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Today the west northern part of the Netherlands , also know as Friesland is celebrating their language  on twitter, by twitting in frissian and using the hashtag #frysk. Happy frissian day.

For those who don’t know Firefox, Thunderbird, Lightning and even FirefoxOS are available in the language. My good friend Wim maintains a blog about Mozilla products in frissian.

And we are approaching our next major release (eg 24) - to give developers time to fix and find issues the project definitively needs more people using the beta version. If you want to give a hand just using it helps (make sure to send crash reports, send perf data if you feel like it). If anything looks wrong bugzilla is your friend for making bug reports.

Back in 1991, my dad replaced the aging Apple ][ with a brand and shiny new Macintosh LC. I had started hacking disks and memory using the nice call -151 on the Apple IIe - I was a geek and hooked.

Before the LC, the way I would acquire new software would be through friends and Dad , he’d bring new cracked games (CCB and others thank you). One day dad came back with a Mac version of Dark castle and I asked where it came from and his answer was ‘the network’. I was curious and wanted to know more. The year after I would spend a few hours a week using my dad’s computer to explore that thing called the network. I would go in a room with a terminal (can’t tell the type) that was connected to the university unix machines. I used emails to contact software authors. Discovered ftp and the umich archives. Created an account on the freenet to have my own email.

At that time I had an atari Falcon so I did atari related stuff. Started using Mosaic 1.0 and 2.0 on the mac or on windows 3.11 - still at my dad’s work. The main machine I was browsing the web with was running a 68030 running at 20 Mhz with a whopping 17 MB of Ram. In those days I was using, irc - email - newsgroups and a bit of web.

Then I went for some military duty.

After that I started studying again and became a fan of BeOS. Got myself a bebox and we had a crappy NetPositiv browser. I was using Macs, Unix and windows with Netscape installed on these. and most of the time N+ wasn’t doing the job. I started using mozilla at M8, trying to report bugs - thinking that fixing mozilla on Linux and windows (eg My work machines) would make a great browser on BeOS later.

I also started building web pages. In 2002 I started hacking on Opendarwin a little bit and discovered Chimera that became Camino. In 2003 version 0.7 had stalled for a long time and when Safari got released - and I liked Camino so much that I started annoying Mike Pinkerton on #developers to make things move. Started doing patch testing, patch writing (eg when an API change would break the tree) and getting involved. Later I switched to doing L10n cause I couldn’t build on my current systems. That led me to attend fosdem 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012.  I was there when Mozilla Turned 10.

In 2008 the project I was working for started to go wrong and I applied to mozilla messaging to work on Thunderbird. I got the job. Since then I’ve been trying to make the Internet (which is way more than the web) the open place I’ve always known it to be.

It’s been a fun ride. I like the fact that the web is browsable these days from any device any os, and I’m sure that this is due to mozilla. I’d resume mozilla with one picture :

If you haven’t tried that new feature in bugzilla do. The url looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=mydashboard.html and you need to be logged in.

Thanks to the dashboard I’ve cleaned up a bunch of old cruffy bugs last week. Send a few emails around to clean more.

If you use bugzilla and the feature is available try it - you won’t be able to do without-it. It has small issues (like creating the list of all the bugs I’m cced on - but that list is probably HUGE).

to whom ever came up with that feature : THANK YOU

So it seems google will be shutting down one more free service, this time it’s the rss feed reader and the Caldv access to google calendars. While closing a free service that they probably couldn’t monetize is something I don’t mind much (also I wasn’t a big user of reader). it’s not the first time a free nice service closes (eg remember delicious ?). I’ve tried since the delicious issue to avoid free services for things I rely on. If I use a service that’s free, I need to be able to hack on it - so I can’t really depend on those  web services. If my blogs go away - fine. If my videos go away I’m fine with that too.

I’m more concerned about the caldav going away, that locks some data to google services only and that’s pretty bad.

For those of you using rss and needing a replacement, I’m pretty sure you’ll find free services here and there - it’s not like reader was the only rss reader online. But if you think that the same story might happen with your new rss reading provider, maybe you could think about trying Thunderbird’s RSS reader : 

• It’s not the best RSS reader on the planet.
• The UI is not ajaxy nor so sexy - but it does the job most of the time.
• Best of all, the source is available and you can fix it, hack it.
• Use extensions to make it better.
• It’s maintained by Alta88 on his free time.

Now what you’ll need to do to switch from Google reader is to get the opml feeds from reader and import these into Thunderbird. The procedure to export the opml feeds is described here : http://googlesystem.blogspot.nl/2008/07/export-feeds-from-google-reader-folder.html.

To import in Thunderbird you’ll first need to add an RSS account , by File -> New -> Other acounts -> blog and news feed. This will create a nice blog and news account , which will be empty. click on it (eg the line in the column on the left with the rss icon) and then choose manage subscriptions. Then click import and choose the opml file created earlier. You’re done !

To try it out with

• your favorite anti-virus
• your favorites extensions
• your email provider

Let us know if you have issues with it and how serious the issues are.

Thunderbird 17 beta can be found at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/all-beta.html

Some popular extensions can be found on AMO and the very popular Lightning and enigmail , here and here (choose the beta branch) respectively.

Right now I’m pretty sure a Teacher in a Tech school is teaching it’s student something on filling bugs and on using bugzilla, mozilla’s bug reporting system. At some point in the lesson they are handed a paper with a workshop instructions.

How do I know that ? Well I follow a number of things in bugzilla and we get :

• 10 bugs created in a spawn of ten minutes
• these 10 bugs are almost identical
• once the bug is created a field is changed (always the same)
• the email addresses form those bugs are very similar.

Now that I’ve explained what’s going on (and this goes one like maybe once a day on the course of the last few weeks).

I love that people are teaching how to use bugzilla and giving them real hand try and experience on the product but it’s bad.

Why is that bad ?

On a system like bugzilla.mozilla.org that is almost at 800000 bugs, you have a lot of users, a lot of things are happening. When you create a useless bug (e.g. an school exercise) you are wasting a lot of time of many people. When a bug is created emails are sent to a huge group of people and a good portion of them will spend a few minutes reading it - and will loose all this time instead of working on issues that affect the mozilla codebase.

When the same thing happens on landfill, it won’t affect as many people. So consider using it instead.

There’s a bugzilla test installation, it’s called landfill, and it’s here: landfill.bugzilla.org.

As you may know we are currently running a test week for Thunderbird 17.

• We’ve reached 64% test coverage.
• Crash stats look ok.

Two days ago I explained on diverse mailing list what the plans for testing Thunderbird 17 would be. In that email I promised to give the number of participants. Right now, at this moment, the number is 17. Which is not low low, but which could get higher. We really need more people with different configurations to give it a try and give us a hand in order to have a decent amount of coverage. Send me an email if you want to sign up.