the lead and bringing back the feature for those who need it.
• Replace globe with the “i” icon, keep separate lock for secure pages. This changes the appearance and behavior of the identity information that appears to the left of the current URL.
• Stop using icon sprites for command buttons. This would only affects extensions and themes that touch the buttons in the developer tools.

XPCOM

• Use the loading document’s principal to populate loadInfo for Favicons. Comment 51 sums it up well. If you call mozIAsyncFavicons.setAndFetchFaviconForPage or mozIAsyncFavicons.replaceFaviconDataFromDataURL, you should pass the right principal using the new optional argument.
• Replace removeAllPages with history.clear() and deprecate it.
• Remove nsIURIChecker.
• Remove nsISaveAsCharset. The interface is still there and should work, but some of the parameters its methods take are being ignored now.
• Make listbox.selectedItems be an nsIDOMNodeList.

Signing

• Firefox is currently enforcing add-on signing, with a preference to override it. Firefox 46 will remove the preference entirely , which means your add-on will need to be signed in order to run in release versions of Firefox. You can read about your options here.

New

• Support a simplified JSON add-on update protocol. Firefox now supports a JSON update file for add-ons that manage their own automatic updates, as an alternative to the existing XML format. For new add-ons, we suggest using the JSON format. You shouldn’t immediately switch for older add-ons until most of your users are on 45 and later.

Let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 45, 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 44.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/02/05/compatibility-for-firefox-45/

http://danielpocock.com/giving-up-democracy-to-get-it-back

This week, we have two new people starting in Release Engineering: Aki Sasaki (:aki) and Rok Garbas (:garbas). Please stop by #releng and say hi!

Modernize infrastructure:

This week, Jake and Mark added check_ami.py support to runner for our Windows 2008 instances running in Amazon. This is an important step towards parity with our Linux instances in that it allows our Windows instances to check when a newer AMI is available and terminate themselves to be re-created with the new image. Until now, we’ve need to manually refresh the whole pool to pick up changes, so this is a great step forward.

Also on the Windows virtualization front, Rob and Mark turned on puppetization of Windows 2008 golden AMIs this week. This particular change has taken a long time to make it to production, but it’s hard to overstate the importance of this development. Windows is definitely *not* designed to manage its configuration via puppet, but being able to use that same configuration system across both our POSIX and Windows systems will hopefully decrease the time required to update our reference platforms by substantially reducing the cognitive overhead required for configuration changes. Anyone who remembers our days using OPSI will hopefully agree.

Improve CI pipeline:

Ben landed a Balrog patch that implements JSONSchemas for Balrog Release objects. This will help ensure that data entering the system is more consistent and accurate, and allows humans and other systems that talk to Balrog to be more confident about the data they’ve constructed before they submit it.

Ben also enabled caching for the Balrog admin application. This dramatically reduces the database and network load it uses, which makes it faster, more efficient, and less prone to update races.

Release:

We’re currently on beta 3 for the Firefox 45. After all the earlier work to unhork gtk3 (see last week’s update), it’s good to see the process humming along.

A small number of stability issues have precipitated a dot release for Firefox 44. A Firefox 44.0.1 release is currently in progress.

Operational:

Kim implemented changes to consume SETA information for Android API 15+ data using data from API 11+ data until we have sufficient data for API 15+ test jobs. This reduced the number of high number of pending counts for the AWS instance types used by Android. (https://bugzil.la/1243877)

Coop (hey, that’s me!) did a long-overdue pass of platform support triage. Lots of bugs got closed out (30+), a handful actually got fixed, and a collection of Windows test failures got linked together under a root cause (thanks, philor!). Now all we need to do is find time to tackle the root cause!

See you next week!

http://coopcoopbware.tumblr.com/post/138749625280

Mozilla Foundation Demos February 5 2016

https://air.mozilla.org/foundation-demos-february-5-2016/

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to talk about the work that we’ve shipped, share the libraries we’re working on, meet new folks, and talk about whatever else is on our minds. It’s the Webdev Extravaganza! The meeting is open to the public; you should stop by!

You can check out the wiki page that we use to organize the meeting, or view a recording of the meeting in Air Mozilla. Or just read on for a summary!

Shipping Celebration

The shipping celebration is for anything we finished and deployed in the past month, whether it be a brand new site, an upgrade to an existing one, or even a release of a library.

Git Submodules are Gone from MDN

First up was jezdez with news about MDN moving away from using git submodules to pull in dependencies. Instead, MDN now uses pip to pull in dependencies during deployment. Hooray!

Careers now on AWS/Deis

Next was giorgos who let us know that careers.mozilla.org has moved over to the Engagement Engineering Deis cluster on AWS. For deployment, the site has Travis CI build a Docker image and run tests against it. If the tests pass, the image is deployed directly to Deis. Neat!

Privacy Day

jpetto helped ship the Privacy Day page. It includes a mailing list signup form as well as instructions for several platforms on how to update your software to stay secure.

Automated Functional Testing for Mozilla.org

agibson shared news about the migration of previously-external functional tests for mozilla.org to live within the Bedrock repository itself. This allows us to run the tests, which previously were run by the WebQA team against live environments, whenever the site is deployed to dev, stage, or production. Having the functional tests be a part of the build pipeline ensures that developers are aware when the tests are broken and can fix them before deploying broken features. A slide deck is available with more details.

Peep 3.x

ErikRose shared news about the 3.0 (and 3.1) release of Peep, which helps smooth the transition from Peep to Pip 8, which now supports hashed requirements natively. The new Peep includes a peep port command for porting Peep-compatible requirements files to the new Pip 8 format.

Open-source Citizenship

Here we talk about libraries we’re maintaining and what, if anything, we need help with for them.

Jazzband

jezdez shared news about JazzBand, a cooperative experiment to reduce the stress of maintaining Open Source software alone. The group operates as a Github organization that anyone can join and transfer projects to. Anyone in the JazzBand can access JazzBand projects, allowing projects that would otherwise die due to lack of activity thrive thanks to the community of co-maintainers.

Notable projects already under the JazzBand include django-pipeline and django-configurations. The group is currently focused on Python projects and is still figuring out things like how to secure releases on PyPI.

django-configurations 1.0

Speaking of the JazzBand, members of the collective pushed out the 1.0 release of django-configurations, which is an opinionated library for writing class-based settings files for Django. The new release adds Django 1.8+ support as well as several new features.

Roundtable

The Roundtable is the home for discussions that don’t fit anywhere else.

Travis CI Sudo for Specific Environments

Next was ErikRose with an undocumented tip for Travis CI builds. As seen on the LetsEncrypt travis.yml, you can specify sudo: required for a specific entry in the build matrix to run only that build on Travis’ container-based infrastructure.

Docker on OS X via xhyve

Erik also shared xhyve, which is a lightweight OS X hypervisor. It’s a port of bhyve, and can be used as the backend for running Docker containers on OS X instead of VirtualBox. Recent changes that have made this more feasible include the removal of a 3 gigabyte RAM limit and experimental NFS support that, according to Erik, is faster than VirtualBox’s shared folder functionality. Check it out!

---

If you’re interested in web development at Mozilla, or want to attend next month’s Extravaganza, subscribe to the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list to be notified of the next meeting, and maybe send a message introducing yourself. We’d love to meet you!

See you next month!

https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2016/02/05/extravaganza-february-2016/

Mozilla runs Winter of Security (MWoS) every year to give folks an opportunity to contribute to ongoing security projects in flight. This year an ambitious group took on the task of creating a new visual interface in our SIEM overlay for Elastic  Search that we call MozDef: The Mozilla Defense Platform.

Security personnel are in high demand and analyst skill sets are difficult to maintain. Rather than only focusing on making people better at security, I’m a firm believer that we need to make security better at people. Interfaces that are easier to comprehend and use seem to be a worthwhile investment in that effort and I’m thrilled with the work this team has done.

They’ve wrapped up their project with a great demo of their work. If you are interested in security automation tools and alternative user interfaces, take a couple minutes and check out their work over at air mozilla.

 

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/02/05/mozilla-winter-of-security-2015-mozdef-virtual-reality-interface/

MWOS Students give an awesome demo of their work adding a unique interface to MozDef: The Mozilla Defense Platform.

https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-winter-of-security-2015-mozdef-virtual-reality-interface/

This actually is Aki.

In addition to Rok who also joined our team week, I’m ecstatic to welcome back Aki Sasaki to Mozilla release engineering.

If you’ve been a Mozillian for a while, Aki’s name should be familiar. In his former tenure in releng, he helped bootstrap the build & release process for both Fennec *and* FirefoxOS, and was also the creator of mozharness, the python-based script harness that has allowed us to push so much of our configuration back into the development tree. Essentially he was devops before it was cool.

Aki’s first task in this return engagement will be to figure out a generic way to interact with Balrog, the Mozilla update server, from TaskCluster. You can follow along in bug 1244181.

Welcome back, Aki!

http://coopcoopbware.tumblr.com/post/138734907015

This is *not* our Rok.

I’m happy to announce a new addition to the Mozilla release engineering. This week, we are lucky to welcome Rok Garbas to the team.

Rok is a huge proponent of Nix and NixOS. Whether we end up using those particular tools or not, we plan to leverage his experience with reproducible development/production environments to improve our service deployment story in releng. To that end, he’s already working with Dustin who has also been thinking about this for a while.

Rok’s first task is to figure out how the buildbot-era version of clobberer, a tool for clearing and resetting caches on build workers, can be rearchitected to work with TaskCluster. You can follow along in bug 1174263 if you’re interested.

Welcome, Rok!

http://coopcoopbware.tumblr.com/post/138733339295

https://blog.mozilla.org/tomcat/2016/02/05/sheriff-newsletter-for-january-2016/

Filed under: Mozilla

http://lauradereynal.com/2016/02/05/ahmedabad-india/

Tunes of the week: Earth, Wind and Fire. Maurice White, the founder, died at 74.

WebCompat Bugs

• A Web compat bug which can be fixed by adding a CSS property, but which led also to the opening of a bug for Gecko about max-width.
• The sad comment of the day was in that bug about fonts on Nokia site: Forgive me to say this, but... Sadly, FF's market has been dropping and keeps dropping, losing to Chrome. At this point "works in Chrome, used to work in FF" should mean "fix it in FF asap". An end user only sees FF doesn't work, Chrome does. They don't care about the technical reasons.
• GetPocket displays an interesting issue on Firefox for Android. The bug had been opened a little while ago, but I took time to create an account to investigate. It sounded familiar to me. It may be related to Bug 1244192
• Two weeks ago, there was an issue about a BOM breaking a templating system in Dojo. Henri Sivonen looked at it and indeed found a bug in XHR implementation in Firefox.
• Sometimes another team of Mozilla will ask help from Webcompat team for contacting site owners to fix an issue on their Web site which hinders the user experience on Firefox. Let's go through some tips to maximize the chances of getting results when we outreach.

WebKit aliasing

• When looking for usage of -webkit-mask-*, I remembered that Google Image was a big offender. So I tested again this morning and… delight! They now use SVG. So now, I need to test extensively Google search and check if they can just send us the version they send to Chrome.
• Testing Google Calendar again on Gecko with Chrome user agent to see how far we are to receive a better user experience. We can't really yet ask Google to send us the same thing they send to Chrome. A couple of glitches here and there. But we are very close. The better would be for Google to fix their CSS, specifically to make flexbox and gradients standard-compatible.
• The code for the max-width issue (not a bug but implementation differences due to an undefined scenario in the CSS specification) is being worked on by David Baron and reviewed by Daniel Holbert. And this makes me happy, it should solve a lot of the Webcompat bugs reports. Look at the list of SeeAlso in that bug.

Webcompat Life and Working with Developer Tools

• Changing preferences all the time through "about:config" is multiple step. I liked in Opera Presto how you could link to a specific preference, so I filed a bug for Firefox. RESOLVED. It exists: about:config?filter=webkit and it's bookmark-able.
• Bug 1245365 - searching attribute values through CSS selectors override the search terms
• A discussion has been started on improving the Responsive Design Mode of Firefox Developer Tools. I suggested a (too big) list of features that would make my life easier.

Firefox OS Bugs to Firefox Android Bugs

• Web Compatibility Mozilla employees reduced their support for solving Firefox OS bugs to its minimum. The community is welcome to continue to work on them. But some of these bugs have still an impact on Firefox Android. One good example of this is Bug 959137. Let's come up with a process to deal with those.
• Another last week todo. I have been closing a lot of old bugs (around 600 in a couple of days) in Firefox OS and Firefox Android in Tech Evangelism product. The reasons for closing them are mostly:
  • the site doesn't exist anymore. (This goes into my list of Web Compatibility axioms: "Wait long enough, every bug disappears.")
  • the site fixed the initial issue
  • the layout.css.prefixes.webkit; true fixes it (see Bug 1213126)
  • the site has moved to a responsive design

Bug 812899 - absolutely positioned element should be vertically centered even if the height is bigger than that of the containing block

This bug was simple at the beginning, but when providing the fix, it broke other tests. It's normal. Boris explained which parts of the code was impacted. But I don't feel I'm good enough yet for touching this. Or it would require patience and step by step guidance. It could be interesting though. I have the feeling I have too much on my plate right now. So a bug to take over!

Testing Google Search On Gecko With Different UA Strings

So last week, I gave myself a Todo "testing Google search properties and see if we can find a version which is working better on Firefox Android than the current default version sent by Google. Maybe testing with Chrome UA and Iphone UA." My preliminary tests sound pretty good.

Reading List

• Frameworks vs libraries (or: process shifts at Mozilla).
• Mozilla's internal dialog on HTTPS by Dave Winner, who's not happy about the move to HTTPS in general. He is worried and it's understandable because the announcements on "burning down everything non HTTP" were not followed-up by regular status on a milder position. Google has also a worrying Marking HTTP As Non-Secure page. That said Mozilla bug had no activity for more than one year, which in bug tracker standards may mean "wait long enough it will die by itself". The push from HTTP to HTTPS should not be valid by itself or more exactly, we should not equate a technology with user security and choices. Maybe there are better and more accessible ways for both Web developers and users to create the same secure environment. Let's Encrypt is a very interesting initiative, but has still too many implications down the road on the development work.
• Discussion in the CSS Working Group about Web Compatibility for 0 vs 0deg for angles. The resolution: "Angles can drop unit when value is 0"
• An email conversation summary visualization. Mail is something I like very much. But I manage it in a way which is a bit different than many people. I also think that the email apps on Mobile are just dumb and it might be a part of the hate that people have for mails. If you send notifications mail to your email address, give yourself a gift… use filtering.
• mike published about A quiz about ES2015 block-scoped function declarations (in a with block statement)

Follow Your Nose

• Previous Worklog
• Bugzilla Activity
• Github Activity

Otsukare!

http://www.otsukare.info/2016/02/05/worklog-cloudy

Sometimes another team of Mozilla will ask help from Webcompat team for contacting site owners to fix an issue on their Web site which hinders the user experience on Firefox. Let's go through some tips to maximize the chances of getting results when we outreach.

Bug detection

A bug has been reported by a user or a colleague. They probably had the issue at the moment they tested. The source of the issue is still quite unknown. Network glitch, specific addon configuration, particular version of Firefox, broken build of Nightly. Assess if the bug is reproducible in the most neutral possible environment. And if it's not already done, write in the comments "Steps to reproduce" and describe all the steps required to reproduce the bug.

Analyzing the issue

You have been able to reproduce. It is time to understand it. Explain it in very clear terms. Think about the person on the other hand who will need to fix the bug. This person might not be an English native speaker. This person might not be as knowledgeable as you for Web technologies. Provide links and samples to the code with the issue at stake. This will help the person to find the appropriate place in the code.

Providing a fix for the issue

When explaining the issue, you might have also find out how to fix it or at least one way to fix it. It might not be the way the contacted person will fix it. We do not know their tools, but it will help them to create an equivalent fix that fits in their process. If your proposal is a better practice explained why it is beneficial for performance, longevity, resilience, etc.

Partly a Firefox bug

The site is not working but it's not entirely their fault. Firefox changed behavior. The browser became more compliant. The feature had a bug which is in the process of being fixed. Think twice before asking for outreach. Sometimes it's just better to push a bit more on fixing the bug in Firefox. It has more chances to be useful for all the unknown sites using the feature. If the site is a big popular site, you might want to ask for outreach, but you need a very good incentive such as improving performances.

Provide a contact hint

If by chance, you already have contacts in this company, share the data, even try directly to contact that person. If you have information that even bookies don't know about the company, be sure to pass it on for maximizing the chances of outreach. The hardest part is often to find the right person who can help you fix the issue.

Outreach might fail

And here the dirty secret: The outreach might now work or might not be effective right away. Be patient. Be perseverant.

Fixing a Web site costs a lot more than you can imagine. Time and frustration are part of the equation. Outreach is not a magical bullet. Sometimes it takes months to years to fix an issue. Some reasons why the outreach might fail:

• Impossible to find the right contacts. Sometimes you can send bug reports through the official channels of communications from the company and have your bug being ignored, misunderstood, unusual. For one site, I had reported for months through the bug reporting system until I finally decided to try a back door with emailing specifically a developer I happened to find the information online. The bug was fixed in a couple of days.
• Developers have bosses. They first need to comply with what their bosses told them to do. They might not be in a very good position in the company, have conflicts with the management, etc. Or they just don't have the freedom to take the decision that will fix the issue, even a super simple one.
• Another type of bosses is the client. The client had been sold a Web site with a certain budget. Maintenance is always a contentious issue. The Web agencies are not working for free and even if the bug is there in the first place. The client might not have asked for them to test in that specific browser. Channeling up a bug to the client will mean for the Web agency to bill the client. The client might not want to pay.
• Sometimes, you will think that you got an easy win. The bug has been solved right away. What you do not know is that the developer in charge had just a put a hack in his code with a beautiful TOFIX that will be crushed at the next change of tools or updates.
• You just need to upgrade to version X of your JS library: Updating the library will break everything else or will require to test all the zillion of other features that are using this lib in the rest of the site. In a cost/benefit scenario, you have to demonstrate to the dev that the fix is worth his time and the test.
• Wrong department. Sometimes you get the press service, sometimes the communications department, sometimes the IT department in charge of the office backend or commercial operations systems, but not the Web site.
• The twitter person is not techy. This happens very often. With the blossoming of social managers (do we still say that?), the people on the front-line are usually helpless when it's really technical. Your only chance is to convince them to communicate with the tech team. But the tech team is despising them because too often they brought bugs which were just useless. If the site is an airline company, a bank, a very consumers oriented service, just forget trying to contact them through twitter.
• The twitter person is a bot. Check the replies on this twitter account, if there is no meaningful interaction with the public, just find another way.
• You contacted. Nothing happened. People on the other side forget. I'm pretty sure you are also late replying this email or patching this annoying bug. People ;)
• The site is just not maintained anymore. No budget. No team. No nobody for moving forward the issue.
• You might have pissed off someone when contacting. You will never know why. Maybe it was not the right day, maybe it was something in your signature, maybe it was the way you addressed them. Be polite, have empathy.

In the end my message is look for the bare necessities of life.

Bugs images from American entomology : or description of the insects of North America, illustrated by coloured figures from original drawings executed from nature. Thanks to the New-York Public Library.

Otsukare!

http://www.otsukare.info/2016/02/05/bug-ready-for-outreach-howto

If you’ve been debugging Gecko, you’ve probably hit the frustration of having the code you’re inspecting being called asynchronously, and your stack trace rooting through NS_ProcessNextEvent, which means you don’t know at first glance how your code ended up being called in the first place.

Events running from the Gecko event loop are all nsRunnable instances. So at some level close to NS_ProcessNextEvent, in your backtrace, you will see Class::Run. If you’re lucky, you can find where the nsRunnable was created. But that requires the stars to be perfectly aligned. In many cases, they’re not.

There comes your savior: rr. If you don’t know it, check it out. The downside is that you must first rr record a Firefox session doing what you’re debugging. Then, rr replay will give you a debugger with the capabilities of a time machine.

Note, I’m kind of jinxed, I don’t do much C++ debugging these days, so every time I use rr replay, I end up hitting a new error. Tip #1: try again with rr’s current master. Tip #2: roc is very helpful. But my takeaway is that it’s well worth the trouble. It is a game changer for debugging.

Anyways, once you’re in rr replay and have hit your crasher or whatever execution path you’re interested in, and you want to go beyond that NS_ProcessNextEvent, here is what you can do:

(rr) break nsEventQueue.cpp:60
(rr) reverse-continue

(Adjust the line number to match wherever the *aResult = mHead->mEvents[mOffsetHead++]; line is in your tree).

(rr) disable
(rr) watch -l mHead->mEvents[mOffsetHead]
(rr) reverse-continue
(rr) disable

And there you are, you just found where the exact event that triggered the executed code you were looking at was put on the event queue. (assuming there isn’t a nested event loop processed during the first reverse-continue)

Rinse and repeat.

https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3627

For the last few days I've been attending linux.conf.au, and yesterday I gave a talk about rr. The talk is now online. It was a lot of fun and I got some good questions!

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/02/rr-talk-at-linuxconfau.html

Pick of the Month: Proxy Switcher

by rNeomy
Access all of Firefox’s proxy settings right from the toolbar panel.

“Exactly what I need to switch on the fly from Uni/Work to home.”

Featured: cyscon Security Shield

by patugo GmbH
Cybercrime protection against botnets, malvertising, data breaches, phishing, and malware.

“The plugin hasn’t slowed down my system in any way. Was especially impressed with the Breach notification feature—pretty sure that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Featured: Decentraleyes

by Thomas Rientjes
Evade ad tracking without breaking the websites you visit. Decentraleyes works great with other content blockers.

“I’m using it in combination with uBlock Origin as a perfect complement.”

Featured: VimFx

by akhodakivkiy, lydell
Reduce mouse usage with these Vim-style keyboard shortcuts for browsing and navigation.

“It’s simple and the keybindings are working very well. Nice work!!”

Featured: Saved Password Editor

by Daniel Dawson
Adds the ability to create and edit entries in the password manager.

“Makes it very easy to login to any sight, saves the time of manually typing everything in.”

Nominate your favorite add-ons

Featured add-ons are selected by a community board made up of add-on developers, users, and fans. Board members change every six months, so there’s always an opportunity to participate. Stayed tuned to this blog for the next call for applications.

If you’d like to nominate an add-on for featuring, please send it to amo-featured@mozilla.org for the board’s consideration. We welcome you to submit your own add-on!

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/02/04/february-2016-featured-add-ons/

Hello, SUMO Nation!

Last week went by like lightning, mainly due to FOSDEM 2016, but also due to the year speeding up – we’re already in February! What are the traditional festivals in your region this month? Let us know in the comments!

Welcome, new contributors!

• johnharris61
• TimothyBergstresser
• Koss_2004

Most recent SUMO Community meeting

• You can read the notes here and see the video on our YouTube channel and at AirMozilla.
  
• IMPORTANT: We are considering changing the way the meetings work. Help us figure out what’s best for you – join the discussion on the forums in this thread: (Monday) Community Meetings in 2016.
  • One potential change is getting live SUMO meetings on Air Mozilla (this may include changing the day/time of the meeting)

The next SUMO Community meeting…

• is happening on Monday the 8th of February – join us!
• Reminder: if you want to add a discussion topic to the upcoming meeting agenda:
  • Start a thread in the Community Forums, so that everyone in the community can see what will be discussed and voice their opinion here before Monday (this will make it easier to have an efficient meeting).
  • Please do so as soon as you can before the meeting, so that people have time to read, think, and reply (and also add it to the agenda).
  • If you can, please attend the meeting in person (or via IRC), so we can follow up on your discussion topic during the meeting with your feedback.

Developers

• The new Ask A Question page has been deployed last week to 10% of users – have you noticed anything about it? Let us know!
• You can see the current state of the backlog our developers are working on here.
• The latest SUMO Platform meeting notes can be found here.
• Interested in learning how Kitsune (the engine behind SUMO) works? Read more about it here and fork it on GitHub!

Community

• Are you SUMO contributor based in Northern America? Talk to Heather!
• Take a look at the SUMO presentation delivered at FOSDEM – you may see some familiar faces there ;-)
• Reminder: take a look at our Work Week Summary for Mozlando. We need your feedback for a few things there.
• Ongoing reminder: if you want to write a guest blog post for the SUMO blog, let us know in the comments!
• Ongoing reminder: if you think you can benefit from getting a second-hand device to help you with contributing to SUMO, you know where to find us.

Social

• Reminder: We have a training out there for all those interested in Social Support – talk to Madalina or Costenslayer on #AoA (IRC) for more information.

Support Forum

• No news apart from… HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MADALINA!

And that’s it – short and sweet for your reading pleasure. We hope you have a great weekend and we are looking forward to seeing you on Monday! Take it easy and keep rocking the helpful web. Over & out!

https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/02/04/whats-up-with-sumo-4th-february/