guy.pyrzak

Prepare yourself for some changes people!

2010-07-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

Bugzilla 4.0 has frozen and soon it will be released. There are a bunch of exciting changes that you can expect which I will try to highlight over the next few posts. The big ones that I'm sure will get a lot of attention, for better or worse, are:

the autocompletes for user fields and keywords
redesigned advanced search page
the redesigned attachments page.
create page validation

We've also got a patch in the works that will redo the homepage and make it much prettier and professional looking thanks to Jon Pink. You can also look forward to that in 4.0!

I've attached images of the 3 new pages which will hopefully encourage you all to play around with landfill!

As always we'd love to hear your feedback about this and the other changes that are coming in 4.0 (there are a lot of them, jsonp, better extension support, new default workflow, more webservices... it's a long list).

YUI and the recordvalueupdateevent event!

2010-03-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had a fairly basic task. I had 2 tables with checkboxes that were populated with data and 1 widget that was supposed to listen to changes in the tables.

I could have just wired my widget into the checkboxes, but that didn't seem like the correct way to do it. Instead I decided to wire the widget into the data model. But the thing that really ended up getting me is to use the recordvalueupdateevent, which is basically the only way to listen to updates in a record set requires 2 things.

1. you have to use this.getRecordSet().updateRecordValue()
2. you have to create the event! .getRecordSet().createEvent('recordValueUpdateEvent');

If you don't do these 2 things you won't be able to get this to work

Below are the two ways i could have done it. Actual code to come in the future.

My hope is someone else who gets stuck with this will be able to find it.
Thanks to http://mart.kiev.ua/yui-recordset-events who wrote about this in Russian or some other slovic language which google helpfully translated to English!

ideas for User stats to gether for more human bugzilla v0

2010-03-09T11:00:00.001-08:00

Statistics to show about a user

All things in list with & in the bullet might have a "veteran" and "newbie" designation.

Newbie and Veteran status can be determined either by a count or time.
-- If it is a count then it would simply be an above a line and below a line
-- If it is a time it would be before X date for veterans and newbie would be determined by N duration before today.
-- We might want to allow users to configure these settings and let them use one or both systems.
-- V1 might just have a config file, V2 might have a table in the database or a param tab

* CC List
***& Num bugs user is on CC list

* QA Field
***& Num bugs user is QA on

* Comments
***& Num
*** Recent Activity ( num bugs in the past N duration )

* Bug Fixing
***& Assigned
*** Assigned and Fixed
*** Recent Activity ( num where status was changed to fixed in N duration )

* Bug Patches
***& Num patches created
*** Num patches created with + flag
*** Recent Activity ( patches created in N duration )

* Bug Filing
***& Num bugs filed
*** Num bugs resolved as duplicates
*** Recent Activity

* Bug Reviewer
***& Num reviews per bug
*** Recent Activity ( Num bugs set to + or - in N duration )

* Bugs Verified
*** How do we do this???

What has the user filed bugs on?
-- With all these stats how do we determine what they have worked on?
-- Do a count per project for how many ANY of the above the user has done, if the number is more than N then that person has that project show up

Once the extension is installed we first need to do old stats gathering
After that we will rely on either a cron job OR hooks or both

We need to extend the user object and add these stats

Bugzilla Extensions: Gravatar and Inline Images

2010-03-08T21:58:00.000-08:00

There are 2 bugs which I have been paying some attention to recently.

The first one is Bug 222861 which requests that images are displayed when they are mentioned in comments. This bug was important to me because I often found myself and others referring to images and attachments in comments and then having to open them up in a new window. I really wanted developers to just see the mocks i made along with my comments about them. It was determined that this bug makes more sense as an extension. So I wrote one. I've posted it here: http://github.com/pyrzak/Bugzilla-Extension--Inline-Images. Hopefully you guys like it!

The second one is Bug 395802 which requests to be able to support gravatar images. This is something Aza Raskin specifically mentioned by saying make it easier to know "who is this guy". Step 1 is adding a human face to a comment via the gravatar, Step 2 might be about grabbing their stats.

There were 2 mocks that I made as suggestions for how this should look. The first is:

Here is the other mock:

My hope is that we're finally to the point where many of Aza's and other's ideas might be possible thanks to the new extension system and the jsonp bug 550727. Both of which wouldn't be possible if mkanat didn't work so hard to add this kind of mash-up and extensibility, so thanks!

Any feedback about either of these extensions or anything else I mentioned is very welcomed.

New Advanced Search UI V2

2010-02-27T16:31:00.000-08:00

Here is the second version trying to take into account the suggestions given.

This UI would remember whatever is expanded and collapsed based on the user's cookies.

Another option that isn't displayed here is the column layout would change from 3 to X based on how wide the screen is (aka elastic).

I tried to increase the information density as well.

For saved/editable searches we might try to use the text description from the search UI.

Looking forward to hearing your feedback about the changes and improvements.

A new layout for the Attachments page

2010-02-27T10:50:00.000-08:00

There were some comments today about the attachments page and how wonky it is. Bug 101770 has become the place where I've decided to post a response and possible solution to the problem but since I'm sure folks don't want to bother going to the bug here are the images that I posted. Let me know what you think. My hope is that we'll be able to implement this new UI quickly and make a big improvement without making anyone too upset about losing the current Attachments UI.

Things to note. The comments box and the attachment iframe would be elastic so they would grow with the width of the page. Clicking edit attachment as comment would cause the comment box to go away and the big area would turn into a comment.

My hope for this layout is to 1 give more realestate to the comment box that is equal to the area on the current bug page as well as make it easier for people editing the patches directly to have more room.

This UI also puts the focus where it belongs, on the attachment itself.

Things to note. I'm not at all happy with the placement of the patch and obsolete checkboxes. Any suggestions on where those should go is greatly appreciated.

Make it like code.google.com's bug tracker

2010-02-18T14:03:00.000-08:00

For a while we've been having discussions about tags and Bugzilla on the dev mailing list. To boil down a lot of the suggestion it consists of "we could do away with most of our fields/flags and replace them with tags, it would make the UI way better".

We've also had other discussions about how the bug edit page should change. Many of the suggestions consist of moving the non-comment data about a bug to the left or right side of the page and letting the comments take up most of the page.

Today (for the first time) i went into the code.google.com (cgc) bug tracker to see what the status of tagging was in chrome. Turns out both of these UI suggestions are exactly how chrome is implemented. I event went to the advanced search page to see if the suggestions i received from the advanced search page were the same (they weren't).

Anyway, i've received the message loud and clear "we like how google did it".

I'm tempted to make a jetpack that makes the BMO UI act/look a lot more like cgc. What do you guys think? Is it worth it or is TidyBug more the direction people prefer?

If you haven't seen cgc here is the URL i looked at today: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=17536

Tidy Bugzilla for Jetpack... kinda

2010-02-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

So I saw the post for TidyBug and noticed someone commented that they switched back to Greasemonkey from Jetpack. I really like the idea of Jetpack, so i was bummed to see that someone had switch away from it because they wanted this feature so... I tried copying some of the features of tidyBug over to Jetpack.

Here is the URL for the jetpack in the gallery: http://jetpackgallery.mozillalabs.com/jetpacks/346

and an image to see what it does to the edit page...

For those of you who are not familiar with tidy bug here is the original post:
http://www.squarefree.com/2009/02/26/tidybug/

I'm still working on moving over all the features (like keyboard shortcuts). But the minimizing (what seems to be the best part) is part of this. Plus this version works with ANY version of Bugzilla running 3.4 onward, not just BMO.

For those using Chrome I might try to port this over as a chrome extension next weekend.

I'll also try using jetpack to prototype some other desired features, like prototyping the quicksearch helper mentioned in my previous post.

Feedback is always appreciated.

Update to the Advanced Search UI

2010-02-15T19:34:00.001-08:00

We've been working on fixes from our usability research and surveys. With the recent post of Bugzilla for Humanity, I was inspired to work on the Advanced Search UI because as Johnathan put it, "it is complete and terrible" and for "99% of searches you don't need it". However the other search, the simple search he doesn't bother to mention and of course he <3's quicksearch. I've filed bug 544404 to help quicksearch magic become more discoverable.

So the solution to make the advanced search page less complicated is a multi-parter as always in the Bugzilla world. Here are the steps which may or may not happen in the order they appear.

Step 1. Make the big summary box at the top of the page use quicksearch instead of a summary search.

Step 2. Make the other boxes on the advanced search page work as a helper to the quicksearch

Step 3. Make the advanced search page less complicated.

1 and 2 are more or less out of my area expertise so I'll leave those to mkanat and jjclark. But making the advanced search page less complicated, I can help with.

The approach I took was inspired by the redesign we did at work, basically apply a grid and hide the stuff that doesn't matter most of the time.

I've posted mocks up on bug 450301 but since I'm sure no one wants to read through the bug I'll post the images here:

and the expanded version

What do you all think?

Jira Vs Bugzilla

2009-09-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

Today a co-worker sent me a link for Jira's Cash for Clunkers, a way to get the word out for the next release. At first I thought my co-worker was trying to say "hey we should use JIRA" (turns out he wasn't). But I think this is a thought lots of people have when it comes to picking bug/issue trackers. And I honestly don't think it is free to compare. In my mind it is like comparing the public library to the book store.

I love the public library. I get to go in and grab any book they have and read it for free(I pretend my taxes don't count)! Wow. That's amazing. But that's assuming someone hasn't checked out the book i want. Sometimes i have to wait for a book and sometimes I am too impatient and i just buy it from the Bookstore.

See the Bookstore has tons of books, not as large of a variety, but usually they have what i want. Often if I want a book they don't have, I can ask for it and they work hard to get it for me asap. Plus, i don't get some crappy fees if I'm late returning the book, because its mine.

I feel like the same thing is true of JIRA to Bugzilla. They are both great bug trackers, but their nature is totally different. You pay for JIRA (unless you're an open source tool) and no one (not even Mozilla) pays to support the development of Bugzilla. Lots of organizations and individuals donate time when they can, but there isn't any money being exchanged from a "bugzilla org" to other folks.

I feel like this by itself makes the comparison not exactly fair. Now if that philosophy isn't an issue and neither is money.

JIRA's UI is cleaner/nicer but not as geared around power users in many people's opinion, but it doesn't support the patch review process as nicely.

To be clear i've used both systems. There are PLENTY of super annoying little things (which maybe jira fixed in this next release). But as someone who has now come to understand JIRA really well and its limitations and understanding bugzilla and its limitations, I'd pick Bugzilla, but most people I work with, prefer JIRA every time.

Maybe JQL will fix the biggest JIRA issue, advanced search, but in the end, I like bugzilla because although admin UI for bugzilla is weird, I honestly find it easier to use (once I understand the mental model) than JIRAs. Oh... also, JIRA's email system makes me want to shoot somone, can't add other people to cc lists, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to turn off emails for specific bugs, it seems like some crazy all the things in a project or none... but that's again a personal issue.

But I'll continue to use JIRA at work, and figure out how to make work-arounds for "adding others to the cc-list" and other issues. But if you're reading this post as a way to find the answer to this question. Ask yourself this: is money not an issue? Do I have lots of novices using this tool? If the answer is yes to both of those, JIRA might be the way to go.

If you've got experts who will live with this tool every day, would prefer emacs, the command line and grep to Office, and want to be able to hack and slash their way to happiness... Bugzilla is probably your solution.

UPDATE ... Search is still horrible! doing a search for a bug with a specific owner between 2 relative dates results in "error" with no error message. OMG i miss Bugzilla. Plus quicksearch in bugzilla is GREAT @username gets me all their open bugs done... jira not so much. :(

my 2 cents

Bugzilla JSON-RPC Webservice with JQuery

2009-07-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

I already posted how you can use YUI to use the Bugzilla web services available on the head. But lots of people don't like using YUI and prefer using JQuery. I haven't used JQuery much, but this experiment seems to have gotten the job done and should supply a basis for how to do more complex stuff with JQuery and the JSON-RPC interface.

Please note the JSON serialization capability isn't part of JQuery so I used a plug-in. The plugin doesn't seem to be as powerful as YUI's JSON serialization, but maybe it is and I haven't explored it enough. Anyway, here goes!

First you'll need JQuery and the JSON serialization parser. I added it under YUI but you should be able to add it before or after the YUI in the header.


    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://jquery-json.googlecode.com/files/jquery.json-1.3.min.js"></script>

Next comes the actual code which is very similar to the previous post.

First you create the JSON-RPC object:


var myObject = { "method": "Bug.add_comment", 
                 "params": [ { "id": 1, 
                               "comment":"I am using bugzilla's webservices with jQuery! YAY" 
                           } ], 
                 "id": 1 };

Then we encode it into a string:

var enc = $.toJSON(myObject);

Lastly we send it on its way using the JQuery ajax method:


$.ajax({"contentType":"application/json",
        "data": enc, 
        "dataType": "json", 
        "url": "jsonrpc.cgi",
        "type": "post",
        success: function(d, ts){
                    console.log('w00t',d); 
                    console.dir(d);
                 }
       });

Just like in YUI we need to make sure we set the contentType to application/json and use a post (get is still disabled due to cross site scripting concerns). I set the dataType to JSON so Jquery would deserialize the response for me.

And now we've got a basic JSON-RPC message being sent. Now we'll still need to handle errors etc, but for now this is enough to get any eager JavaScript developer going.

Another example is getting bug info which might be equally helpful is available below. This method gets information about 2 bugs. I'm not going to explain it as much but it follows the same pattern.


var myObject = {
               "method": "Bug.get",
               "params": [{ "ids": [1,2]}],
               "id": 1
               }; 
var enc = $.toJSON(myObject); 
jQuery.ajax({"contentType":"application/json",
             "data":enc, 
             "dataType":"json", 
             "url":"jsonrpc.cgi", 
             "type":"post", 
             success:function(d, ts){
                     console.log('w00t', d); 
                     console.dir(d)
                     }
           });

The hope is eventually to release some JavaScript plugins for YUI (2 and 3) and JQuery that will make this sort of stuff much easier, like handle the serialization, and errors. But for now these examples will have to do.

For more info about what Bugzilla web services are available check out:
http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/3.4/en/html/api/index.html

Next experiment... Jetpack! Any ideas on a cool bugzilla jetpack app?

Using YUI with Bugzilla 3.6

2009-07-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

So today someone filed Bug 502504 and I immediately became nervous because I had never even tried using the new JSON-RPC api and I was worried it would be too hard to use for anyone.

Well after a few hickups I got it to work on my local machine as well as landfill and I thought I'd post the code and attempt to explain it.

First off you'll need to get a few YUI libraries, specifically the Connect Manager and the JSON library. For ease of my own use I just grabbed utilities.js, but that might be too much for some of you.

You'll need to set the Conent-Type properly:

YAHOO.util.Connect.setDefaultPostHeader( 'application/json', true );

You'll need to pick the Web Service you want to use by looking at the API here. Then you'll need to create the JSON to send over.

According to the JSON-RPC spec you send over an Object/Hash with 3 value pairs:

method : the method you want to use, for this example we'll use Bug.add_comment
params : the params the webservice docs say you need to send. The spec for JSON-RPC say it needs to be an array of objects, for Bug.add_comment is it just a hash of id and the comment and a few other optional things
id : an integer, the id of the call so you can match it up later on, YUI should make it so we don't need to worry about this one, but you might care.

Here is the Object definition for the example...


var myObject = {
    "method": "Bug.add_comment",
    "params": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "comment":"I am using bugzilla's webservices! YAY"
        }],
    "id": 1
};

and then we'll stringify it using YAHOO.lang.JSON.stringify.

var jsonObject = YAHOO.lang.JSON.stringify(myObject);

Now hopefully you know how to use the callback in YUI. If not there are plenty examples.

Finally you call it!

YAHOO.util.Connect.asyncRequest('POST', 'jsonrpc.cgi', callback, jsonObject );

So in this example I added a comment to bug 1, and that comment is "I am using bugzilla's webservices! YAY"

That's it! The full code that I used is below. I was using firebug so you should change the console commands to whatever you want to do with the response:


YAHOO.util.Connect.setDefaultPostHeader( 'application/json', true );
var callback = { 
    success:function(o){     
        console.log('it worked');
        console.dir(o.response); 
    },
    failure:function(o){ 
        console.log('it failed');     
        console.dir(o); 
    }};
var myObject = {
  "method": "Bug.add_comment",
  "params": [
      {
          "id": 1,
          "comment":"I am using bugzilla's webservices! YAY"
      }
  ],
  "id": 1
};
var jsonObject = YAHOO.lang.JSON.stringify(myObject);
YAHOO.util.Connect.asyncRequest('POST', 'jsonrpc.cgi', callback, jsonObject );

Another example for those who would like one...


YAHOO.util.Connect.setDefaultPostHeader(  'application/json' );    
var obj = {
     "method": "Bug.get",     
"params": [         
{             "ids": [
                 1,
                 2
              ]
          }
      ],
     "id": 1
};
var jsonObj = YAHOO.lang.JSON.stringify(obj);
YAHOO.util.Connect.asyncRequest('POST', 'jsonrpc.cgi', 
    {   success:function(o){     
            console.log('it worked');
            console.log(YAHOO.lang.JSON.parse(o.responseText)); 
        },    
        failure:function(o){     
            console.log('it failed');     
            console.dir(o); 
        }   
    },  jsonObj);

Lots of Design Feedback and Bugzilla Usability Data

2009-04-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of interest in the Bugzilla UI recently, which I'm super excited about. Attending usability conferences like CHI, I'd often hear about how hard it is to get any interest in usability or design in the open source community for various reasons (1, 2, 3, 4).

However, thanks to the post that LpSolit posted, many designers at Mozilla have stepped up with improvements to the Bugzilla UI, there is Boriss's suggestions for a new UI as well as Fligtar's new skin. Even a graphic designer from Spread Mozilla, graphicguru, stepped up to help improve my pathetic attempt at graphics(1,2,3). We've gotten some developers, like SS, to give some very useful feedback about how he'd prefer a more minimalist skin in general. And to top it off there has been feedback about new ways to think about the workflow from Jesse. Not to mention the meeting we had with the some of the Mozilla designers about future directions for Bugzilla, as documented by Aza. And today we had a small meeting with even more Mozilla folks about how they thought the tool could be improved. We're hoping to have more meetings in the future with Mozilla developers and get even more thanks to Jono.

It's been extremely exciting it is to see so many people interested in the Bugzilla UI. I'm hoping that with all these ideas you all can expect to see many design and usability improvements in future versions of Bugzilla.

But as my professor Bonnie John would say, one shouldn't design or develop without data. Turns out Mkanat, and many of the Mozilla folks feel the same way! And thanks to a very dedicated and smart group of HCII Carnegie Mellon students we've got usability data. This data was collected this past fall on Bugzilla 3.0, and I've attempted to post their research more or less unedited from their project to the Bugzilla wiki.

I haven't had a chance to look through and write an executive summery/conclusion to all their great data, but I thought to post it without one and perhaps let you all peruse the data and supply me with your important take aways from the data. This research was not based on how people use Mozilla's Bugzilla, but how people use bug trackers in general at software companies and other domains.

Let me know what you think of the data, what takeaways you find and what conclusions you draw from the data and maybe I can crowd source this task conclusion writing task.

Unfortunately Bugzilla 3.4 is going to be out the door pretty soon, and we won't be able to get many of these improvements into this version, but maybe we will see some of the improvements suggested this past week as well as ideas from the usability research appear in 3.6 or later versions of Bugzilla.

Again thanks to everyone who has become interested in redesigning Bugzilla, keep the designs and ideas coming! Feel free to email me when you've got ideas or designs and maybe we can work together to get the ideas into the source.

A new Login Form for Bugzilla

2009-04-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

So we've gotten lots of great feedback on the homepage, it's been really helpful and we're talking to folks about redoing the icons, making sure that the big icons are the right choice and much more. Wait for a post to find out more about the future of the homepage!

But we're also working on the log in process, attempting to make that easier as well!

Here is a view of the current log in form as it exists on the head.

One of the problems with this UI is that you can't reset your password very easily from this page, or any other page really. The nice part is, you can log in from any page, and not have to go through some intermediate page.

So here is the solution we've though of to make it easier to reset your password or log in from any page in Bugzilla.

How it appears if you've never come to the page

What happens when you click on log in, cursor focused on the log in. This is also what happens if the browser auto fills in your username and password.

This is what you'll see if you click on the forgot password link.

I omitted a close icon for now because it didn't seem necessary, but maybe you guys think it is. Let me know!

We're also adding a link to the reset password on the bad username/password error page.

One more thing to note about how this form will work. If the browser auto-fills your username and password, we'll make sure the javascript on the page detects your username and password and displays them to you, so you don't have to click the login hyperlink to login. We're hoping this will maintain the 1 click to login capability that so many people like.

This isn't something that will magically make Bugzilla super easier to use, but hopefully this will take us one step closer to a more usable Bugzilla.

As always feedback is really appreciated and unlike my previous post, I'll get emailed when you guys comments, so hopefully i can respond to your feedback in a more timely manner. Can't wait to hear your opinions.

Bugzilla's new UI for Index.cgi

2009-01-29T18:22:00.000-08:00

Bug 475063 is an enhancement to "Make the logged-out index.cgi simpler". After a few chats with Max Kanat, I've mocked up and submitted a patch to do just that.

Right now the patch looks like this.

Since this is a major change to the Bugzilla UI I'd love to get some feedback about this!

A few things to note:

There have been some discussions about how Buggy should look, with a pupil or without, more recongnizable or less, or even if we should use him at all. So that's in a state of flux.

Also for the dusk skin this UI will look the same, just set to the monocrome of Dusk.

For those wondering "what about the login box on the homepage?". There is another bug to improve that and make it easier to log in from any page! Bug 476090 will allow users to login directly from any page without needing to leave the context that they are in. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to do this ajax style to avoid having to leave the page at all.

Can't wait to hear your feedback about both of these bugs.

Google Chrome, no Undo Close Tab?!?

2008-09-05T10:10:00.001-07:00

I was a bit shocked when Google chrome came out without an undo close tab. Google and NASA helped Mozilla do a lot of research for Firefox 3 on how people use tabs, so I would have thought that Google's browser would have incorporated one of my favorite features that were designed for this purpose, undo close tab!

Granted it might be one of the least well known features in FF3, but I think it rocks. I close the wrong tab at least once a day, and it's mostly b/c i get over eager clicking the close tab or control-w.

The point is, making everything in a browser undo-able is super useful, I wish it would be made a full fledged feature instead of something you can only get to by right-clicking on the tabs that remain.

So Google, take your own advice to other browsers and add an close tab to the undo stack... please?

Extensions I use

2008-09-05T09:56:00.001-07:00

A quick post about the few but helpful extensions I use...

Firebug (duh)
Screen Grab! (for grabbing screenshots of the changes I have made)
Scribe Fire (to write these)

That's it! I haven't found many other super helpful extensions, probably b/c they tend to make firefox run slower or cause the browser to crash, both of which are not fun.

Planet Mozilla Test

2008-08-31T17:30:00.001-07:00

testing!

Bwaaaah! Learning Perl

2008-08-02T19:31:00.001-07:00

I'm learning perl to do some simple stuff with the bugzilla API. Got the Camel book, maybe I'll get through it this time. The fact that Perl has "pointers" kinda makes me sad though.

zug... zug

Status: Busy

2008-07-19T12:29:00.001-07:00

So I have not posted to the blog except for the previous random posting which I actually wrote more than a month ago.

The reason is, I've been super busy with work! I lived in Tucson supporting the Phoenix mission for 3 weeks and I actually wrote blog posting, they're just not public, sorry.

Then I came back to support the release of cxMAS aka cxPRACA 2.0, you can check it out, well the homepage at least (https://cxhazards.nasa.gov). Because of the release cycle we were unable to support Firefox 3.0, which is a bummer. Just not enough testers and we were still working on seeing if our selenium test cases worked. Firefox 3 went from beta to released super fast it seemed, or at least for those of us on Mars time.

I came back to Mountain View in June and have been working on the release of cxMAS and now the release of MSLICE. We've got one more release and then... I'll post the YUI screen scrolling animation that I promised to post.

Anyway, that's a heads up, i haven't forgotten about the blog. Also if you're REALLY interested you can follow me on twitter. But there I'm more just spouting total randomness.

Oh and Dr Horrible (http://drhorrible.com) go, now before it is off the internets!

Spacial Constraints?

2008-07-19T12:21:00.001-07:00

Just something i want to keep in mind. If you can plan spatially. You should also be able to create constraints on targets, where they can be moved/created for a, when Targets can be targeted, what instruments can use them, is there more?

Life In Tucson

2008-05-30T02:17:00.001-07:00

So since the Phoenix lander touched down, I know I'll be spending some time here for a while.

What does this mean for MAS, mostly that I'll be juggling bug fixes with supporting the tool. The good news is when I'm not supporting the mission I should have plenty of time for Bugs and less likelihood of getting distracted.

The past few days have been was amazing and I'm glad I have been involved in this project for the past 3 years.

The fun part is I get to have 2 laptops, my normal mac and a windows machine. What this means is I got to experience the joy of installing bugzilla and bzr on a windows machine. It was as fun as a root canal!

But it works and because of that I was able to knock out a bunch of bugs. I've also done some cool stuff with YUI that I need to post, specifically animating the scroll bar of the whole window! It looks like there are some bugs in IE so I'm gonna fix that, publish it and then yank it out. Because our designers don't like it. But it was still fun to write an extension to the YUI animation class and I think it would be very educational for anyone who wants to write their own.

I've also had a few other wrestling matches with YUI, in the end I'm not sure who won, but YUI did was it was supposed to and it made my life easier, so maybe we both won.

Long story short...

YAY the Phoenix has Landed! YAY YUI ROXORS!

Bugs, in code and in life

2008-05-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

So MAS (formerly known as PRACA) is now in bug fixing mode, which ironically I have learned to love. Unlike feature development, which requires lots of time thinking hard about how to get a design to work within the constraints of browsers, usually just Firefox, and also with good performance it takes a lot of thought. Which while very fun, after many months of it, along with the even more complex design work that I do, my brain gets kinda tired. So when bugs come around it is pretty straight forward. Firefox has Firebug, IE has a few tools that are no where near as nice as Firebug, but much like tea leaves, you can learn to read them, sorta. So I have learned to enjoy the straightforwardness of bug fixing. Something is broken, I fix it! Granted experience has taught me how to fix these bugs, so I never really get confused by them... except for when pure HTML crashes IE, that I like less. But I digress... the point is bug fixing is usually a pretty mild task, that just requires me to work through the possibilities, mark a bug as fixed and then move on to the next one. Unlike features which might take me between 8 and 16 hours of work, a bug takes between 8 and 16 minutes, it's the difference between playing some crazy RPG for a week vs a game of Wii Tennis, both are fun, but you need to change it up.

Now bugs in life on the other hand are MUCH less fun. The bug I am referring to is the loss of my cell phone. A total bummer. I've tried to fix it by calling caltrain and hopefully my lost phone will be found. But this experience has taught me some interesting work arounds for life sans cell phone, mostly how to use IM as a text messaging service, because I don't use my cell phone for much more than that 90% of the time, but it defiantly feels like life without my voice. Sure I can function, I've got IM and I can write stuff down, but talking was so nice! But the good part is, this could be my excuse to get an iPhone, or maybe one of those neato gPhones. Talk about turning a big lemon into lemonade.

Finally, something that is just super duper cool and I must share... The Nintendo Coffee Table. For someone who is ready to buy a Wii just so he can play Zelda, Mario Bros, Mario 3, and Tecmo Bowl again, this is a dream.

How Much YUI is too much? PRACA says "No Such Thing!"

2008-05-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

So since most of the world doesn't get to use PRACA aka MAS (Mission Assurance Systems) you don't get to see how cool version 2.0 will be. But I assure you it is. What is so cool? Well first it uses almost every part of YUI. In fact I'll list it for you and how we use it!

Animation : very sparsely because it can get hoaky, but it is still fun to use!
AutoComplete: We use it for our User Select areas, as will Bugzilla once it gets back to them.
Browser History Manger: We use it to let uses bookmark tabs as well as groups, it's a very cool utility and is great for any site that wants to makes javascript tabs bookmark-able, which is pretty sweet.
Calendar: We use Bugzilla's Custom Date field
Connection Manger: We use it all over to connect to various instances of MAS
Cookie: This is a SUPER nice utility, I especially like subcookies. We use it to store lots of our cookie info such as our nice record save improvements.
Container: We use it as tooltips, help text, resizable panels, the saved searches area... well all over!
Data Source: We use it in combination with the Data Table
Data Table: We use this for letting users select bugs and groups that they want to link to, yeah MAS has bugs that are so big, they have internal linking!!
DOM: I'm not sure how anyone can avoid using this great little utility.
Drag & Drop: We use it for reordering groups
Event: Um... duh, this is just great, and I love it!
JSON: the latest edition we use it to talk with our spell checker, yeah our IE users don't have spell checkers built into their browsers.

So as you can see we've got a lot, and loading all of this YUI stuff isn't free, it takes about 200ms, but totally worth it. If you all in the Bugzilla community have any questions let me know, but overall I'm very happy with YUI and I recommend it to anyone who wants a nice library with lots of useful widgets and utilities in it. That isn't to say JQuery or Prototype aren't great, but YUI has a lot of nice stuff that focuses on adding widgets and utilities to JavaScript instead of adding core functionality to the language itself.

My Podcasts

2008-05-09T21:20:00.000-07:00

I LOVE my nano and podcasts! I listen to them walking to the train, waiting for the train, on the train, on the shuttle, at work, at home... well basically everywhere! So I thought I'd share my list with the web and maybe the web would share some good podcasts with me! So without further adieu here is my list of podcasts in the order that i prefer to listen to them to.

These are the ones that I listen to the most, sometimes I listen to others, but not really. So I guess this proves I'm a wacky liberal in SF, but oh well. I find most of these podcasts informative and humorous. Hopefully you do too.

PS...
Just to note, I used to listen to "This Week In Tech" aka TWIT, however, at some point I realized these guys sounded more like me and my friends hanging around the bar and less like an insightful and well researched show. And while I have many friends who love this and other shows like it (think Diggnation). Once you live in Silicon Valley, it's just a different set of people talking shop, and it isn't as fun anymore, that being said, if you don't live here I'm sure it is a ton of fun to listen to.

It's nice when people say hi

2008-04-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

So I was checking my email last night after a long day and I got an email. It was from someone who was having some problems with the iGoogle flickr widget Braden and I had made a while ago.

Now it's been a very long time since I've done anything with iGoogle (I don't see the point of having homepages really) but way back when iGoogle was starting a friend of mine from school, Braden, asked if I'd be interested in developing some widgets. I wasn't doing much with the web at that time and I kinda missed it so I said, "Sure, why not". It was then that he and I started work on 2 widgets. Anyway, long story short, we made 2 widgets, one for flickr to see your friend's photos and one for colorado snow levels for skiing. Since then the XML feed for the snow levels has gone poof and so the widget is busted, oh well.

Anyway, this nice person, Jennifer, mentioned that she was having problems with the flickr widget and also mentioned that she really liked the widget. Now I'm not sure if people realize how much that means to people who develop free software for others, but it's a great feeling! So thanks Jennifer for saying hi and mentioning you like the stuff and I want to encourage everyone (myself included) to say thanks to the developers who write the code for the software they use and love. I think it is not too often that we hear from people and hearing things from people is like a nice pat on the back and definately is appreciated. So thanks to everyone who has said thanks, and thanks to everyone who has said, "your stuff stinks!" too, because you guys help us make our software better. Basically the only people who I don't want to thank are the silent ones, so... speak up and thank your developers, they work for free after all, so you might as well thanks, it won't cost you anything.

And thanks to those who say thanks, software that isn't used is like ... well i dunno, but it isn't good!

iGoogle widgets made by Braden and Me.

TV On the Web... My Dreams have come True

2008-04-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

So at first I thought life was grand because of hulu.com. Thanks to the writter's strike I was made aware of it (yay writer's strike). I got my private beta invite and off i was to watching tons of TV.

Then Netflix.com came out with unlimited Movie watching for people who used Netflix (which is me) so I got even more TV on the web (too bad i can only use this service on windows machines).

Then Hulu.com went public and it added movies too!! Holy moly!

Of course there is NBC.com, ABC.com and CBS.com which all have a lot of shows sometimes... but not all the time. But I have not been a big fan of them.

Of course there is Adult Swim Videos, Comedy Central Vidoes and now... by far the most exciting thing EVER.... South Park Studios [beta]. Yup, my favorite cartoon, well maybe tied with Robot Chicken, is now fully available on the web.

Yes most of these sites have commercials, but I think that is great. I'm 200% for having commercials on websites because my main desire to having TV on the web is because I want to be able to watch shows when I want. I don't mind having a minute worth of commercials if I can watch the shows when I want! Now if only the studio execs would realize that having older seasons and older shows available won't take away from their DVD sales... well one can dream...

Well good luck to all these guys. I hope you make tons of money and keep it up.

PS. For those who are wondering what's on Hulu, you can see the list here. My personal favorites are: Bones, Battlestar Galactica, My Name is Earl, Heroes, House, 30 Rock, and the Simpsons. Canceled shows like Firefly and Buffy can also be found there.

Designers should use a Wiki

2008-04-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

So the other day my friend posted a twitter about designing on wikis or maybe it was a status message on aim... anyway, he posted something and it started a long conversation about the importance of using Wikis to explain designs to developers.

This reminded me of this idea I had about a paper for CHI, which I have since abandoned. But the idea was that designers need to design not only for our users but also for developers. That doesn't mean doing what developers want but instead communicating in a way that makes sense and is clear to developers. Wikis are helpful in that way because they allow designers to put things up in any format that they like (story board, mocks etc) and with the help of many bug tracking systems you can link designs to bugs which then let developers have a clean spec to work off of. This is something that we've been talking about supporting in Bugzilla, plus Jira and Confluence already do it.

I've talked about using wikis at CHI before during some BOF sessions, and I assumed this was common knowledge a quick google search resulted in:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2005/01/20/wikidocs.html

So it seems like some people know about this, but if you're a designer and you don't know about this then I say, USE A WIKI!. They're great in all forms. Perhaps I'll start blogging more about how we use wikis in our group later on so that i dont have to write about it every time someone asks. Makes sense hu?

Well I'm back to doing praca v2 dev work. Also that conversation with a buddy of mine about animation and why it is important. I'll hopefully get a hold of that paper and power point presentation that we discussed. But the short of it is, animation is great from designers point of view and if you have an animation layer, it is usually easy to implement and makes applications feel much smoother, the problem is... getting managers and developers to understand that... but that's another blog posting all together.

The April Fools day Jokes that made me sad

2008-04-02T19:54:00.000-07:00

So April Fools day was yesterday and there were a few good jokes like:

Alex is moving to canada (by Mel)
Google & Virgin = Virgil (mission to mars)
Google Custom Time (i was hoping this was actually send email in the future, an actually useful feature)

But the one that made me sad was:

The Zelda Movie Trailer

For more wacky things Google has done check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_hoaxes

Don't forget the "back" button

2008-04-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

So Edit Bug (template/en/default/bug/edit.html.tmpl) has kinda become a favorite of mine, but something not many people know is that Edit Bug has to be tested in a few ways to make sure it works properly. Here is the checklist I check when I am about to submit a patch to Edit Bug.

It works how I expect/wrote it, ie all the permutations etc.
It works when there is an error on the bug page (i like alias set to 1111) and then the user hits back. Basically this should appear as the user left it when they hit back. ie... if things are revealed they should be re-revealed automatically.
It still "works" when JS is turned off
It fits on a small screen, defined as 1024×768 and wraps nicely

I'm sure there are some more, so tell me what you think they are. I'm also glad to see people taking the idea that BMO inspired and taking it to the next level such as Bug 424215. So thanks.

Finally, sorry to all those folks who are finding these bugs with BMO's version of Edit Bug, but please don't file them against bugzilla, they're a BMO bug, Edit Bug in bugzilla should pass all of these tests.

Peabody likes what I like

2008-04-02T19:03:00.001-07:00

Peabody Award Winners:

2005

Comedy Central, “South Park.”
R&D TV, in association with NBC Universal Television Studios, presented on SCI FI
Channel, “Battlestar Galactica.”

2006

Rebel Base, Sony Pictures Television, presented on Cartoon Network, “The
Boondocks: ‘The Return of the King.’”
Reveille Studios in association with NBC Universal Television Studios, presented on NBC, “The Office.”

2007

30 Rock Universal Media Studios in association with Broadway Video Television and Little Stranger Inc.
Dexter Showtime, John Goldwyn Productions, The Colleton Company, Clyde Phillips Productions
Wait, Wait…Don`t Tell Me! National Public Radio, Chicago Public Radio, Urgent Haircut Productions
The Colbert Report Hello Doggie Inc., Busboy Productions, and Spartina Productions

Yup, this proves it, i have good taste :) Well to check out if your favorites got on peobody's list check out http://www.peabody.uga.edu/winners/winners_book.php

Now if only Joss Whedon wins a Peabody I'll be happy. Oh yeah. I'm currently obsessed with the Fox show Bones... science geeks solving crimes, and unlike CSI, the geeks actually act like real geeks!

Finally... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollhouse_(TV_series) ... yay...

Oh the features you'll see!

2008-03-06T10:04:00.001-08:00

So with Bugzilla 3.2 more or less in freeze and not getting any new fun-ness; the list of things people want for 4.0 are growing! There is of course the possibility of there being a 3.4, but with bug 398281 and bug 415813 chomping at its heals, it is doubtful that there will be a 3.4, and instead just a 4.0.

Here is a list of the bugs I plan on getting done for 4.0

Useful Homepage (blocking on webservices getting done)
removal of all hard coded styles including brs!
Improve the UI for tagging bugs (yup, TAGS!)
Tabular and graphical reports should be sortable
Saved searches should be available from a menu
page to request forgotten password unclear
Redo the footer search navigation on buglist.cgi
Hovering the Administration link should open a menu with links to separate admin pages

Yup, it's a lot. Although to be fair, most of it will be derived from PRACA.

In other news. I had a really great talk with a Bugzilla user that reminded me of the the importance of thinking of the visually impaired. Bug 420288 shows that we as designers/developers always need to think about those who can't see as well as us, once again... the user is not like me. So I just wanted to say thanks to john elion for doing such a great job of telling us what the problems were that he was encountering and showing us some problems with the UI, namely that finding the format for printing button isn't so easy to find. So... Thanks!

Lastly, I want to make another plea for usability people out there to help out with Bugzilla. We all know the UI needs help, but the project only prospers as much as those who work on it help out. You'd be amazed how much any 1 person can do for a project like this. So if you're interested, email me!

Back to the salt mines

The Forgotten User

2008-02-28T08:55:00.001-08:00

So there is the persona page, the list of "users" that the bugzilla community recognizes. However, there is at least one set of users that has grabbed my attention recently. Mostly because they have been in the IRC the most recently. That group of users is what I am calling the new Bugzilla admin group. These are the guys who:

Have never installed apache
Have never installed mysql
Have never installed perl
Have never installed or admined bugzilla

It seems like the Bugzilla community has more or less given up on helping these guys and figured "eh, let them come to the IRC channel" (understandably so, which I will explain in a bit). Unfortunately I think a lot of these users don't even know how to get into the IRC (just a guess). I think by lowering the barrier of entry to installing Bugzilla we can drastically increase the number of people who use Bugzilla. The problem (and reason why many of the Bugzilla developers have given up on this part) is that setting up apache, mysql, perl really isn't the responsibility of Bugzilla developers. It really makes me wish there was an easier way of doing it. At first I thought, "Hey, I write installers for work, I'll do it for Bugzilla" the problem is then I have to maintain it every time windows/osx/linux changes or does something funny. Mkanat basically said it needs to be fully automated, which seems to be the best case. So lets say people didn't have a hard time installing apache, mysql, and perl, then how could we make setting up Bugzilla easier. I'm not sure if I know the answer either. Maybe some nice System admin will figure out a good way of doing it.

Until then, people who want to try out Bugzilla for the first time. I salute you!

Fieldsets, printing and firefox don't get along

2008-02-19T18:47:00.001-08:00

There are few things that have given me headaches like fieldsets and printing in firefox. We've basically removed all fieldsets from our code to take care of issues we've been having field content being cut off by firefox not printing fieldsets correctly. I know i should file a bug against firefox, but it seems to not be so bad in firefox 3.0 and it's easier to just fix it in our code than file the bug... yeah i know, bad me.

Anyway, if anyone happens to find this page, yes, firefox 2.0 also has printing problems. Bug 234015 says it fixed the problem, but i've got at least one page where it doesn't. If a firefox developer reads this and says, "HEY YOU! file that bug, then maybe i will". First i'll say, well i wanted to ask about it in the IRC channel but i couldn't find the irc channel. Anyway, it's annoying. Fieldset != my_friend

The search for the "Normal" bugzilla User

2008-02-19T15:48:00.001-08:00

So it turns out Bugzilla is more or less in a formative stage for 4.0. There are a lot of bugs with the 4.0 as the target milestone. But there are a few features that are high up on the list.

By far my favorite is bug 344619. Which is supposed to be as nebulous as it seems. It could be read as "Make bugzilla user friendly".

This is a task which some people spend their careers trying to make happen and is a task which might never be done. However, the hardest part as a mozilla UI person mentioned is finding the Normal user.

There was an attempt to make some Bugzilla personas, ~~but it is clear that these are not flushed out at the time of this writing and~~ (turns out they were flushed out, you had to click on the links... but) not very useful in helping to find the "Normal User" other than giving them names.

So the question becomes who is the "Normal" Bugzilla user and how do we design to them? I'm not sure I know that answer yet, but it seems clear that part of my task as the Bugzilla UE lead is to determine who they are. The hard part is there are some huge disconnects, mainly:

The stuff that developers think are important
The stuff (i think) usability people might think are important
The stuff that people I talk to think are important
The stuff that I think a normal user might think are important

What's the lesson to learn? I need to do some formative research to determine what people actually need. Too bad the most important resource in doing formative research is time, something I have little of. For now I'm going to be happy with moving stuff from PRACA back to Bugzilla and helping with the stuff I thought a normal user might want.

I might start writing full Bugzilla personas and then posting them to this blog, but we'll see. Writing personas isn't as easy as one might think.

The other task, continue to look at other bugzilla instances and just chatting to whomever i can talk to. It is by no means scientific, but at least it is some feedback, which is better than the zero feedback I've currently got!

Oh also: http://eclipsewebmaster.blogspot.com/2008/02/mozilla-getting-feedback-from-its-users.html
Go team Venture!

Better Comment/Thread support

2008-02-19T15:19:00.001-08:00

So as I use BMO more and more I've noticed that 90% of the work that is done is via the comments. This isn't at all how we use it for our NASA work, but after talking to a co-worker if the comments system supported more threading, inline images and linking to threads it might be useful to both. I also talked to some guys at Mozilla and it seems they share this need as well, well at least the UI guys do :P.

It seems clear that different groups have different needs (duh), but that's another thread, I'm going to focus on the threads for this entry.

So what would we like to see? Well based on discussions here is what i could come up with:

Actual threads, not just reply to's, maybe with twiddles to open and close the threads.
Linking to attachments, especially when people approve or decline them.
Inline attachments (images mostly). This is REALLY helpful for designers
Syntax and code highlighting. Really useful for developers, hopefully we can use a plug-in method

However, as a mozilla member suggested, we don't want to turn Bugzilla into a strange form of a message board. Things to think about.

Suggestions for Bugzila 4.0 part 1

2008-02-12T15:01:00.001-08:00

There are lots of things that could use some improvement in Bugzilla, I think everyone is in agreement with that. But the question is what do I work on first?

This is the first part of an unknown number of postings about what I and others would like to see in the next version of Bugzilla and hopefully I can update this post with the bug numbers that match the enhancements. Some of these are enhancements that we have done over here at NASA and want to give back to the Bugzilla community.

Make the homepage useful for signed in users (maybe everyone!) Bug 130835
Make a user preference for where comments go Bug 398473 and Bug 371645
New Reports Widget Bug 412685
Menu for saved Searches with filter Bug 324402
Menu for Admin prefs Bug 400674
Option for HTML email that presents information in a more readable form Bug 65477
AJAX search suggestions in the cc field and reassign field, similar to a web-based email client (which i think is in 3.2 already)
The ability to have inline images in comments. Bug 252782

Other than that my hope is to have features that will help get User Experience people more involved with bug tracking and fixes. I'm less sure how we can do this and perhaps some UI folks have some suggestions.

Bugzilla 3.2 patches and polish

2008-02-12T12:16:00.000-08:00

The next version of Bugzilla has a few UI improvements that I helped to implement. One of the improvements was revamping the page that is used to edit bugs, aka edit_bugs.html.tmpl Bug 374020

The last part of fixing-up the edit page for version 3.2 is removing the knob. Yes that's right, no more knob in Bugzilla. For those of you not familiar with it, the knob is the small area at the bottom of a bug that lets you change the status of the bug. In previous versions of Bugzilla it was also used to assign the bug to people. Once I am done with this last patch the only thing close to the commit button will be the the comments. I think everyone in the Bugzilla community will be happy to see it go. So... RIP Knob!

Lastly once I'm done with this change to the knob, I'm going to start doing a Usability QA and filing some bugs with the polish keyword. My plan is to do a heuristic evaluation of the latest version of the code. Hopefully this will reveal some easy things to fix for the latest version of Bugzilla.

I hope to post the evaluation results to this blog along with links to various Bugzilla bugs filed based on the results.