escapewindow

Today we moved mobile to mobile/xul in mozilla-central, in preparation for landing the native UI code in mobile/android.
Mozilla-aurora, mozilla-beta, and mozilla-release are currently unaffected.

NOTE: mobile/android has not yet landed. The builds are switched over and will need to be hidden. I'm doing that as I see them, but would appreciate any help in this matter.

The mobile team has said that mobile/android is at least a few days away from landing.

Attention project branch owners! If you have Android builds on your project branch:

1. You will need to merge from mozilla-central for the 'android-xul' builds to go green.
2. The 'android' builds will burn until mobile/android lands and you re-merge from mozilla-central. These builds need to be hidden.

Attention trychooser users! You probably want the 'android-xul' platform. The mozconfig situation will be a little convoluted for now, so it would be best to land a mozconfig-extra-android-xul at the top of your push to make sure you get the right settings.

Attention l10n users! Due to the move of mobile/locales, we have broken mobile localization on mozilla-central. We will be fixing this and finding a single locale repack solution ASAP.

See also:

bug 701833 - hg move mobile to mobile/xul
bug 701864 - support mobile builds+repacks out of mobile/, mobile/xul/, and mobile/android/

[Endeavor -> Baltra airport]

I woke early Saturday, since I needed to put my checked luggage outside the door of my cabin before breakfast. And since the crew had two hours between our vacating our cabins and the next week's passengers arriving to change the sheets. I decided to give them a bit more time.

The ship has a two week agenda. We saw the south and east islands; the next week's group would see the young, western islands. Lava. Isabela and Fernandina. Flightless cormorants. Between this and the dry/wet season split, I feel like I've seen about a quarter of what there is to see, and I didn't see everything this time around, either.

They played Lindblad Expedition videos as we waited to leave after breakfast... and I want to go on them all. The Antarctic, yes. Seeing the polar bear pressing its face against the ship's porthole to look inside (and hearing Birgit talk about that, the other night) definitely whetted my appetite for the Arctic, before it's gone. The Amazon seemed fun. Baja is close but similarly matches desert and ocean. We didn't get to the Costa Rica portion; it was time to depart.

Our last zodiac ride was a bit sad. I gave Gaby a hug at the dock; all the naturalists were great but I had been with her for some of the most memorable walks.

gaby


a blurry gaby, fernando, aura, celso


sofia, juan carlos, aura

I spotted the last two Giftmas items I needed for the nieces -- bought 'em and then headed into the airport, where there was free wifi. Ahhhh.

[Guayaquil]

Back at Guayaquil, where we were all a bit frazzled. I wanted to go on the city tour despite only having an hour between arriving at the hotel and leaving -- essentially only a half hour in the hotel room to wash up and go out again.

I did enjoy it though, the boardwalk and the colorful old town. Tempered by the sight of malnourished kids trying to sell candy and the knowledge that hailing a taxi on the street was asking to get robbed.

It was nice traveling with only my point and shoot and iPhone camera, after lugging two DSLRs around all week.

Got back, worked out, showered. Headed down to the bar, where many of us were gathered before dinner; it was like the ship, except no soothing announcement from Cindy.

I ate with the nineteen -- those who had gone on the Machu Picchu extension trip before the Galapagos cruise. Now I'm wondering why I hadn't gone, as well; it sounded fun and the group was very tight. I think I was worried about needing more clothes and more camera gear, which was valid. I think limiting myself on this first solo trip might have been good as well.

The prawns were frickin HUGE and seriously tasty.

Afterwards I joined Kristie and Maureen back at the bar and got tipsy on pricy booze and stayed up past my bedtime. It was fun though.

[JFK]

The smooth travels so far? GYE -> JFK not so much.

• Getting called in to have my luggage opened + inspected at GYE, passing by drug sniffing dogs; not being able to communicate well with the Spanish-speaking security staff;
• the screaming babies on the plane all the way to JFK, and I mean screaming. all. the. way;
• noticing that the airline had failed to give me a US customs form after waiting in line, forcing me to double back, find a form, fill it out, and wait in line again;
• US customs stopping me to check my bags again at JFK

all added up to a relieved Aki once I was at my hotel shortly after 11pm.

Staying in Manhattan for a day seems odd, especially after a trip to the Galápagos. I think it was a good end to my vacation, though. A full day to myself, guided only by my iPhone, Yelp, and vague "hm, I want to [eat|see|do] ____".

• a bowl of ramen;
• Adorama. I got to B&H just when they closed, but that's definitely on my list for next time;
• stopped by a Barnes&Noble to pick up The Beak of the Finch, which Alan was trying to read on the plane. It's a fascinating read so far, and I'm only a few chapters in. Much better/more thorough than the Daphne Major documentary we watched, though the documentary whetted my appetite, surely;
• stopped by Guitar Center on a whim;
• a slice of New York pizza;
• Zuccotti Park and #ows;
• a quick walk by the 9/11 tribute grounds;
• pastrami sammich;
• just a general feel for the city that you can only get by walking through it. Bus tours have a different feel.

Google maps tells me a direct route from my hotel to Zuccotti Park was ~4miles. I'm guessing I walked 9-10 miles that day.

I definitely want to spend more time there at some point.

[JFK -> SFO]

The flight home was uneventful. I'm still not all unpacked, nearly a week later.

I'm so glad I brought:

• my cotton carrier; this allowed me to lug around my 100-400mm with ease.
• both my dslrs, though I wish I had brought my 24-105mm instead of my 17-40mm, given how often I was photographing at the 40mm end of that lens. I was using my 7D + 100-400mm between 80-90% of the time. still, being able to switch from telephoto to wide angle near instantaneously helped me capture a lot of shots I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
• my point and shoot and underwater housing were useful, though other passengers were getting better results with smaller cheaper underwater cameras.

The bulk of my camera accessories (filters, mini tripod, 1.4x extender) were all unused. Speed and not having to fiddle with things are so important when you have limited time on the islands, and when you're traveling with a group and need to keep up.

... So many great memories. I'd recommend this trip in a second. Already thinking about where I want to go next.

We woke early, again, to hike to the top of Bartolomé Islet, to see and photograph the iconic Galápagos view.

The snorkeling off the beach of Bartolomé might have been the best of the entire trip. A couple penguins jumped in the water with us, and I saw 3 different white tip reef sharks, one almost close enough to touch.

fish


shark

I'm still very much a bad underwater photographer, but had fun doing it. Some of the others are getting some great shots underwater. I think I'd throw all mine out if they came out like that on land.

After lunch, on the way to Sombrero Chino, we passed by an island with an old crater, and in passing caught a maybe 30 second glimpse of flamingos in the lagoon inside that crater. I managed to get a few not-too-bad-for-being-very-distant shots. It's kind of awesome how they were able to tell us practically to the minute when that view would appear.

I missed the 2nd round of snorkeling, but caught the zodiac ride near sunset, where we saw sea lions playing near the shore. We circled several times, waiting for penguins, but nothing. As it grew dark and we prepared to turn around, a penguin swam up to the lava rocks; we converged; it climbed up and we all were taking a ton of pictures. Then, as we watched, a bunch more penguins swam up and congregated on the rocks. Very, very special.

I cranked the ISO on these last two, as it got dark, so they look brighter than the earlier ones... Can you tell I don't do a lot of editing?

Dinner was an outdoor barbeque where Cindy, our expedition leader, told us we needed to visit South Georgia... Falklands, South Georgia, and the Antarctic peninsula is a full 3 weeks. "Galapagos on steroids" is her description of it.

A bunch more people were out looking for activity in the water; word spreads fast. Wasn't quite the same; headed inside and made the mistake of checking some work email.

(slideshow)

We went ashore at Puerto Ayora, the economic hub of the islands, where we went to the Charles Darwin Research Station to see their tortoise breeding program. So many cute tortoises!

There are tortoise species specific to each island, evolved to match the food supply. At the CDRS they breed the tortoises and bring them back to each island when they're old enough to survive on their own.

We got to see Lonesome George, who may be the last Pinta tortoise.

They also had some Galápagos land iguanas.

A few of the naturalists were able to visit their families, which was good to see. The walk to town was fun; I picked up some presents for the family. Then we took a bus to the highlands.

The sugar cane mill was a nice diversion. I quite enjoyed lunch at a highlands restaurant called Altair. They had an owl nesting in a building in their backyard; when I went to photograph it, everyone handed me their camera to take a picture. That was fun, though I learned I don't have a clue how to navigate around manual mode on a Nikon.

The pit craters weren't particularly interesting to me, since I'm not a huge botanist, and the photo opportunities were slim. The walk through the tortoise migratory route was pretty amazing, though, since there were dozens of tortoises, in the wild, along the way.

During that walk we also walked into a lava tube. We also spotted a rare vermillion flycatcher.

We picked up some high schoolers who had won a school contest, and get to ride with us on the ship. They had never been on a boat and have never snorkeled; I learned second hand that most of the locals aren't allowed into most of the national park areas at all (97% of the islands). I do think that showing them what they're preserving will help local conservation efforts.

(slideshow)

[Dawn]

It's near impossible to drag me out of bed to check email and get to work. Yesterday I woke at 4:30 to fly to the Galápagos, and today I woke at 5:50 to see the dawn across the ocean. I think morning-person-ness is all in the context.

Speaking of, in the I'm-a-bit-surprised-but-it-makes-sense-really-department: at the equator, sunrise is a few minutes off of 6am; sunset is a few minutes off of 6pm, and when it sets it sets fast. And it's like that year-round. If you're looking to bask in hours and hours of sunlight, you're better off going toward the poles during the summer.

(It was overcast and there was no magnificent sunrise to be seen; I went back to bed.)

((My writing style is choppy & mixed tense & inconsistent; this is probably because I wrote the bulk of this on the ship, edited, and added more at home when prepping pictures.))

[Española]

Española is the oldest of the Galápagos islands, which are built from a volcanic hotspot in the northwest and slowly travel southeast via tectonic movement. The southeast currents hammer the island, which is slowly dying; when it's eroded below sea level, it will be gone forever.

Española is the breeding/nesting ground for albatrosses, blue-footed boobies, and sea lions.

[Deep water snorkeling]

Breakfast, then snorkel gear (L fits me for a shorty wetsuit) then deep water snorkeling. Cindy, our expedition leader, made this sound a bit daunting. (If you weren't sure about anything, you should practice off the beach, since otherwise you might be sitting in the Zodiac the whole time and ruining things for your buddy.)

But really, it was easy and fine and felt great going in -- water a bit cold but not too bad, especially with the wetsuit.

I was predictably awful with my unfamiliar underwater camera. I had some ideas of how to improve it the next time, and considered leaving it behind the next time too.

Sofia, the naturalist for the first snorkel group, swam with a real underwater video camera. She followed schools of fish closely and was fun to watch; very graceful in the water. Seems like a fun job :)

I didn't know it at the time, but the snorkeling would only get better from here.

I had a chance to go back to the beach afterwards, but I chose to shower and dress in a bit more of a relaxed fashion.

lobster carapace

[Punta Suarez]

This was a dry landing, and a 1.5-2mi hike over rocky terrain. It wasn't so hard, but a lot of the others had trouble with it or took the short route.

I loved it.

It was sea lion pup season; lots of babies and pregnant mothers.

It was also baby albatross season. Blue footed boobies, endemic mockingbirds, a Galapagos hawk, crabs, marine iguanas, frigate birds, albatrosses, yellow warblers.

We saw an albatross mating dance.

We saw a pair of blue footed boobies nesting a pebble, which they will do if they've found a good nesting site but don't have an egg yet.

(I really love this shot)

We saw a blowhole -- a narrow gap between rocks that the surf shot into and up with a burst of spray, maybe 20, 30 feet in the air.

One of the other travelers had a 500mm lens, trying to get shots of birds on the wing, but I think I held my own with my 100-400mm.

Sea lions and blue footed boobies were directly on the path a lot of the way. I kind of want to see the wet season now, but the dry season is great for fish and birds.

After dinner one of the naturalists, Fernando, talked about how to take better pictures. I knew most of it but it was good for a review, and a lot of people asked me for help.

(slideshow; lots more pics)

I arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, early on Friday morning.

Already some of my biggest worries were over:

• the transfer between United and LAN Ecuador at JFK went fairly smooth, and the 4.5 hour layover was pleasant ;
• Dexter season 5 on my iPhone made the flights go by quickly, and my New Trent battery would have lasted me for significantly longer than my 20+ hours traveling;
• on a related note, I managed to live without having packed any real books [!];
• I had no issues with customs or luggage;
• I wasn't the only one on the flight from JFK, the expedition met us after customs, and the hotel shuttle was quick and comfy;
• I met a few fellow travelers to the Galápagos, and while they were all above retirement age, most of them were quite friendly.

This was my very first time south of the equator. I managed to resist spending the whole day flushing the toilet and watching which way the water drained.

My Spanish is awful and practically nonexistent.

I napped quite a while; I thought I'd snooze for an hour or two but ended up dozing off from 9am-1pm.

I had the opportunity to wander around a foreign city, but I was more interested in washing off travel grime and losing some of the stress and sleep debt accumulated previously.

Guayaquil, from my hotel room

Gym + shower + a late lunch, at an Ecuadorian Japanese restaurant, which I don't particularly recommend trying. Rugby on television was amusing and bemusing; lateral lateral run tackle lateral run tackle lateral run tackle turnover lateral run grab kick, all in about the time it takes to read this sentence. Some Al Jazeera English, then I dozed off again from about 6pm til about 4:30am, an hour fifteen before my wakeup call.

with full logging

Why so many log files?

This is the MultiFileLogger, which creates a log file per log level. We could just as easily default to the SimpleFileLogger or write a new class, e.g. a MultiNetworkLogger.

deathduck:~/src/clean/mozharness [17:39:57] (default)
608$ ls -l logs
total 24
drwxr-xr-x   8 asasaki  staff   272B Oct 11 17:18 ./
drwxr-xr-x  15 asasaki  staff   510B Oct 11 17:18 ../
-rw-r--r--   1 asasaki  staff     0B Oct 11 17:18 log_critical.log
-rw-r--r--   1 asasaki  staff     0B Oct 11 17:18 log_error.log
-rw-r--r--   1 asasaki  staff     0B Oct 11 17:18 log_fatal.log
-rw-r--r--   1 asasaki  staff   5.1K Oct 11 17:18 log_info.log
-rw-r--r--   1 asasaki  staff   3.6K Oct 11 17:18 log_raw.log
-rw-r--r--   1 asasaki  staff     0B Oct 11 17:18 log_warning.log

Because each log file is a superset of all levels above it, you can easily glance at the warning or error log file and determine whether the script detected any warnings or errors.
(debug > info > warning > error > critical > fatal, where '>' means is-a-superset-of)

These are all standard logging module levels except for FATAL, which I added to indicate a critical error that should also exit the script.

What do Mozharness logs look like?

Here's a snippet from running scripts/configtest.py (without arguments):

17:18:00     INFO - Testing /src/clean/mozharness/scripts/../configs/deb_repos/staging_release_mozilla-release.py.
17:18:00     INFO - Good.
17:18:00     INFO - Testing /src/clean/mozharness/scripts/../configs/test/test.py.
17:18:00     INFO - Good.
17:18:00     INFO - 5 of 5 python config files were good.
17:18:00     INFO - #####
17:18:00     INFO - ##### ConfigTest summary:
17:18:00     INFO - #####
17:18:00     INFO - 17 of 17 json config files were good.
17:18:00     INFO - 5 of 5 python config files were good.

The timestamp and log level are prepended to most log files and the console output. By default, we also create a raw log without that information, which is potentially more scrape-friendly.

How does Mozharness detect errors?

The core error detection is through the ShellMixin.run_command error_list.

Generic error lists are defined in errors.py. These are ordered lists of substrings and/or regular expressions, which, if matched against a log line, determines its log level. When we hit a match, we exit the loop.

Two very important features I want to add here:

1. context lines:

   If we set 'context_lines': (10, 3), I want ten lines up and three lines down to also be marked at this log level.
   This requires buffering lines before outputting to the log file and/or console.

   This allows for more useful contents in the error log. Rather than only highlighting, say, make: *** [all] Error 2, you can also include some lines of context above and/or below that line.

2. explanations, to translate obscure error messages into "this probably means [insert human readable message here]". More here.

Mozharness home

If you only make it to one Open Studios stop a year, make it 1890 Bryant (SF, weekend 1).

I only made it to one Open Studios stop this weekend, and saw:

• Gina Tecson - night photo paintings of sf
• Michelle Jader - translucent layered figures a la analog animation
• Michael Kerbow - crowded surreal cityscapes (blog)
• Charles H Stinson - charicature-esque brass sculpture

I missed Peggy Gyulai for the second time, but it looks like she has an open exhibition at 201 California that I might check out later.

I landed mozharness 0.4 today (2091ae4c21ec).

Some notable points:

• documentation;
• python virtualenv creation;
• new MercurialVCS and sourcetool, based on lib/python/util/hg and hgtool (bug 650882);
• more mixins to avoid duplication of code;
• other than bug 690911, mozharness unit tests now pass on windows and linux.

These changes are largely behind the scenes.
However, work is already under way on talosrunner (bug 640890 and bug 650887); more on that in a bit.

(What is mozharness?)

Firefox 6.0b2 is the first combined release: Firefox desktop and Firefox for Mobile running in the same automation, run by the same release engineer.

I remember talking about this with John O'Duinn in pie-in-the-sky brainstorming sessions back in Building K a few years ago, back before Fennec 1.0. It seemed so far away, then. It's a bit surreal seeing it run now.

A large part of the team chipped in on this one, but Rail did most of the heavy lifting. Thank you Rail!