mr mr cote

A lot of people probably don’t know that I manage the team behind BMO, that is, bugzilla.mozilla.org, Mozilla’s Bugzilla installation. Work on BMO is continuous and incremental, and even really useful features often take a while to percolate through the community, so I thought I’d try to draw attention to some recent improvements that should get you pumped to open a Bugzilla tab. Suggested Reviewers A really exciting, and long-awaited, feature is suggested reviewers.

Autophone is an automated system that executes Python test scripts on real user hardware, that is, actual phones. It’s been an active project for about a year now, and we’ve learned a lot about the difficulties of performing automated performance measurements on hardware that was never intended for automation. I’m documenting this story for posterity, since it has been an interesting, if often frustrating, experience. If you want to follow along, the source is on github.

If you’ve the means to buy an Oban 14 or a Macallan 18 whenever a decanter frees itself, you’ll probably want to saunter on past this post. However, if you like whisky but aren’t crazy about spending a good portion of your income on it, let me take a few minutes to tell you about some of my favourite everyday whiskies. I’m not going to include links because most distillers' sites are obnoxious in one way or another, and I don’t have a favourite whisky-reviews site, but a quick search should point you in the right direction.

I bet that the moment most people decide they actually do like git is when they start using ‘rebase’ regularly. I definitely do not completely understand the git model, but rebase shows that there is some seriously cool stuff going on. Anyway, I’ve come upon a rebasing dilemma. The reasons for not rebasing a public repo are clear, but pushing to a remote origin (e.g. github) is also a form of backup.

Keeping wiki pages up to date is a hard problem, but recently we found out that people were having trouble finding out what projects we were working on. Obviously we can’t help people with their problems if they can’t figure out what we do, so I spent some time today updating the A-Team’s Project Central. All the projects we are working on are there, along with owners' IRC nicks and links to project pages and/or docs.

An amusingly frequent pattern: git clone https://github.com/mozilla/new-python-project # ... right, virtualenv mkdir src mv new-python-project src virtualenv new-python-project cd new-python-project mv ../src . . bin/activate # get to work I really ought to make a script to clone new Python projects…

Thanks to dkl, bmo now has an extension which shows a failure data for intermittent-orange bugs. You’ll have to enable the extension by going to the Preferences page and changing “When viewing a bug, show its corresponding Orange Factor page” to “On”. Then the next time you are viewing a bug about an intermittent orange, e.g. the current top orange, bug 789003, at the bottom right of the metadata you should see a sparkline and a count of the failures over the last week, plus a link to its OrangeFactor page.