Muralisms ... Some use[ful | less] ideas!!

Some one should send this guy Mozilla Swag!!

2010-07-01T16:45:00.000-07:00

Look at this article http://www.sutor.com/c/2010/07/ibm-moving-to-firefox-as-default-browser/ ....

To summarize ... he listifies reasons why IBM use Firefox browser as internal standard

Some of the reasons are

Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM’s strategy.
Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity.
Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it.
Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM.
Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function.

While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be. We’ll continue to see this or that browser be faster or introduce new features, but then another will come along and be better still, including Firefox.

I think it was Firefox and its growth that reinvigorated the browser market as well as the web. That is, Firefox forced competitors to respond. Their software has gotten better and we have all benefited. We’ll see this again as Firefox continues to add even more support for HTML5.

Damn! this is a heart warming write up !!

Some one should send this guy Mozilla swag .

Congrats Mike Shaver!!

2010-06-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article about Apple's arrogance & HTML5 here. I was very disturbed that the stupid demo site of Apple actually wants me to see it only in Safari. Frak you Apple! You suck !!

A paragraph that caught my attention when I was reading this article is as follows ...

---- Mike Shaver, chief technology officer with Mozilla, the open-source operation that builds Safari-rival Firefox, was less diplomatic on Twitter. Having difficulty suppressing my contempt for Apple's arrogant and ridiculous HTML5 positioning today, he said. ----

No one could have said it any better!!

When I read that sentence, two thoughts raced through my mind....

The first one was ... "When did Mike Shaver became the CTO?"

and the second one was very stupid ... and a funny but impolite thought ... some thing like my six year old daughter commenting on my Quality engineering experience or my programming skill set.

The second thought that went through my mind almost parallel with the first one was ... " I'm out of Mozilla for a little while and everybody gets to be a Jedi " .... on the lines of the dialog used by Han Solo in Starwars Episode VI.

I know this is an inexcusable thought knowing how smart Mike is and how much his contributions have made a difference to the world of open web and how 'utterly under-qualified' I am to think like that. But in the spirit of openness, and in the spirit of a "leaf commenting on the tree" ... I thought I will share it with my Mozilla friends ...

Congratulations Shaver, if that article referring you as CTO was not a typo.

I hope your level of involvement in Firefox do not diminish on a technical and day to day level because of your promotion.

Why you should not multi task !!

2010-05-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

In my long career, it was not uncommon to see a bunch of engineers attending the Release meeting of Platform meeting or Product meeting with their laptops, fully immersed in their little worlds -- doing a 'body present - mind absent' routine. Well, in defense of some multitasking aficionados , they truly try to optimize on their time by attending a meeting as well as doing some thing else useful like .. say coding or chatting etc!!

In agile organizations, it is given that you always keep your eye on the IRC chat window, keep track of in-coming bugs, comment on relevant bugs, test/develop/plan etc.,etc.,

In my earlier assignment, one thing I did bad was, not being available in the IRC channel always. Even when I was on the channels, I did not pay much attention to the chat when I was busy doing my scripting/tooling etc.,

One thing I always tried to do was -- not to take my laptop into a meeting unless I needed it to present some thing or follow an issue on screen.

I suspect that some of my esteemed colleagues might have found my dislike for continuous multitasking as a short coming but ... that seems not such a bad tactic after all.

You don't believe me !!

Then please read this http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/05/how-and-why-to-stop-multitaski.html

Celik's entry at Mozilla ... about time!!

2010-05-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

It was a good news to see (today) that Tantek Çelik joined Mozilla. Between Shaver, Jay, Celik and UI experts like Alexander Limi I hope Mozilla would make Desktop Class WebApplications enablment a first class citizen in the product strategy.

Should it chose to accept ... Mozilla can really build kick-ass frameworks that would trounce the Sproutcore like systems. But, knowing Mozilla and its mission, I don't believe that would be a good enough justification to start such a project.

Mozilla does not believe in one-up-man-ship as a policy.

But, sooner or later ... the HTML5 based RIA world would become highly fragmented into many camps of looks&feels unless Mozilla like neutral players, whose purpose of existence is -- to enable open and free web standards -- step in ... and step in sooner!!

The worst day to look for ... is a proxy war between various rendering engines via HTML5 RIA generator frameworks.

VP8 and the future of Video in Circa 2015 or RIP H.264 ?

2010-05-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

This blog post is neither endorsed by Mozilla nor represent their position. ..

Few days ago I , Asa and a QA manager were having a spirited discussion during a coffee break. It was few days before the Google I/O and before the world knew when and how Google is going to make the open source announcement of VP8 codec.

So, I asked Asa why should VP8 be successful other than the fact .. that it is backed by Google.... ( God knows, should it chose, Google can make even my dead Grandma the most famous person in the world !! ).

We had a long technical discussion on how Theora / VP3 is a better codec at crappy bandwidths and how VP8 gives a better cost per bit performance over H.264 under majority of pro-sumer video/web-video scenarios etc.,

But the point that caught my attention is that there is an excellent business reason why VP8 would become a dominant player and take over the lands ruled by H.264... (This is in addition to the technical and vendor support reasons ... )

The H.264 is a technology based on a bunch of patents owned by many companies including Apple,Microsoft etc., so for an individual to acquire H.264 license, it would a pain in all places to obtain licenses from multiple patent holders. So, all these companies patent pooled and delegated the job of H.264 licensing to a single vendor, MPEG-LA, who would become a one stop shop to dispense H.264 license and then distribute the proceeds on a pre-agreed basis to all patent holders minus its service fee.

Even though Apple is part of MPEG-LA consortium, it still needs to get a license to use H.264 in products it sells. So, when it pays a dollar to acquire a license, it goes to the MPEG-LA and say, Apple gets 10 cents as profit sharing from MPEG-LA when they do their books.

In effect, Apple payed a total of 90 cents to acquire H.264 license instead of the full dollar. So, it still fraking losing money every time it need to acquire a license. Same goes for all other companies in the consortium that use H.264 in their products portfolio. Only those companies that hold patents in the H.264 pool and do not make any products using H.264 get a true profit from the MPEG-LA bounty distribution.

So, what would be the reason -- why Apple or Microsoft would not switch to VP8!! Nothing !!!

Or, they can force MPEG-LA to come out saying they don't charge any thing for H.264 for next 20 years or some thing like that ... effectively making it a free codec. This would be a questionable outcome if the only-profit-taking-partners object to it.

So, if I can look into the crystal ball ... come year 2015, MPEG-LA may not have lot of chips on hand to play any video codec game. Either VP8 would become the most dominant player in video codec world and makes H.264 a bit player or hopefully, saner heads prevail at MPEG-LA and they would make H.264 an equally free and open source codec by that time.

Couldn't think of a better recent example of market economy creating a winner in the field of Web Video technology.

Leaving Mozilla very soon ...

2010-05-12T13:51:00.000-07:00

After a long and fruitful consulting assignment with Mozilla, I am moving on to take up a full time position at Yahoo!

May 21st is my last working day at Mozilla. I aim to remain a committed and useful volunteer for the cause of open web and open standards and hope to continue my association with the good folks at Mozilla.

Getting a grip on multiple test run results ..

2010-04-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

With more than 150K tests run with each check-in and at approximately
100-120 checks-in a day ... there are a tonne of test results out
there for any one to get a grip. Every engineer checks the test run
results of their putbacks and some people go through all orange and or
burning builds.

So, we have set-up a display dash board to enable every one to
know every thing about every failure from every run .. ( lot of
every's). Here, you can see the following.

What are the latest test failures across all runs on all platforms ?
What are the TOP failing tests ?
What are the total tests that have been failing in the timeline that
we have captured ?

We also provide direct links to easily navigate to a test failure log
to build log to putback data. This of course is in addition to some
nifty time-line graphs for each test failure.

So, without further ado, we would like to present the following URLs
for your kind perusal ...

http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/
http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/topfails
http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/tests

and a sample failure timeline

http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/timeline?name=automationutils....

Success!!

2010-04-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

True success is some thing that you never need to announce your self!!

--Murali Nandigama

Highest Value Extensions that are not yet created for Firefox

2010-03-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

We are going to start a pet project very soon that would identify the most wanted Firefox extensions that are not yet available in the Mozilla Add-Ons website.

The feeder data for this project comes from the web analytics tool to see the most searched for add-ons on the AMO site and then the modulo of the data with available add-ons would provide the answer.

Based on this information, many useful jetpack extensions or Firefox Add-ons can be created to fulfill community needs.

Let us hope that we all be made aware of community add-ons' needs and let us all work together to fulfill the gaps. This would be an excellent opportunity for add-ons contributors to directly work on fulfilling an existing add-on gap.

Please stay tuned for further announcements ...

Fancy Friday @ Mozilla

2010-03-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

Mozilla Cananda office folks apparently have started a counter culture tradition few months ago. That is -- to ask ( voluntarily of course ) the team mates to come dressed up full fancy on Friday. Like in three piece suites, Top hats, Various cultural garbs and what not !! Heck you can even come to office dressed like those Senator types !!

To Quote the original folks who started off all this --

""" Fancy Friday in the Toronto office started off as "Jacket Friday",
a deliberate counterpoint to the "Dress down Fridays"
many of us remember from former, more corporate gigs """

[ Did you see my python geek-ism in the triple quotes ;) ]

However, Mozilla USA , for what it is ... is a way cool place to follow those Corporate customs and we come to office every day in casuals. So, for the fun of it, some Mozilla USA folks have sent a mail yesterday asking us to ( voluntarily of course ) to start adopting our Canadian brothers custom of 'Fancy Fridays'.

So far, I have seen a Scottish traditional dress, multiple pin stripe suites and ties. couple of bling blangs and not many took up the offer ( mia culpa!!) with enthusiasm even though some nice folks offered free photo sessions in one of our conference rooms for all ...

So, in the true Mozilla spirit ... next Friday I would come to office in South Indian traditional dress.

Ideation vs. Innovation

2010-03-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

Long time ago, I happened to watch a video in one of the 'leadership for technical managers sessions'. It is called -- The power of vision : By Joel Barker. It became a great paradigm shifter in my approach & management style.

Recently I happened to come across a powerful corollary to the Power of Vision and I am sure that it would be very helpful to you too ...

Simply put, it states that having a great idea is not a substitute for implementing one... and that creativity, ideation and innovation are three different things !!

This would be a great short read for any one who is interested to know more ..

http://www.sixsigmaiq.com/Columnarticle.cfm?externalID=634&ColumnID=11&utm_source=sixsigmaiq.com&utm_medium=SMO&utm_campaign=LINKEDIN&utm_content=2_3_2010&mac=SSIQ_LinkedIn_SMO_2010&utm_term=SIXSIGNET&shownewswindow=1

On being a US citizen

2010-02-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

After a 11 years of residency in the USA, today I have taken the oath to become a US citizen and with that accepted all privileges, rights and responsibilities that come along with it. It is a good feeling to become a full member of society where I have been living from so long.The first thing I did after taking oath is to register as a voter so that I can vote in the upcoming California elections to vote 'YES' on the open primary measure.

So long .. Sun Microsystems

2010-01-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday has seen a lot of action. Apple announced its iPad. Obama gave his State of the Union and Larry Ellison completed the take over and change in control of Sun Microsystems.

I am very fond of my four and half years at Sun and I know why Sun is what it is today. I also worked for Oracle and it is a great place to work. Oracle has a singular focus on success and most of the times they succeed. Time only tell if Oracle would be able to bring the Sun brand back to its old glory. But if Oracle wants to do that, it must let go most of the Director to VP level Sun staff who were never accused of having an iota of business quotient and market orientation.

The Sun URL http://www.sun.com started pointing to http://www.oracle.com effective today.

So long ... my friend !!

How many cows you got !!

2010-01-26T17:02:00.000-08:00

... just wanted to share this piece of ancient wisdom that one may find useful when asking for an advise from others...

One day, a villager in India goes to the priest/village_doctor and says 'My cows are not happy and not giving as much milk as they used to ... please give me an advise as to what to do'.

The priest gives him a medicine and says ' mix it in the animal feed and your problem would be solved. See me again in a week'.

Next week, the villager comes back more depressed ... 'My cows are not only not giving milk but they are sick now ... please give me an advise what should I do !!'.

The priest goes into his prayer room, meditates and comes back with a different medicine. 'Now ... go back and feed only this medicine to your herd. And come back in a week's time to give me the report'.

This time the villager comes back in 3 days, crying and shaking ... 'My cows are dying !! I lost many cows ... please give me any idea how to save my cows !!! '

This time the priest sits silently for a while ... looks straight in to the eyes of the villager ... and says .. 'Ideas I got many ... how many cows you got? '

Brownbag Presentation on January28, 2010

2010-01-26T16:35:00.000-08:00

I am presenting a talk on risk analysis associated with code changes made to fix bugs in Firefox during the entire year 2009.

At a very high level, the top 10 files which contain the highest source change related risk would be presented.The algorithm used to calculate the risk would be presented. In addition to that, we would also present the current branch coverage, functional coverage and block coverage data [from automated test runs] on those top source change risk files and make some recommendations on how to target for risk mitigation.

The brown bag is scheduled for January 28th,2010 at 12:30PM in Ten Forward. It will also be simulcasted on http://air.mozilla.com

Should large source files be split into smaller ones for work flow efficiencies ?

2010-01-13T17:14:00.000-08:00

I am working on a study of risk associated with code changes made in the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Here is the ten thousand feet view of my approach

Get the list of all bugs that were fixed in Firefox in the last one year [ from Bugzilla ].
Assign a score to each bug fix.

Example: If the source file is modified to fix a security bug in the recent quarter .. give it 20 points, if it was fixed 4 quarters ago, then give it 5 points ... that means a sec-fix can get a score of 20 or 15 or 10 or 5 points based on when a sec bug is fixed in the last 365 days

If the source file is modified to fix a regression bug in the recent quarter .. give it 16 points, if it was fixed 4 quarters ago, then give it 4 points ... that means a reg-fix can get a score of 16 or 12 or 8 or 4 points based on when a reg bug is fixed in the last 365 days

Using a similar logic, a general bug fix would get a score of 12 or 9 or 6 or 3 points based on whether it was fixed 0-90 days ago or 91-180 days ago or 181-270 days ago or 271-365 days ago

Then add all the scores for all source files and stack rank the files in descending order.

Each source file gets a cumulative score based on how many bugs are fixed in it, what types of bugs are fixed in it and when.

Using the bug patch attachments from Bugzilla and bugId in the source control log comments I could create a fairly accurate mapping between bug number to actual source files that are modified to fix the bug.

Remember ... this study is done not on all bugs in the Bugzilla but only on the fixed bugs.

Without getting into too many details, I have found that top 10 files in the stack ranked order of fix-score have 12% of all bug fixes in them. Since there are thousands of files in the executable, this is a significant concentration.

All of these TOP score files are big in size. For example the number one score file has fifteen thousand lines of code in it.

But if I double click the source file and see which methods are actually modified to fix the bugs, the distribution of hotspots is fairly concentrated in the file itself into segments. Typical scenarios are more like 20% of the source file itself has 80% of fixes concentrated in it.

It is fairly obvious that the top 10 files should have additional review mechanisms in place to account for the fact that they have been centers of a lot of bug fix activity. But the actual bug fixing in those files is not uniformly spread across the files.

Here is my question ... since the bug fix hotspots in the files are concentrated , does it make sense to recommend that the large file be split into smaller files so that only those ( small ) files that contain the hotspot segments should be tracked for additional review and the safer portion(s) follow the normal check-in procedures ?

2010 wiki template for status report

2010-01-04T15:30:00.000-08:00

Folks,

If you are like me and use MediaWiki to do a status report on a weekly basis, this is a handy wiki template that you can use.

There are various ways to do a weekly status report [ some may not even do that and that is perfectly fine too !! ] and using a calender format allows to show maximum information in a minimum space.

You can cut and paste the text below into a new wiki window to get the final format which looks like this

CUT HERE >

== 2010 ==

{| class="wikitable"
|-
!align="center" | January
|
! align="center" | February
|
! align="center" | March
|
! align="center" | April
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || || || || || 1 || 2
|-
| 3||[[User:Murali:Status01042010|4]] ||5 ||6 ||7 || 8 || 9
|-
|10||[[User:Murali:Status01112010|11]]||12||13||14|| 15|| 16
|-
|17||[[User:Murali:Status01182010|18]]||19||20||21|| 22|| 23
|-
|24||[[User:Murali:Status01252010|25]]||26||27||28|| 29|| 30
|-
|31
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| ||    [[User:Murali:Status02012010|1]] || 2 ||3 || 4 || 5 || 6
|-
| 7 || [[User:Murali:Status02082010|8]] || 9 ||10 ||11 ||12 ||13
|-
|14 ||[[User:Murali:Status02152010|15]] ||16 ||17 ||18 ||19 ||20
|-
|21 ||[[User:Murali:Status02222010|22]] ||23 ||24 ||25 ||26 ||27
|-
|28
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| ||    [[User:Murali:Status03012010|1]] || 2 ||3 || 4 || 5 || 6
|-
| 7 || [[User:Murali:Status03082010|8]] || 9 ||10 ||11 ||12 ||13
|-
|14 ||[[User:Murali:Status03152010|15]] ||16 ||17 ||18 ||19 ||20
|-
|21 ||[[User:Murali:Status03222010|22]] ||23 ||24 ||25 ||26 ||27
|-
|28 ||[[User:Murali:Status03292010|29]] ||30 || 31
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || || || ||1 ||2 || 3
|-
| 4|| [[User:Murali:Status04052010|5]] || 6|| 7||8 || 9 ||10
|-
|11 || [[User:Murali:Status04122010|12]] || 13|| 14|| 15|| 16 ||17
|-
|18 || [[User:Murali:Status04192010|19]] || 20|| 21||22 || 23 ||24
|-
|25 || [[User:Murali:Status04262010|26]]|| 27 || 28|| 29 || 30||
|}
|}
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!align="center" | May
|
! align="center" | June
|
! align="center" | July
|
! align="center" | August
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || || || || || || 1
|-
| 2|| 3 || 4|| 5 ||6 || 7 ||8
|-
|9 || 10 || 11|| 12 || 13|| 14 ||15
|-
|16 || 17 || 18|| 19 ||20 ||21 ||22
|-
|23 || 24||25||26||27||28||29
|-
|30 ||31
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || ||1 || 2 ||3 || 4 || 5
|-
|6 || 7 || 8|| 9 ||10 || 11 ||12
|-
|13 || 14 || 15|| 16 ||17|| 18 ||19
|-
| 20|| 21 || 22|| 23 ||24 ||25 ||26
|-
|27||28||29||30
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || || || ||1 ||2 || 3
|-
|4 ||5 ||6 || 7 || 8|| 9 ||10
|-
| 11|| 12 || 13|| 14 || 15|| 16 ||17
|-
|18 || 19 ||20 || 21 ||22 || 23 ||24
|-
|25||26||27||28||29||30||31
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| 1|| 2|| 3|| 4 || 5|| 6 || 7
|-
|8 || 9||10 || 11 || 12|| 13 ||14
|-
| 15|| 16 ||17 || 18 ||19 || 20||21
|-
|22|| 23 ||24 || 25 || 26|| 27 ||28
|-
|29||30||31
|}
|}
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!align="center" | September
|
! align="center" | October
|
! align="center" | November
|
! align="center" | December
|-
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || || || 1 ||2 || 3 || 4
|-
| 5|| 6 || 7|| 8 || 9|| 10 ||11
|-
| 12|| 13 || 14|| 15 ||16 ||17 ||18
|-
| 19|| 20 ||21 || 22 || 23|| 24 ||25
|-
|26||27||28||29||30
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || || || || || 1 || 2
|-
| 3|| 4 || 5|| 6 || 7|| 8 ||9
|-
| 10|| 11 ||12 || 13 || 14|| 15 ||16
|-
|17 || 18|| 19|| 20 || 21|| 22 ||23
|-
|24||25||26||27||28||29||30
|-
|31
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || 1 || 2|| 3 || 4|| 5 || 6
|-
| 7|| 8|| 9|| 10|| 11|| 12 ||13
|-
|14 || 15||16 || 17 || 18|| 19 ||20
|-
|21 || 22 ||23 || 24 || 25|| 26 ||27
|-
|28||29||30
|}
|
|
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Su !! Mo !! Tu !! We!! Th !! Fr !! Sa
|-
| || || || 1 ||2 || 3 || 4
|-
| 5|| 6 || 7|| 8 || 9|| 10 ||11
|-
|12 ||13 || 14|| 15 ||16 || 17 ||18
|-
| 19|| 20 || 21|| 22 || 23|| 24 ||25
|-
|26||27||28||29||30||31
|}
|}

Breaking Fake News :: Whitehouse announced the policy to end all threats to the airline security problems

2009-12-29T11:25:00.001-08:00

Washington DC[ 00.14AM local time ]: A visibly tired and red eyed White house press secretary Robert Gibbs has made important policy announcements to sparsely packed sleepy room of white house correspondents that president Obama has approved the latest changes to the FAA security guidelines.

Effective January 1st, 2010 all airlines would be mandated to bomb proof cargo holds of all airplanes that would be capable of flying more than 6 passengers other than the flight staff. All airlines that have flights flying into and out of United States would be required to take up this measure which is expected to cost around 128 billion dollars. White house has initiated serious consultations with the congress to pass a law that would allow the government to redirect the TARP money recovered from US banks to US airlines to provide funding for the extra costs associated with retrofitting all the air planes.

It has also been pointed out that president Obama has urged the airline industry to consider the following points : since US airlines receive funding from government to implement new security measures and all other international airlines would have to foot the bill them selves, this would provide an undue competitive advantage to Us airlines and that is expected to bring the US airlines out of the red into black if only they stop screwing up their advantage by using their usual dick head ways of antagonizing airline passengers and general public.

It has also been announced that effective March 1st, 2010 all traveling passengers would be required to undress at the airports and check in their cloths along with luggage and they would be provided scrubs and sandals to change into. The airport provided clothing would be certified by FAA to be chemical and explosive free and that would prevent the would be terrorists to use their shoes or underwear as explosive devices. Even if their cloths or shoes have the explosives, the bomb proof cargo bases of airlines would prevent any damage to the airline or the passenger safety.

ACLU, which has raised the privacy concerns over the proposed millimeter wave x-ray machines deployment in national airports has welcomed this measure as a victory for passenger privacy and also cautioned for continuous monitoring of change rooms for hidden video cameras or other photographic devices.

Stocks of airport security monitoring x-rays machines manufacturers have tumbled on the wall street in anticipation of this announcement where as the ratings of cloth manufacturers have received an upgrade.

Paris Hilton who was returning from a late night party has commented on this news and wished for a passenger choice to purchase exquisite cashmere scrubs for extra price and hoped that she would not see a day where all passengers would be dressed in the same colored and same quality scrubs causing a fashion chaos.

Update [ 08:30 AM localtime ] Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has assured the public that passengers would have the choice to select from multiple varieties of scrubs to meet their preferences and that business class and first class passengers would be offered a variety of silk scrubs to chose from.

Please take time to show your 'Appreciation' when it is due ...

2009-12-03T12:09:00.000-08:00

Have you ever felt that you could have been appreciated for that big thing or the little thing you have done either because you are obligated to do it or because you volunteered to do it out of your own good will?

Did you take time to stop for a second and appreciate the people that surround your life .. be it your partner, kid, friend or colleague for what they are doing to make your life easier OR more importantly ... what they are NOT doing to make your life more miserable than what you are capable of doing all by yourself?

A little bit of appreciation goes a long way ... some times in ways that you never know could have existed .

Don't believe what I a said !!! then please LOOK at this beautiful example

APPRECIATION MAKES A DIFFERENCE

Word Frequency Counter Facebook App

2009-10-19T12:45:00.001-07:00

Asa Dotzler told me the other day that there is no Facebook App that he could find which would provide word frequency count. So, I set on verifying that statement. I could not find any Facebook App that can provide the frequency count of words after a moderate effort. So, I went ahead and created one

http://apps.facebook.com/freqount/

Why need such an App you may ask!! ... If you are an eloquent, expressive and frequent blogger or web-geek, you may some times get curious to know about the frequent use of specific words or the profile of your word repertoire. This little app hopes to fill that niche ...

But the problem is ... I can not publish the App unless there are at-least 5 Facebook users for this App. So, here I am requesting all the friends who have Facebook profile and and also read Mozilla blogs to kindly give it a try.

URL again http://apps.facebook.com/freqount/

Note: The layout of the application looks better once you log-in to your Facebook account.

Different Strokes

2009-10-09T17:17:00.001-07:00

Standard Disclaimer : What is written here are author's personal opinions and are not endorsed by any organization to whom the author provides services.

Now that I am done with the standard disclaimer, let me share with you some of my thoughts after reading the following feature @ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/nagappan-100609.aspx

I agree with many aspects of the Featured engineer's findings but I have qualms with the way they are presented.

Let me repeat the age old knowledge, 'conventional software-engineering wisdom' is as nebulous a phrase as 'universal harmony'. There is no accepted dogma in this area. There are 'Microsoft' software-engineering practices,'Google' software-engineering practices, 'Oracle' software-engineering practices and so on ... Just because we read some graduate course text books that talk about software-engineering practices, it does not mean that they are definitive. The article's author claims that Microsoft ESM group studies the conventional software-engineering wisdom. This is a non-pragmatic statement considering that the group consists of a lot of researchers who know that there is no 'conventional-way'.

In this context, let me share a pertinent story...which is true.

One of my friends did his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and during the first year, he saw a brown Squirrel and made a statement 'Squirrels are brown!'. Next year his statement was more contained 'Squirrels on the Princeton campus are brown'. The following year his statement was more measured 'Some Squirrels on Princeton campus are brown'. In the final year of his graduate studies his comment was 'I saw a brown Squirrel on Princeton campus'.

I hope the statement 'Code coverage measures how comprehensively a piece of code has been tested' is article writer's paraphrase [ and not of the featured Engineer ]. In this part of the world, in some companies I worked, like Sun, Oracle and Mozilla, code coverage is not used as a measure of comprehensiveness, not at least in the groups I worked in. Here, every one knows that having 100% code coverage does not mean that you have found all your bugs. But having 20% code coverage means that some thing is seriously amiss! Code coverage does not give good news. It indicates potential gaps that we are not at all testing. If you are trying to disprove the assumption that 'Higher code coverage means lesser post-release failures in the field' , then I humbly advise that it is time to get your tuition fee back [ if only your college offers satisfaction guarantee ] and also please visit https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefly . I have seen more people who believe in 'Spaghetti Monster' than those who believe in the bug finding-ness of code coverage.

I would have been seriously shocked too ... if Microsoft developers danced to the tune of 'Kumbaya' after learning this triviality.

The other issue that rattled my brain is the emphasis on Test Driven Development [TDD]. If you were a nascent start-up writing your first shopping cart application checking your code into source code control for the first time, then 'yes' TDD is the new cool kid on the block. But is this the right approach for Microsoft!!

I heard a joke from an industry veteran recently 'Why Microsoft takes years to release a product when the God completed the whole creation in just seven days ? ... Because God does not have to worry about backward compatibility'

What would it take to retrofit the decades worth of legacy code into the TDD model !!

The right approach is in fact 'Change Centric Test Development'.

What is change centric test development ?

Identify the extent of code coverage provided by existing test suites
Identify the nature of bugs filed/fixed on the code base and weigh it against the coverage effectiveness. If you have 100% code coverage on a module but over the last year 80% of bugs are found by customers, then your test suite is rotten. Throw it our, rinse and restart.
Create test-case to source-file/functions/methods mapping .. create test-case to bug mapping ... create bug to source file mapping. Any reasonable source code control system and bug management system and a data base to store mappings would be sufficient.
Track daily code changes and check if you have corresponding tests in the test suite from above steps. If not , create a test case and DO NOT check in your code till you have one.

As you see, this is not a simple TDD approach.

Incidentally, Nagappan practically explains the Change Centric testing infrastructure in the 'Proving the Utility of Assertions' section sans linking it to code coverage data.

Rest of the article deals with Organization Design and its impact on the development process.

While the beginning of the article starts with a sense of universality, the article writer admits [ at the end ] that the findings are derived from studying MS groups and that Nagappan would like to correlate it to other environments. At the same time, the article also concludes that they have solved the 'software-engineering myth buster' .... perhaps an internal Microsoft one!!

Dev Helper Bug-Fix Metrics

2009-10-04T12:23:00.001-07:00

Damon Sicore maintained a cool set of graphs some time ago that was built using few external frameworks.

QGoogleVisualizationAPI by Thomas Schäfer which is a PHP wrapper around Google Visualization APIs.
Simplepie.inc package which is a cool feed reader framework in PHP.
Couple of nifty home made PHP scripts.

The framework has fallen out of use recently. So, Damon has asked our team to revive it. It is revived now and the graphs are getting generated from the framework.

Please have a look in the "Fixes by Dev Group" section of http://people.mozilla.com/~mnandigama/dashboard.html
to find the number of blocker and non blocker bugs fixed by developers during the last 24 weeks till now [ by week ]. Links are provided by development group. Each link contains graphs by that group's developers.

Happy analysis ...
Murali

Oracle Open World - Oct 11-15 2009

2009-09-26T18:13:00.001-07:00

I am attending the Oracle OpenWorld.... during October 11-15, 2009.

I am excited to attend this for many reasons. I was Senior Release Manager for Oracle 10g R3 Fusion Middleware product line when I left Oracle in 2008. If Thomas Kurian were a stock traded on Nasdaq, I would have fully invested my 401K in that stock. I want to know how he is planning to redraw the middleware landscape.

I also was the chief QA engineer for the Java Software quality engineering when I left Sun Microsystems in 2005.

I have told many times to my friends at Oracle and at Sun that ... Management team of Oracle coupled with Sun's Engineering team would create a world class team.

Oracle is almost about to complete the transfer of control on Sun in few more weeks.

This is going to be an exciting future and I hope Oracle would make good use of Sun's technological stack.

Why you should NEVER ask for metrics ?

2009-09-19T00:41:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding pretentious I can say, very humbly, that if you are being asked , by powers that be, to generate a set of metrics ... for any project ... please don't jump at it with headfirst.

I have been living in the world of metrics for more than a decade now and every time I hear some one proposing -- this or that -- metric should be captured, I feel a bit .. well !! I don't know how to word that ...

Let me share a little story which is related to this ...

Long time ago ... there lived a good man in a far remote village in the mid lands. One day he started praying for the lord God to fulfill his wish... and he prayed and prayed for so long with so much dedication that one day, the God relented and traveled from heavens to the earth.

The God spoke to the good man "my dear child !! I am pleased with your prayer and I am here to grant you one wish. Speak !"

The good man bows to the God and says " Dear God .. please grow hair on the ear lobes of my mother-in-law ... "

The God gets puzzled! but he grants the wish any way. Before disappearing, the God asks the good man... "my child ! I am curious to know why you prayed for so long and so hard to ask for such a wish !! "

The good man bows again ... speaks very obediently, "God !! long time ago I read a book that said -- the son-in-law will become very lucky if he gets a mother-in-law with hair on ear lobes. I always wanted to be lucky and so I asked for that boon !! "

And then the God shakes his head,smiles kindly... and speaks "If you wanted to be lucky ... all you needed to do was to ask me for that!! " and the God disappears.

The moral of the story is : What you think you are asking for may not be the right solution to what you want to achieve!

Asking for metrics is just like that !! A metric is a solution that answers a question. Instead of asking the right question, many people ask for a specific solution like a metric with the implicit assumption that they know what they are asking for is the right solution.

Imagine going to a doctor and asking for acetylsalicylic acid instead of telling him that you have an ear pain and you need a medicine to fix it !!

AMO and SUMO bug metrics

2009-09-17T15:21:00.001-07:00

Mozilla Add-ons and Support QA team has asked for a dashboard view for the Add-ons (AMO) project as well as Support (SUMO 1.4) project.

So, I spent a day to come up with these web pages.

Please check these out and let me know...

Your comments are welcome.