Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Friday 14 March 2008

Travel Plans

Lately I've been flat out working on various Firefox 3 blocker bugs. Overall I think layout is in pretty good shape although contenteditable still needs more love. Bugs involving rounding during rendering have also been hard to eliminate, poor Vlad's just about reached the end of his tether :-). On the bright side, the layout regression reports that are trickling in are all very minor, and MathML is just about up to scratch. I also get the feeling that there's been an uptick in new contributors during the last few months. Over the whole product, I've got the best feeling about this release that I've ever had.

[One of the trickiest bugs I worked on recently turned out to be partly due to a regression in cairo's "pixman" library. I was pretty annoyed until I had a John 8 moment and thought about the amount of pain my bugs and regressions must have caused Web developers over the years. Ouch. Sorry everyone!]

Next week, Wednesday to be precise, I'm travelling to Australia for three weeks. The first ten days are family stuff, but I hope to be online and working some of the time. After that I'm going to visit five universities to talk about Firefox and do some recruiting. The schedule is:


  • Monday March 31: University of Queensland, Brisbane
  • Wednesday April 2: University of Sydney
  • Friday April 4: Australian National University, Canberra
  • Tuesday April 7: University of Melbourne
  • Wednesday April 8: Monash University, Melbourne

I don't have final times or room locations for most of the talks yet, but all those places should eventually have the information on their Web sites. I'm interested in meeting people, especially students, on and around those days.

The timing's not great, but there was no way to avoid the Firefox endgame except by waiting for it to ship and then planning the trip, which I didn't want to do. I should be able to get quite a bit of work done on the off days, and I'll be back with a vengeance on Thursday April 9 if there are any bugs left to fix.



Comments

Peter Moulder
I think those last two dates should be Tuesday April 8 and Wednesday April 9.
Craig W
I give up, what was he writing on the ground? ;-) Not sure if there's any good yum char around Mark's flat but anyway what I really need is a place to watch the sumo.
Cheers,
Craig.
Tom Worthington
The Canberra seminar is in the CSIT Seminar Room, N101, Computer Science & Information Technology Building (Building 108), Australian National University, North Road, Acton ACT.
All welcome, no need to RSVP.
Seminar URL: http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/showone.pl?SID=629
Map: http://campusmap.anu.edu.au/displaybldg.asp?no=108
Stephen Merity
Thanks for giving the talk at the University of Sydney - it was interesting to hear some of the issues and future hopes from someone currently 'in the trenches' if you will.
Thank!
Stephen Merity