Last night I posted a new guide to triaging crash bugs.

Reports of crash bugs require a variety of skills to turn into useful bugs: knowing common support issues, tactfully interacting with bug reporters, reducing testcases, finding regression ranges, and knowing how to get each bug to the correct developer(s). I don't expect every triager to be a guru at all of these, so my guide incorporates a workflow that should allow triagers with differing skills to work together efficiently.

I'm going to work with the QA team to organize some "crash bug days" on IRC, but I'm interested in feedback before that as well.

Looks like Firefox 3.5's support for open video has already inspired:

• Dailymotion to add Ogg support,
• The Pirate Bay to create a new site, The Video Bay, which features Ogg-only video, and
• Wikimedia to accelerate the addition of videos to Wikipedia articles. (Articles that already have videos include Geyser and Flywheel.)

And Firefox 3.5 hasn't even been released yet. This Open Video thing might just work.

Most of you know that I recently moved to Princeton, New Jersey for the summer. As a native Californian who generally expects all other states to be completely inferior in every way, (not really) I didn't relish the thought of moving, to of all places, New Jersey. Yet my lack of relish was misplaced. While Princeton isn't exactly the most happening place in the world, it certainly looks like it will be a nice place to spend the summer. Instead of desperate urban hellscape that New Jersey's reputation would lead you to believe, Princeton is instead a nice quiet little town that really if anything, is too nice.

For those of you who don't believe, here's some photos of Princeton, you can see for yourselves: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39879310@N02/3667480710/in/set-72157620661940642/

As for why I'm here, I'm working at Fraser Research, which is a small little research firm redesigning the Internet. It's a project that has been going on for quite a few years now and is slowly getting nearer to completion. The design is interesting and may or may not ever see the light of day, but either way ends up being an nifty project to work on. Some pieces of the design are influenced by some of the work that was done at Bell Labs, as that's Sandy's old stomping grounds. Various pieces take into consideration things that usually are never thought about, so those parts end up being fairly fascinating. Overall, I think it should be a fun summer.

On another topic, due to an amusing set of circumstances other than myself, every last person currently at Fraser is British or an ex-Brit. The other three students are from Cambridge and Sandy and his wife both crossed the pond quite a bit back. It's a bit of an odd experience: I traveled to New Jersey and ended up surrounded by British people, which seems amusing enough to note. The bottom line seems to have been that my active vocabulary has shifted to use words like "bugger" much more often than I really expected.

For those of you who don't really care to go through the full stream of pictures I linked to above, here's a few links into the middle of the stream where you can see something more specific:
Pictures of the office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39879310@N02/3666676329/in/set-72157620661940642/
Pictures of the house: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39879310@N02/3666674929/in/set-72157620661940642/

Oh, also: Tomorrow I visit Manhattan. Perhaps more pictures then.

He Likes Shoes

The top crash signature for Firefox 3.5 Beta 99 and last Friday's Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is "js_MonitorLoopEdge". This signature indicates a crash within code generated by the TraceMonkey JIT compiler. Bug 499169 tracks this topcrash.

The scariest part is that we don't know whether the large number of crashes is due to a single bug or multiple bugs. (All crashes in JIT code appear with the same signature because the crash reporter does not understand the structure of the generated code.) We might not even know until we fix one bug and ship a new release candidate to a large number of users.

We have a list of 3000 URLs associated with js_MonitorLoopEdge crash reports. Bob Clary is going to try loading all 3000 pages. Damon Sicore has already identified one page that crashes reliably. While Andreas Gal debugs it, I'm going to try to make a reduced testcase.

These efforts should fix any crashes triggered by simply loading popular web pages, but might not catch other bugs that involve extensions or when interacting with web pages in a specific way.

If you've been hitting crashes in js_MonitorLoopEdge, please try to figure out how to reproduce them and share what information you can. Click the links in about:crashes to find out if your crashes are in this function. The sooner we figure this out, the sooner we can ship a stable Firefox 3.5.

Erin’s officially a high schooler! On Wednesday, she got an award for her work in the Drama Club:

Here are the happy parents!

Nice work Erin!

(with Mr. Sykes, the drama coach)

Then on Thursday, Erin walked for her promotion ceremony:

There was pretty music:

which caused a lot of hugging:

and smiles:

and posing:

Shortly after returning from their DC wedding, Mildred and Richard Loving were arrested at their home in Virginia. Their crime? He was white and she was not.

Virginia's courts found that since the Racial Integrity Act punished the two Lovings equally, it did not discriminate against any race. They also came up with justifications for the law, some of which seem bizarre by today's standards:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The Supreme Court of the United States, in contrast, could find no rational basis for the law. Instead, they described it as "designed to maintain White Supremacy", as it only divided whites from non-whites rather than trying to protect the "integrity" of every race.

That alone might have been enough to overturn Virginia's law, but the supremes went further. They held that "equal application does not immunize the statute" from the strict scrutiny applied to laws involving race. It would take much more than a supposed rational basis to justify a state law against interracial marriage.

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision concluded beautifully:

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.

Loving v. Virginia brought the end of anti-miscegenation laws, not only in Virginia, but throughout the Southern United States.

I am struck by how recently this decision came: June 12, 1967 was only 42 years ago. That I grew up considering multiracial couples normal is a testament to the success of the previous generation's civil rights movement.

In the spirit of the court's decision, I would like to wish all couples a happy Loving Day.

I'll save the jealousy for February.

Last Sunday I attended the 2009 Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA.

I’ve always wanted to go and Elaine and I were up in SF for the weekend, so I made it! I walked into the building above and assumed that was the whole thing. It was an enormous place with tons of exhibits.

The first one that caught my eye was a dude polishing a piece of glass for a telescope mirror:

I didn’t quite get how it worked, but it was fascinating to watch.

Next I saw a huge living sculpture of old plastic 2 liter bottles:

There was a line and pulley system that caused the ring of bottles to undulate in a wave.

There were many robot sculptures:

and scary vacuum guns!

These bike wheel LEDs were very cool! I almost bought the kit, but resisted… My birthday is coming up, hint hint…

I think this was part of The Long Now’s 10,000 year clock. I just thought it was cool:

Next I saw Tesla coils! They set up a board with hot dogs along a wire for the current to pass through:

Then there were more robots:

Some of the robots got all evil and started decapitations:

SOLDERING IS NOT A CRIME!

I was getting hungry by this point, so I stepped out of the building to get some food and discovered that there was 4x more Faire to cover:

This one was giving me the eye:

I want to try hanging a camera from a kite! Can I borrow your camera?

The robots were really being mean to children even…

Then they went all cyborg on this poor innocent:

This is the robot conversion factory:

The humans allowed to live had to pass through a life sized Mousetrap Game:

One hall was full of crafts and the witches who ply their trade:

and odes to their false idols:

ok, that’s a pretty cool ode - a yarn FSM!

And what would a trip to NoCal be without hippies and their dirty habits:

It’s sad what happened to some of the humans:

but I will admit to eating all the chocolate and vanilla ribbon off of the Hostess Cupcake car! Mmm, delicious!

Sheep lady’s twittering about seeing something stranger than her:

What could it be?

WOOP, der it is:

Some brave humans fought back the robot horde:

But in the end, who can fight robots?

Especially when they use child sympathizers:

I blame the XBoX generation for this madness.

But wait! There’s hope!

Mentos and Diet Coke save the day! And we all fly away:

and eat mushrooms:

and wear awesome coats:

Oh yeah, I ran into Andrew, Kim, and Site Con #3 (dammit, I can’t remember his name. Nice kid… )

More pix here:

haha, Oh man, if I'm not careful this is going to turn into an emo/angsty/angry journaling place. And that's no fun at all.

But I digress. So I hadn't received the replacement card from Chase yet, and it had been sent to my parent's place. They however, told me they couldn't find it and went to go look through piles of mail and stuff. I called the Chase people because they were sending me message after message asking me to activate my card or to call a number. So I called the number. The first guy I talked to said that perhaps my parents didn't know what the envelope looked like. He described it and told me to call my parents back and have them look. I did. They did. They didn't see it. I called back again to ask them what my options were. The girl I spoke with this time however, told me that per company policy, because I hadn't received my card and I wasn't a hundred percent sure where it was, they would have to label it as lost and then close the card out and reissue me another one. I understand the sort of security issues, but what I didn't understand, is that when I asked if I could go check again and give them a call back, the girl said no, we have to close your account rightthefucknow. And I was like, what? The other guy didn't mention that at ALL. What if I needed to get money from an ATM tomorrow or tonight? WHat was I supposed to do when they DEACTIVATED my current card and the branches were all closed? "Use a check" she said. "Or go in with your ID and your old card to withdraw cash." Lovely. Everyone is going to HATE me now if I go to check route. lol. But man. Right now? No chance to get cash at all? Lame. LAME. And she then asked if I wanted to answer the questions so she could reissue me a new card. Did I have an option, I asked. Not really, she replied. I was a very unhappy Jess. If I knew my card was going to get closed, I wouldn't have called back. Admittedly, I did not handle the situation in the most mature way (I'm sure I sounded like a brat, since I kept asking if she was sure I couldn't call them back, and conveniently kept not remembering various purchases, though really, if I hadn't had my computer I would have had no idea at all).

What irks me more is that a couple hours later, my father calls and tells me he found the goddamn envelope in a pile of bills. How do you not notice an envelope like that in a pile of bills?! Shouldn't you like, be looking at the bills? Especially within the past month. His excuse was that there were two piles and he wasn't sure when it got in there. What the hell. You'd think that it would be easier to notice, because most people look at their bills. Apparently not my dad. -.- I'm slightly annoyed at my family too.

Just to be sure, I called Chase back and asked if there was any chance I'd be able to cancel the new card to use the old card. Their answer was no. Sadface. I also asked them if it was really company policy to close out cards rtfn if you're the least bit unsure where it is. She said that they *advise* that customers do so, but said that I could always tell them I'd call right back after checking. So that second girl was completely wrong to say that my account had to be closed right then and there. And that prevented me from having a working card within a week, versus potentially ten calendar days (plus an extra day or three for mailing it down here). Arg. I was super frustrated when I found that out (or really, through the whole thing). But now I'm just kind of tired. And Chase isn't looking super great. Silly of me, to judge the whole company by this one instance with a telebanker (which, like most telephone support lines, aren't superduper). But meh. I'm tired.

I don't have any sort of claim to vast experience with reviewing papers or even a claim to producing useful scientific papers. Yet, I do have a claim to needing to take a break from a paper I'm reviewing to let my thoughts simmer down into something coherent. In the meantime, I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts on paper reviews. These thoughts aren't unique and it's unclear there's much of a contribution in stating them here, but perhaps a recasting of ideas in different words might inspire thought. (Or not, I keep re-reading this and it seems more rambling and disorganized than thought provoking. One day I'll learn to do drafts of things I write before hitting that submit button.)

Reviewing a scientific paper can be incredibly multifaceted. You can take a paper that demonstrates an amazing piece of technology that provides substantial improvements that the authors have data to back up and end up deciding it doesn't make a very good paper. The reasons why this is so can sometimes be hard to express. Especially to the poor disappointed authors who eventually receive your review and read it carefully for clues on how to vanquish whatever it was that turned you off from the research they've put so much time into.

Sometimes a paper's problem is that while one can take a piece of technology and construct an amazing system that works well in a lab, it can be highly unlikely that system will work well in real life. The thing is, you never know whether this is the problem. No one really has any clue what types of systems nicely transition from a lab to real-life. We all have ideas on which types of things will make the transition, but determining whether or not this is going to be a problem with a particular paper is not easy. Real life and reality have been frequently known to adopt sub-optimal solutions just as easily as they've been known to adopt triumphs of the research community. Completely accurate determinations as to which systems will succeed involve market forces, timing and a bunch of other factors not easily grasped, predicting the likelihood research turns to reality requires a type of foresight we haven't isolated. Since this problem is impossible, publication venues for papers generally base review criteria on the contribution a paper provides.

Generally, this means that in addition to creating a good system, one must bring something new to the table. The standard thought is that a paper that doesn't make some sort of contribution is just about unlikely to turn into reality as the work done before it. So even if the authors end up building a good system, if a very similar system has already been built, or the authors only solve a few simple issues along the way, we generally assume that solving those issues was not the limiting factor preventing that type of technology from finding it's way out into the world and making everyone's lives better. So when you read paper reviews or you end up reviewing papers, you hear a lot of discussion about what the contribution of each paper might be. The magnitude of the contribution, that is—the actual advancement in the paper—is the defining factor that usually determines a paper's ability to get published.

While this might seem to make sense, let me re-emphasize: The value of the paper is in it's contribution. No one cares what amazing things the system does if it doesn't also bring a contribution to the table. There are many papers which have laid out what should be really nice solutions to really pressing problems that never go anywhere because of niggling reasons reality cares about and academia doesn't. Unless a paper can show that they've overcome a specific problem with their system any future papers that build equivalent amazing systems aren't useful contributions to the field and will face rejection.

To make this all just a little more complex is the problem that no one really has a clear idea on what merits a good contribution. The type of contribution a paper might bring to the table is entirely ill-defined and often only begins to make sense through lots of practice. A contribution can sometimes simply be combining things together in a different way that uses some undefinable yet recognizable spark of innovation and/or insight to transform a series of most theoretical papers into a robust and deployable system. Another type of contribution is providing a fundamental building blocks that don't really yield any immediate benefit but will eventually (hopefully) be used by later systems to change the world. There are many other types of contributions. While all the types of contributions are important, everyone has slightly different ideas on how to reconcile the wide variety of contributions into a coherent scheme which dictates what papers are truly important and which are not.

It can be frustrating to end up giving poor marks to systems you think are good while giving good marks to systems you think are bad. But it's about the contribution, not about the system.

The end conclusion? Paper reviews are hit and miss. A lot of papers are easy to review and most people who read them agree on the outcome. Others however, are much less clear. Often I think, the more interesting papers tend to fall into the latter category.

I’ve been using this interface for the last few weeks, and it’s making me physically ill:

It boggles the mind…

We got up, had some good Mexican food, then hit the road to AZ. We stopped at too many “trading posts” where Erin was overwhelmed with the selection:

In the whole trip, the only place we ran into a little weather was outside of Flagstaff where we picked up a light dusting of snow:

which broke as we came back down to the desert:

and gave me my only half-decent sunset picture of the trip:

I got to shoot London Bridge at night, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time:

Day:

Night:

Erin got bored, so we experimented with light writing:

Sadly, this summoned a monster which ate us. the end.

Actually, I kicked its butt:

We drove around the lake back into California:

and made a very important pit stop in Julian, CA:

In the time it took to take this picture, and it being Easter Sunday, Mom’s actually locked the door and denied us crumble topped apple pie goodness! So we went across the street to the malt shop and got a lovely piece of pie!

Erin looks shocked because I got her drinking a glass of ichor. Yep, she’s a vampire. See how sparkly she is in all the pictures.

Nine days, lots of bug guts, and 3000 miles later, we made it back home!

Yep, pretty much sums the place up.

Man, it’s taking me forever to finish writing up this trip… I gotta stop taking so many pictures…

My sister Diardra and her hubby Doug live in Arvada, CO right next to Denver:

Diardra gave us directions to the 16th Street Mall

which is right by the capitol:

Erin Yelped and found us some awesome Gyros at Shish Kabob:

We used Yelp a ton on this trip. With the location based iphone app, it worked very well!

I’d done some research before the trip and found that one of my favorite brewers is very close to Diardra’s house, so we took one evening and headed to Oskar Blues’ restaurant in Lyons, CO.

They are one of the first craft brewers who can their stuff, but I wanted to taste it from the tap. So I did:

God Bless sampler trays… Lotsa of lovely flavors and no huge hangover the next day

The place is very festive:

The staff was super nice. I was disappointed that the can price was no cheaper than our local places in San Diego. I had dreams of filling the trunk with cases of Ten Fidy and ruling the SoCal market.

The next morning we were supposed to drive to Albuquerque but how do you get THAT close to Rock Mountain National Park and not go take some pictures… This pattern seemed to rule the trip and make for very late night arrivals…

It’s a very dangerous park:

filled with scary creatures:

As usual, I’m ignoring the “thin ice” signs, although I think I was safe this time:

See the pretty lake behind us? Use your imagination. Or a large blow dryer…

Again, it was so hard not to just sit in one place and watch the light change. I like this shot, but imagine it at sunset…

“Welcome to Bear Lake!”

Six hours later we were on the road to AAAAAAaaaalbuquerque. Erin shot some neat weather:

Then it got dark and I made her listen to REO Speewagon for 8 hours straight!

I think I only have one picture of her with a closed mouth. This isn’t it…

Bryan’s learning how to count:

We saw Wolverine and didn’t go out for sushi.

Erin’s school play opened last night and I got some nice shots:

Erin and her short Mom:

These days everyone asks you for a question and answer combination to recover a password online. These often stump me... it's fairly easy to find out where I went to elementary school or what my mother's maiden name is. Everytime I have to make a new one of these I'm constantly put into a bind.

The trickiest part of coming up with a good security question and answer pair is trying to meet two criteria that have an annoying tendency to conflict:

1. The answer to the question need to be something you'll remember or could easily find out.
   
2. The answer can't be something anyone else would know or could easily find out.

It turns out, there is something that matches this criteria quite well. That's relationships and—more particularly for those who have one to take advantage of—a sexual history.

Now this isn't for everyone, obviously some people's sexual history is rather well documented on Web 2.0 and/or rather well known by their friends, but even in some of these cases it can at least cause quite a bit of work for an attacker and can be used for low-security low-risk type of Q&A pairs. Your friends often can mess with you in other ways, logging onto your accounts usually isn't one of the ones they care to bother with. But hey, maybe your friends like messing with you. Whatever, it's up to you.

There's obviously one more concern I didn't quite document either that's brought up rather quickly when you get into relatioinships and sex. The question shouldn't be that embarrassing. Sometimes you end up talking about these over the phone to some poor customer service representative and something like "Who did I first go down on under the bleachers of my old high school that one time?" is probably not a question or an answer you really want to share with them. That's just too much information. (By the way, for those wondering: This is not an example of a valid question that matches my history.)

So what types of questions are appropriate?

Well, did you ever have a short lived relationship? Simply asking the question:
"Who came before Xander?" or "Who came after Yolanda?" where either Xander, Yoland or the person who matches the answer to those questions could be the person you were in that short lived relationship with awhile back that your friends probably (and maybe hopefully?) forgot about by now.

Or even: "Complete the series: Xander, Yolanda, ???, Zeta." For those with more, uhm, elaborate histories the series could even be people you only did a certain types of acts with if you don't want it to be a simple chronological listing of relationships or partners.

Things like "Who was my first kiss?" tend to come up in those stupid Internet quizzes a lot, so avoid those. Things like firsts are often interesting information and people not yourself are likely to remember them. The person you kissed is likely to remember whether or not they were your first, they may not remember whether they were your fourth or fifth... so questions like "Who was the third person I kissed?" is much more likely to be something you'll still be able to answer but other people will find much more difficult.

Now these still leave some room for social engineering, but doesn't everything?

So go meet someone new tonight, it's a security issue.

(In related news... security implications of blogging about how you chose your security questions online? Probably not the best thing to do, leave it to the professionals.)

I'm a little annoyed that I forgot to switch my grade options to pass no pass, as now I realize it is preventing me (in order to maintain a high GPA anyways) from getting to my sister graduation. Super bummed about that, because I really wanted to be there for her graduation, since you know, important thing right? >_>; I'm planning on talking to my TA about it, but I suspect that there is little way to go around that, since it's on webCT. And it's timed. And it starts at the exact same time as my sister's graduation. >_O

Arg.

My brother Aidan and his wife Renia live in Edwards, CO:

But let’s be real, the real reason for the trip is JACK!

Jack is our new nephew and I hadn’t met him before this. He’s a wonderful little dude with a great disposition. Looks like he’ll have our sense of humor too:

He’s very curious about funny looking faces:

and he knows how to be cool:

Let’s just face it, this is a cute kid…

I didn’t really get to do much concentrated photography on this trip since we were on the move so much, but I did shoot this one night and was pretty happy with it:

I’d have been happier if the netting wasn’t there, but it was cold and dark and I didn’t notice it until I had the tripod all set up.

Aidan, Renia, and Jack live in a beautiful area, very close to Vail. We walked around their neighborhood quite a bit:

and took a side trip up to Vail to see the village and commune with the residents:

This dude was WAY into me:

After 2p, you can ride the gondolas up the mountain for free, so we did:

and enjoyed the beautiful views:

Erin made some sort of Ice Princess Shrine…

Then we all went out and enjoyed some “waters”:

and green goop:

We had a great time getting to meet Jack, and reuniting with Aidan and Renia!

I'd like to see more software nudge people in the direction of GTD's low-stress productivity.

Quests

World of Warcraft organizes your quests according to where you discovered them, not according to where you can make progress on them. You can easily have your character in the right town but forget to advance one of your quests.

Since the game's quest organization is so unwieldy, it limits players to 25 quests. This forces some players to abandon quests with the intent of picking them up again later. But more importantly, "only write down the most important stuff" is the wrong message to send to our children.

Having to maintain your own lists outside of the game makes playing the game too much like work. If instead, the game subtly taught players how to work effectively, they might have more time to play.

Mail

Thunderbird's default set of color labels reflects priorities and reasons (important, work, personal, to do, later). These labels don't really help move messages out of the inbox.

Instead, Thunderbird should suggest contexts and non-action sets (home, office, errands, waiting for reply, reference).

Bookmarks

Firefox has the distinction of containing three dangerous stuff magnets: the bookmarks menu, the bookmarks toolbar, and session restore. I've seen several coworkers fall into the session restore trap, and it's not pretty: with hundreds of tabs, Firefox can take minutes to start.

I like Jono's suggestion of replacing bookmarks with features that speak more directly to use cases like to-read, sharing, and reference. Firefox 3's tags make reference possible but not much else.

To-read is the trickiest, since it can't really be organized. Separating to-read from sharing and reference is enough to keep those other categories clean, but to-read has to work if it's going to be used. Maybe Firefox can include hints about how to use to-read effectively, like having an "airplane" button you click to open all of them in tabs just before you disconnect from the tubes. Or maybe Firefox can keep those items ready for reading without the overhead of having them open in tabs all the time.

Everywhere

What other software could encourage people to discover contexts and the next-action principle? Where else can workflows be improved, so collection buckets are emptied naturally, and users don't need to make a special effort to "stay organized"?

I’d booked us into the motel just outside of Bryce. It turns out that it’s a huge complex of buildings, but easy to navigate and quite close to the park. We woke the next morning to a mysterious substance coating the car:

I haven’t owned an ice scraper since Illinois, but thanks to my genetic influence, Erin’s a genius and we used the room key cards to scrape the windows.

We had a 7-8 hr drive to Denver ahead of us, so we swore we’d just spend an hour or so in Bryce… how hard could that be?

Erin wanted to prove she’d been in snow:

I made the world’s smallest snowman:

Erin shot a lot of our pix from the passenger seat, so she wanted a clean window:

Bryce is full of scenic view of hoodoos. What’s a hoodoo?

Those are. The way I understand it, the area used to be 3000 ft sand dunes, then a sea settled above that. The minerals in the sea seeped down into the sand, inconsistently, forming columns of cement in the sand. As the land was pushed up and the water ran out, it carried away the loose sand, leaving these amazing columns of fractal sand and cement.

There was usually someone at any stop who would trade a group shot if you did one for them:

The variations on the formations were beautiful:

I need a week in just this one spot to do it justice with a camera:

Ok, you get the point - it’s beautiful and everyone should go see it!

Six hours later, we dragged ourselves out of the park to start the 7 hr drive to Edwards, CO to see my brother. We lost the light soon, but I’ll never forget the drive:

We got up the next morning, found some breakfast, then headed north on I-15 to Zion. On previous trips in this part of the country, I’d stuck to the interstate. The views were always awesome, but I wondered what getting off of the beaten path would yield. I was not disappointed!

Zion is a short trip off of I-15, just north on St. George, UT. We stopped at a little town called Springdale and looked at some rocks:

I decided then that I’d resist my rock collection obsession or else the car would be laden with 1000lbs as we headed over the Rockies later in the trip Erin got her Mom some earrings, and we headed into Zion proper. I didn’t know what to expect - I’d done some research for the trip, but I didn’t want to look at too many pictures before I saw it for myself.

There’s a $25 entry fee, then you leave your car at the visitor’s center and hop on a shuttle that runs the length of the park.

I’ll put a link in the blog to all of the pictures, but WOW! Just WOW! It was amazing:

Erin has the photography bug too. I got here here and I was using my iPhone - one of my favorite images from the trip:

I was drawn to the rocks mainly, while Erin loved the water features:

I got a new wide lens piece for my Lensbaby and tried it out here, but only got one or two interesting images:

I need to spend more time with it to learn how to get some part of the image in focus.

I can paste beautiful rock formation pictures in here all day:

I also got a 70-300 Canon IS lens to play with, and it didn’t disappoint:

Erin goes in search of more water pictures:

We encountered much wild life, such as the Thanksgiving bird:

We couldn’t find the stuffing gophers.

Where’s Erin?

I was going to have some deep comments about ageless stone and modern technology, but I remembered that I’m not that deep:

Finally found some phone signal!

It was getting late and we needed to get to Bryce for the next day, so we headed out through the tunnel on Rt. 12:

and found even more amazing sights:

SOMEone was getting a little tired of stopping every 5 minutes to take pix, but I have to say - this was one of the most amazing drives I have ever made. Beautiful!

Good bye Zion. I’ll be back, and I promise to spend more that a day….

It should have started a long time ago. In a way, it did. I've been trying to think about a topic for an honors thesis for International Studies for a while. I've been toying around with different ideas, and I finally got enough time, and off my lazy ass, and walked over to the international studies office, all the way in ERC.

So. Damn. Far.

But very very worth it. Julie, who's the advisor there, and the academic intern front desk lady were both super helpful in answering my questions, and I got to get my hands on the actual thesis (what the heck is the plural for thesis?) themselves to get an idea of what it looks like. Julie's advice was especially helpful for finding a professor to help mentor me for the two quarters I'll be working on the paper. It was relatively simple too.

Pick a topic. It's much easier to get a professor to hop on board (since basically, you're asking them to do more work for essentially free, and most professors have verrry little time) when you can outline your idea and present to them something you're truly passionate about pursuing. Which makes sense. Her advice was also to do a little bit of prelim research to find out if these sorts of topics have been done before - and if I could potentially tweak something small about it.

I'm just slightly worried because there's a component of it that I had mis-interpreted. It has to be 50% non-US content. International stuff, and not just looking at something foreign in America (like how food has changed with migration to America, etc). So I'm a little worried, because obviously, the best sort of research that can be done would be abroad, in the country of origin. And I'm nowhere near able to simply fly out and go "lalalaresearch" in a different country (as much as I'd want to). So the population I thought I could potentially do research on... well, I don't really think I can anymore. Unless I do something about foreign students in America, but I think that would also ding me on the international issue...

Sigh. >_<

Unfortunately, I'm interested in a whole cloud of things; it's difficult to pin it down. And the history sort of things I'm interested in looking at... well, I'm not sure how to turn those into a thesis.

But this is something I really want to go for. I'm willing to do all the work necessary (and hopefully enjoy it!) and really, I'm kind of looking forward to it. Picking a topic has always been the hardest part for me. I'm sure once I get this done with... well, then I can get onto the real work!

Alice suggested that instead of asking for the graph links to be maintained, I could instead file bugs for making the graph server not suck so much that we need the graph links. I filed four bugs, but I'm not one of the main consumers of performance graphs, so it would be good for actual developers and sheriffs to weigh in.

What use cases are important and not covered well by the (new) graph server, johnath's performance dashboard, and the automated posts to mozilla.dev.tree-management? What would help us notice and track down performance regressions quickly?

I believe Bugzilla's workflow can be improved using one of the central ideas from Getting Things Done, the "next action".

Currently, the answer to the question "what is needed to move this bug forward?" is scattered throughout each bug report. Sometimes it's a keyword, sometimes it's a review flag, and sometimes it's the third-to-last comment. It takes me maybe a minute per bug to determine whether I can help, and this wasted time adds up quickly.

Next-actions for bugs

I propose replacing the status field with a next action field, and the assignee field with a next action assignee field. The "next action" field answers the question "what is needed to move this bug forward":

All bugs Understand what's wrong with the code Write patch Automate test Review patch Approve patch Push patch to mozilla-central	Major refactorings Create tests for existing code Design new code Review design Test patch on try server Test patch against fuzzers Fix whatever caused the back-out
New features Provide ideas Experiment by writing extensions Experiment in a usability lab Consider security ramifications Consider accessibility concerns Decide whether it goes in Specify desired behavior in detail	Layout bugs Reduce testcase Find regression range Check against CSS spec Get crash stack Get hang profile Run under valgrind Debug with gdb

Organizing actions by context lets me remember projects when I can move them forward, rather than when they only increase my anxiety. This may be even more important in a community system: who you are is a key context determining whether you can do something.

With a next-action field, it would be easier to find places to put my skills to good use:

• Did Brendan hope to have this patch fuzzed?
• What bugs are waiting for input from the security team?
• What bugs could benefit from extension-space experimentation?

With the addition of a next-action-assignee field, I'd also be able to do searches like:

• What have I been asked to do in Bugzilla?
• What blockers are stuck on me?
• What bugs need someone to volunteer to make a reduced testcase?

Simplifying Bugzilla

I'm asking for new fields, but I think this will actually make Bugzilla less complicated. The "next action" field and its assignee would replace:

• The current "status" field, which is mostly useless because each open state (unconfirmed / new / reopened / assigned) can mean so many different things.
• The current "assignee" field, which is misleading when the next action required is anything other than "write a patch" or "check it in".
• Eleven keywords: uiwanted, qawanted, helpwanted, stackwanted, icon, testtracker, crashreportid, regressionwindow-wanted, testcase-wanted, checkin-needed, push-needed.
• Status whiteboard markers like "[needs review gavin]" and "DUPEME".
• Many comments that are only temporarily meaningful.

It would also make our process more transparent: there is always a first-level answer to "Why hasn't this bug been fixed yet?"