Do chocolate hens lay sugar eggs?
04/12/2006
From the “Happy Easter”-department, LJ shmivejournal answers the age old question: what happens if I make a cake with… Cadburry Eggs?
Deliciousness!
Ahead of the Release Curve I: They’re ALIVE
04/09/2006
I haven’t had a chance to blog about some of the (interesting and helpful, I think) changes that have been going on in the Mozilla build/release world… been too busy pulling all-nighters trying to get the 1.5.0.x releases out the door.
One of the cooler (and almost-complete) changes going on with the Build Farm has been the result of a particular bug that started out small and simple and then kind of… became a catch all bug for awhile.
That main issue that bug tracks is fixing a tinderbox problem that had been so longstanding, that the wiki docs actually codified steps to work around it. The bug was…
Keeping the bit-pushers happy
04/03/2006
In an attempt to reduce the number of bits that need to be mirrored and stored, I”m proposing moving a (relatively?) large set of (old) bits from the ftp.mozilla.org mirror farm to archive.
If there are any comments or questions on doing this, please speak up in the bug.
build_team++
04/03/2006
I’m really excited to announce that we can now finally stop snickering at the term Build “Team.”
Join me in welcoming the newest addition to the Build crew: Rob Helmer!
He’s done a lot of open source work, including work on revision control system visualization tools and a Ruby-based pluggable webserver module.
We’re really excited to have him on board, so if you see him on IRC—rhelmer—please say give him a big Mozilla Project welcome.
And be sure to stress how much fun he’s going to have. 
Welcome, Rob!
Descend and maintain three-thousand until established on the localizer…
03/31/2006
it’s really hard to context-switch from lofty, 40,000 feet discussions of organizational values, communication dynamics, innovation vs. maintenance considerations, requirements discussions for various development support systems, and how we’d like to fix what’s broken and maximize what’s not to… “respin this build” and “that Tinderbox is broken” and “Where are these builds?” and “That tag is set incorrectly…”
Talk about an “emergency decent” to meet a release schedule…
Drive-by
03/28/2006
Mac universal binaries for Bon Echo Alpha 1 are finally available.
The source tarball too.
Back to the Future
03/21/2006
In a time warp wormhole temporal loop nexus bubble reminscent of the worst Star Trek plot-crutch, the rest of Earth caught up with /. today, when Firefox 2.0a1 (sshhhh! Don’t call it that) Bon Echo Alpha 1 was actually released.
In a way, I wish the reports had been right: I’ve been sick for the last three days (breathing is overrated, let me tell you!), so hearing that that the release was done without me having to lift a finger would’ve been… nice.
Now quick: someone go publish that 1.5.0.2 and 1.0.8 are all out the door, too, so I can get some rest!
kswapd has been running for how many DAYS?
03/17/2006
Most of the time, our Build Farm makes me a very unhappy camper.
This is because most of the time, I’m interacting with it in a firefighting/rescuing builds from a burning tree building role.
There are a lot of machines in the Farm that are reviled (gaius, anyone?), and they get a lot of attention.
But there are other machines that, for the most part, quietly do their job, day in and day out, and we never hear from them and they become the well-behaved, but unloved and ignored children of the Build Farm.
Today, I was introduced to such a child when I logged into a particular machine doing Linux 1.0.x Firefox builds, and noticed this:
cltbld@madcow tinderbox]$ uptime
6:03pm up 351 days, 23:37, 3 users, load average: 0.13, 0.18, 0.09
With a name like madcow, I wouldn’t expect such… stability.
But there you have it: our Build Farm star of the week!
Bits for every endianness and a binary for every instruction set
03/17/2006
After some trials and tribulations (and lots of Tinderbox hugging), we finally have universal binaries for 1.5.0.2!
I just noticed they’re being uploaded to the wrong location, so I’ll have to fix that, but you can find the mixed-endianess here.
When they move, you can find the builds via the tinderbox-with-the-boring-name (and a “UniversalBinaries” tag), on the 1.8.0 Tinderbox page.
Special shout out to Mento and Josh, who helped us (me) tremendously in getting these builds available.
Truth be told, it took a little longer than it otherwise might have because…
My own personal www.thedailywtf.com.
03/13/2006
So I’ve been doing some virtual machine migrations—more on that later—but this one relatively old RedHat VM was having problems booting after the migration.
One of the details that has to be taken care of is the physical machines are unlikely to have the same SCSI disk drivers that the VM has, so you have to futz with kernels and modules (oh my!)
While running mkinitrd(8), I kept getting an “/sbin/mkinitrd: line 477: /sbin/tune2fs: Permission denied” error.
I investigated a bit further, and found the permissions on /sbin/tune2fs to be incorrect. After fixing them, mkinitrd spat a more interesting error.
More investigation revealed:
bash-2.05b# file /sbin/tune2fs
/sbin/tune2fs: timezone data
bash-2.05b#
Yeah.
It’s been one of those Mondays…