Well I’m a little late in reporting on my experience of watching someone on Bugzilla. This is partly because I didn’t read the “to-dos” closely enough and then it was because it took a few hours to find out how to watch someone. Well, asking on IRC, I was informed that you go to your user settings. What?! That is so strange. I wish that Bugzilla had a better interface where you could search by user, email, etc. Something to connect you to the people more. The current interface assumes you already know how to use everything.

Anyway, I put Ted (:luser) on my watch list because he’s my main contact for the project I’m working on.

Mullin already said it, but I will say it again – the flood of emails made no sense, I had no way of knowing who commented from the subject line of the email, and basically it took less than one day before I pretty much stopped paying attention to anything from bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org.

I am impressed with anyone who uses this system and gets something out of it.

Armen says there’s no way bugzilla can change because it’s too big – is that really true?

My Experience at Ontario Linux Fest 2007 – At the Toronto Congress Center.

Woke up at 6 am to get the dog walked and eat some breakfast before heading out to get Cesar. Thanks Cesar for being awake and ready to go!

We had to go up to Seneca first and grab the display material from Mary, who was also awake and on time. Perfect so far. Then we headed up to the airport vicinity where the google map had said the center was and I promptly got us a little lost. After checking at the gas station for direction, we were set straight and arrived on time to the conference center where we signed in, got a bag ‘o shwag and found our table.

Once we were set up, I went to the “Women in Open Source” talk that Angela Byron was giving at 9:30. This was an excellent presentation and I was really excited to meet her in person and to talk briefly about her Summer of Code experience. I have been stalking that site for 2 years now and was never sure if it was something I could do or if only elite hackers applied. Meeting a real person who has done it and can speak to how it worked for her was inspiring. She works with Lullabot and thus, Drupal. After her talk I went to a “Hands on Demo” of Joomla and got to see how the other half lives. Joomla is exciting to me and I look forward to having a little bit of time to test out setting up a simple site with it.

Cesar had dutifully staffed the booth for a couple of hours so I went and took over so he could wander around and go to OpenMoko after lunch. At one point though, we plastered all the tables in both session halls with FSOSS flyers so as to get maximum awareness.

Talking to people about FSOSS was great – a lot of folks already knew about it and were coming. I spent a little time talking with Dru Lavigne and learning about FreeBSD. I even got a few install disks so maybe I’ll be testing it out on a virtual machine soon. A few good networking opportunities presented themselves. I met the guy who does all the Linux on mainframes stuff for IBM and he gave me his card to contact him about IBM online learning.

In the afternoon I listened to the story of a LUG partnering up with the United Way up around Owen Sound and fixing up computers for families in need. I hear that we’re doing some similar stuff at Seneca, so I’m going to be looking into how I could help with that project. What I like about this kind of project is that it can be anonymous – so that people in need don’t have to feel like they are getting handouts. Also, this is a great opportunity to work on making Linux useable to people with ZERO technical skills. That’s something I think really needs to keep being improved if there is going to be wider adoption. It also interests me because I need to become more comfortable with installing and configuring Linux so I can be an evangelist.

All in all, a great time was had and I came away with lots of new knowledge and curiousity about Linux and the community surrounding it plus, some new friendships in the making. I could get used to this conference lifestyle.

As a parting note:

did that penguin just move?

To get the information that I need to make this Source Server work.

So in the srcsrv.doc file that comes with the debugging package it says:

Anyone interested in using Source Server with CVS should send email to windbgfb@microsoft.com.

So I did.

Here’s the response I just got:

Good things come to those that wait – and you will not have to wait long. The next debugger release will have cvs source indexing scripts in it. You will probably need to tweak them since cvs installations seem to differ greatly and I was unable to come up with something that was truly general-purpose.

So watch our web site for the release. It will be out soon.

.pat styles

Well that’s interesting because in my sdk I have a CVS.pm and a cvsindex.cmd which is what you need to make this stuff work with CVS. So does Pat know that? Is there a better version on the way?

What I don’t understand right this second is two things:
1. How does the actual indexing of PDB files happen? According to my main source of information (becoming as dog-eared as a web page can get):

When you run SSINDEX.CMD, after it validates parameters it asks the version control system for the list of all source files (and their version numbers) in the target project and below. PDB files are then searched for recursively. For each PDB file found, the Perl code calls SRCTOOL.EXE to extract the list of source files. The code looks through the source files in the PDB file and sees if they match any of the files stored earlier from the version control search: if a match is found, the code saves that file info.

Does this mean that I should be calling SSINDEX.CMD and not CVSINDEX.CMD? Does this look through all folders in the named path? When I ran it yesterday I did several variations but to no apparent success.

and…I’ve forgotten the second thing. It will come to me.