Mike Conley's Blog

I wrote a while back about how Matt, Avi Halachmi and I have been ironing out performance problems with the Australis curvy tabs.

Well, it looks like that work is finally paying off.

Our SVG usage seemed to be the big slow-poke, and switching to PNGs gave us the boost that we needed.

But enough squawking, let’s see some charts.

Before Optimizations

Let’s compare – here’s a chart showing the difference between pre-curves and post-curves, before our optimizations:

Here’s the before shot

Note: it’s been a while since I’ve done data visualization work. I think the last time I did this was in grad school. So there might be way better ways of visualizing this data, but I just chose the easiest chart I could manage with Google Docs. Just go with it.

Let me describe what you’re seeing here – we take samples every time a tab opens, and every time a tab closes*. What we’re measuring is the interval time (how long it takes before we start drawing the next frame), and the paint time (how long it takes to actually draw a frame).

The blue bars represent the performance measurements we took on a build using the default theme.  The red bars represent the performance measurements we took using the Australis curvy tabs.

This is where my graph could probably be clearer – in each group of four bars, the left two represent interval times, and the right two represent paint times.

So, hand-wavey interpretation – we regressed in terms of performance in both painting, and frame intervals, for tab opening and closing.

So that’s what we started with. And then we did our optimizations. So where did we get to?

After Optimizations

Here’s the after shot!

The red bars shrunk, meaning that we got faster for both interval and paint times. In fact, for tab close, we beat the old theme! And we’re really super-close for tab open.

Pretty good!

Curvy tabs for all

Last night, Matt landed our optimization patches, as well as preliminary curvy tab work for OSX* and Linux GTK on our UX branch. So, if you’re on the UX branch (and why aren’t you?), you should be receiving a build soon with some curvy tabs. They’re not perfect, not by a long shot, but we’re getting into the polish stage now, which is good.

* Some notes on our measuring methodology. All tests were performed on a low-powered Acer Aspire One netbook. Intel Atom n450 processor (1.66Ghz), 1GB of RAM, running Windows 7. The device has no graphics acceleration support. We also switched to the classic theme to avoid glass. Avi wrote a patch that opened and closed a tab 15 times, and averaging the frame intervals and paint times for each frame. Those were averaged over the 15 openings and closings. We then ran that test 4 times, giving the machine time to “relax” in between, and averaged our results.

* We don’t have hi-dpi support yet, so if you’re on a Mac with a Retina display, your curves might be fuzzy. We’re working on it.

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Hey all.

I’ve been pretty bad about talking about the address book. Sorry about that. I’ve been pretty busy helping to get Instant Messaging shipped for TB 15.

But with IM polished off, I’ve (once again) started refocusing my attention to the address book.

So where am I?

The Ensemble Project

In short, I’m writing an add-on to experiment with approaches to a new address book. I’m calling it “Thunderbird Ensemble”, because every project needs a cool code name.

The add-on is in its very very early stages. Nothing is usable. Nothing is stable or guaranteed. There’s no UI yet, but there are some tests.

You can track my progress here.

Here are some highlights, implementation details and unstructured thoughts about the add-on, and where I’m going with it:

SQLite Storage Back-end

I’ve chosen to use SQLite (via mozStorage) for the contact database. I was originally toying with using indexedDB, but it’s lack of support for substring searches (which is necessary for things like auto-complete) wasn’t very appealing. I briefly toyed with throwing my own indexing layer on TOP of indexedDB, and then I realized that I was probably reinventing the wheel.

So SQLite it is!

Diffs, Diffs Everywhere

Contact records are a representation of the fields and meta data about a contact. My add-on will be able to calculate diffs between records, and those diffs can be applied on top of records to make changes.

So, for example, suppose I decide to make some changes to a contact – I add some email addresses, remove a phone number, and change a birthday. I’m effectively creating a diff.

Now we apply the diff on top of the original contact, and send the resulting contact record to the datastore for storage.

If the storage happens to be on the network, and the original record we applied the diff on to was out of date, we should get a fresh copy of the contact record, apply the diff, and try again.

Conflict Resolution

With diffs comes conflicts resolution – but conflict resolution is never a pleasant experience, and I’d like the user to not have to deal with that if possible.

My solution is to just be optimistic – if a diff is asking to remove something that isn’t there, great! Mission accomplished! If the diff is adding something that already exists, no problem! We skip!

And for things that get changed, like birthdays, we simply say that the last writer wins.

Maybe that’s naive, but that’s the approach that I’m taking.

What do I have?

I can create contact records, diff them, apply diffs, and “merge” two records together. And I have tests for all of that work.

I’ve got the start of the SQLite backend working (basically, we can set up the database…but that’s it.)

I’m currently working on importing old Thunderbird contacts into Ensemble’s notion of contact records.

After that, I’ll work on getting them written to the database.

Comments? Questions? Complaints? Ask them here. It’s still really early on in the process, but if you find bugs in my code, please file issues on GitHub.

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Once again, I’ve let my blog gather dust.  And the comments have been piling up.  And the emails have been rolling in.  And I’ve been silent.

Sorry about that!

I’ve been pretty heads-down lately – here’s what’s going on:

1. The address book work I was talking about has been put on a tiny bit of a backburner as I deal with two more pressing Thunderbird projects, namely, finishing up the Account Provisioner (a service that offers you email addresses if you don’t already have one) and Tabs on top (a part of the general UX refresh that Thunderbird is working towards)
2. A few weeks ago, I was knee-deep in sound design for a show called FIREraisers being put up by the red light district.
3. UCOSP has been going strong, and our Review Board students have been pluggin’ away.

About the address book – I’ve received a bunch of email making suggestions and asking for things.  That’s great!  I’ll comment on that shortly – I just need a little more time to clear Account Provisioner and Tabs on Top off my plate.

More soon.

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So my dream of redesigning / rebuilding the Thunderbird address book is moving forward.  Here’s the draft feature page.

I also got the Contacts add-on from Labs working (limping, rather) in Thunderbird.  Some very interesting ideas in that add-on.

I’ve also started reading some related work.  Here’s what I’ve been gazing at for the past few days:

1. Bug 674720 (WebContacts or Contacts+)
2. The W3C Contacts API draft spec
3. The PortableContacts draft spec
4. The vCard spec
5. The Firefox Sync development documents

So, basically, I’m exposing myself to as much current work in this problem space as possible.  Is there anything else I should be reading?

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So yesterday I posted some mock-ups for a new Thunderbird address book design, and I got a bunch of really awesome, useful feedback.

Probably what rang out loudest for me was that I don’t really have any data on how real users actually use Thunderbird’s address book.  I know how I use it, but that’s about it.  In fact, I talked a Thunderbird user the other day who didn’t even know that the Thunderbird address book existed.  Go figure.

And here I went and jumped the gun, and tossed together some mock-ups.

If there’s anything that my grad supervisor Greg Wilson taught me, it’s not to jump to conclusions (or mock-ups) when we don’t have any data to back it up.  I’m a scientist, damn it, and that’s just how we roll.

Credit: http://cowbirdsinlove.com/46

Firefox has this great add-on called Test Pilot that lets Firefox users volunteer to have data periodically collected from them.  Work to get Test Pilot working for Thunderbird is underway, and I think that’d be an awesome tool for gathering feedback about how users use the address book.

Some questions I’d want answered, right off the top of my dome, in no particular order:

1. Does anybody actually use Thunderbird’s address book?
2. When someone is using the address book, what are they likely doing?
   1. Looking for a contact?
   2. Sorting and organizing their contacts?
   3. Creating or editing contacts?
   4. Other?
3. Do people use mailing lists?  If so, how many do they tend to have?
4. How many address books do people tend to have?
5. How many address books do people want to have?
6. How many contacts to people tend to have in their address books?
7. Is it important for people to be able to group their contacts into sets, like “Family”, “Friends”, “Acquaintances”, “Employees”, “Co-workers”, etc?
8. Given several address books, where each address book has some large number of contacts, how quickly can an individual contact be found?
9. How much switching back and forth from mouse and keyboard is required to create a new contact, or to edit an old contact?
10. How important is it for Thunderbird’s contacts to be synchronized with other contact services, like Google Contacts or the OSX address book?
    1. Or is it sufficient just to import them?
11. How important is it for Thunderbird’s contacts to be synchronized with user’s mobile devices?
12. On average, how long does it take to create a new contact?
13. On average, how long does it take to edit a contact?
14. On average, how much time are users spending in the address book?
15. What fields do most users want to associate with a contact?
16. What are the top 10 complaints about Thunderbird’s address book?
17. What are the top 10 best things about Thunderbird’s address book?

What are some other questions I should try to get answered?

UPDATE (Aug 29 – 10:00EST)

I’ve gotten some awesome feedback on this post, and some new questions to add to my list.  Here they are, in no particular order:

1. What is the main way in which Thunderbird users use and manipulate their address books?
   1. Through the main address book interface
   2. Through the contacts sidebar in the compose window
   3. Through the inline contact editor within a message header
   4. Other?
2. If the answer to the above is anything other than 1, is it possible that the address book manager is not needed?  Or does not need to be as complicated as it already is?
3. How many duplicate contacts does the average user possess (where a duplicate contact is a contact with the same e-mail address, or possibly the same name)
4. How frustrating is it to add a contact in Thunderbird?
5. How frustrating is it to edit a contact in Thunderbird?
6. How frustrating is it to search for a contact in Thunderbird?
7. How often do users want to create a contact based on a pre-existing one?  Example – creating co-workers, with similar fields for work addresses, etc, but different names, phones, etc.

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When I’m not hacking on Thunderbird, MarkUs, or Review Board, I usually spend my time playing in a band called The Johnson Report.

I normally don’t play the “band card”, but I’m particularly proud of this latest achievement, and wanted to share.

Here’s us playing some Lady Gaga.

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So a few days ago, my official grades for my M. Sc. rolled in.  That same day, I went to the Bahen Centre, turned in my desk keys, got my keycard authorization revoked, and scheduled my computer for erasure.

It felt like some pretty big steps.  There was a palpable sense of finality.  I was out.  It was over.

The University has played a big role in my development, and despite all of my moaning and complaining over the years, I’m glad I went, and I’d do it again.

But not right now.

Graduate school almost didn’t happen for me, and I have two very important people to thank for making that happen:  Karen Reid and Greg Wilson.

I still fondly remember when you cornered me during that codesprint in 2009, and convinced me to try graduate school.  I don’t regret it.  It was the right decision.  So thank you both so much for convincing me, and giving me the chance, and thank you Greg for supervising, and guiding me through.

I learned lots.  I had fun. 

Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the soul of wit.  Well, I

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A major part of my Master’s degree requirements was my research paper.  If you heard me lament over the past year or so about my “thesis”, I was referring to this research paper.

Anyhow, after lots of hard work, my research paper was finally signed off by my supervisor, Dr. Greg Wilson, and second reader Dr. Yuri Takhteyev.  A huge thanks to both of them!

Here’s the abstract, followed by a download link for the PDF.  Enjoy!

Abstract

Peer code review is commonly used in the software development industry to identify and fix problems during the development process. An additional benefit is that it seems to help spread knowledge and expertise around the team conducting the review. So is it possible to leverage peer code review as a learning tool? Our experiment results show that peer code review seems to cause a performance boost in students. They also show that the average total peer mark generated by students seems to be similar to the total mark that a graduate-level teaching assistant might give. We found that students agree that peer code review teaches them something – however, we also found they do not enjoy grading their peers’ work. We are encouraged by these results, and feel that they are a strong motive for further research in this area.

Click here to download my research paper

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Once again, I’ve let a month’s worth of dust gather on my blog.  But I have a good reason for being so busy!

Several good reasons, actually.

And here they are:

UCOSP has wrapped for the semester

This semester, I was a teaching assistant for the UCOSP (Undergraduate Capstone Open-source Projects) course.  I helped out with two projects:  MarkUs and Review Board.

This semester, we saw some outstanding work for both projects.  Lots of great students, lots of good code, lots of leaps forward.

I’m looking forward to helping out next semester with UCOSP.

I won’t be doing it as a paid teaching assistant though.  Why?  Well…

I’ve finished school

My research paper was signed off by my two readers, and I just wrote my last final exam a few nights ago.  Unofficial grades have been posted, and I’ve passed what I needed to pass.

So that’s that – I’m a Master of Computer Sciences, I guess.  Awesome!

I got a job!

I’ve been hired by Mozilla Messaging to work on the Thunderbird project!  I’m 100% psyched about this opportunity, and look forward to peeling into the code.  An added bonus:  since Thunderbird is an open-source project, I’m absolutely free to discuss the code and the various things I’m doing with it.  No NDAs for me!  So stay tuned – I’ll have lots to say about Thunderbird and the Mozilla Framework code.  Just give me some time to wade through it.

Zihuatanejo

It’s been a pretty long road.  I’ve been in school, in one form or another, for over two decades.  It’s strange that it’s over.  I’m extremely excited about my next adventures, but I think I’m going to miss school.

Still, I can’t help but be a bit dramatic…

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In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time. …Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just don’t want to. Five hundred yards… that’s the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile…

Andy Dufresne – who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.

P.S.:  Here are some celebration rituals, if so inclined.

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I know, I know.  I left you all hanging at the edge of your seat with my last blog post, and I still haven’t posted my idea for recognizing good code review.

I’m bogged down with school work, and I’m aiming to have the first draft of my research paper done next week.  So that’s taking 100% of my resources.

Just be patient.  I’ll post my idea soon.

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