Eyes Above The Waves

During the coming week I'll be away in Mountain View visiting the mother ship for the Mozilla Corporation all-hands meeting. That should be fun. I'm making this a short trip because a couple of weeks afterwards I have to make another trip to the USA for the OOPSLA program committee meeting at the IBM Hawthorne lab (my old stamping ground) in New York. It looks like while I'm in town I'll be visiting Google New York and giving a couple of talks (one about Firefox, one about the debugger). On the way home I'll stop over in the Bay Area to visit Mozilla and also attend the Berkeley software researcher's retreat as a guest (thanks chaps!). I would have preferred to do everything in one trip instead of having two trips close together, but the scheduling of the all-hands and the PC meeting would have forced me to be away for at least four weeks, which would just have been too much.

I'm grinding away on OOPSLA reviews. I've done seven papers so far, twelve to go. It can be tough but the papers are mostly quite good so I'm enjoying myself. The travel is going to interfere a bit but I should still get everything done on schedule, especially with the help of old friends and colleagues I've recruited to help review some of the trickier papers (thanks if you're reading this!). Over Easter I'm away with family, which is great --- when I get tired of reading papers, I can go to the beach, go for a swim, or just stare at the horizon and try to figure out what on earth the authors are thinking!!

All this activity does mean I'm falling a bit behind on bugfixing. The next couple of weeks don't look good for that but once the OOPSLA reviews are done I will be back into it. Now that my primary work environment is my laptop, it's easy to get work done even when I'm on the road. The main impediment is accessing Bugzilla via spotty or expensive Internet connections. Wouldn't it be great if Bugzilla could cache the data for selected bugs for offline use? Hmm...