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."

Comments

Natural disaster..

[Anonymous Coward]

...or an attack from Microsoft's ultra high tech assault geek ninja squad, aimed at derailing the conference?

I think any sane person already knows the answer.

bah

[larry bagina]

if this a TRUE bugzilla ticket, it would be closed ("I'm not blocked in") or ignored for years.

Re:bah

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Interesting Vista's

[Fishead]

That highway is quite spectacular, with some interesting vista's along the way. Unfortunately, some of those vista's were poorly designed. The foundation of this particular one was unstable from the beginning, and looks to have crashed Mozilla. Personally, I think they should do away with the vista's and focus on stability and long term viability.

MLM

[iamapizza]

Couldn't they just use Microsoft LiveMeeting to hold their summit?

I should probably hide right now.

Sorry.

Olympics in 2010 will be vulnerable

[Freshly Exhumed]

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?

Re:Olympics in 2010 will be vulnerable

[qdaku]

This is actually what I do for a living --assess the stability of rock slopes. Those guys in vests you see going in before anyone else does, that's me. Though I did not work on this particular case and I usually look at larger scale failures in open pit mines.

In all honesty, they've done what they can. There is no way of 100% securing that highway, or frankly any mountainous highway in difficult terrain. The highway is as safe as reasonably achievable and is inherited from the 60's when our understanding of geomaterials was significantly less than what it is now. Would a tunnel in places be better now? Probably. But it comes down to money and what people are willing to pay. Quoted 3-4 billion for a new route and you can be damn sure there would be budget overruns. It's one of those assumed risks for living in an area with high natural hazard risks.

Hey, the big earthquake that is supposed to be hitting Vancouver any day now could happen during the Olympics. Hell, one could hit china. The world isn't a 100% thing as much as we think we can understand it and it's very true in natural rock slopes where you are dealing with limited data (strength, joint network, etc) of a highly variable system (properties can be difficult to impossible to measure, vary wildly, and have an insane amount of scale effects). You can get the intact strength of rock out of UCS/triaxial tests, you can get the shear strength along discontinuities. Extrapolating that to the entire slope for the complex interaction of sliding surfaces (joints, where you have a guess of what's there but you don't know 100% because it's buried), block movement/crushing/aspherity removal, natrual processes (weathering, frost jacking, tree roots, animal burrowing, strain softening, etc) is difficult and not 100%

If you don't want to have to deal with road closures due to the fact you live somewhere gorgeous in the mountains and have to drive on a road where there IS a risk of rock falls --tough, go live in the Prairies.

WONTFIX

[Jay L]

I guess you missed comment #35:

Since this bug effects only a small portion of Firefox users, proposing this as
WONTFIX.

Perhaps interested parties can create an extension?

Robert Accettura wins that bug.

Re:We are confident to say...

[JustOK]

yah, but how many attendees got stoned?