Tag Archives: Work

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Network, Work

I’m leaving Mozilla

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It’s been five great years, but now it is time for me to move on and try something else.

During these five years I’ve met and interacted with a large number of awesome people at Mozilla, lots of new friends! I got the chance to work from home and yet work with a global team on a widely used product, all done with open source. I have worked on internet protocols during work-hours (in addition to my regular spare-time working with them) and its been great! Heck, lots of the HTTP/2 development and the publication of that was made while I was employed by Mozilla and I fondly participated in that. I shall forever have this time ingrained in my memory as a very good period of my life.

I had already before I joined the Firefox development understood some of the challenges of making a browser in the modern era, but that understanding has now been properly enriched with lots of hands-on and code-digging in sometimes decades-old messy C++, a spaghetti armada of threads and the wild wild west of users on the Internet.

A very big thank you and a warm bye bye go to everyone of my friends at Mozilla. I won’t be far off and I’m sure I will have reasons to see many of you again.

My last day as officially employed by Mozilla is December 11 2018, but I plan to spend some of my remaining saved up vacation days before then so I’ll hand over most of my responsibilities way before.

The future is bright but unknown!

I don’t yet know what to do next.

I have some ideas and communications with friends and companies, but nothing is firmly decided yet. I will certainly entertain you with a totally separate post on this blog once I have that figured out! Don’t worry.

Will it affect curl or other open source I do?

I had worked on curl for a very long time already before joining Mozilla and I expect to keep doing curl and other open source things even going forward. I don’t think my choice of future employer should have to affect that negatively too much, except of course in periods.

With me leaving Mozilla, we’re also losing Mozilla as a primary sponsor of the curl project, since that was made up of them allowing me to spend some of my work days on curl and that’s now over.

Short-term at least, this move might increase my curl activities since I don’t have any new job yet and I need to fill my days with something…

What about toying with HTTP?

I was involved in the IETF HTTPbis working group for many years before I joined Mozilla (for over ten years now!) and I hope to be involved for many years still. I still have a lot of things I want to do with curl and to keep curl the champion of its class I need to stay on top of the game.

I will continue to follow and work with HTTP and other internet protocols very closely. After all curl remains the world’s most widely used HTTP client.

Can I enter the US now?

No. That’s unfortunately not related, and I’m not leaving Mozilla because of this problem and I unfortunately don’t expect my visa situation to change because of this change. My visa counter is now showing more than 214 days since I applied.

Technology, Work

New screen and new fuses

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I got myself a new 27″ 4K screen to my work setup, a Dell P2715Q, and replaced one of my old trusty twenty-four inch friends with it.

I now work with the “Thinkpad 13″ on the left as my video conference machine (it does nothing else and it runs Windows!), the two mid screens are a 24″ and the new 27” and they are connected to my primary dev machine while the rightmost thing is my laptop for when I need to move.

Did everything run smoothly? Heck no.

When I first inserted the 4K screen without modifying anything else in the setup, it was immediately obvious that I really needed to upgrade my graphics card since it didn’t have muscles enough to drive the screen at 4K so the screen would then instead upscale a 1920×1200 image in a slightly blurry fashion. I couldn’t have that!

New graphics card

So when I was out and about later that day I more or less accidentally passed a Webhallen store, and I got myself a new card. I wanted to play it easy so I stayed with an AMD processor and went with ASUS Dual-Rx460-O2G. The key feature I wanted was to be able to drive one 4K screen and one at 1920×1200, and then I unfortunately had to give up on the ones with only passive cooling and I instead had to pick what sounds like a gaming card. (I hate shopping graphics cards.)As I was about to do surgery on the machine anyway. I checked and noticed that I could add more memory to the motherboard so I bought 16 more GB to a total of 32GB.

Blow some fuses

Later that night, when the house was quiet and dark I shut down my machine, inserted the new card, the new memory DIMMs and powered it back up again.

At least that was the plan. When I fired it back on, it said clock and my lamps around me all got dark and the machine didn’t light up at all. The fuse was blown! Man, wasn’t that totally unexpected?

I did some further research on what exactly caused the fuse to blow and blew a few more in the process, as I finally restored the former card and removed the memory DIMMs again and it still blew the fuse. Puzzled and slightly disappointed I went to bed when I had no more spare fuses.

I hate leaving the machine dead in parts on the floor with an uncertain future, but what could I do?

A new PSU

Tuesday morning I went to get myself a PSU replacement (Plexgear PS-600 Bronze), and once I had that installed no more fuses blew and I could start the machine again!

I put the new memory back in and I could get into the BIOS config with both screens working with the new card (and it detected 32GB ram just fine). But as soon as I tried to boot Linux, the boot process halted after just 3-4 seconds and seemingly just froze. Hm, I tested a few different kernels and safety mode etc but they all acted like that. Weird!

BIOS update

A little googling on the messages that appeared just before it froze gave me the idea that maybe I should see if there’s an update for my bios available. After all, I’ve never upgraded it and it was a while since I got my motherboard (more than 4 years).

I found a much updated bios image on ASUS support site, put it on a FAT-formatted USB-drive and I upgraded.

Now it booted. Of course the error messages I had googled for are still present, and I suppose they were there before too, I just hadn’t put any attention to them when everything was working dandy!

Displayport vs HDMI

I had the wrong idea that I should use the display port to get 4K working, but it just wouldn’t work. DP + DVI just showed up on one screen and I even went as far as trying to download some Ubuntu Linux driver package for Radeon RX460 that I found, but of course it failed miserably due to my Debian Unstable having a totally different kernel running and what not.

In a slightly desperate move (I had now wasted quite a few hours on this and my machine still wasn’t working), I put back the old graphics card – (with DVI + hdmi) only to note that it no longer works like it did (the DVI one didn’t find the correct resolution anymore). Presumably the BIOS upgrade or something shook the balance?

Back on the new card I booted with DVI + HDMI, leaving DP entirely, and now suddenly both screens worked!

HiDPI + LoDPI

Once I had logged in, I could configure the 4K screen to show at its full 3840×2160 resolution glory. I was back.

Now I only had to start fiddling with getting the two screens to somehow co-exist next to each other, which is a challenge in its own. The large difference in DPI makes it hard to have one config that works across both screens. Like I usually have terminals on both screens – which font size should I use? And I put browser windows on both screens…

So far I’ve settled with increasing the font DPI in KDE and I use two different terminal profiles depending on which screen I put the terminal on. Seems to work okayish. Some texts on the 4K screen are still terribly small, so I guess it is good that I still have good eye sight!

24 + 27

So is it comfortable to combine a 24″ with a 27″ ? Sure, the size difference really isn’t that notable. The 27 one is really just a few centimeters taller and the differences in width isn’t an inconvenience. The photo below shows how similar they look, size-wise:

Development, Technology, Work

One year and 6.76 million key-presses later

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I’ve been running a keylogger on my main Linux box for exactly one year now. The keylogger logs every key-press – its scan code together with a time stamp. This now allows me to do some analyses and statistics of what a year worth of using a keyboard means.

This keyboard being logged is attached to my primary work machine as well as it being my primary spare time code input device. Sometimes I travel and sometimes I take time-off (so called vacation) and then I usually carry my laptop with me instead which I don’t log and which uses a different keyboard layout anyway so merging a log from such a different machine would probably skew the results a bit too much.

Func KB-460 keyboard

What did I learn?

A full year of use meant 6.76 million keys were pressed. I’ve used the keyboard 8.4% on weekends. I used the keyboard at least once on 298 days during the year.

When I’m active, I average on 2186 keys pressed per hour (active meaning that at least one key was pressed during that hour), but the most fierce keyboard-bashing I’ve done during a whole hour was when I recorded 8842 key-presses on June 9th 2015 between 23:00 and 24:00! That day was actually also the most active single day during the year with 63757 keys used.

In total, I was active on the keyboard 35% of the time (looking at active hours). 35% of the time equals about 59 hours per week, on average. I logged 19% keyboard active minutes, minutes in which I hit at least one key. I’m pretty amazed by that number as it equals almost 32 hours a week with really active keyboard action.

Zooming in and looking at single minutes, the most active minute occurred 15:48 on November 10th 2014 when I managed to hit 405 keys. Average minutes when I am active I type 65 keys/minute.

Looking at usage distribution over week days: Tuesday is my most active day with 19.7% of all keys. Followed by Thursday (19.1%), Monday (18.7%), Wednesday (17.4%) and Friday (16.6%). I already mentioned weekends, and I use the keyboard 4.8% on Sundays and a mere 3.6% on Saturdays.

Separating the time-stamps over the hours of the day, the winning hour is quite surprising the 23-00 hour with 11.9% followed by the more expected 09-10 (10.0%), 10-11 and 14-15. Counting the most active minutes over the day shows an even more interesting table. All the top 10 most active minutes are between 23-00!

The most commonly pressed keys are: space (10%) and backspace (6.5%) followed by e, t, a, s, left control, i, cursor down, o, cursor up, n, r. 29 keys were pressed more than 1% of the times. 30 keys were pressed less than 0.01%. I used 99 different keys over the year (I believe my keyboard has 105 keys).

Never pressed keys? All 6 of the never touched keys are in the numpad: 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 and the comma/del key.

I’ll let the keylogger run and see what else I’ll learn over time…

Development, Mozilla, Open Source

My first year at Mozilla

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January 13th 2014 I started my fiMozilla dinosaur head logorst day at Mozilla. One year ago exactly today.

It still feels like it was just a very short while ago and I keep having this sense of being a beginner at the company, in the source tree and all over.

One year of networking code work that really at least during periods has not progressed as quickly as I would’ve wished for, and I’ve had some really hair-tearing problems and challenges that have taken me sweat and tears to get through. But I am getting through and I’m enjoying every (oh well, let’s say almost every) moment.

During the year I’ve had the chance to meetup with my team mates twice (in Paris and in Portland) and I’ve managed to attend one IETF (in London) and two special HTTP2 design meetings (in London and NYC).

openhub.net counts 47 commits by me in Firefox and that feels like counting high. bugzilla has tracked activity by me in 107 bug reports through the year.

I’ve barely started. I’ll spend the next year as well improving Firefox networking, hopefully with a higher turnout this year. (I don’t mean to make this sound as if Firefox networking is just me, I’m just speaking for my particular part of the networking team and effort and I let the others speak for themselves!)

Onwards and upwards!

Electronics, Open Source, Work

Keyboard key frequency

A while ago I wrote about my hunt for a new keyboard, and in my follow-up conversations with friends around that subject I quickly came to the conclusion I should get myself better analysis and data on how I actually use a keyboard and the individual keys on it. And if you know me, you know I like (useless) statistics.

Func KB-460 keyboardSo, I tried out the popular and widely used Linux key-logger software ‘logkeys‘ and immediately figured out that it doesn’t really support the precision and detail level I wanted so I forked the project and modified the code to work the way I want it: keyfreq was born. Code on github. (I forked it because I couldn’t find any way to send back my modifications to the upstream project, I don’t really feel a need for another project.)

Then I fired up the logging process and it has been running in the background for a while now, logging every key stroke with a time stamp.

Counting key frequency and how it gets distributed very quickly turns into basically seeing when I’m active in front of the computer and it also gave me thoughts around what a high key frequency actually means in terms of activity and productivity. Does a really high key frequency really mean that I was working intensely or isn’t that purpose more a sign of mail sending time? When I debug problems or research details, won’t those periods result in slower key activity?

In the end I guess that over time, the key frequency chart basically says that if I have pressed a lot of keys during a period, I was working on something then. Hours or days with a very low average key frequency are probably times when I don’t work as much.

The weekend key frequency is bound to be slightly wrong due to me sometimes doing weekend hacking on other computers where I don’t log the keys since my results are recorded from a single specific keyboard only.

Conclusions

So what did I learn? Here are some conclusions and results from 1276614 keystrokes done over a period of the most recent 52 calendar days.

I have a 105-key keyboard, but during this period I only pressed 90 unique keys. Out of the 90 keys I pressed, 3 were pressed more than 5% of the time – each. In fact, those 3 keys are more than 20% of all keystrokes. Those keys are: <Space>, <Backspace> and the letter ‘e’.

<Space> stands out from all the rest as it has been used more than 10%.

Only 29 keys were used more than 1% of the presses, giving this a really long tail with lots of keys hardly ever used.

Over this logged time, I have registered key strokes during 46% of all hours. Counting only the hours in which I actually used the keyboard, the average number of key strokes were 2185/hour, 36 keys/minute.

The average week day (excluding weekend days), I registered 32486 key presses. The most active sinngle minute during this logging period, I hit 405 keys. The most active single hour I managed to do 7937 key presses. During weekends my activity is much lower, and then I average at 5778 keys/day (7.2% of all activity were weekends).

When counting most active hours over the day, there are 14 hours that have more than 1% activity and there are 5 with less than 1%, leaving 5 hours with no keyboard activity at all (02:00- 06:59). Interestingly, the hour between 23-24 at night is the single most busy hour for me, with 12.5% of all keypresses during the period.

Random “anecdotes”

Longest contiguous time without keys: 26.4 hours

Longest key sequence without backspace: 946

There are 7 keys I only pressed once during this period; 4 of them are on the numerical keypad and the other three are F10, F3 and <Pause>.

More

I’ll try to keep the logging going and see if things change over time or if there later might end up things that can be seen in the data when looked over a longer period.

cURL and libcurl, Development, Firefox, Haxx, Mozilla, Open Source, Work

daniel.haxx.se week #3

I won’t keep posting every video update here, but I mostly wanted to mention that I’ve kept posting a weekly video over at youtube basically explaining what’s going on right now within my dearest projects. Mostly curl and some Firefox stuff.

This week: libcurl server cert verification API got a bashing at SEC-T, is HTTP for UDP a good idea? How about adding HTTP cache support to libcurl? HTTP/2 is getting deployed as we speak. Interesting curl bug when used by XBMC. The patch series for Firefox bug 939318 is improving slowly – will it ever land?

cURL and libcurl, Development, Mozilla, Open Source, Work

My home setup

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I work in my home office which is upstairs in my house, perhaps 20 steps from my kitchen and the coffee refill. I have a largish desk with room for a number of computers. The photo below shows the three meter beauty. My two kids have their two machines on the left side while I use the right side of it for my desktop and laptop.

Daniel's home office

Many computers

The kids use my old desktop computer with a 20″ Dell screen and my old 15.6″ dual-core Asus laptop. My wife has her laptop downstairs and we have a permanent computer installed underneath the TV for media (an Asus VivoPC).

My desktop computer

I’m primarily developing C and C++ code and I’m frequently compiling rather large projects – repeatedly. I use a desktop machine for my ordinary development, equipped with a fairly powerful 3.5GHz quad-core Core-I7 CPU, I have my OS, my home dir and all source code put on an SSD. I have a larger HDD for larger and slower content. With ccache and friends, this baby can build Firefox really fast. I put my machine together from parts myself as I couldn’t find a suitable one focused on horse power but yet a “normal” 2D graphics card that works Fractal Designfine with Linux. I use a Radeon HD 5450 based ASUS card, which works fine with fully open source drivers.

I have two basic 24 inch LCD monitors (Benq and Dell) both using 1920×1200 resolution. I like having lots of windows up, nothing runs full-screen. I use KDE as desktop and I edit everything in Emacs. Firefox is my primary browser. I don’t shut down this machine, it runs a few simple servers for private purposes.

My machines (and my kids’) all run Debian Linux, typically of the unstable flavor allowing me to get new code reasonably fast.

Func KB-460 keyboardMy desktop keyboard is a Func KB-460, mechanical keyboard with some funky extra candy such as red backlight and two USB ports. Both my keyboard and my mouse are wired, not wireless, to take away the need for batteries or recharging etc in this environment. My mouse is a basic and old Logitech MX 310.

I have a crufty old USB headset with a mic, that works fine for hangouts and listening to music when the rest of the family is home. I have Logitech webcam thing sitting on the screen too, but I hardly ever use it for anything.

When on the move

I need to sometimes move around and work from other places. Going to conferences or even our regular Mozilla work weeks. Hence I also have a laptop that is powerful enough to build Firefox is a sane amount of time. I have Lenovo Thinkpad w540a Lenovo Thinkpad W540 with a 2.7GHz quad-core Core-I7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD. It has the most annoying touch pad on it. I don’t’ like that it doesn’t have the explicit buttons so for example both-clicking (to simulate a middle-click) like when pasting text in X11 is virtually impossible.

On this machine I also run a VM with win7 installed and associated development environment so I can build and debug Firefox for Windows on it.

I have a second portable. A small and lightweight netbook, an Eeepc S101, 10.1″ that I’ve been using when I go and just do presentations at places but recently I’ve started to simply use my primary laptop even for those occasions – primarily because it is too slow to do anything else on.

I do video conferences a couple of times a week and we use Vidyo for that. Its Linux client is shaky to say the least, so I tend to use my Nexus 7 tablet for it since the Vidyo app at least works decently on that. It also allows me to quite easily change location when it turns necessary, which it sometimes does since my meetings tend to occur in the evenings and then there’s also varying amounts of “family activities” going on!

Backup

For backup, I have a Synology NAS equipped with 2TB of disk in a RAIDSynology DS211j stashed downstairs, on the wired in-house gigabit Ethernet. I run an rsync job every night that syncs the important stuff to the NAS and I run a second rsync that also mirrors relevant data over to a friends house just in case something terribly bad would go down. My NAS backup has already saved me really good at least once.

Printer

HP Officejet 8500ANext to the NAS downstairs is the house printer, also attached to the gigabit even if it has a wifi interface of its own. I just like increasing reliability to have the “fixed services” in the house on wired network.

The printer also has scanning capability which actually has come handy several times. The thing works nicely from my Linux machines as well as my wife’s windows laptop.

Internet

fiber cableI have fiber going directly into my house. It is still “just” a 100/100 connection in the other end of the fiber since at the time I installed this they didn’t yet have equipment to deliver beyond 100 megabit in my area. I’m sure I’ll upgrade this to something more impressive in the future but this is a pretty snappy connection already. I also have just a few milliseconds latency to my primary servers.

Having the fast uplink is perfect for doing good remote backups.

Router  and wifi

dlink DIR 635I have a lowly D-Link DIR 635 router and wifi access point providing wifi for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and gigabit speed on the wired side. It was dead cheap it just works. It NATs my traffic and port forwards some ports through to my desktop machine.

The router itself can also update the dyndns info which ultimately allows me to use a fixed name to my home machine even without a fixed ip.

Frequent Wifi users in the household include my wife’s laptop, the TV computer and all our phones and tablets.

Telephony

Ping Communication Voice Catcher 201EWhen I installed the fiber I gave up the copper connection to my home and since then I use IP telephony for the “land line”. Basically a little box that translates IP to old phone tech and I keep using my old DECT phone. We basically only have our parents that still call this number and it has been useful to have the kids use this for outgoing calls up until they’ve gotten their own mobile phones to use.

It doesn’t cost very much, but the usage is dropping over time so I guess we’ll just give it up one of these days.

Mobile phones and tablets

I have a Nexus 5 as my daily phone. I also have a Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 that tend to be used by the kids mostly.

I have two Firefox OS devices for development/work.

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Mozilla

I’m eight months in on my Mozilla adventure

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I started working for Mozilla in January 2014. Here’s some reflections from my first time as Mozilla employee.

Working from home

I’ve worked completely from home during some short periods before in my life so I had an idea what it would be like. So far, it has been even better than I had anticipated. It suits me so well it is almost scary! No commutes. No delays due to traffic. No problems ever with over-crowded trains or buses. No time wasted going to work and home again. And I’m around when my kids get home from school and it’s easy to receive deliveries all days. I don’t think I ever want to work elsewhere again… 🙂

Another effect of my work place is also that I probably have become somewhat more active on social networks and IRC. If I don’t use those means, I may spent whole days without talking to any humans.

Also, I’m the only Mozilla developer in Sweden – although we have a few more employees in Sweden. (Update: apparently this is wrong and there’s’ also a Mats here!)

Daniel's home office

The freedom

I have freedom at work. I control and decide a lot of what I do and I get to do a lot of what I want at work. I can work during the hours I want. As long as I deliver, my employer doesn’t mind. The freedom isn’t just about working hours but I also have a lot of control and saying about what I want to work on and what I think we as a team should work on going further.

The not counting hours

For the last 16 years I’ve been a consultant where my customers almost always have paid for my time. Paid by the hour I spent working for them. For the last 16 years I’ve counted every single hour I’ve worked and made sure to keep detailed logs and tracking of whatever I do so that I can present that to the customer and use that to send invoices. Counting hours has been tightly integrated in my work life for 16 years. No more. I don’t count my work time. I start work in the morning, I stop work in the evening. Unless I work longer, and sometimes I start later. And sometimes I work on the weekend or late at night. And I do meetings after regular “office hours” many times. But I don’t keep track – because I don’t have to and it would serve no purpose!

The big code base

I work with Firefox, in the networking team. Firefox has about 10 million lines C and C++ code alone. Add to that everything else that is other languages, glue logic, build files, tests and lots and lots of JavaScript.

It takes time to get acquainted with such a large and old code base, and lots of the architecture or traces of the original architecture are also designed almost 20 years ago in ways that not many people would still call good or preferable.

Mozilla is using Mercurial as the primary revision control tool, and I started out convinced I should too and really get to learn it. But darn it, it is really too similar to git and yet lots of words are intermixed and used as command but they don’t do the same as for git so it turns out really confusing and yeah, I felt I got handicapped a little bit too often. I’ve switched over to use the git mirror and I’m now a much happier person. A couple of months in, I’ve not once been forced to switch away from using git. Mostly thanks to fancy scripts and helpers from fellow colleagues who did this jump before me and already paved the road.

C++ and code standards

I’m a C guy (note the absence of “++”). I’ve primarily developed in C for the whole of my professional developer life – which is approaching 25 years. Firefox is a C++ fortress. I know my way around most C++ stuff but I’m not “at home” with C++ in any way just yet (I never was) so sometimes it takes me a little time and reading up to get all the C++-ishness correct. Templates, casting, different code styles, subtleties that isn’t in C and more. I’m slowly adapting but some things and habits are hard to “unlearn”…

The publicness and Bugzilla

I love working full time for an open source project. Everything I do during my work days are public knowledge. We work a lot with Bugzilla where all (well except the security sensitive ones) bugs are open and public. My comments, my reviews, my flaws and my patches can all be reviewed, ridiculed or improved by anyone out there who feels like doing it.

Development speed

There are several hundred developers involved in basically the same project and products. The commit frequency and speed in which changes are being crammed into the source repository is mind boggling. Several hundred commits daily. Many hundred and sometimes up to a thousand new bug reports are filed – daily.

yet slowness of moving some bugs forward

Moving a particular bug forward into actually getting it land and included in pending releases can be a lot of work and it can be tedious. It is a large project with lots of legacy, traditions and people with opinions on how things should be done. Getting something to change from an old behavior can take a whole lot of time and massaging and discussions until they can get through. Don’t get me wrong, it is a good thing, it just stands in direct conflict to my previous paragraph about the development speed.

In the public eye

I knew about Mozilla before I started here. I knew Firefox. Just about every person I’ve ever mentioned those two brands to have known about at least Firefox. This is different to what I’m used to. Of course hardly anyone still fully grasp what I’m actually doing on a day to day basis but I’ve long given up on even trying to explain that to family and friends. Unless they really insist.

Vitriol and expectations of high standards

I must say that being in the Mozilla camp when changes are made or announced has given me a less favorable view on the human race. Almost anything or any chance is received by a certain amount of users that are very aggressively against the change. All changes really. “If you’ll do that I’ll be forced to switch to Chrome” is a very common “threat” – as if that would A) work B) be a browser that would care more about such “conservative loonies” (you should consider that my personal term for such people)). I can only assume that the Chrome team also gets a fair share of that sort of threats in the other direction…

Still, it seems a lot of people out there and perhaps especially in the Free Software world seem to hold Mozilla to very high standards. This is both good and bad. This expectation of being very good also comes from people who aren’t even Firefox users – we must remain the bright light in a world that goes darker. In my (biased) view that tends to lead to unfair criticisms. The other browsers can do some of those changes without anyone raising an eyebrow but when Mozilla does similar for Firefox, a shitstorm breaks out. Lots of those people criticizing us for doing change NN already use browser Y that has been doing NN for a good while already…

Or maybe I’m just not seeing these things with clear enough eyes.

How does Mozilla make money?

Yeps. This is by far the most common question I’ve gotten from friends when I mention who I work for. In fact, that’s just about the only question I get from a lot of people… (possibly because after that we get into complicated questions such as what exactly do I do there?)

curl and IETF

I’m grateful that Mozilla allows me to spend part of my work time working on curl.

I’m also happy to now work for a company that allows me to attend to IETF/httpbis and related activities much better than ever I’ve had the opportunity to in the past. Previously I’ve pretty much had to spend spare time and my own money, which has limited my participation a great deal. The support from Mozilla has allowed me to attend to two meetings so far during the year, in London and in NYC and I suspect there will be more chances in the future.

Future

I only just started. I hope to grab on to more and bigger challenges and tasks as I get warmer and more into everything. I want to make a difference. See you in bugzilla.

Development, Electronics, Mozilla

Crashed and recovered in no time

Working from home, even writing software from home, my computer setup is pretty crucial for a productive work day.

Yesterday morning after I had sat down with my coffee and started to work on my latest patch iteration I noticed that some disk operations seemed to be very slow. I looked around and then suddenly an ‘ls’ of a directory returned an error!

I checked the system logs and I saw them filling up with error messages identifying problems with a hard drive. Very quickly I identified the drive as the bigger one (I have one SSD and one much larger HDD). Luckily, that’s the one I mostly store document, pictures and videos on and I backup that thing every night. This disk is not very old and I’ve never experienced this sort of disk crash before, not even with disks that I’ve used for many years more than I’ve used this…

boomI ripped the thing out, booted up again and I could still work since my source code and OS are on the SSD. I ordered a new one at once. Phew.

Tuesday morning I noticed that for some unexplainable reason I had my /var partition on the dead drive (and not backed up). That turned out to be a bit inconvenient since now my Debian Linux had no idea which packages I had installed and apt-get and dpkg were all crippled to death.

I did some googling and as my laptop is also a Debian sid install I managed to restore it pretty swiftly by copying over data from there. At least it (the /var contents) is now mostly back to where it was before.

On Tuesday midday, some 26 hours after I ripped out the disk, my doorbell bing-bonged and the delivery guy handed me a box with a new and shiny 3 TB drive. A couple of hours ago I inserted it, portioned it, read back a couple of hundred gigabytes of backup, put back the backup job in cron again and … yeah, I think I’m basically back to where I was before it went south.

All in all: saved by the backup. Not many tears. Phew this time.

cURL and libcurl, Development, Mozilla, Network

My first Mozilla week

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Working from home

I get up in the morning, shave, eat breakfast and make sure all family members get off as they should. Most days I walk my son to school (some 800 meters) and then back again. When they’re all gone, the house is quiet and then me and my cup of coffee go upstairs and my work day begins.

Systems and accounts

I have spent time this week to setup accounts and sign up for various lists and services. Created profiles, uploaded pictures, confirmed passwords. I’ve submitted stuff and I’ve signed things. There’s quite a lot of systems in use.

My colleagues

I’ve met a few. The Necko team isn’t very big but the entire company is huge and there are just so many people and names. I haven’t yet had any pressing reason to meet a lot of people nor learn a lot of names. I feel like I’m starting out this really slowly and gradually.

Code base

Firefox is a large chunk of code. It takes some 20 minutes to rebuild on my 3.5GHz quad-core Core-i7 with SSD. I try to pull code and rebuild every morning now so that I can dogfood and live on the edge. I also have a bunch of local patches now, some of them which I want to have stewing in my own browser for a while so that I know they at least don’t have any major negative impact!

Figuring out the threading, XPCOM, the JavaScript stuff and everything is a massive task. I really cannot claim to have done more than just scratched the surface so far, but at least I am scratching and I’ve “etagged” the whole lot and I’ve spent some time reading and reviewing code. Attaching a gdb to a running Firefox and checking out behavior and how it looks has also helped.

Netwerk code size

“Netwerk” is the directory name of the source tree where most of the network code is located. It is actually not so ridiculously large as one could fear. Counting only C++ and header files, it sums up to about 220K lines of code. Of course not everything interesting is in this tree, but still. Not mindbogglingly large.

Video conferencing

I’ll admit I’ve not participated in this sort of large scale video conferences before this. With Vidyo and all the different people and offices signed up at once – it is a quite impressive setup actually. My only annoyance so far is that I didn’t get the sound for Vidyo to work for me in Linux with my headphones. The other end could hear me but I couldn’t hear them! I had to defer to using Vidyo on a windows laptop instead.

Doing the video conferencing on a laptop instead of on my desktop machine has its advantages when I do them during the evenings when the rest of the family is at home since then I can move my machine somewhere and sit down somewhere where they won’t disturb me and I won’t disturb them.

Bugzilla

The bug tracker is really in the center for this project, or at least for how I view it and work with it right now. During my first week I’ve so far filed two bug reports and I’ve submitted a suggested patch for a third bug. One of my bugs (Bug 959100 – ParseChunkRemaining doesn’t detect chunk size overflow) has been reviewed fine and is now hopefully about to be committed.

I’ve requested commit access (#961018) as a “level 1” and I’ve signed the committer’s agreement. Level 1 is entry level and only lets me push to the Try server but still, I fully accept that there’s a process to follow and I’m in no hurry. I’ll get to level 3 soon enough I’m sure.

Mercurial

What can I say. After having used it a bit this week without any particularly fancy operations, I prefer git so much more. Of course I’m also much more used to git, but I find that for a lot of the stuff where both have similar concepts I prefer to git way. Oh well, its just a tool. I’ll get around. Possibly I’ll try out the git mirror soon and see if that provides a more convenient environment for me.

curl

What impact did all this new protocol and network code stuff during my work days have on my curl activities?

I got inspired to fix both the chunked encoding parser and the cookie parser’s handling of max-age in libcurl.

What didn’t happen

I feel behind in the implementing-http2 department. I didn’t get my new work laptop yet.

Next weekDaniel's work place

More of the same, land more patches and figure out more code. Grab more smallish bugs others have filed and work on fixing them as more practice.

Also, there’s a HTTPbis meeting in Zürich on Wednesday to Friday that I won’t go to (I’ll spare you the explanation why) but I’ll try to participate remotely.