Awesome Bugzilla Publicity
So I’ve been a bit busy with things lately and I’m just starting to catch up on a couple podcasts I regularly listen to, one of them being CNET’s Buzz Out Loud, which I’m still a few weeks behind on. This is where Molly Wood, Tom Merritt, and Jason Howell discuss tech news for 20 or 30 minutes every weekday. Well, back in the last week of June, they were talking about Bill Gates having his last week at Microsoft as a full-timer, and it somehow turned into a conversation about Bugzilla. :) It was so awesome, especially Molly’s last line at the end before they got back to the actual story. 
Source: CNET Buzz Out Loud Podcast, Episode 752 @ time index 20:50
TOM: It’s Bill Gates’ last week on the job at Microsoft, although he’ll still be working there, after his last day, part time.
MOLLY: Whether they want him to or not.
TOM: He’ll be the.. I think we speculated he’ll be a bug squasher?
MOLLY: Yeah, something like that
TOM: He’ll just be getting.. they’ll be filing bugs to Bill and he’ll just like hunt ‘em down
MOLLY: They’ll give him his own special Bugzilla queue.
TOM: Yeah… Heh, yeah, like they’re using Bugzilla.
MOLLY: Who isn’t? Everybody uses some form of Bugzilla for bugs.
TOM: That’s a good question: Is Microsoft using Bugzilla …
MOLLY: (interrupting) Sure!
TOM: … or do they have their own proprietary bug-killing system …
MOLLY: (interrupting) Oh, come on…
TOM: … er, bug-tracking system? Er, you — Microsoft using an open source bug tracking system?
MOLLY: Oh, well, I guess
TOM: I dunno, it’s just a question in my mind.
MOLLY: I was like who? Everyone… what? Come on… Bugzilla, it’s just what you use!
Bugzilla at OSCON 2008
Bugzilla will again be participating at the Mozilla booth at OSCON. Max and I will both be there from 2:30 to 3:30 on Thursday afternoon for sure, and you may find us hanging out at other times as well. If there’s any other Bugzilla folks going to OSCON, please drop in and help us. :) Last year Bugzilla got a pretty good reception (we generated more non-Mozilla-employee traffic at the Mozilla booth than Firefox did!)
If you’re trying to find me at OSCON, follow this link for where I plan to be (the sessions listed are subject to change based on my whims as we get closer to OSCON of course).
wither build-graphs.mozilla.org?
We have this site called build-graphs.mozilla.org. We seem to have a situation where nobody remembers why it still exists. Given the number of tinderboxes that still report data to it, I find that hard to believe, so hopefully this blog post will shake out a few people who remember (in case I failed to CC the right people already). :) If that’s you, go make yourself heard on bug 428617.
A new way to use Bugzilla
This was just too good to pass up.
Halfway in the Digital Age at the Daily WTF
UPDATE: Gerv apparently found this a couple days ahead of me and I’m a victim of being behind on my bugmail. See bug 430508.
bugzilla.mozilla.org now in version control
So this is something we’ve been wanting for a LONG time, and we finally got it set up as we were staging bugzilla.mozilla.org for last week’s upgrade. The exact code that we’re running on bugzilla.mozilla.org is now directly checked out onto the production servers from a version control system. What’s more, there’s a read-only mirror of it visible to the public, including all of our custom templates and everything, so anyone is welcome to check out the exact code we’re running and make patches against it if there was something about one of our customizations that bothered you, or you felt like fixing one of the myriad of bugs in the Other b.m.o issues component in Bugzilla that are local to our installation rather than upstream Bugzilla.
We ended up using Bazaar for the version control. This was a hard decision to make because Mozilla is using Mercurial for most of the newer stuff these days, so we really wanted to follow suit and not have “yet another VCS” in use, but we wanted to be able to merge in code from the upstream Bugzilla repo periodically (which still lives in CVS, and doesn’t appear like that’ll be changing any time soon), and someone was already doing a sync of Bugzilla from cvs->bzr every 6 hours. Trying to set up any kind of regular import to Hg wasn’t turning out to be very fun.
So, if you want to check out a copy of what we’re running, you can do this:
bzr co http://dm-bugstage01.mozilla.org/bmo/3.0/
Have fun!
stage.mozilla.org take 3?
So as you may or may not have noticed, the stage.mozilla.org update previously advertised wound up getting partially reverted about a day after it was deployed. After getting the full production load on it, we wound up crashing it several times again. There’s just not much we can do to emulate real users using WinSCP to upload files from our load testing scripts. 
We’ve gotten some new patches to the unionfs filesystem driver that attempt to fix some of the crashes we’ve been getting. Unfortunately our only real way to test them is to throw it back into production and see what happens. As such, over the next week or two, the stage.mozilla.org domain name will be swapping back and forth between the old machine and the new one periodically as we test things. If you were following the directions given in the previous announcement this shouldn’t affect you at all, but I thought it would be good to give people a heads-up. Obviously this means today’s deadline for the old machine to remain available has been averted, and it’ll probably still be around for another week or two at least.
If you absolutely need to reach the old machine, it’s at stage-old.mozilla.org. The new machine is at stage-new.mozilla.org. The stage.mozilla.org domain name could point at either one of them at any given time for the next week or two while we continue testing. If possible it’d be great if you can continue to use stage.mozilla.org and follow where the domain points so you can help with the testing. But if you run into any problems, feel free to use stage-old.mozilla.org just to guarantee the old way of access.
#build on irc.mozilla.org is the place to ask if you have questions or have any issues.
stage.mozilla.org moving *finally*
Migrating stage.mozilla.org to a new host has been in the works for a long time. It’s been stalled for a couple months while we worked with the developers of the unionfs filesystem (mostly by providing them with crash reports) to stabilize it to the point where we felt comfortable putting it to use on a production service. That time has finally come. The alternative to unionfs (keeping 9 terrabytes of disk space online at once, completely dedicated to the FTP staging process) was really not cost effective, and it was really worth waiting for.
This Thursday, March 13th, we’ll be switching the DNS for the stage.mozilla.org domain name to point at the new box. The SSH host keys have been copied over, so most people will never notice. The existing box, effective immediately, is accessible using the name stage-old.mozilla.org. If for any reason you’re nervous about switching your upload process to the new box this coming Thursday, you can use the stage-old name to keep using the old one, for now. Stage-old will go away on Tuesday, March 25th, so you’ll have until then to resolve any issues you have (or get IT to resolve them if you think it’s our problem). Feel free to file a bug against Server Ops if you need help.
Be sure to read my previous post for details of how the new system will work (it is a little different, though most well-behaved upload scripts shouldn’t be affected). The most noticeable change will be that there will now be a slight delay between when you upload something and when it shows up on the ftp server, since we’re now virus-scanning what you upload before it gets made available on the ftp server. On the current system that we’re moving away from, the virus scan runs after the files are placed on the ftp server, and then the files are yanked afterwards if they get flagged. This of course, could let something get out there briefly, which we obviously don’t want.
Bugzilla Summer of Code 2008
The Bugzilla project is once again going to be participating in the Google Summer of Code under the Mozilla banner. Gerv has the details. If you know of any projects that would be good, be sure to add them to the brainstorming page. For reference, here’s what we signed up for last year (although we never got any takers to work on them - probably for lack of advertising, which we’ll do this year).
How to fix the anime industry
Justin Sevakis over at Anime News Network a couple days ago posted an open letter to the anime industry. It’s really good and worth a read. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the anime scene, his letter does a really good job of explaining the current state of the industry and why anime distribution of questionable legality happens the way it does.
Personally, I’m one of those people who will buy the DVDs of a show that I’ve watched when it finally becomes available in the US, because I believe in supporting the artists who create this stuff, and that’s the easiest way to do so. But as Justin points out in his letter, 90% of the good stuff never makes it to the US, ever. You can look back a few posts in my blog to see a list of some of the series I’ve watched. There’s a lot. Hardly any of them have DVDs or other merchandise available in the US yet. I haven’t shelled out very much money, just because there’s no one to give it to. Some of them actually did get licensed (Pretty Cure) and then the licensee never did anything with them. Some actually made it to market (Ojamajo Doremi/Magical DoReMi) but didn’t survive halfway through the first season in the US (even though there were 4 seasons of it in Japan) because of poor marketing, or (by some accounts) poor execution on dubbing/editing of the English version. My kids love Magical DoReMi, and we’ve managed to accumulate a fair bit of merchandise (doll sets, accessories, DVDs) recently for them to play with, found on clearance at local stores and on eBay. And it wasn’t because of the US marketing (because they took it off the air years ago), but because we saw the fansubbed Japanese versions.
There are shows that do make it and do well. Digimon, Pokémon, and Mega Man are good examples, from which we own a good few dozen DVDs. And one mustn’t forget Naruto (although nobody in my household is a fan of that one). But from the total size of the market, that’s a very small number of shows.
I really hope the industry takes Justin’s letter to heart. It’d make my day to be able to get this stuff from official sources, even if it cost money, although I’d personally prefer ad-supported websites 
. It’s a global economy now, and thanks to the Internet, it’s a world market. It’s time to give up on the region-locked licensing and just distribute globally from the get-go.
Trying to find that long lost tab
I’m very much a power user. I use my web browser constantly, for both work and play, and get extensive use out of tabbed browsing. I keep web pages that are related to the same task in tabs in the same window, and open a new window when I’m shifting gears to work on another task. And I often go back and forth between tasks as things come up or I need a break from the routine, or whatever, so eventually I wind up with a situation like right now where I have 12 windows open, and about half of them have 5 or 10 tabs in them.
Now I’m looking for a specific tab, and it was sort of a one-off thing, and I don’t remember which window it’s in. And it’s not the frontmost tab in the window it’s in, so I can’t just look in the Window menu to find it.
Now I’m thinking it would be really cool if the Window menu had submenus for each window that had multiple tabs in it, which listed the tabs in that window. Then I could just mouse over the windows in the Window menu and glance through the submenus looking for it. Bug 405933 filed.
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