03.31.09
Posted in Camino at 2:26 am by Smokey
Has it been two weeks since the last Camino update? How time flies when you’re driving a release.
First, a reminder that applications for this year’s Google Summer of Code are due this Friday. Camino sample project ideas are here, with more information here and here. We look forward to your applications!
- Stuart Morgan again handled a large portion of the review/superreview queue over the last couple of weeks. When he wasn’t reviewing patches, Stuart also fixed some issues with our default browser lookup code (particularly on factory-fresh systems where the default browser isn’t set in certain places) and vetted Summer of Code project suggestions.
- Sean Murphy finished his work on abstracting the transient bar code this week, which enables him to add a new transient bar to support the coming anti-phishing feature. Also, for any Git aficionados, Sean documented the process he uses to manage his Camino development with Git.
- Christopher Henderson posted several new or revised patches, including UTF-8 URL display in the Bookmarks Manager, the “Allow Flash From This Site” context menu item, and AppleScript support for getting the text or source of web pages. He also fixed a regression in the display of the bookmark bar on Mac OS X 10.4
- Ilya Sherman fixed a regression that caused new downloads sometimes to appear at the top of the Downloads window, and he also posted a patch for more cleanup of our downloading code.
- Chris Lawson has been on crash prevention patrol recently, finding and fixing places where Camino might crash if Gecko objects disappeared unexpectedly. He also added support for localization of the folder name used when saving a web page as “HTML Complete.”
- Most of my Camino time over the past two weeks has been spent on the forthcoming Camino 1.6.7 security and stability release, checking in patches, working on release notes, and joining in on the general Mozilla fun of zero-day exploits popping up in the middle of the release process. (As a result of all this fun, I got to do my first-ever respin.
) I also worked on some test scripts for Christopher Henderson’s new AppleScript features and finished the patch for the latest omnibus ad-blocking bug. In my spare time, I began writing a password migration utility and ran into some fun endian-related Apple bugs, so I now owe Apple a pair of rdar:// bugs instead of having a working utility. On the other hand, I didn’t have Sam’s job, so for that I should be thankful.
That’s it for now. Look for Camino 1.6.7 very soon, and we’ll be looking for your Summer of Code applications!
Permalink
03.17.09
Posted in Camino at 1:38 am by Smokey
…today in #camino:
[7:14pm] hendy: this works for me now too: get source of current tab of front browser window
[9:34pm] hendy: “You want a selection? I can get you a selection, believe me. There are ways, Dude.”
[9:35pm] sauron: i do believe Safari cannot do that
Permalink
03.16.09
Posted in Camino at 1:39 am by Smokey
It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down and write a weekly Camino update—a month and a half, if you believe the calendar. However, we’ve been working on lots of exciting bugs and features in that time, many of which are already available in the nightlies.
- In case you missed the announcement (or the software update notification), we released Camino 2.0 Beta 2 on February 27. That release contained Ilya Sherman’s Growl integration work and a number of Gecko fixes that made milestone life a lot more pleasant.
- In addition to his ever-present reviewing and superreviewing, Stuart Morgan hacked on diverse areas of the codebase. He updated our software update feed-generation script to fully support multiple branches and polished off one of the follow-up bugs for the safe browsing feature. Stuart also investigated several possible causes of shutdown crashes and reduced the likelihood that various Gecko objects related to our UI could cause crashes when quitting Camino. Finally, he spent some time poking Core regressions that adversely affected Camino and whipped up a quick patch to make our default browser detection more robust on factory-fresh Mac OS X 10.5 systems.
- Sean Murphy has been busy working on bringing the safe browsing implementation up to shipping quality. He reworked the initial Gecko-based implementation in order to make the new feature localizable, and he’s been working on abstracting the code that runs our current “transient bars” (the Find bar and the pop-up blocker bar) so that it can better support new types of bars, such as the one that will arrive with safe browsing. In addition, Sean revised his patch to speed up the tab dragging code and fixed a dragging-related drawing problem with background tabs on 10.4.
- Christopher Henderson has posted a couple of iterations of his patch to add Flashblock whitelisting to the context menu of blocked Flash objects. He has also investigated a bookmark bar appearance regression on Mac OS X 10.4 and helped out with reviews, branch backports, and whatever other code questions I threw his way.
- After taking a breather for homework after finishing the Growl integration, Ilya Sherman continued finding, fixing, and reviewing patches for download-related bugs during the past few weeks. His latest patch finally resolves the longstanding complaint that we fail to scroll to a sane place in the Downloads window when restoring the window after launch. Ilya also discovered an additional performance problem with Flash that wasn’t resolved by last month’s Gecko fixes.
- When he was not flying, Chris Lawson continued work on his downloads preferences migration bug. With help from one of our forum regulars, he also finally got to the bottom of a bizarre bug that had caused the cookies sheet to fail to open in certain cases (a website had set an invalid cookie) and coded up a fix. Chris also helped investigate several other bizarre bugs that appeared during this timeframe and reviewed some of the patches that fixed them.
- Jeff Dlouhy reported some progress on his Tabsposé bugs, and he also posted a revised in-progress patch for integrating Quick Look into the Downloads window.
- Philippe Wittenbergh has been working on polishing the appearance of our error page overlays. Way back at the beginning of this reporting period, he produced a final set of full content zoom toolbar icons after we (finally!) came to a decision on the style and color that we wanted. Philippe has also helped investigate and tirage many of the bugs that have been filed during this time.
- In addition to driving Camino 2.0 Beta 2 last month, I’ve been coordinating the forthcoming Camino 1.6.7 security and stability release. I’ve also worked with Flashblock developer Philip Chee to investigate several Flashblock-related bugs discovered by Camino users and to push Philip’s fixes into our builds. In addition, I finally got to land my long-suffering patch to make Camino use maintained XUL theme files so that things like error page buttons no longer look deformed.
Whew! A month-and-a-half is a little bit too much time between updates.
One final note for tonight: it’s Summer of Code time again (an entirely different type of March Madness for college students), so if you’re a student, please keep Camino in mind for your project application for this summer; if you’re no longer a college or university student, we’re also soliciting ideas for potential projects from all of our users. Mike Pinkerton will be writing more about this in the near future, so keep watching his blog for the full set of details about submitting your ideas and for the Camino Project’s own list of sample project ideas.
Permalink
03.11.09
Posted in Camino, Life at 2:31 am by Smokey
(Trying to make this a quick little post before bed, because active bugs+meeting agenda took too long…)
In the process of investigating another bug, Chris Lawson and I found, filed, figured out, fixed, and checked in the fix for a bug today:
[11:54pm] cl|zzz: i like these bugs we file and fix in one day.
This was a pretty simple fix, which is why I was able to do it, and after chasing some really bizarre bugs over the past few days, figuring out the cause and writing the patch certainly made me happy.
It’s relatively rare that I fix a Camino bug that involves actual code, given that I can mostly AppleScript my way out of paper bag. When I am able to fix such a bug, like today, it reminds me that over the last four or so years, I have actually learned something useful about our codebase. I could guess the cause was related to isTextBasedContent and menu item validation, head over to MXR and find the isTextBasedContent function, and then stick in a fix.
It’s the little things, really. Every little bug-fix counts, and even though I spend most of my Camino time doing lots of other little things that also matter, it’s good to be able to knock out a code bug every now and again, too. 
Permalink
03.02.09
Posted in Life at 2:42 am by Smokey
One of the things about being a boy growing up in the South is that snow becomes one of those mythical things you hear about, read about, but rarely ever see (experience). When we’ve been so lucky as to have a fabled White Christmas (once, I think), it meant that we had some light flurries on Christmas morning and then the sun was going strong, no sign of winter remaining, by noon.
I have a couple of rather nebulous and two distinct memories of real Georgia snows from my youth. When I was very little, one year we had what seemed to me a big snowstorm; I remember baggies on my shoes (most people and children did not have snow boots in the South), coming back inside frequently to warm up to a fire and hot chocolate, and my first sled. See, we lived up at the top of a great big hill, and either the street (a bit dangerous, and too fast) or the backyards made for incredible sledding. To take advantage of our great location and these wondrous conditions, my dad built me a sled out of spare boards and tacked sheet metal on the bottom of boards that made up the “runners,” ensuring the sled would go flying! Compared to the garbage can lids the other children used, I was sledding in style. For some reason after that snowstorm I managed to convince my parents to buy me a real sled (apparently, despite my fond memories, the handmade sled was not good enough for me), and, amazingly, we had another big snowstorm the following year, so I got to use the new sled, too. At some point not long thereafter, everyone started fencing in the backyards (a tragedy of the commons of another sort), and our days of amazing sledding were done.
Once we moved to Lawrenceville, there must have been a couple of years with a good snow, or at least some decent ice on the roads. Backyards were all fenced in, and the street was neither as steep nor as long, so my salient memory of that era is that one of our neighbors owned ice skates, and she went ice skating on the street; we had to avoid hitting her as we attempted to sled.
After that, my memory becomes stronger, but the snow events seemed less memorable. In the blizzard of March 1993, I remember going out with my dad to check on the situation at his office and then trying to go to the library so I could continue doing research for a major English paper due the next week. We saw no other cars out on Lawrenceville Highway, and needless to say, the library was not open. People still talk about that blizzard, but for me there was nothing particularly exciting to remember about it beyond Lawrenceville Highway as a snowy ghost of a route.
In 1996 we had another big snowstorm; it hit the weekend I was supposed to go back to college after a break. We were sitting in the family van at a traffic light waiting for it to turn green when we were rear-ended by someone who was driving too fast, couldn’t stop, and probably shouldn’t have been driving in the weather at all (in the South, that means pretty much anyone who hasn’t moved here from the North). Luckily there was only minor vehicular damage, but I was a day late getting back to school as we waited until things had melted enough that we could take the car to get me back to Rome.
Most of my memories of the ridiculous relationship between Southerners and snow come from my years in Washington, DC, which for all its hustle and self-importance is, in so many ways, just another Southern city—except that it gets a decent snowstorm once a year. Despite the regular nature of snowy inclement weather, Washington and its residents aren’t prepared to handle the white stuff. Just like in Georgia, mere mention of the four-letter word is enough to clear the supermarket shelves of milk and break (I first saw the phenomenon for myself in Washington), and while the District has snow plows and salt trucks, you’re lucky if the main thoroughfares are ploughed well. Further, many schools, companies, and so forth key their closings off of the Federal Government, and say what you might about that bureaucracy, but it is very reluctant to close. As a result, snow means something short of mass chaos but bordering on mass insanity.
My first winter in Washington, we had one of the bigger snowstorms I experienced there, and of course everything remained “open.” I dutifully hiked the 30 minutes or so down the hill to campus, mostly over unshoveled sidewalks (owners or residents are required by law to have the sidewalks in front of their homes/buildings shoveled within a few hours after the end of a snowstorm; most years I was lucky if half of the sidewalk on my way had been cleared by a few days after the storm), only to find out that I may or may not have class. That’s right, the professors had just as difficult a time getting to campus. After a while one of the women who worked in our department finally arrived, explaining she had walked the last few miles to work, since traffic was not moving enough for Metrobuses or taxis to be useful means of transportation. Out on Healy Lawn, undergraduates were making the most of the class-or-no-class? day by building giant snowmen and having snowball fights and other kinds of winter fun.
In spite of all this insanity, I loved snow in DC. In part it was because it was snow, but in part because snow was one of the only things that slowed life down. I used to look out my window and wander up to the lobby to look out on Wisconsin Avenue becoming covered with snow as the storms arrived late at night, watching the bustling street become a peaceful, pure, sparkling white otherworld. It was as if someone had placed a soft blanket on a screaming baby and he had fallen into a deep, peaceful sleep. I marveled at it time and again…and then fell off to sleep, dreading the morning to come.
For the first time in several years, we’ve had a decent snowstorm here in Georgia, again in March as they so often are. The yard soon became white, the birds all atwitter as they fed at the feeders all day, and the neighbor children tossed snowballs in their backyard. As semi-melted snow began to accumulate on the street, the unseen exit of a car across the street left two snow-hearts on the street in front of our driveway. 
And that amazing feeling, of peace and of wonder, descended again upon me…snow—yes, it really does exist!
Now, as in Washington, I’m off to sleep, trying not to think of the chaos that Monday morning will bring, turning the magical into the vexing.
Permalink
