Radoye’s Ramblings

I have uploaded the still non-functional extension onto the Project Wiki page. You can get it HERE. It is progressing much slower than i hoped, but I’m not giving up!

Spent the last few days reading several tutorials on Mozilla extensions, doing the “Hello World” example in several different variants, been looking at existing extensions already installed onto my FF, played with Ted Mielczarek’s online Extension Wizard tool… I tried to apply what I’ve learned on the REAL problem at hand - namely the bug that was assigned to me, but so far i was unable to make real progress, this being way more complex than the ol’ “Hello World”. Yet it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying, though I’m going to need to look for some help, someone to show me step-by-step how to do this - because the existing online tutorials simply aren’t good enough…

I don’t know how much time (if any) i have still left to get my OSD600 credit, but i will nevertheless continuo working on this…

Now that my all other projects have been laid to rest, I’ve finally started making some progress towards the 0.3 release as well as catching up on labs and other stuff.

Hopefully everything will be done by the end of the week - it’s getting awful close but it’s all the time i got.

Keep an eye on this blog as well as on my Wiki page for progress reports.

Things have been awful quiet around here lately, the reason is that I’m completely tangled up in an unrelated group project that has turned into a total nightmare. I have to push that one through no matter what, so i missed the 0.2 release deadline. Oh, well…

I guess I’m going to have to pay the price - Chris is going to hit me with a mark penalty, no hard feelings, those are the rules of the game, i don’t deliver on time - i don’t get the mark.

I’m going to push on towards 0.3 nevertheless and try salvage as much as i can - but I NEED TO FINISH THAT @#$! PROJECT FIRST!

The v0.1 has not yet really sunk in yet we already have to turn our thoughts towards the next release, such is the pace of Open Source software development.

I actually have to thank Mike Shaver for this idea, if i can make it work it could save me a lot of headache giving me freedom to take the project wherever i want instead free poker download7 card stud softwarefree texas holdem poker game,texas holdem poker game,texas holdem poker game online7 card stud tipsplay money pokerfree texas holdem poker play,texas holdem poker online,texas holdem pokerplay 7 card stud pokerfree online poker gamefree texas holdem poker download,download poker superstars,poker downloadcard company credit ukcredit card numbers,credit card digit number,credit card phone numberscard credit download free generatorsears credit card applicationcalculator card consolidation credit loan,calculato card consolidation credit loan ?,credit card consolidation loancash back business credit cardciti credit card application statuscard credit free machineassociate citibank credit cardcalculator card consolidation creditannual card credit fee noach and credit card processinghsbc credit card,bill card credit hsbc pay,application card credit hsbcbad card credit credit visacard credit debt help karenat t credit card onlineapply for discover credit carduk credit card applicationcredit card interest rate calculatoramerica bank card credit securedapplication card credit searsbank card city credit national,national city bank secured credit cardbest card consolidation credit deal0 interest rate credit cardteen credit card debt statistics,credit card debt statisticscard credit debt help,non profit credit card debt help,need help with credit card debtcalculator card consolidation credit loanmbna credit card online accessbanking business card credit small,small business credit card,business business card credit smallcard consolidation credit free,free credit card consolidationamerican black card credit expresscard credit debt management ukbad card credit visadiscover credit card online,card credit discover online paybank card credit disney one,bank one credit card,aarp bank card credit onezales credit card online payment,online credit card payment,card credit ge online payment serviceaccept card credit online paymentcard credit event online processing registration,online credit card processing,online credit card processing system0 card credit interestsetup online credit card processingchase credit card home page of being dependent on others. His suggestion was to consider packaging it as an extension rather than a patch. Having passwords stored in a SQLite table instead of a plain txt file is already standard in the rest of the Mozilla world and it will be implemented in Firefox too sooner rather than later - just not yet. If we do it as an extension it will allow Firefox 3 users to use it if they wish, and (if done properly, of course) it could get picked up for later releases as the default solution.

So my first task is to look into what would it take to successfully get the current code and package it as an extension, what modifications would be necessary to get it work. At least there’s some movement now - I’m not sure if it’s in the right direction, but finally something is happening.

A visit by Mike Shaver today.

I just wish to thank Mike on a very informative (and very informal) lecture today, I really enjoyed it. Those in the class who missed it - shame on you!

The time has come - we’re supposed to show some initial result. But in my case - it seems the result is that there’s no result…

It’s a fact of life for a developer working with a source base as large as Mozilla with so many people doing their thing and changing a bit here and a bit there, that you can’t count on having your patches that worked yesterday working today too. I’ve spent a better part of my reading week getting to know “my” bug - as you already know if you read my previous blog entries i got involved after a lot of work has been already completed so i had some ground to make up before i was able to contribute - it was important for me to get an understanding of how this piece of code interacts with the rest of Mozilla source. At the time i entered the picture there was already a working, though imperfect, solution for the problem. It was in a form of a new separate js source file and two patches to existing source files to integrate it into the rest of the code. Back then it used to work. I had a Mozilla checkout a couple of weeks old that i used to learn the ropes with this bug and with it everything worked fine.

But now it doesn’t. The function we had to patch in one of the other files has been changed, and in such way to render our solution unusable. The last few days I spent looking at an entirely different portion of the code (now I’m looking at c++, not js) investigating how to adjust our code to work with the new changes, but with a deadline for my first release (and a pretty strong ultimatum from Chris that if I don’t have something today I’m not going to get my 15%) i decided to release - nothing.

Well actually, the release is a removal of the now offending patch. A new one that will replace it will come with v0.2.

More details HERE and HERE.

This blog has been quiet for a while, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy with Open Source projects.

Most important - I’ve been trying to fully digest “my” bug and to understand exactly how this interacts with the wider Mozilla world. This is not helped by the fact that I’m not really familiar with JavaScript, being mainly a C/C++ guy. Also, my project is somewhat different from my fellow OSD600 students, because while most of them are starting from a scratch i already have something quite advanced on my hands. This can be a blessing - someone has done much of the work already - but also a curse, because in a sense I have landed in the deep end of the pool right away. This project seems to be at a stage where it is probably better suited for the follow-up OSD700 course than this one.

Second - I have been receiving A LOT of emails during past week. One reason is that I’ve been watching on Bugzilla the people involved with my bug - and there’s quite a few of them. Most of the messages are completely unrelated to my project but they do give me a better appreciation of the scale of the whole Mozilla world and the level of involvement some developers have with it.

The other reason is “Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam.” - this blog has attracted quite a number of spam replies. So far not a single meaningful comment, but I’ve had the opportunity to learn everything about a bunch of products I never wanted to know anything about. But that’s life on the blogosphere, I guess…

Last but not least, I’m trying to be up-to-date with the Minefield as much as I can, using every opportunity I have to get a fresh stable checkout. I noticed some changes with the chrome, Firefox 3 is finally starting to get its distinct “face” compared to it’s older cousin.

Also, we had an interesting lab in-class this week, I’ll tell you more about it soon…

Being smack dab in the middle of a mother of all snowstorms usually means a lot of trouble. But not always, especially when you’re in school. Having my classes canceled today and being able to stay home finally gave me the opportunity to catch up with my OSD600 stuff which includes this little blog of mine.

Over the last week or so i was busy another project, unrelated to OSD, which pretty much took up all my time but i did do a few things - like building minefield on my home machine. After waiting for a few days for the flames on the tree to go out, i downloaded the source and all went without a problem. A debug build took just under 25min.

My Gear

I have two PC’s in a network, one of them is my old beloved Win98Se box (well, not exactly - a heavily modified Win98Se with “unofficial” SP 1.2a, completely removed IE, with the old 95 shell instead of it…) running on a 2.4G Celeron with 1G RAM and the other is my new XP professional SP2 with a 2×2.66G Core 2 Duo E6700 with 2G RAM, connected with a Linksys firewall router.

I stuck with the 98 because i just couldn’t stand the look and feel of XP - similarly i can’t stand Vista now - and switched only when i was forced because of my schoolwork. It took me some time to figure out how to get it to look and behave “right” because the standard XP color scheme with neon blue taskbar and lime green start button would give me headaches. Whoever came up with that design should be shot!

The Project

Since OSD600 is a project based course, i ended up with this one. As it stands now, Firefox stores the login information for various websites in a TXT flat file. Other Mozilla applications, as well as other types of data within Firefox itself are being moved to a SQlite database, so the same would be the preferred choice for this too. The bug has already been raised here and as i see people did some work on it.

The plan is to contact whoever is working on it and see what is done and where (if) can i be of use

Navigating the Minefield

Having spent most of the last week setting up my blog, irc and wiki accounts for OSD600 (and also on other courses) this weekend i started poking a bit more around the Mozilla code base. I looked at the bugs reported on Bugzilla, the testing going on at Tinderbox, downoaded the source code though i did not yet built it, since it seems there are still a few things I’m missing and need to set up… In any case, I also downloaded a pre-built binary of the latest Minefield trunk (for those who got here by accident, Minefield is the name Mozilla uses for the latest untested working version of what will one day become Firefox).

One thing that immediately struck me is that new Firefox 3 looks and feels pretty much same as the current Firefox 2. I know there are a lot of changes “under the skin” and a lot of new features added, but i recall when Firefox 2 first came out how different it looked compared to the first Firefox - it took me some time to adjust, now with the 3 it’s smooth sailing right away. I used Minefield interchangeably with the “regular” Firefox over last few days and it didn’t give me any trouble during casual surfing, it was quite stable (and truth to be told i didn’t try too hard to break it either).

Stepping Into a Different Kind of a Minefield

I know what I’m going to say here might stir up some controversy (hence the title) but during last week I had a discussion with a couple of my fellow OSD600 students, who shall remain nameless, reflecting on the required material for the first week’s blogpost and one of them said something that caused me to re-evaluate what i saw and heard.

One of them made a remark about the zeal displayed among the Open Source gurus and compared it to a religious cult. While i wouldn’t go as far to describe it as a religious cult since the Open Source community is too heterogeneous for that, certainly some people did display quite a lot of fervor which can be a good thing but also a bad thing too. There seem to be a fair bit of disagreement among the “big wigs” where the Open Source ship needs to go in the future or even if there is a need for knowing where to go at all.

In any case the energy wasted on arguing about something like for example did Linux benefited from GNU or vice versa would IMHO be much better used if it was spent on actually developing new software. Then everyone would be a winner.