05.31.10
Posted in History, Life
at 8:36 pm
by Smokey
In the 1940s, all four of the children of John and Mary Ardisson of Export, Pennsylvania, answered the call of their country and served overseas in branches of the United States Army. All four were lucky enough to return home safely. Since the last Memorial Day, two of them have left us.
Dorothy Anna Ardisson, 1917-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Nurse Corps, World War II (March 1942-October 1945); service at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, and Oran, Algeria
Gerald John Ardisson, 1921-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Air Forces, World War II (March 1943-October 1945); service in the skies over France and Germany from Nottingham, England
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05.28.10
Posted in Camino
at 2:04 am
by Smokey
As I alluded to recently, we’ve been very close to shipping usable nightly builds of Camino 2.1a1pre running on top of Gecko 1.9.2. The last bug blocking these builds, a change in Gecko 1.9.2 that triggered regular crashes, was fixed on Wednesday.
As a result, as of Thursday morning, we have Camino 2.1a1pre nightlies we’re not afraid to recommend all nightly testers. We’ve updated the nightly download link on caminobrowser.org, and I’ve pushed Thursday’s nightly to users of the experimental builds via software update. There are still a number of regressions present in 1.9.2-based 2.1a1pre builds (mostly caused by Gecko changes), so for the moment we’re continuing to produce 1.9-based 2.1a1pre nightlies, but we hope to turn them off in the not-too-distant future.
Once again, special thanks go to Christopher Henderson, whose intrepid hacking was responsible for most of the key breakthroughs that have gotten us to this point. Because of his work and that of the rest of the Camino team, 𝌙 is something tangible, something that Camino fans can use on a daily basis, and something that is a large improvement on Camino 2.1
We still have much work ahead of us, but we’re all excited that everyone can now experience the fruits of our recent months’ labours. Please take the new nightlies for a spin, and, as the “nightly build” text on caminobrowser.org admonishes, “Please report any bugs you find while you browse. Isn’t life on the bleeding edge great?!”
1 For those of you on non-Mac platforms who are reading this post directly on افكار و احلام (rather than on a planet or in a feed reader), you’re likely able to see 𝌙2 thanks to some @font-face work by the always-resourceful Philippe Wittenbergh and the fine folks responsible for the DejaVu Sans font. ↩
2 Writing this post led me to discover a fun WordPress bug, as WordPress seems to truncate fields when encountering a “raw UTF-8” 𝌙 glyph (or perhaps any SMP glyph). ↩
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05.24.10
Posted in Camino
at 10:06 pm
by Smokey
Ouf, has it really been nearly two months since the last update? 
Since the last Camino update, though, we’ve been hard at work on various projects.
- On the releases front, we’ve readied the Camino 2.0.3 release; at this point, we’re only waiting on the multilingual build.
- Stuart Morgan continued to handle most of the super-review requests, and he also fixed a number of bugs during this period. He fixed a follow-up issue with the new Spotlight importer, eliminated a situation where clearing history or resetting Camino failed to clear the “Recently Closed Pages” menu, and updated our Sparkle usage to current code (minus the changes that make the current Sparkle fail to work on Mac OS X 10.4). Stuart also wrote patches to remove usage of a pair of deprecated functions and to prevent possible exceptions with some autocomplete searches.
- At the time of the last update, there were still a few of Christopher Henderson’s initial set of build-with-1.9.2 patches waiting for super-review; those have since landed. In addition, he wrote a quick patch that eliminated the most common cause of “magically reappearing autocomplete window,” much to the relief of nightly build users. Finally, about a week ago, Christopher came up with a magnificent 1-liner to fix the vexing xpconnect/component registration problem, allowing us to have the tinderboxen produce nightly builds without failing during startup tests.
- Since the last update, Philippe Wittenbergh finished the “follow-up” work he had undertaken on our 2008-2009 icon update, fixing the issues that we had raised with several of those icons. He also continued to help with triage, testing, and upcoming ad-blocking changes.
- After a couple of review cycles, Cocoa widget hacker Markus Stange’s patch to fix how we saved and loaded print settings landed earlier today.
- In the past few weeks, I’ve focused on general-purpose extermination and patch shepherding, fixing a number of smaller bugs and helping get other patches landed in the tree. I’ve also worked on a couple of patches to make Gecko’s various “sourcestamp” display functions more useful to all of the projects that build from more than one repository, and I made the aforementioned anchor-preservation fix to MXR’s blame links. When not working on those items or the 2.0.3 release, I also continued to do infrastructure work related to bootstrapping our new Mercurial repository and 1.9.2-based nightly builds, and I produced experimental builds on roughly a fortnightly basis.
A week ago Sunday, thanks to hendy’s path-normalization patch and some last-minute fixes for my own errors, cb-xserve04 produced the first nightly build of Camino 2.1a1pre with Gecko 1.9.2. Although we’ve been building these nightlies successfully for a week, they are not yet usable; we still need the patch for bug 533001 to land in the mozilla-1.9.2 repository to prevent hourly crashes in the nightly builds. This afternoon the patch to fix bug 533001 was approved for landing, so hopefully later this week we will actually start shipping 1.9.2-based Camino 2.1a1pre nightly builds!
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