What I have worked on since I started as a full-timer

We are doing a process of self-evaluation at work which make us look into the past and see which projects we have liked working on.
In this blog post I list the projects that I have worked on and I go into further detail in each section. On the first section you will see the overall picture, on the second one I have listed some blog posts related to the projects in chronological reverse order and in the last section there is a link to ALL the bugs that I fixed since April.

The big picture of what I have worked on in this last year is:

• L10n nightly updates for Firefox (finished in Q3)
  
• I fixed nightly builds and repackages-on-change as a contractor (Fall 08 and Winter 09)
  
• Multi-locale build for Fennec (Q4)
  
• WinCE localized build for Firefox (Q4-Q1)
  
• Machine setup and failures diagnosis (all the time)
• Central deployment of packages (puppet and OPSI - Q4)
  
• Some evangelization (Talks at Seneca and interviews - Q4)
  

This is the list of projects that I have worked on in a sequential order:

• Localized Windows CE builds for Firefox (Jan 2010)
• Upload Fennec single-locale binaries in a sub-directory (Nov 2009)
• Install required libraries on scratchbox through puppet (Nov 2009)
• Blogging blitz - L10n infrastructure (Nov 2009)
• Individual locales for Fennec (Nov 2009)
• Multi-locale builds for Fennec (Nov 2009)
  
• Talk at Seneca about volunteer involvement (Oct 2009)
• Install required library on Scratchbox (Oct 2009)
• Initial involvement with mobile side of release engineering (Oct 2009)
• Fix queuing of partial updates generation after enabling L10n updates (Aug 2009)
• Deployment of L10n nightly updates (Aug 2009)
• Generating MAR files (May 2009)
• Generate partial & complete mars for nightly l10n builds on m-c (Feb 2009)

If you want to look at the bugs that I have fixed since April you can have a look at this query:

• Query of fixed from 2009-04-01 to 2010-01-01
  

Cheers,
Armen

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Making sense of buying a house in Toronto

I am trying to get a place for myself and I have found this article that talks about closing costs when buying in Toronto and mentions the following items:

• Survey. ~$650 seller
  
• Title Insurance. $250-$275 seller?
  
• Land Transfer Tax. Depends on price of house and if you are a new house buyer. Explanation.
  
• Legal Fees. $600-$800. buyer or seller?
  
• Disbursements. $400-$600
  
• Statement of Adjustments. Varies.
  
• Home Insurance. A house purchase has this cost as a closing cost; a condo doesn't have it.
  
• Mortgage Application. A mortgage broker gets paid by the lender so take advantage of it.
  
• Mortgage Appraisal. ~$200. It can be waived.
  
• Home Inspection. $200-$450
  
• Status Certificate. ~100 for condo purchases and taken care of by the seller
  
• CMHC Insurance Premium. You don't pay it if you put 20% or more for down-payment. If you have to pay this premium it will be determined on how much you put as down-payment and it can be included in your mortgage. The PST on it is due the date of closing.
  

I have another post on the bake for the effects of the HST that will apply starting on July 1st.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

2 years ago: The beginning of my releng path

Two years ago I started working on my first Release Engineering project, as a student, which was to integrate unit tests into the try server.
I really didn't know what was I getting into but it lead me, without my knowledge, to an internship with Mozilla's Release Engineering team. I have to thanks for Shaver on going nuts and say that this would be a suitable project for a student and Dave for being there to support me. I still don't know if he really thought I could have made it happen or if he just wanted to see me if I would not drown. I never completed the project (setting the machines with our college's IT to pass the unit tests was not easy) and it took some time to Mozilla to get this project introduced into its production systems.

I don't know if I have mentioned before but it has been two years of immense growth as a developer and being able to work with great people that have taught me tons and supported through this journey.

If you are a student taking the open source course know that even after some time in the industry I still get projects where I simply don't know how to tackle them.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Localized Windows CE builds for Firefox are being produced

On Wednesday we had our first successful batch of nightly repackages for WinCE in the mozilla-central branch.
If you have a Windows CE device and you feel like giving it a try you can find the builds in:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central-l10n
Look for "wince-arm" in the filename.
We will have builds for the 1.9.2 branch shortly as soon as a couple of patches land.

You will find out that we generate a cab file, a zip file and the complete MAR file (which means that we should get updates as well assuming that all goes well).

I don't have a device myself to test that it is actually working so I will be happy to hear from you if you find a problem.

If it all goes well we will have release builds as well for when Firefox 3.6 comes out of the door.

NOTE: I can't say which locales will go out the door and it is not my call.
NOTE2: For more information you can go to the bug where everything is happening by following this link.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.