If you are new to Mozilla’s IRC channels, as I am, then you might have noticed some new and unknown words. All companies and communities have internal lingo built up over many years. Mozilla is different from a typical company because regular internal communication is done in the open. This means we get to hear said lingo used among employees who all know the terms by heart.

It can be intimidating coming to any community with such history and culture as Mozilla. This feeling is perfectly normal and will dissipate in time. To help the process let us explore some of the common terms unique to Mozilla. Thus you’ll know the terms the next time another Mozillian uses one.

R+

Mozilla has a healthy culture of code reviews. Real, concrete, effective code reviews mean approval is not trivial. An r+ means completing a code review and approving the commit. Some aspects of the patch may need changing but for the most part the patch is clear for commit. The wiki has more details on r+’s and their exact meaning if you want to get technical: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Code_Review#What_does_r.2B_mean.3F

R-

The opposite of an r+ is the r-. Given when a patch is rejected, an r- does not mean the change cannot be fixed. Since r- can come across discouraging I suspect reviewers only use the term when talking to long term contributors.

CLOBBER

In all situations I’ve seen where CLOBBER gets mentioned it has been out of frustration. To clobber a tree causes a massive slowdown and annoys other developers but I do not understand the exact cause. The wiki provides some details but I’m not familiar with the build system: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Clobbering_the_Tree

ping

To get someone’s attention on IRC it is typical to mention their name in a message. This triggers highlighting of your message and triggers a bing sound on some IRC clients. If someone is on IRC but not active it is common for mozzilians to “ping” them. Such a ping takes the form, “<username>: ping”. For example when pinging me you would say “danieru: ping”. You’ll notice that this typical usage excludes any details about why the person is getting pinged. Instead it has been suggested that a ping should also contain a sentence mentioning the ping’s purpose. So going back to our example you might want to say “danieru: ping, I need help compiling fxos. I’m getting linking errors with example()”.

pong

In response to a ping the person pinged will often say “pong”. This means you may see “ping, pong” if both users are online at the same time. For any native English speakers reading the humour comes from the usage of “ping” which is a network tool used to check connectivity as a way to check for the attention of other Mozillians. Then in response “pong” interprets the ping as the “ping” in ping-pong, a sport also known as table tennis. Sorry if this ruins the humour.

++

In programming languages inspired by C the operator ++ is  the pre or post incrementor. It is used like thus: “var++”. This operator will make the incremented variable equal to the original value plus one. Thus on Mozilla IRC, ++ is another way of saying “+1”. In turn “+1” is an expression meaning “I like this” or “This is true”. So if someone says ++ it means they are agreeing with something said earlier.

And that completes my knowledge of Mozilla specific terminology. If you know any other terms please mention them or ping me.

land

Commit a patch to the inbound branch or repository after the patch has been reviewed with a R+. For Mozilla Central this would be mozilla-inbound or for Gaia the gaia/master branch.

Uplift

Merge or promote a patch from the inbound repository to the stable branch. For Mozilla Central this would be Mozilla Central or for Gaia this would be a tagged version branch such as 1.2.

Sec-Critical

When security bugs which cover normal browsing get found they are marked sec-critial. These bugs cannot be viewed by the general public until they have been fixed. Once a fixed version of our software has been shipped the sec-critical bug is made public. For example  see Bug #785967

Chemspill

When a security bug is found it may force our hand and require an early general release of our software. This early release is known as a chemspill.

Clownshoes

Bugs vary in scope and size yet in general a bug will only have one developer writing code to fix it. This can create a situation where the bug is larger than the person. Or as the analogy goes: the person is wearing oversized clownshoes.

TODO: No other terms I know of. Can you suggest any?

My Firefox phone arrived today! The ZTE Open is an interesting device. ZTE is selling it on ebay for ~$80. By no means is it a high end device. In theory I like the idea that developers are not running devices 7 times more powerful than their users. Targeting the emerging market only pushes down the average device’s horsepower. As a bonus this dev phone is cheap and does not require subsidization or give aways like the earlier androids or blackberry dev phones. The price itself puts it in impulse buy territory.

First I must admit to being struct by the box’s slipcover. The cardboard look is utilitarian and sparse.

The box under the slipcover is more typical for a smartphone. I can imagine seeing this box on a retail shelf.

Included with the phone is a micro usb cable, headphones, and a usb charger. Without listening to them I suspect the headphones are not going to sound good.  The battery is pre-inserted in the phone.

We must insert the battery which requires finding the latch in the the lower right corner. I’ve photographed the location since it was harder to find than expected. You will not feel the latch during normal usage.

Upper left is the microSD card slot, the right is the fullsized sim slot.

First bootup splash screen.

Second bootup splash screen.

Once booted we enter the setup process. There are things I think should be changed. Please do not that this as criticism but instead as justifications for my suggestions which will find their way into bug reports.

Once we’ve entered the wifi password and joined the network we’re sent back to the network select screen as shown below. This was not what I expected. I thought we’d go on to the contacts screen since we’ve done everything we can do with the wifi.

This screen is what I do not understand. We already have network access, and we’ve had minutes to initiate the GPS. I should not have to tell the phone anything of what it is asking. Notice how the time has defaulted to the epoch, unix timestamp zero. Now assuming we need this screen only as a fallback I wish we were not expected to guess what those buttons will change. It should tell me we are looking at:

1. Region
2. Nearest City in timezone
3. Date
4. Time

I bring this up because I got confused. I thought #2 meant province / state. I do not know what or where “Pago Pago” is. I thought #3 is date format. Similar to how golang defines date formatting. Instead it was the date selector.

Considering the emerging market nature of FxOS’s target market I think this risks confusion. I know that when selecting a timezone I must pick Edmonton. I know this only from installing linux several times. We cannot expect regular people to know they must select a city, which they may not live in, which must be close, but which must not be in the next timezone. To make matters worse the list is ordered alphabetically. Without knowing the exact city to select we must search through a list containing every city on our continent.

Good would be to order by location. Better would be to have them select their location on a world map. Best would would be to use our GPS if we have a signal.

Now onto the time selector widget. This is what said time selector looks like right after we hit “change”. Notice how it knows the current date. Remember how the screen prior defaulted to timestamp zero. The phone already knows the current time!

Better would be to preset the setup screen’s time to whatever time this time selector widget thinks it is. Best would be to send off an NTP packet and get the real time over the network. Remember, we already setup the wifi connection.

This title is too long.  I had to change my app’s title to fit the app screen, this screen needs the same treatment.

I wish something in bigger letters told me this is a newsletter signup screen. Instead I thought it was a registration screen.

The following tutorial is good and does the job. I’m sure they would prefer a tutorial which used the real homescreen instead of the abstract images. I understand that feature is extra work on a level beyond the other suggestions. I just hope it is on someone’s todo list.

Note how it asks us to find new apps to the homescreen’s left, we will have a problem with this later.

Also note how it asks us to swipe down.

Keeping in mind the instructions we saw earlier I wanted to install the app i made a few days ago. This screen is supposed to be where one finds new apps. Yet these search results do not look like the “IP Address” apps I saw in the Firefox Market. Instead these look like website bookmarks.

Rather we must go to the homescreen’s right where we find the Firefox appstore. And it is here we find my app.

As we noted earlier one should be able to bring down the notification screen by swiping down from the top. Instead we must press, hold, then pull down. Swiping down without holding is interpreted as swiping left or right.

Now just for interests’ sake let us analyse the ZTE Open’s box in relation to the other dev phones I have. The Nexus 4 aims to look premium. The box is trying to convey that a $300 phone can be no less premium than the $600 competitors. The Blackberry 10 box aims to feel exclusive through the mission statement on the box. All the Blackberry dev phones are given as gifts to developers. They want you to feel honoured and inspired to develop an application.

The exact mission statement is:

Exclusive for the Blackberry Developer
Community. Not a production modal.
Evaluation unit -- not for resale.

Millions of possibilities..

By my guess the ZTE Open aims to look grassroots or atleast non-intimidating. The Blackberry mission statement is the opposite. Blackberry wants to look established and confident. ZTE Open wants to look new and promising.

To be honest I think the box achieves the goal. I do not expect FxOS to be complete. I expect it to have room for improvement and to be welcoming of my contributions. That is what FxOS needs right now, the luxury boxes can come later.