I spent the past six weeks roaming around Europe with a netbook, and used that time productively to get some work done on Firefox. Part of that involved building on Windows for the first time, and experiencing the joy of pymake. However, I found the extra characters required to fire off incremental builds with pymake [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla | 6 Comments »
Actually, this little trick has been possible for at least a year and a half since I fixed the enhancement request, but I don’t believe it’s common knowledge. When writing something like someEventTarget.dispatch({ run: function() { … }), you can simply use someEventTarget.dispatch(function() { … }) and skip the object goop. It looks cleaner to [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 2 Comments »
The self-serve tools, specifically cancel.py has received some important usability upgrades at the urging of jst and ehsan. Now, simply running python cancel.py will be enough to get you going – you’ll be prompted for your username, password, branch and hg revision. The builds displayed also show their state (running, pending or complete) as well, [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla, projects | 3 Comments »
I’ve seen this come up in several bugs recently, and it’s time to disseminate some knowledge. Here is what an unexpected crash usually looks like: TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | /tests/content/media/test/test_seek.html | application timed out after 330 seconds with no output PROCESS-CRASH | /tests/content/media/test/test_seek.html | application crashed (minidump found) You’re looking at a test harness timeout because of [...]
Posted on March 31st, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 1 Comment »
Update: the tool is now easier to use and doesn’t require adding your password as an argument. See this post for more details. I’m a big fan of the self-serve tool that RelEng provided for people with LDAP access. When I can see a try build going bad, I can cancel all the remaining builds [...]
Posted on March 29th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla, projects | 5 Comments »
I’ve filed bug 640629 to address an intermittent source of orange: incorrect nsITimer creation. I first ran across it while working on making httpd.js collect garbage more frequently, a task which quickly turned into orange whack-a-mole as more and more problematic test constructs popped out of the nether. Mounir Lamouri (volkmar) recently fixed another instance [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla | 2 Comments »
Nine days ago, I made an off-hand remark in #content that I might be able to get the geolocation service working in Fennectrolysis by the end of the day if my plans worked out. I also remember referring to the process as “not a big deal.” Since that moment, I have put in a significant [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2010 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla | 4 Comments »
You’re looking at a mind-bogglingly alpha Jetpack prototype running out of process. Yesterday was a black triangle moment for me, as I finally saw the culmination of 2.5 months of work to make the words “Gmail it” appear in the status bar. In this implementation, when a Jetpack tries to do something that doesn’t really [...]
Posted on March 16th, 2010 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla, projects | 2 Comments »
I realize that while I’ve been contributing to Mozilla since last July, I’m still quite new to a lot of the process and knowledge that more experienced developers take for granted. Therefore, I’m going to document the steps I’ve taken to increase my understanding and involvement in hopes that it generates some discussion on the [...]
Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 10 Comments »
As a follow-up to my previous post about merging mq reject in emacs, I thought I’d share some improvements to the process that I’ve made since then. (defun switch-hg-reject () (interactive) (let ((other-file (if (string= (substring (buffer-file-name) -4 nil) ".rej") (substring (buffer-file-name) 0 -4) [...]
Posted on March 1st, 2010 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, emacs, mozilla | 7 Comments »
CS student by day. Code vigilante by night. No mercy. No surrender.
