Archive for February, 2008
X-country February 24th, 2008
It’s done! 3600kms and a lot of packing and lifting later, I’m in Moncton and waiting on my stuff. A few last-minute things to do before we take possession of our new house, but otherwise, it should be business as usual this week.
Oh yeah, I posted a few pictures from earlier this week while doing my car shuffle.
Posted in General | Comments (2)
Monctonia February 18th, 2008
I’m moving. Over the next week, I’m going to be busy shuttling between Ottawa and Moncton and getting ready for the movers to pick up our stuff on Friday. I have a lot of work to do.
While away, for questions related to the unittest machines, please see Chris Cooper (aka, coop online). Talos queries should go to Alice Nodelman (alice on irc). Test development questions and reviews can go to Bob Clary, Clint Talbert or any of the regular Core::Testing contributors.
Without delving into the reasons behind the move, I will answer some frequently asked questions.
Q. Moncton? What’s that?
A. It’s a city in New Brunswick, Canada. Read the frequently-updated wikipedia page.
Q. Why are you moving there?
A. I have family there. I enjoy the maritimes and the quality of life. Moncton has an international airport and I expect to be able to travel more because I have a support system in place to help out while I’m out of town. Direct flights to Toronto and Ottawa helps too.
Q. Why not Toronto (or your favorite city here)?
A. A bunch of reasons, really, but it was a hard decision to make. I have a lot of friends in Toronto and would love to be closer to them. That said, Toronto’s expensive. Then there’s the traffic… Public transit helps, but… it’s public transit. I love Toronto and expect to visit often if not more frequently than I do now.
Q. Moncton? That sounds like the kind of place you move away from.
A. I did move away from it and want to move back!
Q. Why would you move to the middle of nowhere?
A. It’s actually on the east coast of Canada. Thanks.
Q. Why are you leaving Ottawa?
A. I like Ottawa, I really do, but it’s never really felt like home to me. I will miss my friends but I promise to come back and visit.
That answers most of the regular questions. Now I have to load up my car and make a high-speed shot through some heavy rain. It’s going to be a mad week.
Posted in General, Mozilla | Comments (3)
Work Week Recap February 4th, 2008
It was a fun work week in Mountain View. Despite the large number of toys available in the main area of Building K, there was a tremendous amount of work getting done on Firefox 3. Beta 3 freeze occurred (and continues) through stalwart sheriffing and sheer force of will, pushing a steady stream of patches being into the tree in preparation for its release. Mostly, I tried to stay out of everyone’s way.
On the test development and automation end of things, we had some productive meetings to set our direction for the next few months. We’re going to put some fast-cycling talos machines up to take over from the aging, test-only tinderboxes that have been keeping Rob Helmer up at night. These should come into being in the next couple of weeks and we’ll run them in parallel during the bake-in period to compare the numbers.
I also had the opportunity to sit down with Bob Clary and bring up a couple more machines for the JavaScript Testing project, aka “Sisyphus“. You can visit them on the MozillaTest tree on the tinderbox server — they’re the ones with “js test” in the title and are currently all orange due to tinderbox error parsing funniness. Over the next little while we’ll bring up the remaining platform (Mac OS X Intel) and fix up the displays so they’re only orange when they’re supposed to be orange.
But wait! There’s more! We’re also going to be beefing up the unittest farm with some redundant machinery. Each platform will become part of a triadic set similar to the triples of machines we have running talos tests. This is the first phase in building in some parallelization and error checking into these machines in an attempt to cut down on cycle time and improve reliability.
Finally, Chris Cooper improved the clobber support across all three platforms and applied a little special sauce on the Windows box that should dramatically reduce the number of stuck processes under Mozilla-build.
Tags: Build, Infrastructure, Testing
Posted in Infrastructure, Mozilla | Comments (0)