Archive for August, 2007

My responses to this week’s Friday 5:

1. What were your after-school hours usually like when you were in high school?
   A lot of time at home alone.
2. What are the first moments like when you finally get home after a long day?
   I work at home, so I don’t get home after a long day.  However, when I go upstairs, I generally play with my daughter first thing.
3. Where do your thoughts normally turn after the December/January holidays have passed?
   My January birthday.
4. When did you last allow someone to cut in front of you in line?
   Today, at the airport.
5. What are you going to do right after you finish answering these questions?
   Continue browsing the web.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time poring over .idl files in BBEdit lately while I work on building reference documentation for Firefox 3.  I finally got tired of not having syntax coloring and the like, so I created a codeless BBEdit language module for them.  It’s nothing fancy but it’s a start.  You get syntax coloring on comments, strings, the names of keywords, and so forth, and the function popup is presently populated with the names of all the interfaces defined in the file.

Doing more than that will require a full-fledged language module, which I’m looking at doing because I’d like to have the function popup populated with both the interface names and the names of all the attributes and methods defined therein.

If you’d find the current module handy, you can download it.  Just unzip it, drop it in the ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Language Modules folder (create that folder if it’s not there already) , and restart BBEdit.

You may need to go into the preferences, choose the Languages panel, and create an association between the “.idl” extension and the Mozilla IDL language.  In theory this should happen automagically but I didn’t try it.

Oh, and this should work in the free TextWrangler as well.

It’s third quarter all-hands week at Mozilla, so I’m sitting at a table in lovely Mountain View, California, listening to Bob Sutton talk about assholes and how to avoid them.

Nobody ever claimed that we don’t have interesting meetings at Mozilla sometimes…

This week’s Friday 5:

1. You’ve always wished for it, and your wish has come true: There’s now a twenty-fifth hour in the day, but you have to spend it the same way every day on something you don’t have enough time for now, and it can’t be for sleep. How will you spend this extra hour every day?
   Playing with my daughter.
2. As if that weren’t enough, an extra day has been added to the calendar, and you can insert it anywhere you want, except the day immediately before or after a holiday, and you have to spend it the same way every year. How will you spend this extra day each year, and when on the calendar will it appear?
   The day after my birthday.
3. Someone is giving you an extra twenty dollars per week (or its equivalent, if your country uses a different monetary unit) to spend any way you want, but you have to spend it the same way every week, and it has to be on yourself (no charity or gift-giving, and no investing or saving!). How will you spend this extra twenty dollars per week?
   New books!
4. Wow! When you woke up this morning, you noticed that someone snuck in and added a new room to your living space! The room is for your exclusive use, and it can serve only one FUN function (and it can’t be used as a bedroom or storage). What fun activity will be reserved for this new room?
   TV and video games.
5. A magic backpack appears on your door. It will hold any one thing you can normally carry by yourself, it will render that item weightless, and it will collapse to the size of a small pack of gum. What will you carry in it?
   My iMac.

It finally dawned on me last night, after someone asked about how to contribute code to the MDC wiki back-end, that the article that explains how to fetch the code is out of date since we moved over  to SVN as our source repository.

So I’ve updated the “Hacking wiki” article.  The contents work for me, but I’ve done this stuff before.  If anyone sees anything wrong with it — or would like to augment it with more detail if any is needed — please feel free to do so.

My daughter’s favorite TV show (The Upside Down Show)  was canceled after just 13 episodes.  Needless to say, Sarah and I have each now seen each of those episodes more times than we can count.  Sophie will go to the TV and say “Watch David,” (David being one of the two main characters on the show), or “More David,” depending on whether or not she’s seen it already recently.

We have most of the episodes on our DVR, but not yet all of them — need to get the rest of them recorded, then I’m burning DVDs so we’ll have them for the long haul.

We don’t understand why she loves the show so much, but it somehow has enormous appeal for her despite our not getting why.

So, as I’d hoped, the replacement iMac we have on order got switched to the new model:

IMAC 20/2.4/SD/AP/BT

• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2×1GB
• 320GB Serial ATA Drive
• SuperDrive 8X(DVD+R DL/DVD+RW)
• NO MODEM
• Apple Mighty Mouse
• WIRED KYBRD & MAC OS X KIT
• Country Kit

Yay!

You might think it’s a sunset or a forest on a snowy day, or some kind of intergalactic phenomenon, but it’s not.

The most beautiful thing in the world is when your daughter catches a glimpse of you down a hallway and her face lights up, she scrambles down from the chair she’s on, and runs down the hall to leap into your arms with a “Daddy!”

I’m the kind of guy that works by putting his head down, focusing specifically on the task or tasks at hand, and generally ignores everything else going on.  I know that there’s been quite the discussion ongoing about Thunderbird’s status and how to promote its future growth while extricating it from Mozilla’s day-to-day concerns (or something to that effect).

It’s not ignorance or disinterest, but a need on my part to stay on the sidelines of issues that don’t have a particularly enormous impact on my work.  I think that it’s pretty clear to everyone that something has to be done organizationally to make Thunderbird fly better and farther , but what it comes down to from my perspective is that moving Thunderbird out of Mozilla’s direct administration basically means that I don’t have to feel guilty anymore about not having time to write any documentation for it (which I have in the past).

I’m all in favor of less guilt for me.

Beyond that, though, I trust others to make the right decision (or at least one that’s not so wrong that the universe implodes).  That’s good enough for me.

So I continue to poke away at the documentation for Firefox, leaving that debate to others.

Last week I posted several new reference pages for various Places classes, and that work will continue this week and for the next few weeks, most likely.

In addition, Mark Finkle has been feverishly posting new documentation on the excellent new FUEL library that will ship as part of Firefox 3.  I’m quite excited about FUEL as it will make extension development easier and faster.  There are also unconfirmed reports that it will improve your love life, discover life on another planet, and get Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton out of the news.

We’re making great progress on the developer documentation for Firefox 3 — I’m also excited to see how many of the programmers, and other members of the community, are pitching in on the documentation at every level.   Thanks, all!

My responses to this week’s Friday 5:

1. Who’s your favorite of Looney Tunes characters?
   Bugs Bunny
2. What have you done too much of lately?
   Play World of Warcraft.
3. When did you last play cards?
   Last week.
4. Where were your keys the last time you couldn’t find them?
   On the kitchen table.
5. Why didn’t you do today everything you were supposed to?
   Too freaking tired.