Firefox Goes Live + Thanks + Possible Job Opening

As I have mentioned previously, lots of technology has been awaiting the new year when we are fully staffed in order to deploy. Tomorrow we are going live with the new 8 CPU, 6 Core server for deploying Firefox sessions. Everything is all compiled cleanly and natively on 64bit OpenSuse 11.3, stable and fast. Between noon and 1pm when the users are lunch, I'll do a backup of all $HOME/.mozilla directories and push them over to the new server. Then I just change the launch scripts to point to the new server and everybody is live. This technique works out well; if we have an issue that requires a rollback, all we do is change the launch scripts back to the old server. Today I'm giving the new Internet circuit and the plugins a good shakedown. Frame rates are good and sound quality over PULSE is excellent.

I'm expecting an afternoon tomorrow of minor tuning issues and helping people that didn't read the announcement message; but no major problems. In the shot below you can see I'm giving FF a good Flash test with Youtube.



Many thanks for Vincent Untz who has been working with me on getting a few upstream patches merged into OpenSuse 11.3 to fix a few showstoppers on our GNOME desktop upgrade project. A few more patches to GDM, Nautilus/GIO and avant-window-navigator and we will be ready to move the desktop into wider beta testing. Right now I have about 20 people testing and using it fulltime, and feedback is very positive. I've spent a good amount of time squeezing every second of time from our customized Xsession login script. I'm firing some of the code into background processes as appropriate to allow the script to get to the point that gnome-session starts as quickly as possible.

There is a chance that we will be hiring one programming position in the next few weeks. When I have an exact job description and notification, I'll post it here in case anyone is interested.