The funniest Mozilla bug thread!

So here I was snooping around Mozilla’s Bugzilla hoping to ferret out an interesting bug to quash when I stumbled on this peculiar bug, 95849. Definitely, this is the joke that keeps on giving and for a good solid ten years it has certainly delivered the laughs. It’s things such as this that makes the hours spent poring over code all the more worthwhile and enjoyable. Kudos to all the commenters and contributors!

Smartphone OS Wars, Nokia & CEOs

V-Day. Not that fateful day the Japanese decided to throw in the towel after seeing the horrors visited on Nagaskasi. No, not that one. Rather, valentine’s day. A day to spend with that special someone or in the case of quite a number of Finnish engineers for Nokia, a day to mull the impact of what that week’s seismic announcement of an alliance between their company and Microsoft means for them and their careers. To be honest, they’ll be gutted. Not only have they been told in not so subtle terms that their flagship OS, Symbian, is not good enough to take on the next generation of smartphone operating systems from major rivals but that they aren’t even trusted come up with a competing version. A double blow for the Finns; a champagne moment for those much maligned at windows mobile. For the latter,  seven is definitely the charm.

Before i delve into analyzing the deal, there’s a question which begs to be asked.  It often pops up in “water-cooler" conversations amongst techies. Do the suits upstairs know what they are doing? Simply, did Mr. Elop make the right call? It’s quite derogatory to describe non-technical staff members in that manner, i admit.  The recent move of Larry Page into a hands-on management position got me thinking about what makes one a success of an executive overseeing a product division or the entire firm itself. I limit myself to tech firms. Success here does not include maximizing profits by slashing the workforce and asking the remnants to equally share the workload to maintain quality. Nope, i apply a rosier(ideal?) definition: a situation where an executive presides over an increase in the revenue stream of existing products either by their improvement or the introduction of new products or services. Should that executive leave his/her post with neither a significant change for the better or worse, in my book that still qualifies as a quasi-success. How much change is significant? Finding an answer to that could be the subject of a thesis. Theoretically, every firm independent of size can be said to have  a “change-threshold” beyond which effects tend to be adversely manifested or send the firm on a upward trajectory. For the purposes of discussion, my definition will identify Microsoft’s erstwhile chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, tenure as a quasi-success. Eric Schmidt’s handling of Google from a startup to the 800 pound gorilla they are today is an example of a successful oversight. The litany of executive missteps and failures aren’t too hard to find. Managing people, making them interact and perform as envisaged is hard enough. Of that i am a realist.

So what’s the secret ingredient of success besides having the intellect required of the job? From my readings, it appears that those with a long history(read: worked with the bolts and nuts) in the sector they’re overseeing, a hint of narcissism,  possessing an unshakeable belief that they’re almost always right yet  can identify their own faults, adapt and step aside for a fresher smarter individual tend to experience success per my definitions. Does Elop tick the boxes? The Nokia board obviously thinks he does. However, using all of 5-6 months to arrive at a major decision of this magnitude raises an eyebrow. The other red flag-given his background- is settling on Windows Phone 7 as a viable solution to their woes despite having Meego in the wings. A damning indictment is the memo he sent to the staff. Was the last one utterly necessary? Not being privy to internal deliberations means that one can only make educated guesses.  Despite having a strong presence in every market, Nokia never really made inroads in the North American market. Could that have been due to a marketing issue? As of this writing, i am yet to see a Nokia phone advertised on TV for any major US telecom network. We’ll know if after shipping new handsets, the problem still persists. After all, Samsung and other Asian manufacturers seem to be doing well.

Depending on one’s view and interest with regards to Nokia, the range of responses to the deal centered mainly around profound optimism and pessimism. Vic Gundotra remarks and Elop’s response to them just frames the issue nicely. The deal obviously means that Nokia”s performance in the future will be beholden to the success of the Microsoft’s mobile OSes. This will ultimately reduce Nokia to being a handset manufacturer. RIM’s acquisition of QNX software which coincidentally does many of the things Meego hopes to do means that Elop will frequently be on the special hotline to his Redmond golf buddies to make sure they deliver. With Google slowly tightening their hold over Android and God-knows what Apple is brewing for the coming months, Nokia’s board will be hoping that the new fellow hired made the right call. The alternative? Elop unintentionally tried to put out the burning platform with…napalm.

2010: A Year in Review

With an ankle sprain and a sore jaw, i bade adieu to 2010 and welcomed the new one. In case one was wondering, i suffered a humiliating old-lady-like tumble down the stairs. When one’s back begins to creak from shoveling the snow off the driveway then i guess such falls are expected. Resolutions? Nada. When a state of equilibrium is attained, trying to perfect that is folly. However, the concept of having resolutions is to ensure that the mistakes, missed objectives and other failed aspirations of the old are not repeated in the new one. This well applies to individuals and corporations regardless of size. So with the start of the new year, i look back at the highlights, lows, blunders and eye-popping moments in the technological industry that some may not have been aware of. Resources such as PC World, NYTimes, Wired etc provide more than ample reviews of the tech sector for the last year.

Of all the engineering disciplines, software design and development is largely abstract. By that, before the product is shipped, a service implemented and rolled out; most of the prior deliberations about the kind of functionality that software will provide, and how its constituent modules interact in a predetermined orchestrated manner to produce the desired effects are mostly done in the mind. Although various software aids are used throughout from development editors, code testing and coverage tools to analyzers to check the logic as well as fine tune the software to the desired performance; at the end, it’s humans doing all of that. Homo sapiens, the root cause of almost all bugs. The ones we’re absolved of all responsibility are the typical ‘you’re-just-out-of-luck’ hardware failures. So bearing in mind that software might not work as specified, there’s also the insidious situation where it works so well that it actually does a bit more than intended…the stuff of nightmares! Like all good horror stories, a friend’s tale of his team losing part of the code repository brought to mind the T-Mobile Sidekick fiasco two years ago. It usually begins with a harmless event which with hindsight turns out to be quite a blunder.

There’s a reason why clients are regularly encouraged to get an upgraded or updated version of any software they’re currently using. Apart from the offering of newer features, the upgrade often offers a ‘safer’ option as compared to the previous version since all known bugs will have been thoroughly resolved.  So when bunch of criminals stole Google’s Gaia source code, the shock was palpable. After all, Gaia was Google’s single sign-on system that controlled passwords needed to access a particular Google application a user was interested in. As much as the sophistication of the attack mechanism is to be admired-from a purely technological viewpoint, of course- it was appalling to learn about the initial flaw which served as the vector for the attack, upon a forensic audit. Google had basically been hacked through a zero-day exploit via IE6. As incredulous as it sounds, yes Internet Explorer 6 of all the browsers available to Google in 2010! To be fair, they might have had a valid reason for hanging onto this browser but that begs the question of what legacy internal application was making them use it in the first place.  There’s a joke that a successful dealer doesn’t partake of his own product…for a resolution those in Google’s IT department might want to try any of these: sample what its team responsible for Chrome having been brewing of late; take a tour of Mozilla and download a copy of their renowned fiery resident or better yet get a couple of eager code-happy interns to drag that dinosaur app kicking and screaming into modernity.

Talking of code theft has just brought to mind another case of 2010 albeit this time with Goldman Sachs. Ah where would ol’  trusted Goldman have been had dear Uncle Paulson Sam not bailed out AIG? That’s another matter of course. When their talented VP of Equity Strategy, Sergey Aleynikov, who had been working for years on high frequency trading software for the firm decided to tend his resignation and leave for greener pastures, he cleaned out more than his desk alone. He nabbed a “few” source file copies as well. It’s one thing to save a snippet of an algorithm or a clever workaround one did code but to ‘back-up’ 32 MB of the accompanying supporting files is pure larceny no matter how one tries to belittle it unless of course the individual in question can afford the kind of lawyers O.J Simpson had.  Unfortunately his legal defense team’s arguments weren’t convincing enough to the federal grand jury. Incredibly, not to be outdone, 26 year old Samarth Agrawal of Societe Generale’s high frequency trading team had also decided to ‘share’ a few lines of the firm’s Distribution Quotation System’s code with  Tower Research Capital LLC. Upon being caught red handed, he spilled the beans and admitted he had been angling for a position with them-as if he was on minimum wages at SocGen. I would love to be the fly buzzing overhead when both men get to meet in the penitentiary yard. Oh, the giddy talk of algorithms. At the time of writing this, Oracle is facing a lawsuit for code theft….Once is an occurrence; twice, a coincidence; thrice, time to check the water cooler supplies for contamination.

The unluckiest guy of 2010 definitely has to be Grey Powell. Grey who? Well, he was that Apple engineer who had a few drinks in a bar mostly frequented by geeks and left an iPhone 4 prototype there just a few weeks before its scheduled public release.  The resulting saga between Cupertino and Gizmodo ranged from denials to a SWAT-like raid before Apple’s General Counsel’s letter finally got the prototype returned. Hollywood couldn’t have scripted it any better. I guess that old saying about finders keepers was made irrelevant once and for all. The episode just didn’t end there. Apple released the new version of the phone which subsequently brought to light the shortcomings of its in-built antenna and signal-strength indicator computing formulae. Both got somewhat resolved but not without the scrutiny of the media. When the dust settled, the executive in charge of hardware development for the iPhone needed a new employer. And Grey? It’s believed he’s still with them, after all it would have been a bad PR move to give the fellow a shove when the world is watching when it was something that could easily have happened to any other person.

Obviously, i could continue to drone on and on about the not too noticed bits of last year, but was there something-a new product, service etc..- that piqued my interest in the last calendar year? Two stood out for me. For someone who cut his teeth programming with Turbo C++ and CodeWarrior, the first time i switched to Visual Studio 2005 was so sweet.  Two iterations later, Microsoft’s release of version 2010 packed with goodies continued the fine work they had been doing. For now, my old 2008 Professional Edition is adequately serving its purpose although i have taken the 2010’s Express Edition out for a spin. It rocks! The other? Google’s Instant Search. When a newscaster  called it auto completion on steroids i was dumbfounded.  Although, the concept of having search results pop up on the fly as one types has been tried before such as Zheng’s attempt with Bing, Google’s implementation went way beyond using  just a couple wrapped APIs. Theirs was a sheer feat of scaling results and the guys that worked on their Caffeine search index certainly deserved more than the $10k pay rise they got to in order for Google to retain their talents. The ball’s in Microsoft Bing’s corner. I wonder what are they brewing for 2011?

A lot more happened that i haven’t mentioned. The whole Flash on iOS debate to the announcement by Canonical that the Ubuntu will be running Unity as its desktop manager in their next release are just a few examples of the meaty ones i left out. Perhaps i should have gone into details at the time. If 2010 is anything to go by, this year certainly seems promising.