Mozilla Related Blogs aka Blogupdates

Recently, I found that I needed my chrome Mochitest to wait for a XBL binding to apply, before continuing the test. For the end-user, waiting is hardly an issue - by the time they see the new user interface, all the bindings have applied. Mochitest (and most other automated test harnesses) runs straight through, and brakes for nobody. In some cases you can pull some trickery with nsIThreadManager, convincing Firefox to wait... but that's hardly reliable.

So I came up with a three-part solution.

1. Force my XBL bindings to fire DOM events when the constructor executes.
2. Break up my test functions into (slightly) smaller functions, each of which handles a part of the overall test. Two parts cover the main functional testing, while a third part is specific to the XBL binding.
3. Implement a generic testing harness for Mochitest which can manage the flow from one function to another.

This new test harness, which I call PendingEventsTest, adds a layer of complexity on top of SimpleTest. Each test function is added via PendingEventsTest.addTest(), and you can pause for a DOM event with PendingEventsTest.addEventLock(). The whole test sequence can abort with an error by calling PendingEventsTest.abortFail(). You can advance to the next test function in the sequence with PendingEventsTest.asyncRun() or PendingEventsTest.run().

There's more complexity to it than that, of course. To move data from one test function to another, I also added "payload" support, for storing a generic object. Also, this is written for chrome Mochitests - it will likely fail in content Mochitests. Still, this new test harness helped me finish support in Verbosio for my equivalent of the <xbl:children/> element in markup templates.

Lastly, it (and the logging service I wrote a few weeks ago) is licensed under MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1, so anyone who wants to borrow this for Mozilla code is welcome to. Cheers!

Some people have already noticed that we no longer release nightly builds that support Thunderbird 3.0 and SeaMonkey 2.0. As of January 31st, our nightly builds will no longer live in the latest-comm-1.9.1 folder, but in the latest-comm-1.9.2 directory.

The main difference between the 1.9.1 builds and the 1.9.2 builds is, that the latter will only support nightly builds of the Thunderbird 3.1 and the SeaMonkey 2.1 development branch. This also means that our next Lightning release (1.0 beta2) will not support Thunderbird 3.0.x and SeaMonkey 2.0.x and users of those releases will have to update to be able to get the latest Lightning release then. For now, users that want to test the latest Lightning fixes should either download Lanikai 3.1 alpha1 or a recent nightly build of Thunderbird (also called Shredder) or SeaMonkey.

The reason for this decision is (again) one of (developer) resources. Currently the following development areas/branches are available to us:

• The comm-1.9.1 branch, where development for Thunderbird 3.0 and SeaMonkey 2.0 took place.
• The Gecko 1.9.2 branch (home of Firefox 3.6) that in combination with the (soon to be created comm-1.9.2 branch) will be the basis for Thunderbird 3.1, which is currently scheduled for a release in April 2010.
• The so called trunk, on which the release after Thunderbird 3.1 will be developed. The SeaMonkey folks are targeting the trunk for their 2.1 release.

With our current resource situation we are not able to fully support all three areas/branches. We have therefore decided to only fully support the Gecko 1.9.2 branch and give a somewhat limited support to the trunk. Those of you who want to follow our work are encouraged to download the Lightning Nightly Updater add-on, which should make updating Lightning much easier for you.

Thanks for staying with us.

Four weeks ago we released Lightning 1.0 beta1. At the time we also said, that we would make a 1.0 beta1 release available for Sunbird as well, the last Sunbird release from us as previously announced.

Now what's holding it up? The answers are: technical stuff and real life. To elaborate more, we're still having problems to produce the Sunbird 1.0 beta1 release builds in all our supported locales. The only two people who could fix that (Philipp and Gozer) are either too busy because they have to learn for their university exams (Philipp) or too busy, because they have to work on getting other (higher priority) releases out of the door (Lanika 3.1 alpha1 and Thunderbird 3.0.2).

The good news is that Philipp's exams will be done in the coming week and Gozer's main time consumer is either already done (Lanikai 3.1 alpha1) or will be done from his side in the coming week (Thunderbird 3.0.2). So expect a Sunbird release shortly thereafter.

A photo of me taken during Netexplorateur Forum last year ended up on Flickr. I can live with a photo of me, taken by someone who had the right to take it, ending up on a web site. But that photo under CC was reused by someone else (someone I don't know at all) and included in a public slideshow.And that, I disagree with, at least w/o my authorization. The whole process is rotten here. I never gave any kind of formal authorization for that.

The fact is photo is reusable - but only the photographer decided it, I never said it myself - does not mean the law applying to the photo does not apply any more. In particular, and according to the french law applying to the photo of a french citizen taken by another french citizen on french soil (hey it was even inside the French Senate's building!), the rights I own on my personal image are imprescriptible and no use of my image can be done w/o my authorization. The photo was taken by an acquaintance of mine and that was not a problem. I did not know the photo ended up as CC.

My image is mine, and I'll make sure to keep it mine in the future.

Hier, mon Michel à moi, mon poupouchniok, a fêté ses 11 ans. Bon anniversaire mon fils !!!

A common situation I run into is that I have some testcase, I profile it, then I optimize one of the things that looks slow a bit and reprofile. If I'm lucky, then the fraction of time it takes drops from B to A (A < B of course, with B standing for "before" and A for "after"). What does that mean for the overall time of the testcase?

Obviously, what it means depends on both A and B. If we assume that the time taken for the part that wasn't optimized hasn't changed, then the overall speedup is (1-A)/(1-B).

So B - A = 5% would mean a 2x speedup if B is 95% and A is 90%, and only a 1.05x speedup or so if B is 5% and A is 0%. If B is something like 53% and A something like 48%, then you get a 1.11x speedup.

All of which is to say that focusing on the hotspots is _really_ the way to go, if at all possible.

Sodapop turns 9 weeks old tomorrow. The most notable change from a week ago is that one of her ears has started to stand up. Eventually (probably in a week or so) both will be standing tall. The next change, besides weight gain and better manners, will be when more of her silver hair comes in. You can see a bit of it around her eyes, but she's still mostly black and tan.

Sodapop at 8 weeks

Sodapop at 8 weeks 6 days

For those people paying attention (and anyone who might want to update my Wikipedia entry,) Sodapop the yorkie is the third child in our family behind Ptolemy the cat and Munch the bunny.

This is the third in a series of blog posts (previous: 1, 2) on how Mozilla is using its trademarks to try and make sure everyone gets a genuine copy of our software, for free. Mozilla has a form where people can report sites abusing our trademarks. And we are very grateful to people who do. Harvey Anderson, the Mozilla general counsel, has recently posted some statistics on what those sorts of reports have helped us achieve. But we aren't the only people trying to deal with the problem of "subscription trap" sites. downloados.de is a private initiative in Germany educating internet users about the typical set-up of a subscription trap. It comes across like a typical trap site, but when the user makes the final click to send off their personal details and to obtain the software, the website then informs them that they were about to spend money on free software and that they should be more careful next time....

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This is the second in a series of blog posts (previous) on how Mozilla is using its trademarks to try and make sure everyone gets a genuine copy of our software, for free. I will continue to use Germany as an example. When we discover a wilful trademark infringement, we normally take the following steps, in increasing order of seriousness: Contact search engines to ask for the site to be delisted. We have a good relationship with the major search engines, and being delisted or having their advertising removed does a great deal to "cut off the air supply" of fraudulent sites. Report the site to consumer protection agencies such as computerbetrug.de, antiabzockenet.blogspot.com and boocompany.com. Send a cease and desist letter. In most cases, sending a C&D sorts out the problem. If it doesn't, we: File a DENIC domain dispute and request cancellation or transfer of any infringing domain names. Where there is a domain name involved which infringes Mozillas trademarks, we can file a domain dispute alongside sending the C&D. For German domains, this is very quick and cost-efficient (national stereotypes at work :-). Upon cancellation of a .de domain by the infringer, DENIC automatically transfers the domain to Mozilla. (For other TLDs, it's not so automatic.) We have already obtained numerous domain names this way. Examples include "mozilla.de", "mozilla-europe.de", "mozillamessaging.de" and "mozilla.fr", as well as dozens of typosquatted domains. Unfortunately, for subscription traps, a C&D rarely has any effect. So we move on to: Obtain a preliminary injunction (PI). In Germany, PIs are also quick and cheap. Typically, it takes 1 or 2 days to obtain a PI. The proceedings are ex-parte (you only need one side in court), the other side is not even notified of the application for a PI and there is no discovery of evidence. You make your case, and the judge decides. PIs become effective upon service. If they are not complied with, they can be enforced through penalty payment proceedings. However, a quicker way to take the site down is by approaching the provider. Under German law, internet providers are liable for infringing content once they are made aware of the infringement. Thus, a letter to a provider, accompanied by a copy of the PI, usually leads to the immediate shutdown of the site. (Remember, the site has already been warned of proceedings by the C&D; this is not coming out of...