I have been meaning to make this post for the last week and a half. I have been so occupied getting everything set up and visiting San Fransisco. The internet alone required about 4 trips to get set up. Even then we had to have a service call. Anyway, here is the story of my first week as a Mozilla intern!
I flew on an Air Canada A320 going from Toronto to San Fransisco. Apart from circling around San Fransisco for a while in a cloud, it was a very boring flight. That being said, a flight should never be interesting! 
After landing we needed to take the seemingly hundred mile cab ride to Oakwood Apartments in Mountain View, CA. This was the most scary cab ride of my life. I had to show him how to work the van and we weaved all over the Bayshore Freeway. Eventually, it all worked out and we made it to Oakwood Appartments safe. I am very impressed by the accommodations so far aside from the internet connection. We have decided to set up Comcast cable internet in our appartment. Setting up Comcast required us to make about four trips, including one half way to San Fransisco
On the Monday of the first week, we all met in front of Oakwood where we were greeted by Julie who gave us the cars. I am driving the Nissan until Nino heads back for Toronto when I am going to switch with him for the Jetta.
After arriving at the office we were given the grand tour and the IT talk. During this talk we were each given a Macbook Pro and we had the internal network specifics explained to us. My original Macbook Pro was giving me random kernel panics. I spoke to Sean who swapped it for a new one. The new one so far has been running really well for me. I find that the 2gb of ram that this machine has is very constraining as it limits me to running one VM and being very selective about which programs I am running.
After the IT meeting all of us interns met with our managers. My manager is John O’Duinn and my mentor is Aki Sasaki. I spent some time with them while they showed me around. We did the weekly Mozilla Foundation call where John introduced me on the video feed. This was done in our big meeting area. Really though, this area is much more useful for watching movies!
Over the next few days John and Aki spent a bunch of time explaining our current build system and went over some areas where I could do work. It is really nice to know that the projects they are putting me on are of actual value instead of being busy work! My first project is to work on getting TryServer to work for Maemo. Maemo is the Linux based operating system that runs on Nokia’s internet tablets. The bug I am working on right now is limited in scope to trying the build and not running unit tests. Because of the low power in the actual tablets I am cross compiling fennec using my Linux VM. This is done with scratchbox. Scratchbox is a cross compilation environment for Maemo. In order for the unit test’s to execute they need to be run on actual devices. This means that I would have to hook up the completion of the try build to a unit test run on device. When I get unit tests to work I may get to work with the n810 cluster Aki has on his desk 
I am using Aki’s Wince Try Server patch as a basis for my Maemo try work. Wince is the other Fennec platform we are working on right now. Wince has a much easier build environment as it does not require file path manipulation as much as Maemo does. I will put this in its own blog entry as I don’t want it to get lost.
Anyway, last week was hectic but also a ton of fun. I am really looking forward to a challenging summer!
