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2008 Mozilla Summit Affected By Rock Slide
An anonymous reader writes "The recently concluded 2008 Mozilla Summit, held in Whistler, Canada, was impacted by a rock slide that cut off the main highway between Whistler and Vancouver, where most attendees planned to depart via airplane. In true open-source fashion, summit attendees collaborated on a solution, opening a Bugzilla bug (severity: "blocker"), posting crash dumps, and proposing solutions, including chartering a flight (which would land first in TRUNK, then BRANCH). Eventually, attendees settled on a workaround which seems to have been successful. For next year's summit, organizers might want to consider a location with more redundancy."
Many events during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics will be held in Whistler.
Now we are seeing why people are very nervous about the idea that the one and only direct connecting highway connecting Vancouver and Whistler does not have acceptable uptime, security, or redundancy. The Pemberton-Lilloet-Hope-Vancouver workaround is hopelessly time consuming.
There is a train route between Whistler and Vancouver but it is also vulnerable for most of the same reasons.
The government sold the IOC on the Vancouver-Whistler idea by promising to throw millions of dollars of upgrading at that highway, and after a few years of work already underway we get this giant dump file.
Are we being set up for a snowcrash?
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Even through the bear encounter, rock slide, power outage, and overnight bus trips to the airport, the organizers (especially Dan Portillo) made everything happen as smoothly as it could. Everyone had a great time, and (most) of the almost 400 attendees made their flights home. There was even a "Mozilla Camp" at the Vancouver airport where everyone was waiting for hours. Pictures of the summit are being aggregated on summit.mozilla.org. We all learned a lot and met lots of people, and overall the summit was a huge success.
All open source bug trackers are like that. I've had a bug closed INVALID against Apache Tomcat because, even though it broke Internet Explorer support, it was needed to work around a bug in some other browser. No one could remember what other browser, but hey, who cares about supporting Internet Explorer?
My favorite "dumb bug close reason" though has to be a bug I filed against Java's AWT about an easily reproducible VM crash under Windows. Sun closed it immediately as WORKSFORME because they couldn't reproduce it under Solaris.
My favorite "dumb Mozilla bug close" (to move ontopic-ish) was some bug where the reporter originally reported it via a comment on another bug. He was then told to file it as a new bug since, while related, it wasn't that bug. So he did, and this new bug was then immediately closed as a duplicate of the original bug.
All of the bugs I've submitted to Mozilla are invariable closed as duplicates. Generally this isn't because I haven't already looked for the bug, but because I have and failed to locate it through Bugzilla's crappy search. One time this was because they had some very, very generic bug that was basically "feature X doesn't work" and all bugs related to it were duplicates.
My general experience with bug reporting is not to bother. It's just not worth it.
(Posted anonymously because I can't remember any of the actual facts. So take this as a meaningless rant. YMMV and all that.)
Neil Deakin almost missed his own wedding because of the rock slide. He had to take a float plane to get out of there.