I love deserts.  Maybe it’s because I grew up in a swamp.  Maybe it’s because of the rock, the hard-edged faces, the difficulty of the landscape.  I think it’s because of the absolute silence in the desert.  It is perfectly quiet, perfectly still.  Not all the time, but most of the time.  I am especially drawn to deserts that are somehow knocked out of their element.  Last time I saw this was when I watched the remnants of hurricane Ivan dump the amount of water Big Bend would get in ten years in two days.  So you can imagine my delight when I found that the Mojave desert had been hit by this latest winter storm.

Anytime something like this happens in a desert, all sorts of strange things start happening.  Different plants will bloom, odd animals will suddenly appear.  So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled across the extremely rare Andean Snow Beast!

RAAAAAAAAAAR!

I met a guy tonight that’s spent a bunch of money (more than I’ve ever spent on a new car) on his dream.  His dream? To combat apathy and empower people.  Pretty cool, eh?

I’ve always had this wild distrust of money, like it’s some unbroken horse that’s going to throw you the moment it gets a chance.  Maybe it’s from the way I grew up, I don’t know.  But, as I’ve spent the last several years in different businesses, I’ve come to see money as just another tool to get you where you want to go.  Nothing scary, just practical, like a pair of channel locks.  Not good for everything, but when you need it, nothing else will do.

My dream is not unlike his.  To spin a story that axes the frozen sea inside all of us (thank Kafka for that line).  But, I’ve never really brought all my talents and tools to bear on that problem.  I’ve done part of it here, part of it there.  I do some of it every single day.

This really came up because of another email I got this week from a domain name registering service.  You know, those people that you pay to get things like www.isntthiscool.com or whateveryouwant.org.  About ten years ago, I registered cmtalbert.com.  In ten years, I’ve never done a thing with it.  Ten years.  It was quite a blast from the past.  I remember registering for it and spending a few minutes trying to imagine what I’d be doing in 2008.

I didn’t think I’d be working for an incredible Open Source movement, living right above the Pacific Ocean, and still not have a published credit to my name.

But I think the time has come to really look at this entire enterprise the way I’d approach something at work.  Let’s spend money where it helps, let’s do what it takes, and climb after my dreams without keeping one hand on the rope at all times.

I would normally write this sort of thing in a journal, and all four of my regular readers (thank you! ) would  never see it.  But, this time, I thought it made sense to pledge myself to this publicly.

What would you spend a ton of money on if you had to?  What is it you want to do in your heart of hearts?

I think this was a great conference.  Thanks to the folks from Mozilla Europe for organizing it.  I’ll have more to say about it later, but I wanted to dash down a few thoughts before running off into the internet free lands for vacation.  We had an amazing audience of people that came together.  The presentations were well attended, interesting and the audience had no qualms about getting involved and asking good questions.  It makes me happy when I get asked hard questions; it means I’m not just talking to the wall on the other side of the room.

We discussed quite a few things regarding test development.  There is a lot of interest in the Mozmill tool, as you might imagine.  Everything from the Mozilla Messaging team beating down the door to use it, to other folks interested to use it for their own testing of extensions and what not.  I have another blog post I want to write about that, so I’m not going to talk about it here.  Beyond that, we also talked about some other very interesting things:

• You don’t need a debug build to build with tests.  I don’t know when this changed and why our documentation hasn’t kept up, but –enable-tests is enough to build a build that will have Mochitests enabled.  However, it does not appear to run reftests if you build a release build this way.  Looking into that, and I have it on my list to change MDC. (Thanks Serge!)
• We talked about some serious printing tests.  We might be able to get some folks to volunteer some time to help with creating them once we have a plan in place for how to do this.
• Bernd and I talked about DOM Level 2 tests.  Too many of these are currently not enabled.  We need to look into getting these enabled on the tinderbox builds.
• It might be useful for developers to have a set of dedicated machines with debug environments that are the same structure as the tinderbox test machines.  These would be used to debug those failures that only occur on the tboxen.  I’ll float that idea around more formally when I get back.
• There is a patch that Jonathan (from SVG & Joost, didn’t catch his last name) has which will enable mochitests to run on IE.  I think this could be a big step to broadening our test framework to help increase interoperability across the web.  From talking to him, it sounded like several of the changes he made are the changes I am making to improve running mochitests on XULRunner applications (looking at you, Fennec).  So, he’s going to get me the patch and we’ll go from there. As you can imagine we also thought about how to get them to run on Webkit, he thinks he has an idea of how to do that too.
• I met a new contributor from France who’s interested in getting involved with QA.  We talked at length about ways to get started, things he found to be barriers to entry, and I tried to remove all those.  I think that he’ll start out by helping us translate some of the QMO documentation once our new site is ready.
• I learned also that you do in fact need to build with –enable-tests in order for Reftest to work.  I didn’t know that until someone asked us the question and I had a look at the makefile.

I did a new talk on Automated testing in general, and came up with an image of how to think about all our testing frameworks at Mozilla and how to understand where each one fits in relation to the others.  I’ll share that out, but it’s a blog post on its own.  Martijn did a great job with presenting Reftests and his “How to Reduce a Website to a Testcase” talk.  I also re-presented Shawn Wilsher’s Toronto Dev Day slides on Mochitests.  I think those are the best presentation to date on Mochitests, and they had an added benefit of the last slide stating “if you have any questions, email Shawn Wilsher”. 

I’m off for a week, hanging out in Eastern Europe and Germany.  I’ll see you on the happy internet when I get back.  This laptop is closing in 5-4-3-2-1 <poof>.

Yesterday was my first day in Spain.  I walked through the Barri Gotic and Catalunya Square, and was completely lost from about 5PM to 7PM when I finally found my way to Sagrada Familia.  I have never been in a big city where I’ve seen so many people laughing.  Everywhere I looked, people laughing, people cutting up, people having a good time.  I don’t know why, I don’t speak enough Spanish to understand anything, so as far as I can tell, it’s just another Friday night in Barcelona.

What a great city.

There was some response to my earlier post asking for volunteers to help with the QA Companion tool.  I’ve started to get the tools together that we’ll need in order to start working on this add-on.  There will be a project page on the up-coming final release of the quality.mozilla.org (QMO) site.  But for those of us already bristling with ideas on how to make the tool better, just check out our little Design Center.

If you want to find the code, build it, and see what’s up there, you’ll enjoy taking a look at the new QA Companion Hacking Guide.

As we get started, there will be other posts concerning design decisions and design quandries that we want feedback on.  But in the meantime, feel free to put your ideas on the lists in the Design Center page.

Calling all Add-On developers and would-be-Add-On developers!  The QA Companion Add-On could use your help!

Zach Lipton and Ben Hsieh created the QA Companion Add-On.  This is an extension that sits in a little window outside Firefox or Thunderbird and helps you to run litmus tests against the application.  It has helped hundreds of people when testing Firefox, and has become a central part of our QA Test Day events.

Both Zach and Ben are students and they’re busy with school, so maintaining the Add-On has fallen to me.  I can keep up with the maintenance on this, but that’s really not enough.  The QA Companion has great potential, lots of people have thought about ways to do more interesting mash-ups with it, including integrating some of the Nightly Tester Tool Functionality, integrating Mozmill automation UI etc. If we’re really going to take this little tool to the next level, then I can’t do it all by myself.

I’m asking for volunteers.  If you’ve always wanted to work on an Add-On, but it seemed like too big of an undertaking, this is a great opportunity.  The base code is already written, and it’s all pretty straightforward.  I’ll help you understand its ins and outs and will help you with the planning, new features, bug fixes, and ongoing maintenance.  Together, we can design a new direction for the tool and make it a really useful item for all the testers out there in Mozilla Land.

So often, getting involved with the Mozilla Project is like a scary leap into the dark water of the deep end of a pool.  This time, with a solid base of code, an installed base of users, and a willing mentor, you have a unique opportunity to step into the shallow end, and get deeper as you ramp up your skills.
Reply to this thread if you’re interested.  I look forward to working with you.  I’m on IRC as ctalbert (irc.mozilla.org, channel #qa).

In uncertain two-year-old shuffles, my niece followed my sister through the Super Wal-Mart where they were buying groceries.  When they came to the checkout-line, my niece turned to the woman in line behind them and said, “My house is broken.  Is your house broken?”  The woman behind them said no, her house was fine.  Then she offered to buy my sister’s groceries as my sister endeavored to explain that they didn’t need help and were living with her parents until their house could be fixed.  However, the woman working the register overheard and started crying as she was not so lucky.

There are snaking lines where charities are giving out free rice, shoes, bottled water.  Standing in one such line this morning, my mom wondered what kind of a toll all this will have on my nephew, who at six is experiencing the aftermath of his second major hurricane.  I reminded my mom that this was her second major hurricane, and she’s lived in the area for forty years.

Insurance adjustors squirm through the wreckage like snakes in polo shirts with oily grins and slippery handshakes.  I hear story after story of people being refused coverage.  One of them tried to tell my friend’s parents that they could not cover the crack in the foundation of the house because there is no way that it could be hurricane damage.  Hmm…let’s do some math.  Six feet of water in a fifteen hundred square foot house…that’s 9000 cubic feet of water, at 62 pounds per cubic foot, we have 558,000 pounds of water.  So, um, yeah, that crack was definitely caused by the furniture they had in the house.

My sister’s been no luckier.  Her insurance group, Farmer’s insurance is trying to weasel out of paying anything for their house, which had about seven feet of water covering the first floor.  They had just bought that house a few months ago, and finished the downstairs renovations in August, so this is especially disheartening.  They have hurricane coverage which in their policy is supposed to cover storm surge.  That battle is ongoing, and I think every single resident of Bridge City is fighting it.

Many people are living in mobile homes on their driveways.  My mom has heard that only ten percent of homes in Bridge City didn’t get inundated by the rising waters from the surge.  There are rumors that the entire south eastern subdivision of town, the part of town closest to the marshlands, will be condemned and bulldozed.  Every house has been turned inside-out; sheetrock, furniture, carpet, paneling, pictures, clothes, cabinets are piled in front yards.  The air reeks of mildew and mold.  At least one school is mired in three feet of black sludge – a combination of tar, heavy metals, and mud.

And so the stories keep rolling in.  Everybody down there is struggling to get by, to figure out what to do next.  What can we do?  We can call insurance companies urging them to act responsibly.  Farmer’s number is: 1-800-435-7764.  But at the end of the day, I still want to throw tools, water, food, and clothes into the back of my truck and start driving toward Texas.  But, what can I do when I get there?

I can’t do anything.  I can sit here, three thousand miles away and marvel at the insight of one little girl.  In some intuitive way, she knows that all we can do now is reach out and support one another through these rising tragedies.  All our houses are broken.  And no one is coming to fix them.

I just read Secretary Paulson’s plan for fixing the economic crisis.  I don’t know whether or not it would fix the economy, I tend to have my doubts, considering his history.  But, I do understand politics, and I know a power grab when I see one.  This is really just a power grab disguised as an economic “good idea”.  Let’s look at it in a little bit of detail.

First off, there is section 2, part b, subsection 1: “entering into contracts…” Look at the mess the executive branch has made of Iraq where they have entered into all kinds of contracts under the guise of the “public good”.  And the contracts we have in Iraq are subject to more scrutiny (i.e. very little) than what he’s proposing here (none). For example, just look at the next sentence:  “without regard to any other provision of law…” He wants the ability to break any law he damn well pleases and have no accountability whatsoever.  That’s not just a bad idea, that’s completely unconstitutional. No public official should be above the law.  And the last time I looked at the constitution, it said that congress is supposed to oversee the executive branch.
While we are mulling over the implications to the principle of the separation of powers, let’s look at section 2, part b, point 5: “issuing such regulations and other guidance”.  He sets himself up as the sole regulator of this entire plan.  Therefore the executive branch gets to regulate the executive branch’s plan.  That’s congress’s job, per the constitution.  This is simply wrong.  If you love America, if you believe in our system of governance as laid down by the founding fathers, then you absolutely cannot allow this to be made into law.

Section 3 is absolutely insulting.  “The secretary shall take into consideration…protecting the taxpayer”.  That should be a bit more than a consideration.  In fact, that should be the entire point of this proposal.  It should be to protect the taxpayer,  not to bail out corporations that screwed up, especially corporations that did so under Secretary Paulson’s watch.

And honestly, you don’t need to look any further than Section 8 to see where this is going:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. (emphasis mine)

This is a recipe for financial totalitarianism.  If you already control the military (which the executive branch does) and if you have complete control over the financial system and you’re above the rule of law, then what does that make you?  A Totalitarian State.
It would be far better for us to go into ten years of economic depression than to destroy our democracy in the name of saving a few banks and a bunch of investments.  Please for everything that is good about this country, for everything that is bad, call your congress-people and tell them in no uncertain terms to block this takeover of our government.

What use is saving the economy if you lose your freedom in the process?

I am in Toronto, Canada this week, and haven’t had much time to follow anything.  I think there is lots of news coverage relating to the fledgling recovery.  Gabrielle posted a link to some pictures.  I really wish I could head down there and pitch in along side everyone else.

I have learned that many of the flooded homes in Bridge City are turning out to be unsalvageable.  Much of Galveston and Crystal Beach and Point Bolivar and Sabine Pass were simply wiped off the map.  Those homes don’t even exist anymore.  On the plus side, I also heard that electricity is on in Mauriceville, which is good.

It looks like FEMA and the Red Cross and the National Guard are all jumping in now.  I hope that continues.

My one big worry though is about the private insurers.  With the credit crisis and the recent financial implosion over the weekend, I worry about how much the private insurers are going to be able to pay the claims that the Texas Gulf Coast residents are trying desperately to file.  The degree that the private insurers’ assets are tied up in these firms will directly relate to how many claims they will be able to pay out.  I think that the Texas Gulf Coast is going to be very dependent on the Federal (and to a lesser degree, the State) government to help get the money to clean up and rebuild.  With the credit crunch putting a squeeze on people, and the loss of all collateral (aka houses) everyone is going to be in a tight place.

I would recommend that everyone affected (and anyone else concerned) by this add one more call to their list.  Call your state and federal representatives and push them to start working on allocating funds to help all these communities rebuild.  Yes, I’m asking you to call and press the government before there is a dire need to do so, because (1) I remember how poorly Rita and Katrina aftermath was handled, (2) we have far more leverage while the news organizations are still focused on the Texas gulf coast, and (3) if the government does act, it’s notoriously slow.

Here are the numbers if you are interested:

• White House: 202-456-141, 202-456-1111
• Federal Senate Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 (I think)
• Federal House Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
• Texas State House and Texas State Senate
• Texas Governor’s Office
• Or, you can just use the great site at congress.org to find all your elected officials.

Today, I flew from San Francisco to Dallas to Toronto for the Mozilla Developer Days. Halfway through my flight, I glanced out of the window and found myself face to face with Ike.

The monster of wind and water that ravaged my hometown concealed itself behind ragged gray clouds and wore an obscuring white haze like a cloak of impunity. I was eye level with the hurricane that flooded my home and destroyed so many places I loved along the Texas coast. I wanted to anthropomorphize a masochistic deity, to find a face in that tattered mass of clouds and shake my fist at it. I wanted to be angry. But, for all its hellacious destruction, it was not really there. Ike was only energy. You could stand in that cyclopic eye and stretch your hand into the turbulence of the eyewall, and you would not touch a thing. I didn’t know how to feel at that moment.

I look again at Ike. The spiral bands are broken. The thunderheads are fragmented. It is dying. Thinking of my town, the town I unabashedly hated for years, I see a kindred fragility. In one moment, everything is there, all the potential, the palatable substance, the vitality of life, everything we can chose to love or to hate. And in the next, a tumultuous fragility, a humbling vulnerability. You, me, the places we live, even the dying Ike are all linked in this common paradox. Though we may cling to the demagnetized compass of the past, though we may blindly trust the unwritten future, all we really have is this one singular present moment.

It is only natural to focus on the damage and what has been lost–it’s on all our minds and it weighs on our souls. As the waters recede, as we return to our homes, we will start talking about rebuilding. But, rebuilding doesn’t start with ripping out mildewed carpets and tearing down waterlogged Sheetrock. It doesn’t start with interminable calls to insurance agencies and FEMA. It doesn’t even start with coming home.

Rebuilding starts in our hearts. It starts now, wherever we are. Look to your loved ones, hold them close. If we rebuild by starting in our hearts first, then we start to rebuild the entire world, and not just our town.