The Rumbling Edge

ViewAbout

2008-11-21T18:06:49Z

I wrote a Thunderbird extension (and my first one too!) that allows the display of all available about: windows in Thunderbird. Shredder Alpha 3 and above is required though. It is called ViewAbout and can be downloaded from Mozilla Add-ons.

Description of ViewAbout:

Enables access to various about: dialogs from the View menu.
Every available about: dialog can be viewed - about:buildconfig, about:config, about:crashes, about:credits, about:license, about:mozilla, about:neterror (seemingly useless) and about:plugins.
These windows can be closed using Ctrl(or cmd)-w.

Try it and let me know how it is. I have also made ViewAbout’s AMO Dashboard public, so everyone can see just how many users need about:crashes or about:config and the like.

(Mark Finkle was a great help throughout the development period, so thanks, Mark!)

Mark Surman interview in Sept 08

2008-11-10T14:37:47Z

I had the honour of interviewing Mark Surman when he dropped by Singapore in September prior to the start of his work at the Mozilla Foundation. We talk a bit about his upcoming role in the foundation, the role of Mozilla in education, and managerial structure in general. Unfortunately due to the lack of time I am unable to do anything more than transcript the first video.

Videos one, two, three, four and five are in .mov format (now in .ogg too, see end of post for links, but they are in poorer quality having been transcoded from .mov and thus are smaller in size). SHA-1 checksums are at the end of the post. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Edit: Thanks to KaiRo’s suggestion, I tried to embed the videos using the new video tag, so here’s the first video below. It should play automatically after it has finished downloading.

Edit 2: Halfway through the video when played by Firefox 3.1 beta 1, it should crash at nsOggDecoder::HandleVideoData. I don’t know if this is fixed in the recent nightlies though. You have been warned!

Edit 3: More document tidyings, I got my <video> information from this devmo page, any queries please redirect to that page…

Edit 4: Took out the autoplay attribute, to play the video, one should right-click to show controls and play if the controls don’t show up.

Your browser does not support the <video> element.

Transcript of the first video:

GK: Hi, Mark.

MS: Hi, Gary.

GK: So, you’re taking up a new position, as an Executive Director for Mozilla Foundation.

MS: That’s right. (nods head)

GK: And, here’s a couple of questions for you. Let me start off with…

GK: What are your plans for your role as an Executive Director, especially with regards to the community, the goals, and education?

MS: So, as people who know the history of Mozilla know, it started out as a foundation because everybody who was involved in the beginning really had this big public mission of keeping the internet open, keeping the web open, and the main way they want to do that was first with a browser.

That was so successful, but they needed really to spin off a company just to manage that part of the mission. But the mission remains that broad desire to keep the internet open. So now, the things are really established with Mozilla Corporation, with Mozilla Messaging, there is a kind of a desire on the part of the board to think of what else can we do to keep the internet open.

So, my role as Executive Director coming in, is to work with the Mozilla community, to work with other people who are interested in getting involved with the Mozilla community, to figure out what’s the new terrain in terms of keeping the internet open. A part of that is about bringing more people in, who care about the values of Mozilla, so education, you know specifically working, say with students and professors, who’re gonna learn about open source and use the Mozilla community as a way to do that and also contribute, that’s one way to bring people into the community.

So the foundation will probably explore some things in that area, but also, you know just engaging the 200 million people who use Firefox and people who use Thunderbird and other Mozilla products and saying, "You know, maybe there’s something more here than just a great product."

And it is, a great set of products. Maybe there’s some values that resonate. You know, things like, Spread Firefox or Download Day, people resonate with Mozilla’s brands and want to get involved, so another role for the foundation is to figure out beyond using those products, are there other ways for those people to get involved and express their interest in the open internet.

Maybe that’s getting involved in issues like data, maybe that’s just kind of evangelizing to their friends and relatives on why the open internet and keeping the web open are important. Those are the kind of things we’ll look at in the foundation. But the really key thing is to make sure that what we do is driven by the Mozilla community, just like everything else is. So there is this new opportunity to create new opportunities for participation.

GK: So, how do you plan to reach out to educational institutions that are interested in teaching open source, but they have no idea how to start?

MS: Hmm, I’m not sure that the first place to go, is to go to educational institutions that have no idea how to start.

I think the first place we want to go is, places where there are professors, places where there are students who are already active over there in open source, already interested, possibly already contributing to programs or to communities like the Mozilla community, or other communities that are doing open source. And help them find a way to structure what they’re doing, bring it into the classroom, get credit for what they’re doing, involve more people in what they’re doing.

So really, I think what we’re looking for early on, and this is all still to be formed, and we may need to get more people’s opinion on this, is champions working in universities, working in colleges, working in educational institutions, who already are excited about the values of Mozilla and the values of open source, and who want to go further with that. So, that’s the first place to start.

GK: How do you feel about Seneca’s program so far?

MS: I think the Seneca program is a real beacon for people who want to do exactly that, who want to take their interest in open source and turn it into formal courseware, a formal offerings.

The Seneca people basically teach computer studies, and what they’ve done is they’ve started a course about three years ago, where the students who are learning Mozilla programming aren’t doing that just in sandbox or just in a laboratory; they’re going out in the Mozilla community, with the help of their professor and contribute directly, learning this real-world environment, which makes, you know, good sense in terms of contributing to Mozilla, but also good sense in terms of them being ready for the job market, right?

They learn to work in a global community, they learn to work with the real skills involved in, you know in open source but also in the real world of producing any piece of software. And you don’t often learn that in kind of a traditional computer studies programmes, so the community is part of who’s teaching those students.

And they have expanded, at Seneca, from just doing Mozilla; now they’ve got the same model for doing OpenOffice and for doing Linux builds and a whole bunch of stuff. So that’s a very successful model, the question is, can other people build on that kind of approach, and hopefully they can.

=====

sha1 hashes of:

f70a128912812a0d5d557a22e67272e867510a7b - 1.mov
a3c9106aab353d78ba48c7bab559a4f9c6a1d351 - 2.mov
6344faf29d3e1cf52e28a0d916e71fc33f1748d8 - 3.mov
47896b722b03cd1e381ef9c4782edbcb3c4bea99 - 4.mov
bac37b9a4582e6741df10e73f4b598c2f92e0652 - 5.mov

7ffe67e95e89a4503874eb5837fb1d235a8e86fc - 1.ogg
2ea95529efbeb79b9c18237b0d11c617552c9005 - 2.ogg
c9f84818d088aea830e607e3c01d41138541ed17 - 3.ogg
7f059bf520ef7c9a5e2850495f0f51640f152d1d - 4.ogg
dcdd235a50576114397f33f6cdf9537588f49733 - 5.ogg

2008-11-08 Sunbird 1.0 builds

2008-11-08T18:10:15Z

Current Sunbird (0.9) | Next planned Sunbird (1.0) | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Common:

Fixed: 281690 - days are shown two times in Minimonth (depending on timezone)
Fixed: 290747 - use sunbird.jar for sunbird specific files
Fixed: 303663 - should ICS calendar always bumps DTSTAMP on all events when writing?
Fixed: 305432 - setting nativeTime sets timezone to UTC
Fixed: 348481 - Unifinder: focus is lost when moving between events via up & down key
Fixed: 351145 - Selected entry not readable in unifinder or task list due to text/background color combination (if focus is moved away)
Fixed: 351880 - Selecting repeating event in Unifinder does not select events in Main View
Fixed: 358498 - calAttendee::icalProperty bug with rsvp
Fixed: 361634 - imip-bar should consider local status of iTIP/iMIP invitations
Fixed: 394902 - update libical
Fixed: 401597 - Provide Sunbird nightly updates via aus2-community.mozilla.org server
Fixed: 415509 - [Trunk] Only the last event of a day is selectable by mouse click in day/weekview
Fixed: 418345 - Decide how to handle Generation property properly - CalIInvitation and Layered Event models
Fixed: 431127 - Move email-specific itip processor code to the transport
Fixed: 431383 - Replace GIF with APNG throbber
Fixed: 445769 - iMIP bar isn’t updated after declining an invitation
Fixed: 446172 - add tentative invites to invites-counter
Fixed: 450565 - Accept an iTip/iMip invitation -> enabled ‘Default alarm setting’ is not considered
Fixed: 451018 - Change "Send attendees invitations via email"
Fixed: 452381 - Don’t pass strings to setTimeout
Fixed: 452759 - Tracking bug for 0.9 RC cleanup
Fixed: 454543 - Calendar Multiday-View: Performance improvement is required
Fixed: 455752 - Update internal timezone database to version 2008i
Fixed: 456354 - Thunderbird3: Get rid of "Today" toolbarbutton
Fixed: 456364 - Thunderbird3: Remove Find Events, Delete, Print, Reload from Toolbar
Fixed: 456377 - Thunderbird3: Integrate New Event, New Task into Write Button
Fixed: 457024 - Crash during shutdown [@nsXPCWrappedJS::Release][@nsCOMPtr<calITimezone>::~nsCOMPtr<calITimezone>]
Fixed: 457203 - iTIP overhaul
Fixed: 458190 - Broken unit tests
Fixed: 459184 - Timezone for Australia/Perth is wrong
Fixed: 459803 - Searching with unifinder causes error output and doesn’t work
Fixed: 459908 - Error "gCalendarStatusFeedback is not defined" when some dialogs
Fixed: 460263 - postflight on macosx fails when building thunderbird with preinstalled lightning
Fixed: 460408 - Shutdown crash at nsXPConnect::GetRuntime() when shutting down Thunderbird with Lightning with new profile created
Fixed: 460649 - make use of new search textbox widget in unifinder
Fixed: 460994 - Crash Reporter is not enabled in Sunbird
Fixed: 461121 - Thunderbird3: Move Invitations link into status bar
Fixed: 461162 - Port bug 451466 to calendar [make -C calendar/locales wget-en-US]
Fixed: 461328 - Errors appear because chooseCalendarDialog.xul and calErrorPrompt.xul aren’t packaged anymore
Fixed: 461337 - Sunbird tinderboxen need more disk space to stay green
Fixed: 461628 - Failed to load jar:calendar.jar!/content/calendar/calendar-minimonth-busy.js
Fixed: 461709 - Remove ctrl-q for quit on Windows (like Thunderbird)
Fixed: 461826 - .ics attachments from Thunderbird/Lightning not compatible with iCal
Fixed: 461944 - Selected event in unifinder is not highlighted in calendar view
Fixed: 462393 - Sunbird tinderboxen busted [Error: mozilla/dist/bin/js: Not a directory]
Fixed: 462447 - Remove CVS leftovers from new buildbot mozconfig files
Fixed: 462837 - WARNING: Illegal character in window name prompt-occurrence-modification
Fixed: 463060 - Clean-up and move clipboard.js

Common (Providers):

Fixed: 461166 - e4x parser borks on surrounding white spaces and certain response elements
Fixed: 462026 - 301 and 302 redirects not done properly with caldav provider
Fixed: 462317 - Crash [@strlen][@icalmemory_strdup] when closing a recursive event
Fixed: 463079 - Assertion failure, can’t load any remote calendars

Lightning-only:

Fixed: 404468 - Can not review calendar whilst reviewing invitations
Fixed: 412096 - [Today Pane] "New Event" button should have the same disabled state as the calendar new event button
Fixed: 462490 - Today pane -> ‘new event’ icon is defect

Sunbird-only:

Fixed: 449917 - Opening context menu without having selected an item reveals blank entry

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-calendar1.0+): (29)

Open: 394195 - Dialogs don’t persist width and height set by user
Open: 402365 - [Trunk] Tabs break calendar mode view
Open: 404039 - [Trunk] New added tasks don’t appear in task list
Open: 405529 - [Trunk] Event dialog: Typed start time or end time reset to default after moving focus
Open: 421600 - local copy of remote calendar is corrupted if edited while server is inaccessible
Open: 432704 - [Trunk] Drag and Drop in Month/Multiweek view fails [Error: this.parentBox is undefined]
Open: 441822 - Installing Lightning Trunk on Thunderbird 3.0a2pre breaks Folder tree’s accessibility
Open: 442520 - [Trunk] Can no longer set dates in a different month
Open: 451696 - [CalDAV] Provider doesn’t handle REQUEST/CANCEL correctly
Open: 453052 - Drag & drop of all day event in week view fails with error dialog
Open: 454933 - [calendar integration] move month, day, week mode buttons into calendar view
Open: 454935 - [calendar integration] remove lightning toolbar
Open: 455358 - [Trunk] database schema upgrade fails [An error was encountered preparing the calendar located at moz-profile-calendar:// for use.]
Open: 456379 - Thunderbird3: Move Category, Mark Completed, Priority into Task View
Open: 456385 - Thunderbird3: Integrate Calendar and Task mode menu items into new menu
Open: 457586 - Export calendar to HTML fails if task without due date exists in calendar
Open: 459402 - Provide Sunbird l10n builds from comm-central
Open: 459645 - Open Timezone dialog in attendees dialog -> error output
Open: 459818 - Changes in task mode are not visible without additional user interaction
Open: 459905 - Endless loop of error messages "email is null" in Invite Attendees dialog
Open: 460030 - Invitation overlap normal event boxes
Open: 460252 - Today Pane Integration in the new Thunderbird tab model (currently not available in mail tab)
Open: 460266 - ‘Open task’ menu via context menu is broken
Open: 461124 - Mode/Tab doesn’t change when using Alt+[1234]
Open: 461511 - If ‘Directory Server’ is enabled it is not possible to add more then one attendees at once
Open: 462838 - Using the ‘Status’ column in unifinder to sort events/tasks leads to an exception
Open: 463267 - Adding or modifying event throws exception [Error: "cal.itip is undefined" in calTransactionManager.js]
Open: 463282 - Repeating tasks cannot be created or imported
Open: 463392 - caldav calendars are not visible in the ’select calendar’ dialog

Lightning .xpis now located here.

Sunbird builds:

Official Windows, Official Windows installer

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

2008-11-08 Thunderbird Trunk builds

2008-11-08T17:46:08Z

Previous Shredder - Alpha 2 | Current Shredder - Alpha 3 | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Worthy news from the past weeks:

Global database (gloda) has just landed, but still has rough edges, exptoolbar (a new toolbar UI) will follow suit soon.
Eudora 8.0.0b4 has been released.
There are now at least basic fakeserver tests comprising POP, IMAP, News and SMTP.
Bugday queries now focused on cleaning up old bug queries. We think the queries encompass all of the old ones in Mail-land and should be pretty comprehensive. Your help is needed!

Thunderbird-specific:

Fixed: 217348 - Inconsistent accesskeys for Add/Remove buttons on Send Options dialog
Fixed: 223132 - need a scrollbar on the envelope panel (view all headers / long addr lists)
Fixed: 226551 - Large "mark as read" seconds (delay interval) value corrupted and integer preferences not validated
Fixed: 312478 - View message source: Wrap long lines toggle does not do anything
Fixed: 313525 - RSS feeds not working in L10N Thunderbird(Finnish, Korean,etc.)
Fixed: 316245 - Secure news server icon does not display padlock
Fixed: 329501 - Fails to handle feed: urls without protocol in the url (e.g. feed://domain.com/rss.xml)
Fixed: 329687 - Remove control-q-for-quit accelerator (like Firefox)
Fixed: 335534 - Return receipts not conform to RFC 2047
Fixed: 345386 - Non-custom install progress meter refers to installing optional components when there aren’t any
Fixed: 348450 - Unable to subscribe to feed URLs passed from browsers (Windows and Linux)
Fixed: 364987 - creating second RSS ("News & Blogs") account fails
Fixed: 368177 - Add support for mouse Back and Forward buttons, and the Stop, Search and Bookmarks keys on media keyboards
Fixed: 375880 - Append default domain to user name in ISP RDF File ignores SMTP setting
Fixed: 376975 - use "number" type for textboxes in options dialog
Fixed: 379806 - threaded/grouped-by-sort views unavailable in saved searches across multiple folders
Fixed: 389735 - Unable to open a message in a tab when using the vertical layout
Fixed: 408323 - Import of mail from Outlook 2003 fails completely
Fixed: 418490 - Implement iterator-helper module for dealing with xpcom arrays in javascript
Fixed: 422723 - Thunderbird Preferences/Certificates tab buttons wrap strangely
Fixed: 429118 - Spellcheck gives up after too few misspelled words in HTML editor
Fixed: 440552 - Auto-detect online status based on network interface status
Fixed: 449679 - delete/compact temporarily disabled after clicking account node and then another folder (in which a msg doesn’t load into view)
Fixed: 450413 - Mark messages as read UI box ungreyed after reopen settings
Fixed: 451333 - Shortcut for rewrapping (ctrl+r / command-r) doesn’t work
Fixed: 452296 - Old sent box not imported after updating Eudora
Fixed: 453841 - Remove unused strings in installer’s custom.properties
Fixed: 458655 - Position Mac About dialog somewhere better than 0:0
Fixed: 459286 - gtk stock items for thunderbird menu items
Fixed: 460781 - Restoring default start page blanks textbox on Windows
Fixed: 460929 - Eudora migration doesn’t show items being imported
Fixed: 461096 - Small buttons in Mac account manager break number textbox spinbuttons
Fixed: 461112 - Remove obsolete/unused entities in Thunderbird string files
Fixed: 461351 - Drop unnecessary includes from some of Thunderbird’s migration code.
Fixed: 461665 - allow dbclick to edit tags
Fixed: 461683 - "// this is obsolete" does not a useful function make
Fixed: 461686 - There is no help(.rdf)
Fixed: 461817 - shift + delete should do stuff even when the folder pane has focus
Fixed: 462423 - allow changing and choosing mail start page even when it is not set to show at the start
Fixed: 462565 - can’t switch away from view threads with unread messages
Fixed: 462681 - mailWindowOverlay.js style/whitespace/indention/comment/linewrap cleanup
Fixed: 462756 - Nobody cares about "defaultInboxLoadedOnStartup"
Fixed: 463003 - Context menu for selected text in content shows all items
Fixed: 463390 - Failed to set IMAP mail server "security settings" in preference window
Fixed: 463523 - Exptoolbar needs an addrbook.png icon in pinstripe as it is in qute

IMAP, News, POP and SMTP-related:

Fixed: 423354 - Thunderbird appears to be locking out Gmail IMAP accounts (forces password re-entry)
Fixed: 437193 - Implement an IMAP fake server testing scheme for /mailnews
Fixed: 461029 - Log POP errors to the PR_LOG module
Fixed: 461621 - Crash in nsNNTPProtocol::~nsNNTPProtocol() on shutdown after Tb is left open for some time

MailNews Core:

Fixed: 63941 - New Card layout shouldn’t assume high screen resolution
Fixed: 146075 - ‘Message > Edit Message As New’ (== ‘Edit As New…’) set an incorrect initial "X-Priority:" value (when present), which messes up ‘Options > Priority’ U.I. also; and code cleanup.
Fixed: 204339 - [RFE] Mozilla Mail should support the setting and reading the mail-followup-to header
Fixed: 211439 - Delete should mark as read (also on POP and IMAP when offline)
Fixed: 235086 - add a bit of jitter to the biff-interval
Fixed: 325429 - My own address should be removed from Mail-Followup-To: on reply
Fixed: 379070 - Remove nsXPIDLCString / nsXPIDLString from mailnews
Fixed: 385838 - POP3: don’t sync after each header
Fixed: 404489 - filters using as custom mail header "Sender" do not work (matches From instead)
Fixed: 418749 - Convert account-manager’s navigation tree from rdf to js
Fixed: 445554 - MsgMailboxGetURI doesn’t escape the relative path as should be done for a URL
Fixed: 446250 - Keyword changes don’t generate usable notifications, makes tracking changes to tags difficult
Fixed: 449768 - Reindexing should save message metadata (junk-related, tags, etc.)
Fixed: 450485 - thunderbird trunk nightly w32 buildsymbols broken on comm-central so no useful breakpad report - symbols missing at http://symbols.mozilla.org/thunderbird
Fixed: 450494 - Global Database functionality should go in MailNews core
Fixed: 453885 - Generalize bayes code to support multiple traits
Fixed: 455964 - IMAP parser assertions since autosync turnon
Fixed: 455966 - IMAP threadsafety assertions post-autosync landings
Fixed: 456668 - Multiple forwarded (attached) messages given the same name
Fixed: 457052 - try to repair cause of assertion - Borked message header
Fixed: 457452 - Leaking nsAutoSyncManager on shutdown
Fixed: 458357 - FindRealServer inefficiently calls FindServerByURI
Fixed: 459333 - Fix (leftover) regression from bug 199298
Fixed: 459431 - port to comm-central: bug 454730, bug 455670, bug 454376, bug 450717, bug 454841, bug 457214, bug 445321, bug 457082
Fixed: 459949 - Broken focus (arrow keys, copy and paste don’t work) in non-recycled compose windows
Fixed: 460258 - Provide text debug facilities for fake servers
Fixed: 460416 - Crash in account wizard
Fixed: 460479 - crash [@ nsMailDatabase::UpdateFolderFlag]
Fixed: 460631 - Resources? MIME don’t need no stinkin’ resources!
Fixed: 460636 - nsMsgSaveAsListener sometimes inserts extra LF characters
Fixed: 460641 - Cleanup null checking for the folder in nsImapService::StreamMessage
Fixed: 461252 - First filter in Message Filters should be selected
Fixed: 461256 - saving message leaves dest file locked
Fixed: 461584 - toggling imap message read state doesn’t work in cross-folder saved search
Fixed: 461946 - Replace nsIUrlListenerManager by an nsTObserverArray.
Fixed: 462036 - comm-central builds failing due to MoreFilesX.h and supporting code being removed from mozilla-central
Fixed: 462045 - make server.isSecure work for POP/IMAP
Fixed: 462548 - remove nsIMsgFilterService.h
Fixed: 462697 - MDN "MsgMdnDisptched" typo trying to say "dunno, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t"
Fixed: 462725 - MDN fails to encode subject until after an email has been sent
Fixed: 462736 - add support for PARALLEL_DIRS to build system, ||ize suite/
Fixed: 462835 - Spell collector right in ns(I)AbAddressCollecter
Fixed: 463087 - test_bug428427.js and test_nsIMsgFolderListenerLocal.js crash

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-thunderbird3+ with Target Milestone of Thunderbird 3 Beta 1): (42)

Open: 123440 - Stop that annoying modal dialog when mail can’t connect to the mail server from connection time out error
Open: 218999 - Thunderbird should use a tabbed interface (thundertab)
Open: 307023 - Re-editing quoted-printable HTML message (Open Draft, Forward Inline, Edit-as-New) shows corruption of tag attributes (<img> <body> etc)
Open: 338549 - Mailnews account password prompts at startup no longer serial
Open: 350314 - STARTTLS is called TLS in user preferences (remaining IMAP/POP3 case)
Open: 360648 - [Meta] TB toolkit autocomplete migration
Open: 364376 - Not all Message header fields are focusable by <tab> (Keyboard accessability)
Open: 364519 - [IMAP] On start Saved Search (virtual) folder is hidden
Open: 367896 - messages don’t show in threaded view with this 3 msg mbox (show in unthreaded view)
Open: 370306 - Move Address Book’s autocomplete (and addressing widget) implementation to be based on toolkit’s
Open: 385502 - investigate turning on offline imap by default
Open: 392328 - [Meta] tracking bug for thunderbird tabbed interface problems
Open: 392330 - thread pane sometimes doesn’t match focused tab
Open: 396874 - copy sent mail into sent-mail folder failed [imap, offline folder disabled]
Open: 419597 - migrate and import everything from outlook express crashes [@ msvcr80.dll@0x14580 - nsCSSScanner::NextURL(unsigned int&, nsCSSToken&)]
Open: 422814 - Make account configuration quick, easy, and more secure
Open: 427627 - enable jemalloc on thunderbird trunk
Open: 429440 - Preview pane must be visible for tabs to render.
Open: 429817 - background-image not working in non-chrome user stylesheets in thunderbird
Open: 429843 - mailnews UI work to catch up with how certificate "security exceptions" are handled
Open: 433567 - Replace Mozilla Corporation references with Mozilla Messaging
Open: 448198 - f=f: Reply to non-f=f message containing certain characters breaks quoting
Open: 450038 - "Help | Shredder Help" doesn’t redirect to a help site of the applications locale
Open: 453763 - nsIMsgFolderNotificationService needs a folderAdded notification
Open: 453928 - Reevaluate mailnews use of CAPS
Open: 453943 - Review JavaScript in mail/rss policies
Open: 455098 - Crash [@ objc_msgSend] removing Junk button from toolbar
Open: 455835 - make sure the message header pane works with a11y themes
Open: 455947 - subscribe dialog gives broken expression
Open: 455978 - need status and emergency brake UI for gloda
Open: 456291 - Imap auto-sync updates folder that have "mail.check_new_mail" pref _off_
Open: 456596 - emails with lots of addresses in the To: field should only show first N by default
Open: 456814 - Message reader enhancements (tracker)
Open: 456940 - Customize Toolbar leads to doubled account list in "Get Mail" buttons drop down
Open: 457751 - Delete, Rebuild Index, Undo sequence causes a crash on imap folder [@ morkRowObject::SetRow(nsIMdbEnv*, nsIMdbRow*) ]
Open: 458255 - need update snippets for lightning nightly builds
Open: 459482 - Dock Icon should show new mail at the same time as the growl alert
Open: 459487 - OnItemIntPropertyChanged not fired with BiffState atom when IMAP + folder selected for offline use (No New Mail/Biff Notification)
Open: 462364 - Deleting a List from Address Book does not get reflected immediately
Open: 462952 - Add mac native tabs as in Fx3
Open: 463577 - inline forwarded messages show too much html composition chrome
Open: 463606 - Locale files for gloda are in the wrong place

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (discussion)

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

Teaching Open Source

2008-10-24T05:43:14Z

A few months ago, post-internship, I wanted to start a course for third-year college students in my second year of college, along the likes of Seneca, so the professors here at NUS kindly paved the way for me to teach Mozilla as a course (CS3108). (They however indicated that it will _not_ be a normal course, it is just a "student-run activity", because I am not a professor.) This wasn’t large enough to obtain more publicity, a recent local paper article on open source education by-passed local major universities.

(Note: This post is Singapore-centric, a partial response to Mark Surman’s, and is timed to coincide with the open source track at Seneca, due to school commitments, different round-the-world locations that sit exactly on opposite sides of the world and lack of resources, I am unable to attend. Apologies in advance, much as I would like to share my experience in-person.)

The first semester of teaching the course has proved to be an invaluable learning experience, and I will share some thoughts below:

Teaching open source effectively takes time to come to fruition

The college must be sure that teaching open source is the right way forward. Industry trends take time to go back into the classroom, and the act of convincing the college’s board of educational directors that open source is essential for the student’s future, takes time to come to fruition.

There must be an advocate within the college strongly pushing for this act of teaching open source, be it a Dean, a professor or a student. These people are vital to sustaining the vibrancy and enthusiasm of the course, because to educators, "everything starts from the classroom". That is, of course, an old notion, because in the case of open source, there is a community to start off in, but this thinking is still inherent in certain educational circles. So colleges want to ensure that whatever "new stuff" they are teaching are relevant in the outside world, and that huge level of inertia of accepting "new stuff" also takes time and much effort to overcome.

Everything starts from one

Every thing starts off from one. Be it one advocate, one teacher, or one student, as long as someone is interested in open source, this is a chance not to be missed. Maintaining his or her interest in open source is the main challenge — though it also depends on the individual personality of the person. Once this opportunity is gone, he or she will end up just like the other graduates out there.

Every bit of effort counts. Every single bit of effort, possibly even with recognition, will give tremendous boosts of confidence to the advocate that they are on the right track, that they are not doing something in vain, and that they are not the only ones who think open source thinking is useful for the future of the computer workplace. It’s painful and tough if the contributor / advocate feels that he or she is seemingly the only one around the country / region that is interested in this sort of stuff. It takes willpower to overcome that — once that willpower is gone, it’s difficult to re-obtain.

Mindset shifts

Without the support of someone in the college, it is not easy to negotiate the red tape that exists throughout the educational institution’s hierarchial structure. Countless emails and bounces from place to place, from people to people, it is very important that the college itself is probably recognizing the importance of open source. Merely recognizing alone is not enough; there are still possibilities that the college educators do not know how to teach open source in a way that is suitably generic, i.e. not just focused on Mozilla or Linux alone, but rather also encompassing the open source spirit, the act of sharing code, the different open source licenses out there.

High-level educators note the fact that code cannot be shared, that plagiarism is involved (which is extremely frowned upon and can be liable to severe penalties) very often to students. As such, students already have the thinking embedded inside their very minds that their code is their king, this also takes a lot of effort to overcome, especially when during the open source course, the advocate begins to talk about sharing code, which is contrary to what the student has been taught in all his life. Changing this mindset is virtually impossible in the high-level educators’ world, this affects the students too. Another issue that I won’t go into very much detail due to different implementations for different academic institutions and the fact that I am just a not-so-performing-well-undergraduate, is the question of how to grade the student, besides “Pass/Fail”.

This is not the only thing in teaching open source that goes against what is taught in other places. An example is compiled code tests. Students are taught that their C++ (or whatever language) code should have comprehensive compiled code tests. It makes sense for the student’s project, when you have merely thousands of lines of code and hundreds of source files. However, this goes against what is listed for Mozilla, simply because this doesn’t make sense. With something in the likes of millions of lines of code in the Mozilla codebase, this represents something on the many orders of magnitude greater than what the student will accomplish during the course of his college education. It is wasted effort if the student is taught to write compiled code tests only to find that it is not really relevant in a project as large as Mozilla.

Learning open source is a learning curve for students. Fresh graduates already have thinking enshrined into them about the closed source opportunities. Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, (especially the selling of) YouTube are just the many examples that are actively promoted. What is lacking here are open source ones. Note that these students already know about the existence of open source, and most are probably already using it, they just do not see a future of themselves surviving on an open source job. Open source is not seen as ensuring a bread-and-butter future, it is seen as something done in a hobby and will get relegated in priorities if there is a lack of time or money. Materialism plays a part in going against open source.

Certification (Sidenotes)

People ask about certification. Microsoft certification, now there is the Apple University, something on their CVs that certifies them for their job. Having contributed to lines of code to open source is hardly perceived as certification by students, though the open source developers themselves may attest otherwise.

APIs (Sidenotes)

Students ask about open source APIs. If there is something Mozilla lacks that may prove useful to educational folks in the future, it’s an API. They want fresh, readily available, well-documented APIs to code whatever they want. The closest anything that Mozilla has is probably MozMill API and Ubiquity documentation, on a level that is suitable for easy level entry into Mozilla coding.

Conclusion

Having more people and resources available around in a region, would always help to push the cause forward. Starting something regarding open source education is good, but maintaining the momentum and ensuring the sustainability is the tough bit.

The education sector is a tad slower to recognize and respond, and adapt to industrial trends. Open source is just one of them.

(What a long >1200 word post, thanks go out to the reader for lasting till this end, time to go back to lectures on basic datapaths / pipelining. This post will also become part of my final report on CS3108.)

Mozilla in the Movies

2008-10-21T04:51:16Z

Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox

Thunderbird, Lightning, Penelope

(The) Flock

2008-10-19 Sunbird 1.0 builds

2008-10-21T08:55:51Z

Current Sunbird (0.9) | Next planned Sunbird (1.0) | Previous releases

Common:

Fixed: 386432 - Unify front-end code of Lightning and Sunbird
Fixed: 393748 - Active tasks are dimmed (grey) in task list while completed tasks are shown in black
Fixed: 405196 - unifinder: selecting event in unifinder doesn’t select it in day or week view
Fixed: 412817 - Improve ASSERT macro output or remove the macro
Fixed: 414336 - Last day in minimonth view is always not bold, independent whether events exist or not
Fixed: 419007 - Invalid ics files don’t trigger INVALID_TIMEZONE error, times are assumed as floating
Fixed: 428091 - [Trunk] Unifinder close button icon is misaligned/misplaced
Fixed: 431775 - [Trunk] Remove unused gopher files
Fixed: 435166 - better error handling for repeating tasks without start date [NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER in calRecurrenceInfo.js]
Fixed: 438964 - Closing Edit Event window without modifications prompts Save Event dialog if event is on a remote calendar and it wasn’t saved twice.
Fixed: 451912 - major update not offered when some language packs are installed
Fixed: 455728 - Consolidate sort mechanisms in different views and trees
Fixed: 455733 - Consolidate filter mechanisms in different views and trees
Fixed: 455768 - Convert calendar/ from application/x-javascript to application/javascript
Fixed: 455863 - select event in unifinder scrolls multiday-view to time in its timezone, not view timezone
Fixed: 455869 - Remove MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH ifdefs from calendar trunk code
Fixed: 456037 - Provide Sunbird nightly builds from comm-central
Fixed: 456102 - Minimonth should generally be able to show free-busy states
Fixed: 456362 - Thunderbird3: Move Today Pane Button into Status Bar
Fixed: 456715 - Remove COMM_BUILD ifdefs from calendar code
Fixed: 456923 - add a build target to compare bin/ and the package list
Fixed: 457692 - Switch the invites dialog to use local Address Book autocomplete on toolkit interfaces
Fixed: 457854 - Drag Shadow doesn’t disappear after event resize
Fixed: 458163 - lightning 0.9 source tarball is missing in ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/calendar/lightning/releases/0.9/
Fixed: 458368 - Move and integrate calendar/prototypes to calendar/base
Fixed: 458492 - remove lightning/nightly/latest-trunk/ or link to lightning/nightly/latest-comm-central/ builds
Fixed: 458589 - Drag and drop ical (.ics) attachments onto calendar icon does nothing
Fixed: 458808 - Remove some unused entities from calendar.dtd
Fixed: 458858 - Lightning keeps asking for password on startup
Fixed: 459500 - cleanup packages-static, add missing and remove unnecessary entries

Common (Providers):

Fixed: 407961 - Google sends Email reminders to all non-google attendees, 24 hours before the event
Fixed: 456865 - Select Calendar dialog doesn’t show Google Calendars when accepting invitations
Fixed: 457830 - Delete extended properties
Fixed: 457890 - Lightning 0.9/Google Calendar 0.5 do not synchronize Google Alarms anymore

Sunbird-only:

Fixed: 414957 - [Trunk] Missing link on the Plugins pane of the Add-ons manager dialog
Fixed: 437622 - Sunbird: Upgrade via update mechanism fails, restart results in error on local calendars (timezone extension not installed)
Fixed: 459107 - Sunbird startup error (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND - nsIXPCComponents_Utils.import)
Fixed: 459432 - Please move to Gecko 1.9

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-calendar1.0+): (30)

Open: 329570 - Concurrent editing ICS calendars by multiple users can lose data
Open: 402365 - [Trunk] Tabs break calendar mode view
Open: 404039 - [Trunk] New added tasks don’t appear in task list
Open: 405529 - [Trunk] Event dialog: Typed start time or end time reset to default after moving focus
Open: 412809 - [Trunk] Customize toolbar dialog w/ Tb trunk breaks a lot of stuff
Open: 415509 - [Trunk] Only the last event of a day is selectable by mouse click in day/weekview
Open: 421600 - local copy of remote calendar is corrupted if edited while server is inaccessible
Open: 432704 - [Trunk] Drag and Drop in Month/Multiweek view fails [Error: this.parentBox is undefined]
Open: 441822 - Installing Lightning Trunk on Thunderbird 3.0a2pre breaks Folder tree’s accessibility
Open: 442520 - [Trunk] Can no longer set dates in a different month
Open: 451696 - [CalDAV] Provider doesn’t handle REQUEST/CANCEL correctly
Open: 454933 - [calendar integration] move month, day, week mode buttons into calendar view
Open: 454935 - [calendar integration] remove lightning toolbar
Open: 455358 - [Trunk] database schema upgrade fails [An error was encountered preparing the calendar located at moz-profile-calendar:// for use.]
Open: 455752 - Update internal timezone database to version 2008g
Open: 456354 - Thunderbird3: Move Today Button into Calendar Grid
Open: 456364 - Thunderbird3: Remove Find Events, Delete, Print, Reload from Toolbar
Open: 456377 - Thunderbird3: Integrate New Event, New Task into Write Button
Open: 456379 - Thunderbird3: Move Category, Mark Completed, Priority into Task View
Open: 456385 - Thunderbird3: Integrate Calendar and Task mode menu items into new menu
Open: 457024 - Crash during shutdown [@nsXPCWrappedJS::Release][@nsCOMPtr<calITimezone>::~nsCOMPtr<calITimezone>]
Open: 457586 - Export calendar to HTML fails if task without due date exists in calendar
Open: 458190 - Broken unit tests
Open: 459645 - Open Timezone dialog in attendees dialog -> error output
Open: 459818 - Changes in task mode are not visible without additional user interaction
Open: 459905 - Endless loop of error messages "email is null" in Invite Attendees dialog
Open: 459908 - Error "gCalendarStatusFeedback is not defined" when some dialogs
Open: 460030 - Invitation overlap normal event boxes
Open: 460234 - Sunbird fails to load a calendar if HTTP Auth is required
Open: 460266 - ‘Open task’ menu via context menu is broken

Lightning .xpis now located here.

Sunbird builds:

Official Windows, Official Windows installer

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)