The Surgery

Yesterday I started the Mozilla Thunderbird email client on my Ubuntu machine and two new windows appeared, sort of like this:

“Huh?” I thought, “I’m not running Netscape.” Attempts to close, and force close these windows were unsuccessful.

I rebooted, started Thunderbird again and there they were, taunting me with their tenacity. I Googled the words “Mozilla Quality Feedback Agent Thunderbird” and here’s what I’ve been able to determine.

Thunderbird has a built-in feedback agent which “activates” whenever a problem is encountered. It lets you send memory trace information to the software engineers that maintain Thunderbird. This information alerts engineers to potential problems and gives them an opportunity to repair buggy code (if that’s what caused the problem) in future releases of the software.

You can’t close the Feedback Agent if you don’t wish to take part in their feedback programme, without first answering a few questions. You can click “Next>” a few times and then select “Don’t Send”, and you can also turn the agent off altogether:

It’s a bit annoying the first time it appears, but remember that software engineers rely on feedback from users to ensure smooth-sailing when it comes to future product releases; especially free software like the Mozilla project.

For more info see the MozillaZine Quality Feedback Agent website.

A few weeks back I spoke to Oscar Trimboli, Microsoft’s Group Manager for Real Time Collaboration products in Australia and New Zealand.

We spoke about the new Unified Communications products recently launched by Microsoft.  Here’s Oscar’s blog entry on the interview.

This interview went to air on Tech Talk Radio Episode 35.