Bugzilla's new UI for Index.cgi

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?!?

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

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

1. Firebug (duh)
   
2. Screen Grab! (for grabbing screenshots of the changes I have made)
3. 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

testing!

Bwaaaah! Learning Perl

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

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?

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?