Scouring the Source
Wednesday, 24 September 2008 19:28
Jason
For the Mozilla Source Code Reading Lab, I have decided to look into how the browser closes a tab. What I have found, is that from one of many places (I cannot tell exactly where), the function "removeTab" is called, with "aTab" passed in. This then calls "this._endRemoveTab" passing in theaTab, and true. As near as I can tell, this line is the one that actually removes the tab, however, while the mTabContainer is of type tabcontainer, I am unable to find the definition of the tabcontainer to follow this further
Mozilla Developer Days
Thursday, 18 September 2008 11:18
Jason
Unfortunately, I missed the first day of the two (which probably would have been the more useful day to attend), but was able to make it for the morning half of the second day, for the testing seminars. Since I currently have no experience with writing anything for Firefox, and didn't attend the first day, I wasn't able to connect what they were talking about with much, nor was I able to try anything out, since I didn't have a build of Firefox on my laptop at the time. If it had been later in the semester, after I had started to look nto the Firefox code and had tried writing something for it, I would have been able to know exactly what theywere talking about, and would have learned something from it. As it is, I know I'm going to have to look all this up again at a leter date. As for the actual presentations themselves, they were quite well done, and the speakers certainly knew what they were talking about. The only thing I woud have changed would have held it later in the semester, even if only by a couple of weeks.
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Experiences Building Firefox
Thursday, 18 September 2008 22:06
Jason
So, for the OSD600 lab, I downloaded and built Firefox (Minefield, to be more accurate, otherwise Humphrey's gonna kill me...). Seeing as when I first got into Linux, we didn't have such fancy things as "Package managers" and had to compile everything from source... I jest, really, they were there, but I had just never heard of them, nor were they as good as they are now. but anyways, I used to always build things from source, including the Linux kernel itself, and so this really wasn't all that new of an experience. What I did learn, though, was a bit about Mercurial, and autoconf. Wanting to get the latest version, I used mercurial to clone the Mozilla repository to my local machine, and compile it from there. When this was done, I had the problem of there not being the configure script I was expecting. Since it was not an official release, it didn't come with one, so I would have to generate one myself. This took me a little while to figure out, until I came across something in the build documentation (don't ask where, I couldn't find it when I went looking for it) telling me that I needed to use autoconf2.13. After learning that the newer version of Autoconf I had installed wouldn't work, and I got the 2.13 release, I was finally able to build the newest Minefield. I've noticed that my build times were substantially less than those from people using similar systems, but I think this is because I had no particular desire to run the tests the make scripts run, so I disabled these is my .mozconfig file.At some point, I should try building this thing on Windows, but that would require me to actually use the OS for somehting more than gaming, which I have no real desire to do...
Green for Open Source
Monday, 15 September 2008 21:05
Jason
With the upcoming election, I think we should know at least a few of the issues each party is fighting for. In this case, I have been alerted to a campaign idea that I believe will have a positive effect on the Open Source community. The Green Party of Canada is promising to ensure that any new software the government uses follows open standards, and to try changing the bulk of the software the Government of Canada uses to Open Source. While I have severe doubts as to their getting many seats in parliament (or any at all, for that matter), the simple fact that they're saying somehting about it may get others thinking about it to. Getting the idea out there can often be just as good as they themselves getting into power and performing the deed. Presuming, of course, that whatever party does get into power decides to contribute to the Open Source Movement, I would not be too surprised to see some of the big software companies--can anybody say "Microsoft"?--paying off our MPs to continue using their products. Even if this does happen, if this becomes even a minor issue, it helps the cause, as it will cause a greater number of people to know about--and consider using--open source software.
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