aakashd

Gotta say, that town is something else. I don’t think I can fit all the stuff we did into one tidy blog post, but here’s the laundry list of places worthwhile to check out (and the reasons associated to why its worth a visit):

• Food Carts: We stopped by the ones on 3rd and Washington and ate at “Built to Grill”. Best chicken panini I’ve ever had (they use home-made sun-dried tomatoes with a special set of spices to them too). I really wish
• Japanese Garden: If you’re going to be a tourist, you might as well go all the way and end up here. There’s some great picture taking opportunities all over the place.
• Voodoo Doughnuts: Just pure ridiculousness. I’m pretty sure I got diabetes after one visit there and don’t regret it. One thing to remember, don’t order the $4 doughnuts unless you know what you see what it is. Oh, also, there’s something to be said for the place to have a line out their door at 4pm on a Thursday.
• Powell’s Bookstore: Tourist stop! Largest bookstore in the world with micro-cultures within each floor (there’s 5 floors where each could be its own bookstore really).
• 3D Art History Museum: You’re going to think it’s some lame place when you first get in there, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised once you start looking a lot more into it. The people who take care of it are incredibly passionate about the art and it carries over to their museum. Did you know the ViewMaster was headquartered in Portland before it got shipped overseas.

Oh, and we got to Seattle (3 hour drive from Portland). 2 days! Good times.

We drove a little over 550 miles today and got to Mount Shasta, Medford and Eugene (Oregon). Mount Shasta was worth the stop! Not only was it close to the I-5, but the people there are really courteous. We hopped by the visitor’s center to got some hints on trails to hike around the area (ultimately choosing the Bunny Flat Trail) and took the 11 mile drive up the mountain (we got to an elevation of about 11,300 feet). For a really easy trail, the thin air was really rough and we didn’t go too far. Nevertheless, the mountain really offers some great picture taking opportunities and we got several. I’d recommend the trail to anyone that ends up in Mount Shasta for a bit because the view is well worth it. Past that though, there isn’t much else around Mount Shasta. The town has a few lunch and bar spots, but it’s mostly for out-of-towners rather than local folk. We booked it out of town and made it to Medford, Oregon for dinner.

The AAA tour book offered us Porter’s Dining at the Depot as a primo destination for dinner and boy…that book disappointed. The place was a “historic landmark”, but its food wasn’t so great. Our waiter was a good guy, but we just got tired of the flies and decently-prepared-but-not-for-their-price steaks and wine. On a side note, Yelp did give it a 3 star review which means that the sentiment is shared (I mean we are talking about a $50-a-meal restaurant here). Medford didn’t seem like the right place to stop, so we continued on another 3 hours to Medford and stayed at a Best Western there in order to get extra time in Portland (only an hour and half away!) tomorrow.

Missed Opportunities:
* The Olive Hut
* Jacksonville, OR – Home of Bruce Campbell

“Baby, I AM putting you in the corner!” – Lana Kane, Archer

The training wheels are off. We’ve set aside our original dashboard in place of a snazzy new one. What you see now is a little more refined and little more polished than what our Mozilla feedback triagers have been used to. Of course, by a little I mean a lot. Check it out. Like Lana Kane, it’s cool, it’s high in dexterity and it makes your life a whole lot easier when siphoning through our copious amounts of Firefox Beta feedback. Big shout outs go to Chris Howse, Frederic Wenzel, Dave Dash, Michael Kurze, Stephen Donner, Ryan Snyder, Justin Lazaro and Shyam Mani for making this happen.

Features

• Complete UX Overhaul of the Dashboard, Sites and Themes pages
• There is RTL Support
• Search for only for messages with URLs attached by adding “URL” to the keyword search field

Finally, here’s a list of bugs fixed in this release.

Life is full of surprises. Pigs fly. Hell freezes over. A project team releases more features in a ’3-dot’ release than a ’2-dot’ release.  Anyways, that’s beside the point. The Input team has some goodies for our users in the latest release of Firefox Input. We’ve implemented a page for summarized website-related feedback, linkable individual feedback, searching by URLs and more! A big thanks to Frederic Wenzel, Dave Dash, Michael Kurze, Andres Garcia, Stephen Donner, Shyam Mani, Chris Howse, Kevin Brosnan, Aaron Train and Aleksej R. Serdyukov for making it happen.

Features

• Sites: Michael Kurze, a fantastic metrics intern here at Mozilla, has written a cool web-app that siphons a week’s/beta’s worth of Firefox Beta feedback centered around URLs on a daily basis. Then, it performs a cluster analysis on the messages received with those URLs and posts them in a pretty manner on our Input dashboard. To read about his experience, take a look at his blogpost.
• Individual Pieces of Feedback are Linkable: Dave Dash took an onus on adding an unexpected win by making individual pieces of feedback linkable. To instance this, simply click on the date of the individual message! Here’s an example of what it looks like.
• Search through messages with URLs: Another piece of awesome from Dave Dash. Dashboard users just need to type in “URL:” and any wildcard to search for that wildcard through any messages with a URL attached. Use this example on how to use the new feature.

Bug Fixes

• When a new beta has entered a release cycle, our feedback submission pages should still be available until a day after it has been released.
• Input now has Hudson running on it.

Dave Dash made the fantastic suggestion to use Archer characters as project names so we get the chance to use quotes from the show in our release blog posts. So, here goes:

“Don’t be shitty, can’t we just enjoy the moment? ”

For those that haven’t watched an episode Archer, Malory employs raw commentary with a bit of panache to other characters on the show. We’ve employed that same characteristic with our newest version of the Input project. Here’s a list of the new features out for this release:

1. Data Analysis Tool: Clusters – Mozilla has been experimenting with a method of text analysis called “clustering” for issues submitted to SUMO. We felt that there was a natural fit with Input’s feedback data and wanted it in. It polls all received feedback over the previous week’s daily, performs a Cluster analysis on that data and posts the output to the Input Dashboard’s Clusters page. Note that the analysis software is still in-development and there are data issues that need to be fixed. If you want to help, Dave Dash has it stored on a handy github repo.
2. URL Submission for “Happy” Reports - From feedback received, our users want to tell us about websites that work better on our beta than previous versions of Firefox. So, we’ve added a spot for users to add URLs to their “happy” feedback.
3. Mobile Support - We’re geared up for Mobile Firefox’s Beta! Head over to m.input.mozilla.com and check out the new pages. Currently, our new Clusters pages is not mobile-friendly, but we’ll be fixing that before Mobile Firefox Beta 1 comes out.

We’ve also added a number of bug fixes that make our dashboard faster and much more efficient:

1. Searches are sorted by time in descending order
2. Feedback from Windows builds are now separated by Windows versions (i.e. XP, Vista and 7)
3. Translation with escaped text (i.e. other languages that not be supported by your keyboard configuration) are now correctly sent to Google Translate.
4. Wording changes to our submission pages and dashboard
5. Parsing through the accept-language header to work with Firefox 4 Beta 2