Mozilla: WebAssembly, Mozilla Test Pilot, VR and Bootstrap

• Testing GNU FreeDink in your browser

  This is a first version that can be polished further but it works quite well. This is the original C/C++/SDL2 code with a few tweaks, cross-compiled to WebAssembly (and an alternate version in asm.js) with emscripten. Nothing brand new I know, but things are getting smoother, and WebAssembly is definitely a performance boost. I like distributed and autonomous tools, so I'm generally not inclined to web-based solutions. In this case however, this is a local version of the game. There's no server side. Savegames are in your browser local storage. Even importing D-Mods (game add-ons) is performed purely locally in the in-memory virtual FS with a custom .tar.bz2 extractor cross-compiled to WebAssembly.

• Welcome Punam to the Test pilot team!

  A couple months ago Punam transferred from another team at Mozilla to join the Test Pilot team. Below she answers some questions about her experience and what she’s looking forward to. Welcome, Punam! [...] Before Mozilla I have worked with SonicWall, eBay and Symantec doing web development.

• This week in Mixed Reality: Issue 7

  Missed us last week? Our team met in Chicago for a work week. If you had the chance to come and meet us at the CHIVR / AR Chicago meetup, thanks for swinging by. We strategized our short and long term plans and we're really excited to share what we're unfolding in the coming weeks.

• Why bootstrap?

  Over the next few quarters, I'm going to focus my attention on Mozilla's experimentation platform. One of the first questions we need to answer is how we're going to calculate and report the necessary measures of variance. Any experimentation platform needs to be able to compare metrics between two groups. For example, say we're looking at retention for a control and experiment group. Control shows a retention of 88.45% and experiment shows a retention of 90.11%. Did the experimental treatment cause a real increase in retention or did the experiment branch just get lucky when we assigned users? We need to calculate some measure of variance to be able to decide. The two most common methods to do this calculation are the frequentist's two-sample t-test or some form of the bootstrap. In ye olden days, we'd be forced to use the two-sample t-test. The bootstrap requires a lot of compute power that just wasn't available until recently. As you can imagine, the bootstrap is all the rage in the Data Science world. Of course it is. We get to replace statistics with raw compute power! That's the dream!

FreeBSD 11.2 Beta 3 Brings LLVM Updates, Various Fixes

For those of you with some extra time over this US holiday weekend due to Memorial Day, FreeBSD 11.2 Beta 3 is now available for testing. This third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 11.2 comes with various updates to the LLVM compiler stack, support for setting service types for outgoing RDMA connections via the KRPING utility, fixing a SPARC64 boot issue, and a variety of other bug fixes. Direct: FreeBSD 11.2-BETA3 Now Available

Cumulus Networks Continues to Build on Linux to Enable Next Generation Networking

Now in 2018, Cumulus' model of enabling white box networking with a Linux based distribution has increasingly become the norm and along with that shift, Cumulus has become increasingly successful. Cumulus has raised a total of $129 million in funding, including a $43 million Series D round that was announced on Jan. 23. In a video interview with EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet at the 2018 OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Rivers outlines how the company has evolved in recent years and where it is going next. "We have help to change the world around with the concept of buying switching hardware and software separately," Rivers said. Also: Open source networking startup Lumina Networks raises $10 million Series A round from Verizon Ventures

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