thunderbird

In my not so humble opinion generating a graph like this from a database shouldn't require a 70 line ruby script!

Presentation created for June 30, 2011 Vancouver Ruby / Rails meetup (flickr set, slideshare, pdf)

See my Better Support Living through Software for the full details

And just for fun here are the flickr pics of the slides:

I. Better Living

II. Just Say No

III.We Can Do This

IV. Support Comes to You!

V. Fork this!

In the course of customizing Mozilla's Kitsune knowledge base website for Thunderbird (from the great Mozilla SUMO dev team, thanks jsocol and team!) software, I needed to change locale strings to reference Thunderbird instead of Firefox. Locale strings consist of:

• msgid e.g. "Firefox Help"
• followed by msgstr which is the localized version e.g. "Firefox-Hilfe" (for the German locale)

For Thunderbird I changed all occurences of Thunderbird to Firefox where there was a Thunderbird equivalent (I didn't change strings that have no Thunderbird equivalent e.g. there is no mobile version of Thunderbird so I left all mobile related strings unchanged). In the above example "Firefox-Hilfe" becomes "Thunderbird-Hilfe"

To do this automatically for all languages that the knowledge base for Thunderbird supports (which is dozens), I wrote a ruby script to do this: changeMessages-po-to-tb.rb

Of course this fails for languages where nouns are declined like Polish which in various situations uses "Firefoksa" instead of "Firefox" for example.

But it works for most of the locales and therefore has saved me and the localizers considerable time.

Is there a better way to do this? Perhaps a built in search and replace utilty in Linux or Mac OS X?

UPDATE November 2011:

The code has been dramatically re-factored so i deleted it from the gist. Please use the revised code at:
https://github.com/rtanglao/momogs/blob/master/emailReport-m.rb

For my technical support lead job at Mozilla Messaging, I continue to try to find the best way to sort and sift and help out folks who need support and identify the hot issues. We currently use Get Satisfaction for Thunderbird support and I subscribe via email to everything but it's really difficult to read through the over 200 emails a day that Get Satisfaction sends

So I developed over the last 9 months a series of Ruby scripts to see the most active support topics (getactive.rb),  the contributors who are actually being marked by the community of users as solving a support topic (getcontributors.rb), who's doing the most replies (gethappykludged.rb) and pick out some random support topics (getrandom.rb)

Up until last week I have been using these scripts on a manual basis but not as consistently as I would like since it's pain to run all four manually.

To make a single email report that ties together everything in one nice summary, last week I finally took 3 hours and wrote emailReport.rb (code after the jump). It's crude but it works and is a useful report that I run every day now for the previous day (e.g. on Monday morning, I run it for Sunday and Saturday). It runs all the above mentioned scripts and then emails a summary email:

Here's an example of how you invoke it:

(for August 2, 2010)

./emailReport.rb 2010 8 2 2010 8 2 2>emailreport.20100802.20100802.stderr 1>emailreport.2010082002.20100802.stdout

And here's a sample email:

From: xxxx@gmail.com
To: yyyy@zzzzzo.com
subject: MoMo Support Report FROM: 2010.8.2 TO: 2010.8.2
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:31:16 -0700

Get Satisfaction Top 5 active:
5,http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/how_do_i_export_folders_as_mbox_files_thanks_chris
5,http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/migration_of_thunderbird_data_from_old_to_new_computer
4,http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/delivering_mail_98_thunderbird_problem
4,http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/from_thunderbird_to_outlook_how
4,http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/cannot_start_thunderbird_already_runnning

Get Satisfaction Contributors:


Top 10 Get Satisfaction Repliers:
2, cam_1319937
3, simonpaquet
3, ankitgupta1980
3, davro
3, pat_drummond
3, kent_james
4, bhuvnesh_thakar
5, wayne_mery
9, archaeopteryx
30, michael_a_pasek


5 Random Get Satisfaction Topics:
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/crashing_after_start_up
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/problems_editing_an_email_to_be_forwarded
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/dmg_file_whats_this
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/want_to_use_thunderbird_for_mass_mailing
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/pasting_images_takes_minutes

What I did well

• It works and when it doesn't I can check stderr for diagnostics and usually quickly figure out what went wrong (Get Satisfaction has a known bug on topics that have URLS that begin with numbers and also JSON can't cope when folks paste binary data into support topics; fortunately both cases are rare -:-) !)

What could be improved

• The JSON API is called on the same data four times, once for each script (i.e. I don't store any of the GS data) so it takes 5-10 minutes to run emailReport.rb!
• It would be more efficient to just read the data into a database, e.g. couchdb and then have the four scripts read from the database
• Ruby is not an excellent choice for Windows users; would be better to write this in JavaScript and then anybody (i.e. other support contributors not just folks on Mac OS X or Linux) could use it
• Badly need to way to extract the GS conversations I am involved in and highlight the top 5
• Although a separate can of worms :-), I would love to have a really great search engine that works on the GS support data; unfortunately the GS management view search doesn't work so well.

Help Wanted

I'd love some help :-) (what's in it for you! Open Source Whuffie, fame and adventure :-) !!!)   in the following areas:

• Convert to JavaScript and to a web app so all can use it :-) !
• Put the GS support data into a JSON friendly database like CouchDB

The Code

The code has been dramatically re-factored so i deleted it from the gist. Please use the revised code at:
https://github.com/rtanglao/momogs/blob/master/emailReport-m.rb

A belated gig change post: Since July 21, 2009, I have been Technical Support Lead at Mozilla Messaging. It's been quite the wild ride. I have been immersed in Mozilla Messaging's product, the open source Thunderbird  Email client (in particular getting ready for Thunderbird 3 currently scheduled for November which has a plethora of improvements including the super spiffy global search) as well as tweaking the Mozilla Messaging Implementation of Get Satisfaction for Thunderbird support as well as starting the deployment of a Knowledge Base for Thunderbird. Busy times! Good times!

Sidenote: I'd completely forgotten the intensity of focus that's needed to ship a big product like Thunderbird; couple that with the knowledge that millions of people will be using it and with the history of Mozilla makes for a unique experience for me because the Unix network management software I worked on at Nortel was big but only used by 100s of users and even then by all reports most of the features were unused, contrast that with Thunderbird where seemingly every feature no matter how obscure is used by lots of folks!