Knowledge++

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 amount of work (at least several hours every day), and learned:

• My estimating skills are severely underdeveloped
• How to make use of the cycle collector
• How weak references work
• Best practices for XPCOM reference counting
• There’s a confusing thing called nsIClassInfo which I should learn more about, but I know enough to force it to do my bidding for now
• How non-modal prompts work
• The meaning of obscure GCC linker errors like “undefined reference to vtable”
• How to implement an XPCOM object in Javascript
• Implementing XPCOM objects in Javascript frequently results in much more pleasant code than C++

Having said all that, yesterday I got the Fennec geolocation permission prompt to appear when triggered by a content page, and the proper callback was called when I allowed or canceled the request, so I’m confident that I can have a patch up for review by the end of the holiday weekend. Of course, given my track record, that means it might be up by the end of the week.