Today’s Dilbert is probably an old joke, but a good one.

This morning, I noticed something funny about how I approach various operating systems.

When Microsoft Windows Vista was released, I stayed way the hell away. I have a (nearly) perfectly functional Windows XP box, deliberately overbuilt when I bought it so it would last a while. The news reports about Vista were less than flattering, and ditto the blogs. Despite the occasional BSOD, which I now accept with mild grumbling, Windows XP is sufficient for my needs and the last thing I want to do is install an operating system (again) – and all the necessary build software – for building Mozilla. With Vista Service Pack 1 not too far off, I’m still convinced of the rightness of my decision.

Apple’s Macintosh OS X 10.5, code named Leopard, was released a few days ago. At first I was tempted to go get it, but then I noticed my laptop’s antivirus expires in a couple months. So again, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach, letting the AV program run out before upgrading. Again, the machine is adequate to my needs. I haven’t fired up my Mac Mini in a little while, probably because I don’t have a monitor dedicated for it or a desk big enough. (I’m lazy on that front.)

The Fedora Project will release the Fedora 8 edition of Linux in seven days. Yesterday, I pre-ordered a copy of it. Two USA dollars plus shipping and handling, from an online vendor. (When Fedora 7 was released, I set my box to downloading it – first by FTP, which died a couple times, and then by Bittorrent… but in deciding to be generous to others and allow for twice the upload amount as the download amount, it took three days to reach that 2.000 factor. Thanks a lot, Comcast.)

Here’s the part I don’t rationally grok. With Mac, and especially with Windows, I perceive a fair bit of pain with upgrading the operating system. With Linux, it’s not even a question – I like it, and I actually look forward to the latest & greatest.

I had some rough experiences with Kanotix, a Debian-based system, but primarily because I couldn’t get LILO to default to Windows at the time. I have had some good experiences with Fedora in the past, and I still do

. Maybe it’s because I don’t hear nearly as much bad stuff about Linux in general that I’m willing to trust it more. Maybe it’s because I can get copies of a Linux-based OS dirt-cheap. (Legally, too. I don’t do pirated software.) Maybe it’s because building Mozilla has the lowest barrier to entry on Linux – almost everything comes with the default OS installation. (The debuggers are extremely painful to use, though.) Maybe it’s because the malware community fears offending the (very smart, very persistent, and very loud!) Linux-based developers community. Maybe it’s because of the frequent updates Fedora offers – average one set every week, I’ve noticed – far more often than the Two Titans.

I don’t know what it is, really. Ultimately, I don’t think I care. Fedora’s brand of Linux is one I simply don’t have any cause to question. With Windows or Mac, I’m 90-95% sure that I’m at fault when something unexpected happens. With Linux, it’s 99.9%, at least. I simply take for granted that Linux Really Does Work… and for a developer, that’s saying a lot.

(It’s not 100%… see http://sourceware.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl issue 2353. Granted, I reported it last night, but…)

This week in the evenings, I’ve been banging on the inter-process communication (IPC) bug to try and get it working for me, with little success. I finally remembered about noon today that your standard output stream is buffered. So now my blocked testcase has been hit with a plunger (pun intended).

So among the several things I tried was a NS_ERROR break in the IPC code, along
with GDB, the GNU Debugger. Here’s roughly how it turned out…

Continue reading Fun with slave-driving programs →

This week, I had a series of “great” ideas for things I wanted to do with Mozilla code, starting with a gripe from three and a half years ago. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t, and it’s generally evolving.

Tonight’s idea, for instance, was to start using XTF to augment XUL’s capabilities. However, since XUL is a predefined XML language in Mozilla, XTF can’t share the same XML namespace. No problem – a second XML language, plus display: -moz-box, and I’m in business. It’d also mean explicitly defining the public interfaces to these elements in IDL, something I’m not opposed to.

I’ll get back to this subject in a bit, but I need to express another thought here. These two subjects are related, and frankly I’ve been chewing in silence on this other subject for months now.

What’s going on with Mozilla 1.9.x?

Continue reading Overwhelmed →

From the Mozilla 24 upcoming.org page:

Stanford is a 20 minute walk from the Palo Alto train station. Visit 511.org for details on public transit.

Hmm

. I looked on 511.org, and it suggests walking that distance. Too bad I don’t know my way around the University…

The northbound Caltrain arrives at Palo Alto Caltrain Station at 9:31 am, leaving San Jose Diridon at 9:00 sharp. The day pass from San Jose to Palo Alto and back is eight dollars.

So here’s what I want to do. Anyone going to Mozilla 24 @ Stanford by Caltrain from the South Bay, let’s meet in the northernmost car (the bike car, usually). I’ll be wearing a blue Firefox shirt and carrying my usual light blue laptop bag, boarding at Diridon. If you’re heading to the event by Caltrain, please reply here and join me. All we need is one person familiar with the University, and we can head off together. Otherwise, we can wait for the southbound train 30 minutes later and join up with our Franciscan colleagues, or we can ask a local for directions. 🙂

(No offense to our Chinese readers or their communities is intended.)

There have been quite a few major storms lately. Erin has dropped to a tropical depression out in the Pacific. Hurricane Dean’s making a mess in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. (Category 4

. Oh, boy.) One storm we’re not hearing much about in the U.S.A., though, is Super Typhoon Sepat. It’s heading northwest, straight for the heart of China, with a pit stop in a rather controversial island. The Phillippines already took a hit from this one. (I call it a Super Typhoon because earlier stories rated it a Category 4, though right now I think it’s somewhere between 2 and 3. Still a monster, though.)

I was browsing around on Google News this morning before leaving for work, trying to find out a bit more. Most of the headlines were appropriately serious – but one of them didn’t make a whole lot of sense. From the Shanghai Daily: Typhoon Sepat to cool city over weekend

I’m sorry, but I burst out laughing when I saw that one. Only in China is a super typhoon considered good news.

(The story does mention the seriousness of the storm leading to closures and heavy weather preparations – but in the typical reverse-pyramid style of newswriting, lesser facts are put at the end of the story. As a former Journalist for the U.S. Navy, I can say this story is written that way. Apparently, the danger a massive storm brings is less important than shaving a couple degrees Celsius. Go figure.)

Generally speaking, when I post requests for help on my blog, it’s for some little bug that has me stumped. This time, it’s for something longer-term.

The company I work for, DVC Labs, wants Mozilla experts. Simply put, we’re swamped right now and will be for the foreseeable future

. We’re also pushing the boundaries of what Mozilla can do, with an interesting twist that I can’t talk about publicly. (Start-up life. You know how it is…)

So if you happen to be a Mozilla developer frustrated with where you’re at right now, or you’re looking for one of those once-in-a-hundred-years, win-the-lottery types of deals (I won’t go so far as to claim “Google-IPO” type of deal… I’m not that brash), ring my company phone. I’ll pass it on to my supervisor, and we’ll go from there.

(E-mail removed, as I only got one actual response and a couple dozen spam since.)

It occurs to me that various people are working on editing tools or extensions to Mozilla to support editing. I know of some of them:

• ETNA (which seems to put out news updates and releases even less frequently than I do…)
• Code Editor from Paul Rouget
• My own Verbosio project
• Daniel Kirsch (kirschkern) mentioned an interest
• As did “Emery”.
• Mariano expressed an interest in driving the XUL IDE project.
• Last, but certainly not least, the fantastic work from the guys over at ActiveState.

All things considered, that’s quite a list. Each individual contributing has their own itch to scratch, and the projects don’t really compete with each other. (You might argue that ETNA and Verbosio compete, but I don’t see it that way. Verbosio’s an experimental project right now.)

Three of the others I met through Mozpad. (ETNA we haven’t heard from yet, but we haven’t gone out of our way to invite them either. Oops.) This makes me think we could form a small working group over at Mozpad – not for the IDE (which is apparently going to be Eclipse), but for smaller editing applications.

What would this new group try to do? I don’t know yet

. I suppose the starting point would be for us to share ideas and code – and avoid duplication of effort. I personally doubt we’d try to develop a common editing tool anytime soon, seeing as our efforts are going in different sub-sets of editing right now, and we’re all pretty busy. I think my initial intent is to answer questions from community members about what work is going on in the editing space, and who’s doing it, and how developers could contribute.

Then again, maybe none of us have the time for that…

UPDATE: Okay, so ETNA is alive and well. I just haven’t heard much about it lately. (It’s not my fault Laurent isn’t on planet or the moon. 🙂 )

I was just thinking Friday @ noon Pacific time that any such group as I describe above should probably start with a simple wiki page on mozpad saying “Here’s what editing tools work is going on, and who’s doing it.” Then I don’t have to guess about who’s doing what. 🙂

Mr

. Roadshow from the San Jose Mercury News

I landed in the newspaper yet again. I don’t know how I do it. (It’s also my 400th blog entry.)

Every now and then, I have a really good idea, something that I think
would shake up the authoring/editing community and add simple, useful
capabilities we’ve never seen before. Basically, I run into a problem when
I’m working on code, and I come up with a solution… but I just don’t have
the time to prototype it, implement it, and see how it works out. I figured
today that I might as well throw a few of these ideas out for the community
to chew on.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention – if anyone wants to implement these ideas, go right ahead. 🙂 I’m posting them because I don’t have time to do them myself right now.

I’d like to see what the Mozilla community – and the authoring / editing tools community at large – think. The ideas I’m sharing now are in the extended entry.

Continue reading Raindrops from a brainstorm →