Extension Updates

Obviously for those keeping up with this rather minimal blog I’m somewhat behind where I hoped to be since my last post. Still no new release of Nightly Tester Tools so I thought it worth giving a quick roundup of the few extension’s I’m still working actively on and what’s happening with them:

Nightly Tester Tools is getting the main development work right now. My previous few weekends have been spent working on coding zip support so that it can update an extension’s compatibility info on the fly in the xpi file. This will allow the Mozilla extension manager to do it’s job, which is handling the safe install of the extension itself. Right now I’ve slowed down because I’m about to start talking to Mozilla about getting the zip writing component into the Mozilla platform which will undoubtedly require some API changes. That and I don’t have a Linux or Windows platform to do a build of the component on. If anyone wants to volunteer to assist (you need to already have experience of building a mozilla app) then please get in touch.

Tab Sidebar is an extension that many are waiting for the updates that I currently have in development. A lot of it is there and working, unfortunately there are also some broken bits so it’s really a case of finding the time to get those fixed.

/Find Bar/ is now totally broken on trunk builds of Firefox, but should still be ok on 2.0.0.x builds, though I have had a few error reports and suggestions on how to proceed. The next steps are to make this handle block content in pages as paragraphs and then to try to find and fix what’s causing a rare crash. I also need to work out how toadd to the new find bar widget on trunk without duplicating too much of it, but so far that’s proving to be tough.

Toolbar Thinger is not receiving a lot of attention. I have had some good reports that people are finding it very useful, also a couple of reports of problems unfortunately not in enough detail for me to be able to track the issues down. At some point I want to find a nice icon for it, do a full track through for any issues I’ve missed and then do a first proper release.

Update Channel Selector was always a very simple extension and so unsurprisingly it’s not needed a lot of work. Unfortunately it seems that Vista has changed that. In order to change the channel, the extension has to overwrite a file in the application’s installation directory. Vista doesn’t let you do that as easily as previous versions of Windows did. Unfortunately I do not have a Vista machine to play with so resolving that could take time.

Finally I have taken the step of marking JavaScript Options and Cookie Extras as officially discontinued. It’s unfortunate but I do all this work in my spare time and as you can see from above, I simply do not have enough of it to be able to keep up with the extensions that I want to spend time on, let alone those that I have lost interest in. I will continue to make the extension’s available on my site and I have decided that if enough people let me know that the extension works flawlessly in newer versions of the application then I will update the compatibility information (I am about to do this for Cookie Extras). However I will be releasing no new versions of these extensions.

Since both those extensions are open source (as are all my extensions) if anyone particularly wants to take over development of them then I am happy to discuss that possibility.

Zip Writer Update

I spent some more time this weekend hacking on my Zip Writer component. It’s now pretty capable. It can open existing zip files and remove entries and append to them, happily rewriting the headers and everything exactly as it encountered them. And the other major win is that I have deflate code up and running which makes compression possible.

All this has allowed me to reintroduce making extensions compatible during the install process in a far safer way than was the case before. NTT can now watch the EM datasource, spot that an extension has finished being downloaded, then open that extension’s xpi file and if necessary rewrite the metedata to claim compatibility with the current version of whatever app you happen to be running in.

Depending on time I may have the next release of NTT out the door by the end of next weekend, but things are hectic as usual and I have to be various places over the coming week.

Long Standing Crappiness

So there’s been this bug in Firefox for … well quite a while where it would suddenly stop remembering your toolbar customisations, window positions and even make your bookmarks appear to not be there, and in Firefox 1.5, make the search bar non-functional.

Well I’m quite proud to say that after quite a lot of research, and help from those guys doing Firefox support, particularly stevee, I think I have a fix for at least part of the problem. This bug (or at least the part I’m interested in) is all caused by one corrupt file. For quite some time I was unable to reproduce, and it turns out that that’s because the issue actually resolves itself in Minefield which is what I use day to day. Once I started testing on BonEcho it became pretty obvious what was going on. So the patch I’ve just posted for review basically spots a corrupt file on startup, and deletes it. Short and sweet.

Of course it’s not really the solution to the problem, just a nice way to make Firefox recover without too much hassle. The real issue is how the file gets corrupt in the first place.

Zip Writer

One of the annoying omissions from the Mozilla platform has always been the inability to create a zip file. It’s been bugging me for some time since it’s the only way for Nightly Tester Tools to properly manage overriding compatibility for an individual extension install, without doing dangerous things like it used to. There’s been a Google Summer of Code project on creating such functionality but it didn’t get all that far.

Well Saturday night I finally bit the bullet, after talking about it for a long time, and took a crack at it myself. I didn’t like the API’s presented in the SoC project so I decided to just start from scratch andknock up something really really simple. And when I say simple, I mean that initially all this thing was going to do was create a zip file (no editing existing ones), and add files and folders to it, with no compression. That makes it simple see, just add a few file headers here and there and all you’re doing is copying data around.

Rather surprisingly it almost worked. Lots of problems handling CRC calculations in JavaScript, but got there in the end. Well to a point. It managed to write out zip files when the files added were not too binary in nature. I made the mistake of attempting all this in JavaScript which it turns out doesn’t work with binary data too well. Particularly not when the Mozilla interfaces I used pass then around as char* data types which js then turns into a unicode string.

So onto the second implementation in C++ this time. I guess it was probably inevitable that it would come to it, but JS at least is real quick to prototype things like this in. The C++ implementation now works as well as I’d initially hoped, so since then I’ve of course got bored and started looking into having real compression in there and maybe editing zip files in the future. Like most of my code all this is open source, you can view it in my subversion repository. What’s more, since I moved on, Mook has taken the JS implementation, plumbed in some cleverness and made it work for binary files too!

Obviously the code is to be used at your own risk and right now it’s not all that thoroughly tested. Hopefully though if I can convince bsmedberg of my API’s, this code might end up making it onto trunk so everyone can use it.

Muppet Parade

Yes I am shamelessly adding new posts in an attempt to make the front page look something other than sparse, well sort of…

Anyone who read my homepage for about the past year will remember some idiot sending me a pointlessly rude email. Well coincidentally it happened again so I thought I’d share this one as well. Now remember that (due to my shameless neglect to do anything about it) when people fill in the contact form on my site, I have absolutely no clue where they are coming from or quite often what they are talking about:

From: beeotch

Comments: wtf is ur problem. put what the extension dus u sonofabitch

Oh I so enjoy some of the messages people send me.

No seriously most of the people that contact me are great, a couple though really need to remember that I write these things in my spare time and don’t charge a bean for them. As you should remember for the majority of extension authors.

First Post!

Well here we are, the first post of what I'm trying my best not to call a blog, since I secretly snigger at my friends who have blogs.

For those of you new to this site, welcome, for those returning, check out the spiffy new look, ain't it thousands of times better than it was! There's still a bit of work to do, improving the information on my extensions and such but my website has always been a bit of a work in progress.

So I should say that this won't be much of an interesting blog unless you are particularly interested in Mozilla related stuff. I don't intend to write about my personal feelings (apparently I have them) and I'll be keeping rants about news/stuff to a minimum.

Displaying posts by tag and getting feeds for tags is in the pipeline, so hang tight and I'll post here when that sort of gubbins is done.