mozilla

Mozilla's IT team is pivoting to a more community-focused approach. Our director of IT, mrz, has been writing extensively about it over the last few weeks.

As you can imagine, the difficult part of this is to balance security with accessibility. We'd like to be open, but we can't give the keys to the kingdom out to anyone who promises to help. The approach we're taking is to treat volunteers as we would part-time employees - post positions, interview, and then supervise to gain trust. This is a fairly common model, actually, for any organization with volunteers and a need for security. Youth programs, for example, generally do an interview and background check with new volunteers, and those volunteers will be paired with senior volunteers or staff for a while.

However, it's a bit cumbersome, both for Mozilla and for potential volunteers. We must design entire positions - ongoing tasks or roles that a volunteer can work on for an extended period of time - and then select a limited number of volunteers to fill those roles. For potential volunteers, an application and interview can mean a long time (weeks?) before they get to do anything hands-on. It also carries the risk that we'd have to turn a qualified volunteer away due to lack of suitable positions.

So what to do?

We need a more fluid way of interacting with potential contributors. Since our bug database is public, we can begin by simply tagging a few bugs that are appropriate for newcomers -- things that don't require sensitive access and are well-encapsulated so they can be completed without extensive knowledge of Mozilla's infrastructure.

Here's the list.

It's a bit short right now. There are a few things that may help:

• We can get better about identifying appropriate tasks and projects and making bugs out of them.
• We can identify a means of giving limited or sandboxed access to a new volunteer.
• Consumers of Mozilla's IT resources can begin tagging bugs, where Mozilla can provide the resources and volunteers can do the heavy lifting - got any ideas?

I've been working on improving the monitoring of the build slaves at Mozilla. As part of this project, I needed to be able to submit passive check results to the Nagios servers via NSCA during system startup. I'm doing this from a Python script that needs to run on a wide array of systems using whatever random Python is available. We run some oddball stuff, so the common denominator is Python 2.4.

It turns out that there's no Python NSCA library, although there is Net::Nsca in Perl. So, I wrote one, and put it on github: https://github.com/djmitche/pynsca.

At the moment, this only knows XOR, and only does service checks. That's all I need, but hopefully it can be easily expanded to cover other purposes. The one thing I want to avoid is adding mandatory requirements -- this should work, at least in plain-text and XOR modes, on a plain-vanilla Python installation.

By the way, the startup script I'm working on is runslave.py, which includes a modified copy of pynsca and does a number of other housekeeping jobs as well. More on that in a subsequent post.

The new beta of Firefox 4.0 was released today. I'm not quite willing to run Minefield (nightlies), so I've been eagerly awaiting this beta to fix some nagging but not show-stopper bugs in 4.0b6. One of those involved bad interactions of App Tabs with Panorama. Now the app tabs nicely decorate the side of each tab set in the panorama view.

Another nice thing is that the Option-Space key combination, which opened panorama in 4.0b6, no longer does so. That's OK - I found that to be too easy to press anyway. It's now bound to Command-E (right there at the top of the "View" menu).

Panorama has also been re-bound to swipe-up and swipe-down, which makes me less happy. In most apps on the Mac, those swipes are equivalent to the "Home" and "End" keystrokes -- they scroll to the top or bottom of the current page. So with a little help from my new co-workers, I discovered the settings to fix that.

The full list of gesture bindings is written up here, but the two I needed to change are browser.gesture.swipe.up and .down. The scrolling commands to bind to them are cmd_scrollTop and cmd_scrollBottom.

4.0 has a number of other great UI enhancements, too. I'm excited to see 4.0 finally released!

[edit: fixed formatting]

I am getting started in releng at Mozilla, and IRC provides a central meeting-place for the group. As such, indicating your status to this group is an important, so others can know whether you're nearby to answer a question or take care of a problem. This is generally done by adding suffixes to the IRC nickname, e.g., "dustin|afk" or "dustin|lunch".

Before I go further, I know that this is frown on, and even results in autoignores, in some corners of IRC. If that's the case for you, read no further.