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Archive for March, 2010

All Starred Messages in Thunderbird 3

30 Mar

I “star” messages in Thunderbird pretty frequently as a reminder to go back and look at them. But it doesn’t usually work.

Why not? There is no easy way to go back and look at starred messages by default. I could resort each folder, looking for stars, but that’s annoying. I was hoping one of the Smart Folders would be “Starred Messages” but, sadly, I was wrong.

You can’t even easily search for starred messages!

But you can create a new saved search. Here’s how:

  1. Go to File > New > Saved Search…
  2. Name it something like “Starred”
  3. Set “Create as a subfolder of:” to wherever you’d like the folder to live.
  4. Click “Choose” to pick which folders to search.
  5. Change the filter to “Status” “is” “Starred”.
  6. Save it.

Then you can open your saved search in a new tab, or just leave it in the list of folders.

Posted here to save someone else some time.

 
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Weekly Update for 3/15/2010

16 Mar

I’m going to try to do weekly updates of what I’ve been working on, what I want to get accomplished, and what kind of progress I made since the last update. I don’t know if I’ll stick with Mondays, but it seems like a reasonable starting point.

Last Week

Last week I helped get SUMO 1.5.2 finished—for desktop support, at least. That mostly involved code reviews, and debugging a very strange issue with our Sphinx indices (I didn’t change anything and it started working).

I also started work on SUMO 1.5.3, specifically bug 532498, which will hopefully alleviate some of the problems our contributors in Europe have been seeing when editing knowledge base articles. The strategy is to move the work for sending email notifications out of the web server process to speed up responses.

This Week

My primary goal this week is to get version 1.5.2 for mobile SUMO done. We found some issues with forums and search that stopped us from pushing this update at the same time as 1.5.2 for desktop.

While we work on 1.5.2, I’ll be working with our IT team to get Kitsune into a staging environment and see what we need to do to get Gearman up and running—for bug 532498, again—for SUMO.

 
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Code-sharing Update

08 Mar

When we decided to move SUMO to a new platform, one of the reasons we chose Django was code sharing and reuse—specifically that SUMO and AMO would be able to share code, meaning both teams would save time and see benefits.

So how is that going? Were we right in our assumption here? The code we’re sharing so far:

MultiDB Router
A Django DB router that supports reading from a pool of slave databases.
Cache Machine
A powerful caching library for Django that, in particular, provides automatic object caching and invalidation through the ORM.
Jingo
An adapter for using Jinja2 templates with Django.
Django-Nose
A test runner for Django using Nose.
Django Debug Cache Panel
Adds a cache panel for Django Debug Toolbar.
Test-Utils
Tools we use testing in the Django/Jinja2/Nose setup.
Bleach
A library for sanitizing and linkifying user HTML, based on html5lib.
Fixture Magic
Django management commands for working with fixture data.

Additionally, we expect both teams will probably use the following, eventually:

DidYouMean
A wrapper for Hunspell, using PyHunspell to provide spelling suggestions for searches.
Django Gearman
Provides an easier interface from Django to the Python Gearman bindings.
AMO’s JS and CSS minification
AMO has already solved the problem of JS and CSS minification with Django and Jinja2.

And it’s not a released library, but SUMO has also been able to directly reuse code from AMO to simplify pagination.

Overall, it seems like we’re doing really well on this! It’s great to see the projects not just sharing code, but packaging and publishing it on Github and PyPI. If any of the above is useful to you, go ahead and try it out! You can open issues with any of the packages on Github, or find us in #webdev in irc.mozilla.org.

 
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