After an interesting ride internal, I’m back to open and hacking Bugzilla — at least for a couple weeks — helping Andre with technical and coding stuff for maemo.org Bugzilla, as the increasing amount of incoming bug reports takes more and more time. It’s very nice to see the same old guys still around.
My priority tasks are first some quick, much needed tweaks to the current version. Then on to new lands, getting Bugzilla 3.4 in shape for maemo.org. Stay tuned.
If it’s a hardware failure, why does it strike twice in a row at 6 AM? If the four NIC goes bonkers, why is that related to the sound card? If it is a bus, why does a freaking centimeter make a difference?
I don’t know.
All I do know is, that I am back online. Different four NIC, different slot, minus sound card. So what the hell is really failing here? The four NIC, the sound card, the board — or a combination thereof?
Definitely a combination. Something died, something is about to die.
I am online. For the moment.
Finally, got myself a floating head. Woot! Yes, that’s me on the left (or right, depending where you actually read this).
After being physically maltreated to get some decent pictures taken to work with, getting nicened-up, re-assembled and undergoing other unspeakable treatment — it is done. Thanks a ton to the artist, a close friend of mine.
Oh, and yeah, unlike most pictures of me, I actually like my little hackergotchi. 
You can find it live right next to my posts on Planet GNOME, Planet Openismus, as well as statically on my blog’s main site.
So recently, some $user entity joined a particular mailing-list. And starts asking questions. Nothing wrong with that!
Granted, quite a cannonade of questions. Sure, we can handle that. Showing off a profound lack of understanding what he’s dealing with. Right, we are patient, usually, and can explain (again) or point to specific doc sections (yet again). Asking quite dumb questions, often with a confrontational undertone. This is where it gets annoying.
Today, that new kid in the kindergarten came to an obvious conclusion. We need a proper forum! This current $thingy is unberable. And he would even provide the forum. No, wait, he already got a domain… Mind you, the $thingy he uses is a popular “forum frontend for mailing-lists”. I’ll try hard not to mention the name.
So he uses a third-party forum to access a mailing-list, because he can’t handle the mail. Can’t handle the forum either, obviously. And takes the forum front-end’s flaws as evidence a mailing-list is unusable, and we need a forum. This logic strikes me.
Did I mention the list’s topic is about email, quite in-depth, filtering, from an admin’s perspective?
So he got his shiny new domain. I guess he’ll sit there forever, eye-balling his precious forum, constantly reloading the gazillion threads he started to see if anyone answered his questions. He forgot one thing, though — the knowledgeable folks who actually can answer his questions, and properly maintain the forum.
On to more productive things…
Just in time for the Summit, according to plan — I am pleased to blog about another round of custom features and tweaks for the maemo.org Bugzilla. Finally managed to push them live yesterday with our über-busy sys admins. Aside from quite a few almost-invisible stuff behind the scenes, general minor polishing, re-phrasing and branding, there are highly visible and useful features, to make Bugzilla a more pleasant experience for all of us.
Just like Nokia employees, active Maemo community members now are labeled as such on comments, generally giving a hint to their commitment and knowledge about the Maemo platform. You deserve it! We’ve started to add this bit to a few members already — if you spot one we’ve missed but should have this, please don’t hesitate to ping Andre or me.
A long-standing request is being added automatically to the Cc list when commenting on bugs. This now is a user preference, by default adding you to any bug sufficiently interesting to you to comment on. If you prefer the previous behavior (hey Ryan), getting it back is just two clicks away. Of course, this still can be set on a case-by-case basis.
Another convenient enhancement are visually highlighted quotes, making it easy to distinguish between the new information and what it refers to. Enjoy, I hope you like it!
Recently added task: Custom hacks to Bugzilla to provide IRC bot interoperability. Working on it with jott, this will be a nice feature for the IRC channel.
On a related note — already half way in Berlin. I’m excited to see you there!
Yay, mc-fast is back. And what a nice feedback it sent me…
Freqs for those rules in 'mc-fast' mass-check:
MSECS SPAM% HAM% S/O RANK SCORE NAME
0 1996 1999 0.500 0.00 0.00 (all messages)
0.00000 49.9625 50.0375 0.500 0.00 0.00 (all messages as %)
0.00000 41.1323 0.0000 1.000 1.00 0.01 T_PQRTW_4
Could it possibly be I just created a killer rule to identify > 40% spam with no false positives? Seriously low scoring spam. Using a single, really short RE? Could it possibly be there is one major spammer out there, that uses this easy to catch finger print on all his spam? And that no one spotted it before…?
Granted, that’s just a tiny pre-flight corpus used for some very basic, fast evaluation. Eagerly awaiting the real mass-check results tomorrow…
Some of the stuff I have been hacking on in the background recently finally has been rolled and pushed on bugs.maemo.org — now that the infrastructure issues have been resolved. Thanks, Ferenc.
Besides some nicening up (A bunch of delimiting dashes with HTML and CSS? Yeah, right…), the reporter and some roles are now clearly stated for every comment. No more scrolling and jumping through the page, just to find out if the commenter is the original reporter. No more mouse twiddling, to see if a commenter is a Nokia employee. You now have that invaluable information right at your fingertips.
Yes, I’ve been spoiled by GNOME bugzilla. Probably the best bugzilla out there. There are a lot of features that just make a triagers life much easier. Supporting the workflow rather than being interruptive. And now we got the first set of bugzilla enhancements for maemo.org.
Hope you will enjoy these first custom features. Got some more tweaks like this and larger features on my list, and started working on that already…
More backlogged news. I’ve been invited and accepted to become a SpamAssassin committer a couple weeks ago. Quite an honor, given there are not many hackers with this status. Even more so, because I did contribute to SA before in various ways, but didn’t yet submit rules or code for upstream inclusion.
I guess, coming up with a few rules that seriously hit low-scoring spam, while resulting in a (less than) negligible amount of false positive hits triggers some attention. The style of arguing and dealing with the developers may have helped, too. Anyway, I am now one of these developers myself. Yay me. 
Unfortunately, ever since I’ve been granted this status, I didn’t have the time nor sufficient sneaky spam to develop new rules. Until now. Spotted a pattern yesterday night, and hacked up some rules — turns out, this is a new ratware variant, no hits older than a week. I expect more of these, soon.
Thanks guys (you know who you are). Access to the nightly mass-checks is just awesome to check a rules performance in development.
Consequently, I shouldn’t have mentioned that in public either. Well, I’m not going to talk about fight club (even though it is a great movie, and I finally got the book)…
But myself, my involvement in Free Software and maybe some random thoughts and rants. I’ll try to keep rants low, though. Re-introducing myself, since I have neglected my blog for way too long, here are some quick facts in a nutshell:
I’ve been an active Community guy for a long time, dating back to the old Helix-Code / Ximian days. Bugsquad volunteer, lurker and occasional triager, have been a heavy load triager in the past. Maintainer of GARNOME, the build utility for the GNOME Desktop, member of the GNOME Release Team, and of course GNOME Foundation member.
And recently hired by Openismus as maemo.org bugmaster, together with Andre, to support the community around Maemo. An awesome opportunity, and working with the friendly maemo.org community already has been quite some fun. I’ll add more colorful bits soon while I go along. I promise.
Bad Behavior has blocked 45 access attempts in the last 7 days.