As the saying goes:

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should

well, at least that’s how I think it goes – Google wasn’t being helpful in finding a citation. So, back to the post.

I’ve run my own mail server ever since I could afford to pay for a remote server – heck, even before VM slices were common. That also means that i’ve managed my own anti-spam set of tools and have had to maintain them on a regular basis to keep up with the changes in tech.

No more. I’ve tossed in the proverbial towel!

I’ve been listening to Leo rave about Mailroute.net for a long time but it’s always gone in one ear and out the other as, you know: I don’t need that service – ha! After spending another couple of hours today updating my server, checking logs and looking thru my spam folders (yes, folders – one on the server and a couple on my local IMAP server) I realized that was time that I could be doing writing code or something, heck anything, else.

Sure it’s a subscription service and sure I am now losing some control, but it seems to make sense at this point in time. I’ll check back in later to see if it still seems like a good idea after a couple months.

Jabber, the original name for the technology that we now know and love as XMPP, was first brought onto the scene 12 years ago today! Here is a screen grab of the original slashdot post:

Thanks to stpeter for the reminder of this aniversary.

Recently I’ve been working with Joel Maher (of the autotools team at Mozilla) to get the Firefox 4 beta code to run Talos tests on the Tegra 250 development board.

Once Joel wrangled the many tests that had subtle dependencies on device and operating-system, we began to pair up getting each test suite to run from the command line. After getting that stage done, we started in on the tool changes needed with him fixing or filing bugs for the auto-tools side and me getting the existing Talos build steps to “know” about Android and mobile testing in general. Previous Talos testing was all on the same device as the test itself, but mobile introduces a new wrinkle – the device being tested often cannot also run a web server or any of the support tools that the testing framework requires.

Once I coded the buildbot proxy to control each buildslave based on the heartbeat signal coming from the Tegra and Aki pounded my patches to the buildbot factory and config into shape, we landed them to our internal staging environment last week and I’m happy to say that we have put the three Tegra’s we have available into a puddle (a bit too small to be called a pool ;) )

For those who enjoy the Tinderbox waterfall (which I do) – you can see them in all their Green glory here and one of the tests shown in gory graph detail here.

This is a huge win for the developers and it couldn’t have happened without a lot of cross-team work: Joel, Clint and Bob from the auto-tools team, the mobile dev team and a big shoutout to Aki on the releng team for mentoring me thru the new stuff and slogging thru the many last minute details to get this moved from Staging to Production.

We also realize that this is just the beginning, heck, it is working for three Talos tests and none of the reftests and it’s only running on three Tegra’s! But all of that is being iterated on and tests will be added as soon as they clear the auto-tools team :)

thanks!

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.