Major Update

Well folks, I have quite a few little points to mention today. I haven't posted in over a week now because I didn't have enough to talk about. I don't like to write a small blurb every day. I prefer to wait until I have something substantial to write about. With everything that has gone on the last week or so, I think I can throw them all together into one blog post. A sort of mystery stew of sorts.

First off, bug triaging. I have been spending a lot of my time triaging unconfirmed bugs for the Firefox Password Manager. I have been able to get the query of bugs down from 38 to 23 and I expect to drop that number to at least 13 by next week. By my math, the unconfirmed password manager bugs are down 39% after the first week and should drop by 43% by next week. These are very good numbers from where I sit.

Next at bat, Major Update. So Major Update, what is it? Well this is where we offer an update to users running an older version of Firefox to the latest version of Firefox. In this case, for users running Firefox 1.5 to be updated to Firefox 2.0.0.4. So Major Update was supposed to get pushed out last week, but there was a little snag with the CJKT (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) locales regarding default homepage and default search engine. Needless to say, the snag has been pretty much tested to death and we are pretty satisfied with the results. We are pretty happy with the product and are confident it will be successful when it is released into the wild soon.

The next major event of the week is the Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 release. There are quite a few improvements and the developers have been working long, hard hours to get it to where it is today. I think everyone is pretty happy with the product as it is today. There is still much work to be done, but for an Alpha, things are looking pretty good. I have been using A6 for a while now and have only run into a couple minor hitches, which were fixed fairly quickly after reporting them. Kudos developers.

On a lighter note, last Friday was the intern hootenanny. There is not much that CAN be said about this event. It was a lot of fun and most of the interns showed up. We talked. We laughed. We played catchphrase. The party got shutdown at 10:30 by the man, so we moved it to the hot tub. Suffice it to say, we had a good time. It was a good icebreaker event for all the interns. I believe that Andrew Stein, marketing intern extraordinaire, took some excellent pictures. If you ask him nicely, he may share them with you.

The final event of the last few days was my aerial tour of the bay area. With Preed piloting and Alex Buchanan along for the ride, we took to the skies over the bay. This was originally supposed to be an aerial tour of San Francisco. Unfortunately, the cloud cover over the west end of the bay was too thick. If we had tried to go to San Francisco, we wouldn't have seen anything. So we opted for a tour of the east bay area (Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, Livermore, San Jose). Even though I was a little down about not seeing San Francisco, I was not disappointed at all. It was still a nice trip. I was able to snap quite a few pictures, which I added to the flickr set from the time Reed went flying with Preed. You may notice that I renamed the "Preed & Reed's Flight Tour of Pismo Beech" to "Bay Area Aerial View". Since all the photos are pretty much the same area, it made sense for me to just collaborate them into a single set.

Oh, and let me tell you about "engine out procedures". This is basically where one forces the nose of the plane to drop taking the plane with it on a quick decent of a few hundred feet in a few seconds before taking control of the plane back and leveling it off. While this scared the crap out of me, it was a lot of fun. I couldn't put it any more eloquently as Preed: "it is like being on a roller coaster without any of the safety devices." Awesome Preed...just awesome. Hopefully we can get out to do an aerial tour of San Francisco soon. Maybe we will get out and do an aerial sunset tour of the coast as well. If so, expect many more photos to come.

Anyway, that is all for now.

Chimo!