Oxymoronical

Yep, this post is totally not Mozilla related so I’ll keep it short, but a lot of people in Mozilla do take great photos and maybe they are stuck in my position: No actual GPS device and an compulsion to try to correctly GPS tag their vast collection. I put it off for a long while but finally this weekend wrote a Lightroom plugin to help ease a lot of the manual labour. Go check it out if you’re interested. It’s even on github!

About three and a half years ago (I recall it happening at the 2008 summit in Whistler), Rob Strong handed ownership of the add-ons manager over to me. I had already been very involved in working on the module so I was really excited to have something to call my own and be responsible for. It’s been a great few years with many fun bugs and new features culminating with the complete redesign that we did for Firefox 4 and the third party blocking features in Firefox 8, but times have changed. I now have more responsibilities on my plate (like managing the awesome Add-ons SDK engineers) and to be honest I think it’s probably a bad idea to have such a fundamental feature of Firefox to be under the control of just one person for so long. So I’m delighted to say that Blair McBride has agreed to take over as module owner.

Blair has been integral to the add-ons manager work since Firefox 4 where he wrote all the UI parts of the redesign from scratch. Most recently he knocked it out of the park with the default to compatible feature that is in beta builds now. That was a large hairy project involving multiple teams that Blair basically ran as the lead engineer with no real help from me. Since then he’s proven to be keen on moving the add-ons manager forwards in ways that I wish I still had the time for so I’m sure that I’m leaving the module in safe hands. I still really care about the add-ons manager so I know I’ll continue to be active in reviews, bug reports and discussions (hopefully Blair won’t have to tell me to shut up too many times ) but I look forward to seeing where Blair takes things now.

I recently switched to a Windows laptop and have been going through the usual teething pains related. One thing that confused me though was that when I was running xpcshell tests on my new machine they would frequently fail with access denied errors. I’ve seen this sort of thing before so I know some service was monitoring files and opening them after they had changed, when this happens they can’t be deleted or edited until the service closes them again and often tests open, close and delete files so fast that there isn’t time for that to happen.

It took me a little while to remember that I can just use Process Monitor to track down the offending service. Just fire it up, set a filter to only include results to a particular directory (the temp directory in this case) and go create a file there and see what shows up. I was quite surprised to see Crashplan, the backup software I (and probably many people in Mozilla) use. Surprised because Crashplan isn’t set to backup my temp directory and really I shudder to think what the performance cost is of something continually accessing every file that changes in the temp directory.

Turns out you can turn it off though. Hidden in the depths of Crashplan’s advanced backup settings is an option to disable real-time filesystem watching. From what I can see online the downside to this is that files will only be backed up once a day, but that’s a pretty fine tradeoff to  having functioning xpcshell tests for me. There is also an option to put crashplan to sleep for an hour or so, that seems to work too but I don’t know exactly what that does.

It confuses me a little why Crashplan monitors files it never intends to backup (even when the backup server isn’t connected and backups aren’t in progress) and it is quite a lot of file accesses it does too. Seems likely to be a bug to me but at least I can workaround it for now.