[tor-reports] Mike's August Status Report

[Mike Perry]

I closed the following following trac tickets in July:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~MikePerry201208

Exec Summary of Trac Tickets:

Firefox 15 was released, breaking Torbutton's Javascript hooks and
forcing a last-minute release of Torbutton 1.4.6.1. Firefox 15 users are
now without fingerprinting defenses. Also on the browser side, I did a
little work to make the HTTPS-Everywhere SSL Observatory detect a system
Tor instance and ask the user to opt-in if it was found. I spend a
similar amount of time investigating a crash issue with the image cache
isolation patch, but to no success.

I also worked on fixing warnings and log messages due to strange circuit
creation codepaths for the path bias defense Nick was kind enough to let
me sneak in to 0.2.3.x for log-line exercising.


Non-Trac tasks:

I announced the Tor Browser Hacker job, did some phone screens, code
reviews, and writeups. A couple more candidates have trickled in, and
more work still needs to be done. (~11pts).

I spent some time discussing traffic analysis (especially Website
Traffic Fingerprinting) with some researchers and others as well as
reviewing published work, thanks to the semi-annual End-to-end traffic
correlation thread on tor-talk.  (~4pts).

I handled a couple of releases on tor-qa, and did some testing myself
since the Mac users seem to have disappeared. (~1pt).

I tend to spend at least a day every month (sometimes two) organizing
trac tickets for my status report, monthly radar, deliverables and
personal goals, not counting simply commenting on tickets. (~6pts).

In addition to my personal tickets, I decided to try to go through our
'SponsorZ' tickets and pick out large ones that would seem to require an
additional hire (or someone ignoring their existing responsibilities for
a long period of time) in order to complete in a timely fashion. I
retagged these with 'SponsorZ-large' (4pts):
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~SponsorZ-large

It took another couple days to fill out my expense reports, hours,
invoice, and come up with a rough draft for my deliverable plans for the
remainder of 2012. Still working on finalizing that list... (~8pts)

I met with Roger and Peter a couple of times, discussing exit node
funding, browser woes, and other general tor stuff (~7pts).

My notes say I did about a day's worth of sysadmin on turtles. I forget
what. (~4pts).

I didn't account email and other misc communications this month, but I
do know I worked about 190-200 hours due to an altered daytime schedule,
so based on the above, I guess random overhead/unaccounted time was
about 23pts.


Time keeping notes:

32 points development, 45pts non-dev, 23 points misc
communications/discussion/distraction.


Trac Workload Stats:

At the beginning of August, 59 major+ tickets were assigned to me. I
closed 6 major+ tickets in the month. 63 major+ tickets are now assigned
to me.


Next Month's Radar:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~MikePerry201209

Exec Summary:

I have to do some writeup for TBB, publish up my node container scripts,
and keep an eye on some tickets. I also need to finish up the interview
process, and hopefully fix the crash issues with my image cache
isolation patch.


Comments:

I've begun to view my next month tags as more of a radar than
a set of goals. It seems like I only get about half of them done anyway.
However, with this in mind, I've also begun putting things "on the map"
multiple months in advance, to remind me to revisit at a later date them
when other stuff has matured.

Also, I think that as I feared in June, supporting both Firefox Rapid
Release for TBB-alpha as well as ESR for TBB-stable is the difference
between expecting to get major-priority tickets closed or not. Hopefully
the additional browser hacker position can close this gap.

Since 10.x-ESR, it appears I've spent 26 points (or around 50 to 75% of
one month's worth of my dev capacity) on rebasing patches and reviewing
Firefox Rapid Releases for TBB-alpha:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~tbb-rebase

However, due to build issues on numerous platforms I don't actively
develop on as well as general TBB-alpha woes, it's been hard for both me
and Erinn to get a working TBB-alpha release out before the next FF
rapid release. Once buildbot is running smoothly, I think the back and
forth time for fixing weird platform compilation issues should go way
down, so I'm willing to keep at it until then.


-- 
Mike Perry
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/attachments/20120908/37bfb5ae/attachment.pgp>