A couple months ago, I was talking about my new Vista x64 not-yet-building box. It still doesn’t work yet, but I now have a clue or two as to what’s going on.

I applied the relevant parts of a patch for bug 418938, and I found I could at least launch bash. In doing a little extra searching, based on comment 12 of that bug, I found something very interesting…

Note SourceForge apparently puts most recent comments near the top. Note the comment dated 2007-11-03 19:44 in particular. That sounds exactly like the problem I’m facing.

I’ll haven’t finished trying the CygWin approach yet, for what it’s worth. I simply put it on the back burner for now. Updates as I get them (don’t expect edits to this post, though).

For many months, my custom-built WinXP desktop has been giving me blue screens of death, and more recently, random restarts. Since I can’t use it to build Mozilla anymore, I decided I might as well take it into the shop for repairs. The company that built it is closed on weekends (grrr), so I dropped it off at Fry’s Electronics for a diagnostic.

Several days later, I spotted a computer deal that was pretty hard to beat: a Gateway GT5676 computer, 64-bit AMD processor…

Continue reading Hardware ups and downs →

We have entered an interesting phase in the development cycle, what I like to roughly call the end-game. It’s a point where sacrifices and unpleasant decisions are made.

In this particular case, it’s in seeing a number of bugs which were marked as blocking the 1.9 release losing that distinction

. The blocking1.9+ flags are in several cases being changed to blocking1.9-.

It’s a sad truth: not all bugs are created equal. Indeed, not all blockers are equal in severity or impact, either, and near the end of a project, drivers end up re-evaluating bugs to see what really needs to block a release. Not enough resources (human in particular), and not enough time.

I’ve seen this cycle at work, too: bugs that block a release up until a certain arbitrary point in time. That time being, “it’s time to ship something.” To me, it’s a bittersweet moment: on the one hand, very serious bugs are being taken off the must-fix list. (For a bug to get blocking1.9+ in the first place, it has to meet a high criteria.) On the other hand, it signifies that what we have now is nearly ready for our customers, and developers can either spend time on what gets us to a shippable state, or on bugs that, ultimately, don’t matter as much as others. In the interest of meeting “when it’s ready”, bugs that aren’t critical to that readiness state get dropped.

I haven’t complained about any of the bugs I’ve observed getting knocked off the blocking list, because the drivers are right about one thing: Gecko 1.9, and its primary child, Mozilla Firefox 3, are in a nearly-shippable state already. We’re at the point where it’s time to accept the fantastic work done so far with some bugs unfinished. As I said, it’s a bittersweet moment: we’re at the finish line, we just need to break the tape. We’ll deal with the sore ankle some other time.

Now, I just look forward to hearing what the post-1.9 plans are for 1.9 code. There’s talk at mozdev of using Mercurial instead of Subversion for the next-generation repository. If I had a clear guarantee that 1.9.x releases would have equivalent Mercurial repositories (or at least tags) to go with them, that’d be a big plus.

I’m running on my Fedora 8 box Mozilla Firefox 2.0. I see a link for Battlestar Galactica, Season 3, on CNN’s page near the bottom. What page do I get back when I load it? This one. EW doesn’t describe my feelings. Ewww does.

I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve been browsing the Internet and tinkering with computers a lot longer. So do tell, how does Firefox on Linux differ that much to a web server from Firefox on Windows or Macintosh? The best you’ve got is the user-agent string, I’d think. One of the biggest goals of Firefox is that web pages look the same on different platforms. More to the point, how do you suggest I upgrade my browser to a totally different operating system?

I’ve seen some stupid web-discrimination in the past (and I still do from time to time), but this is pretty near the top

. There’s no excuse for that.

Others can speak more eloquently than I can about the significance of mozilla.org’s birth. I’ll put it in much simpler terms: I owe my professional career to that event and the years that followed.

I have always been a fan of the Mozilla code base – dating all the way back to my early high school years when Netscape was appearing on the scene. Shortly after I’d finished writing my book on JavaScript, I discovered Mozilla’s user-interface had a huge JavaScript presence in it

. After a few years tinkering around in the Mozilla codebase, a recruiting agency contacted me and asked if I wanted to do that for a living. To which my answer then – and now – is “absolutely, yes!”

A few years later, I’m working at Skyfire Labs, Inc., (which coincidentally appeared today in the Wall Street Journal), and I’m having the time of my life. I’m doing what I wanted to do, and I’m getting paid nicely to do it. What could possibly be better than that?

So when someone wants to throw a party to celebrate what Mozilla’s done for the past ten years – not just at the beginning – I’m there. Mozilla technology made it possible for me to earn a decent living doing what I do best. This community made it possible.

So, to everyone who’s written a line of code, filed a bug, written a testcase, figured out how to make it easier on others, or just written down what it does and how to use it… thanks.

The Dark Side of Extensions

As a guy who works on Firefox code on a regular basis, and as someone who recently started reading CodingHorror again, I thought it worth pointing this post out. Jeff Atwood is usually insightful.

That doesn’t mean I agree with him, and I certainly don’t, here. I’m posting this in the hopes that someone from our Firefox community will respond. Mr

. Atwood is one of those voices worth hearing and answering, in my opinion.

Robert Kaiser’s comments on SeaMonkey and Mozilla Messaging bring to mind my own thoughts. I’m not sure how well this will be received, particularly as MoMe (sorry, David, I couldn’t resist) is just getting started, and what I have in mind might be ambitious.

One thing I remember very clearly about the compose-message part of SeaMonkey, and probably Mozilla Thunderbird hasn’t changed this, is its use of a hypertext editor in composing e-mails – in fact, the same basic editor technology that SeaMonkey’s Composer, and NVu (I’d bet) also use. It’s a <xul:editor/> tag.

This XUL editor element probably hasn’t gotten nearly as much love as the rest of the Mozilla code base over the years. Netscape had a good team going on that. MoCo, not so much. Just finding current peers for editor reviews can be difficult, and they have other things to do. (So do I, sadly.) I’m not aware of a great deal of work that’s gone on in the editor space over the last few years.

Perhaps MoMe can adopt the editor modules and bring some people aboard to work on them

. I’ve long held an interest in improving the editor, just no time to work on it (I’m busy and need help, too!). A dedicated team of three to five people on the editor code alone would probably go a very long way.

Just my own two bits. Congratulations, guys!