I was sitting at my desk going thru a mental checklist of things that need doing in the final couple of days before I travel to the 2010 Mozilla Summit (wow it’s like 4 days away!) and I read on one of the Moz Forums about someone asking for an .ics file of the schedule…

Hmm, I know VCALENDAR and can hack-parse html …

So 3 hours later and I have a very basic program that reads the Schedule wiki page, sucks out all of the tables that represent the daily schedules and generates a .ics ready for importing into your favourite calendar program.

Requires Python 2.6 or 2.5 with ElementTree installed: generate_summit_calendar.py

enjoy!

With a lot of help from Aki, Ben (heck the entire RelEng team) and the Mozilla Mobile team, my work to enable nightly signed builds of Fennec for Android were landed.

\o/

This was an interesting task because it involved a little bit of each job in the RelEng world at Mozilla:

I had to update the puppet manifest which we use to distribute files and manage configurations for the build farm so the signing keystore and configuration file would get to all of the production build servers. I also had to write a small Python program to make the actual call to Jarsigner because if we just called it from within the Buildbot step, the output would include the keystore passwords and that appears on the build server’s web page – not good.

I also had to drill deep into the various parts of the Mozilla Buildbot configuration and custom code because the Android build was new and just different enough from the other mobile builds that it wasn’t just a cut-n-paste solution.

And all of this I was doing the Mozilla way for the first time and let’s just say they have some unique custom code :)

But today the first half of the task was completed and that allows the nightly signed builds to be made public. What remains is to remove some work-arounds (for the packaging and tests) and then to start building the steps required to generate a release version of Fennec for Android.

The first day jitters are over, tho to be honest I didn’t really have any as I feel I know the Mozilla team already.

I first started interacting with them when I was with OSAF because as the build/release person for OSAF my job was to maintain the tools used and the vast majority of them turned out to be the same tools that Mozilla used. Little did I know that I would eventually inherit the care and feeding of some of them ;)

Now jump back to the present and I’m an employee of Mozilla and thankfully the culture hasn’t really changed, sure there are some “inside” differences and quirks, but I think they have done a good job at maintaining the same look-n-feel for folks no matter if your a mozilla.com person or a mozilla.org person.

For me the most fun was browsing the internal employee phonebook and seeing people who i’ve either admired or worked with on other projects – very cool :)

So forms have been filled out, subscriptions have been made and I think I’m plugged into all of the info sources I need to be wired into – now to figure out what the team needs to be solved and start learning.