Category Archives: mozilla

JS runnables: now with less boilerplate

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Josh Matthews

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in mozilla | 2 Comments

Cancelling builds from the console, now easier than ever!

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Josh Matthews

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in code, mozilla, projects | 3 Comments

How to identify expected and unexpected crashes in tinderbox logs

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Josh Matthews

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 | … Continue reading →

Posted in mozilla | 1 Comment

Self-serve, now in bulk

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Josh Matthews

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in code, mozilla, projects | 5 Comments

nsITimer anti-pattern

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Josh Matthews

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in code, mozilla | 4 Comments

Knowledge++

Posted on April 4, 2010 by Josh Matthews

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in code, mozilla | 4 Comments

I’ve seen the future, brother: it is dynamic additions to the status bar that don’t block the main process.

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Josh Matthews

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in mozilla, projects | 2 Comments

Getting involved with Mozilla

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Josh Matthews

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in mozilla | 19 Comments

Faster mercurial patch queue merging with emacs

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Josh Matthews

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”) … Continue reading →

Posted in code, emacs, mozilla | 7 Comments

Applied knowledge

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Josh Matthews

I think I’m starting to feel more at home in the Mozilla codebase. It’s an exciting feeling when you can actually start answering other people’s questions instead of always being on the asking end.

Posted in mozilla | 5 Comments