Ill-mannered Grandiloquence

I don’t remember the exact details of how I first got involved with supporting Firefox. I know I started in #firefox (that’s an IRC channel, for those of you not familiar with the syntax) but I don’t remember if I’d just been hanging out in the channel, or if I’d actually had an issue myself that I got help with there. In either case, whether it started with a specific solution or not, I found myself able to answer some common questions that I’d seen answered before. That’s all it took.

When I answered the easy questions, it left the more experienced helpers – who were usually developers or extension authors pulling double duty to make sure users got support – free to take the harder questions or to spend more time working directly on projects. As myself and some other community members were around more often to help, some even took the opportunity to stop giving support regularly and quite wisely spent their time on tasks they were better suited for, like writing patches and creating new features.

The great thing about supporting Firefox is that if nothing else, either a new profile or a fresh install will solve the problem, or it’s caused by a third party app (there may be a few uncommon exceptions I’m forgetting here). A new install leaves all the user information intact, and settings can easily be moved between profiles. Eventually you start to get a feeling for which symptoms are going to be caused by a bad install and which are caused a broken profile simply by troubleshooting issues yourself. A while after that you’ll start to get a feel for which files specifically can cause which symptoms. So even though the old helpers were still around and available to help us if we got stuck, we were pretty well able to handle most issues and only ping them when we thought we’d found a bug that they’d want to check out.

For the most part, helping out on SUMO is going to be quite similar to my experience, users will learn from each other, and from reading the knowledge base, and some will even move on to contributing code and developing. However, Live Chat is one to one by nature. While users can always invite other helpers into a chat, or ask in the workgroup for help on issues they don’t know about, it’s harder for more experienced users to cut in if they know the answer to a problem. Because helpers aren’t watching each other help as much, it’s harder for them to get a head of the learning curve by learning from others’ experiences.

How to replicate this accelerated learning is going to be an interesting and very important problem for me to solve. I’ve already put some tools in place which I will blog about separately. This week I’m going to focus on monitoring chats and being around for helpers to ask me questions. I’ll take what I learn and figure out what areas our helpers could use the most help with, then work with our room monitors to figure out the best ways to give our helpers what they need. Of course we’ll constantly re-evaluate what we can do to help our helpers, and any suggestions are always welcome.

For those of you not yet familiar with the new Live Chat software, we have it set that while everyone can sign up for an account to help, only people who have been approved can actually take questions from users. Last week we didn’t do any new approvals, and we apologize for the delay to those of you who have been signed up and waiting patiently. The software is new to us as well and we took the time to familiarize ourselves with the user control options that are available (and which ones aren’t). This helps give us an idea of how many approvals we can do at once, while still making sure we’re providing a quality service to our users.

We’ll be doing new approvals this week, starting today after the SUMO conference call, so that’s around 11am PST (GMT -8). We’ll only be doing a few at a time so that we can monitor new helpers, and guide them. If you have any questions you can find us either via the conference feature in the product, or drop by #sumo on irc.mozilla.org

I’ve finally sat down to process the emails I asked for in regards to times people can commit to help. With the responses I’ve received so far, we can extend our hours during weekday afternoons. However, I didn’t receive many emails committing to the later hours, though I know we have plenty of helpers on during the evenings.

If you haven’t already, please email majken at gmail dot com with the hours you are willing to commit to being around. If you’re available 12 hours of the day, that’s great, but unless you’re saying you will be on and helping 12 hours a day, that’s not what I’m after. Also, if the time you can be around is less than an hour at a time, don’t worry about mentioning it.

Again, you’re free to help whenever you feel like it, but this is for the purposes of making sure we have the coverage to advertise being open. Also, if your times change, don’t sweat it, just drop me another email.

As it stands I’ll be extending the hours to:

Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 9am – 3pm PST (GMT-8)
Tuesday, Thursday: 12pm – 4pm PST (GMT-8)

Please email me ASAP if you can help extend the hours further!

As many people who know me might already know, I’ve been leading the effort to bring real time text support to Firefox users. We’re live now, it’s going really well, and I’m doing some really cool things with some really cool people. I’ve been remiss about blogging things as they’ve been happening, though probably in large part to the fact that I haven’t done something like this before. I’ve found myself doing a lot of assessing in the moment, and then dealing with whatever that assessment meant should happen next. I think I’m ahead of that curve now, in no small part thanks to the community that sprouted up over night to help share the load!

It’s been really interesting for me, finding myself on the other side of contributing to Mozilla. While I understood how rapidly things move, and how busy it can keep you, I didn’t quite understand how much effort it really took to make sure other, less attention demanding, tasks got done. I’ve never been one to decide something shouldn’t be done just because it’s hard. In fact I’m a firm believer that some of the things most worth doing take a fair amount of thought and effort.

I was reading planet a few weeks ago and noticing how a few users and projects would simply put what they’d done in the week in simple bullet form. I found myself finding posts like these incredibly helpful and informative. In some cases, more helpful than the detailed posts about one particular task.

Again, now on the other side, I’m realizing how many people don’t know what I’m up to even though I think I’m mentioning everything I do somewhere where people can see. Of course, if I talk about it in IRC and someone isn’t there, they don’t know about it. Then figure that not everyone will see what I post on the newsgroups, or the bugs I file in bugzilla and I’ve realized that to keep people (including myself – especially myself?) informed of the tasks I’m working on and have completed I should really be blogging.

So, here’s my commitment to try and blog at least once a week what I’m doing, what I’ve accomplished, what I’m trying to accomplish and anything else interesting that comes up. Maybe I’ll even manage to blog about things that have already happened. I’ve even picked out a shiny new WordPress theme! Actually I’m going back and forth between two, I may or may not switch periodically.

The issue

There have been a number of reports of Firefox 3 beta 1 consuming high amounts of memory shortly after being run (anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes) and needing to be killed in the task manager, only to happen again next time.

The workaround

The bug has been filed, and the culprit seems to be the safe browsing list. The first link contains the workaround, which is to simply leave Firefox alone for a while – seems to be 9 minutes according to the two people I’ve heard from – and it will go back to normal, and stay that way.

What’s going on

In a new profile, which is what we recommend you use when testing a beta, Firefox needs to download the safe browsing blacklist. This list is supposed to be downloaded in increments, not all at once. Something’s going wrong and triggering the list to be downloaded all at once. See the second link to follow along (the first link is a dupe of the second link, but contains the workaround).

There’s currently a debate going on in the Firefox support planning newsgroup about what to call the “Import” article.

The issue is that we’re trying to come up with an explanatory term to describe the profile data. We think “data” is too vague, but are having a heck of a time coming up with something shorter than “bookmarks, settings and add-ons” to describe bookmarks, settings and add-ons. “Personal Information” has been tossed about, but I think too many novice users will think that means things like their credit card numbers and address etc.

So I’m curious about two things:

1. Do most novice users think we mean all the profile information when we say settings?
2. What term would you use to describe all that good stuff that someone would want to keep from browser to browser or profile to profile?

FWIW this isn’t a vote for a new term or anything. I’m just curious. If we get something good maybe we’ll use it.

Mitchell Baker finally blogged about the Mozilla Foundation and the “Thunderbird situation.” I replied to her blog, but it’s pretty lengthy, figure anyone that cares about my opinion will more likely see it here than there, so here is what I posted there (mostly, I had the full thing in my clipboard, but replaced it without pasting over the copy I’d made in progreess).

I agree that things are going to get really interesting with the web and what it can do. I think we might be missing the boat if we think it’s all going to happen within the browser. All the talk I hear about “the web is the future!” sounds like Firefox as OS, and maybe it’s my lack of vision, but I just can’t see that working out well. If everything is going to be “on the web” then where does a browser separate from the operating system fit in? Will it be like PowerDesktop, an alternative file exlorer?

I think there is a serious underestimation of how much people want their data *off* the web as much as possible, especially in North America. What will happen for those users? I guess Firefox would save their data to the HD and tell the server to delete it, and then the web interface would be able to read the mail again? Or Firefox would display it without sending it back to the server? Isn’t that another suite?

I think my biggest problem with all this is I don’t know how far in the future all this is, maybe it’s next year, and so it’s *Really* happening, but is it really? What’s the timeframe for this? Are we really somewhere with standards that it can happen so soon? 5 years maybe?

So while everyone’s really excited about what’s coming down the tubes, I’m sitting at home wanting to use an email client, and a calendar manager, and I like not having to go online to check stuff (*my* internet is up pretty much 24/7 and I have unlimited bandwidth, but pretty sure that’s still the minority). Especially on my laptop. Yeah there’s mobile phones, too, but seriously what is the security like? Hackers are just beginning to get into the market and will phone providers and manufacturers really have the experience to close the holes quick enough to keep people’s data safe in the near future?

All this R&D is great, but I’m a user and I exist *right now* and my data could use managing *right now* and *right now* I don’t care how many apps I have to use to do that, that’s what my operating system is for. I care that things like Thunderbird, and Sunbird (which is an alpha I might add, it’s amazing) work. really. well.

If the technologies are going to converge, then fine. But why so much bet hedging? Why not let it happen organically? Innovate the current products and UI. I mean web based or standalone the UI that people like is going to be the same. Isn’t that what the foundation is supposed to be doing anway? Nurturing things that are good for people *now* and seeing where they can go?

It’s a dream that takes years of hard work, devotion, rejection and ultimately one that many of the talented will have to walk away from unrealized. One I never really considered a possibility for myself even when it was still “the dream.” One I hesitated to dream for my children, but couldn’t help myself; hoping it was their dream, trying to prepare myself for the day that they, too, might walk away from it. Even after all that hoping, and knowing that they were in a better position than many to catch that dream, I still find myself completely floored that one of them has.

Gryphon will be performing 5 nights with the world renowned National Ballet of Canada in one of the first stagings of Balanchine’s Don Quixote since his death. Balanchine left the rights to the production to his Dulcinea, Suzanne Farrell, who revived the ballet in 2005 for her own company. Ms Farrell is staging this production and so not only does Gryphon have the wonderful opportunity of being in this ballet, he will also be spending some time with a legend.

This is a ballet that I’m not familiar with apart from general knowledge of Don Quixote (tipping at windmills etc.) and so I can’t tell you more than what Gryphon’s roles will be. In a fantasy scene he will be a sword-fighting crusader-rat, and in another scene, which I can only assume happens in a church, he will be an altar boy.

There are 10 performances in total, with two groups of children performing in 5 shows each. Here are the nights Gryphon and his group are performing:

Friday, June 15th (Opening night)
Saturday, June 16th (eve)
Wednesday, June 20th
Thursday, June 21st
Saturday, June 23rd (eve)

All performances begin at 7:30, with a special “Ballet Talks” session about the ballet 45 minutes before show time in the theatre’s lobby.

Tickets can be purchased online or by phone. Prices range from $40 to $155 depending on where you want to sit. Additionally, 10 or more tickets qualifies as a group and is eligible for 20% off, reduced service charges, and a complimentary ticket, so if everyone wants to go on the same night, please let us know ASAP and we can try and get a group together. I’d like to go opening night (Friday), and I already have tickets for the 23rd (Saturday) so I’ll propose those dates for the group and see what happens.

We’ve been getting a fair number of people in #firefox the past two days who are having issues logging in to Myspace. Myspace is sending out broken cookies causing affected users to see the Firefox error:

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.


IE users are just seeing a could not load page error. The problem is NOT with Firefox, nor is it with your computer.

Only some accounts are affected. People who are seeing this error with their own accounts are able to log in to a friend’s account on the same machine. Your account isn’t disabled. It’s still there and other users can view it. You’re simply being sent malformed cookies when you try to log in.

Myspace hasn’t made any sort of bulletin about this issue so we can only guess that they’re having issues with one or more of their servers. Some of the people that were seeing the problem have also said it resolved, so it seems it’s a problem on multiple servers and is being fixed.

If you can’t log in but still wish to browse Myspace:

Delete the Myspace cookies in your browser of choice. You can browse any page as long as you don’t try to log in to your account.

If you need to log in to your account, or don’t want to wait for the problem to resolve:

Users have reported being able to log in to their accounts through Myspace’s IM program.

Install and run http://imupdate.myspace.com/nsis/MySpaceIM_Setup.exe

Once you’ve logged in to the service, click on the “MySpace” button at the top and then “Home.”

If you require further assistance:

Please contact Myspace directly. If I come across more information I’ll post it here, but there’s nothing else anyone can do to solve the issue, except have everyone who is experiencing it contact Myspace support, and hopefully that’ll get them on it.

29 days and counting! I always forget to plan early enough since it comes so quickly after the holidays, but this year I’m going to stay in Toronto for a long weekend and if anyone wants to join, they’re welcome to. It’s the weekend of the 17th even though my birthday is the 9th. I’m going to get a room at a nice hotel with room service and probably just go bar hopping/clubbing. If you’re interested in tagging along, get a hold of me.

In light of that, if anyone was wondering what to get me – and this isn’t a solicitation of any kind, just a few people every year always ask me what I want, so if you were already planning on getting me something, here it is – I would love Starpoints to put towards my spree. You don’t have to be a member to buy them as a gift, the person just has to be a member to use them – Starpoint gifts. My points number is 720626286. A free night is 7000 points, but I can get a discount on a night with as little as 1000 points. Oh, and Victoria’s Secret gift certificates are welcome, as always!