technical on Oxymoronical

Can't you do this faster with AI?

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:00:00 +0000

I’m hearing this question asked a lot lately. Both within Mozilla and from others in the industry. You come up with a plan for implementing some feature, put your best estimate on how long it will take to implement, and then you get push back from folks several levels removed from the project along the lines of “Wouldn’t this be faster if you used AI?”, or “Can’t Claude Code do most of this?”.

What would you say you do here?

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:12:00 +0100

I’m currently joining a couple of new projects and the inevitable first step is introductions over Zoom and the usual questions: who are you, where are you based, and what is your role on this project. I’m a Principal Engineer here at Mozilla, which might make you think that my role is going to be a lot of development. But this isn’t the case and I thought others might be interested in what it actually means. Somehow along the way it ended up turning into a post about how I see the different career levels for engineers at Mozilla, but hey maybe that is useful for others too?

Making a case sensitive directory on Windows and macOS

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:53:00 +0100

Now that Firefox has switched to git as its canonical source code repository a number of us have been longing for all the nice features that Mercurial used to provide that are much more awkward with git. So many of us have been experimenting with Jujutsu which provides a lot of what is missing. It’s pretty good, I recommend giving it a go if you are also forced to use git!

But it has an annoying bug. If you’re on a case insensitive filesystem (the default on macOS and Windows) and a change renames a file in a way that only changes the case of the filename then Jujutsu gets confused. I think what’s going on is when it tries to apply the change it tells the OS to rename the file and then the OS sees that the filename is the “same” and does nothing. Subsequently Jujutsu constantly thinks there is a change because the filename on disk doesn’t exactly match what it expects and everything gets messy. The workaround is to manually rename those files to the correct names but that is annoying. I don’t know if Mozilla are particularly bad at this but the two examples in the issue are us and another just landed recently 😂.

Some thoughts on coding with AI

Sat, 24 May 2025 20:17:00 +0100

As you probably know AI tools are here and expectations range from “This is going to destroy the environment and make everyone unemployed” to “This is going to usher in a golden age freeing humanity from drudgery”. The reality is of course somewhere between the two and I don’t think we’re really going to know exactly where for many years.

I believe strongly in learning and understanding the tools available to us so that we can make pragmatic choices about what tools to use when. So for quite a while I’ve made various attempts to try using AI for coding. Most of my attempts have involved going to ChatGPT and asking it to write some code for me or answer questions about API specs. And it’s never been a great experience. Generally the code it generated wouldn’t work and it would confidently lie about what specs required. Clearly some people find this useful but I’ve never quite found out why yet.

A non-fitness expert review of the Pixel Watch 3

Sat, 24 May 2025 19:38:00 +0100

It’s been many years since I went to the gym regularly. I’m reasonably active, I enjoy long hikes and I try to ride my bike to the co-working space I use weekly. But weather and kids often get in the way of doing any of that and frankly the lack of exercise is starting to show. So it’s time to start hitting the gym again. And what better way to encourage me to do that than buying an expensive new gadget to help me track my progress!

Controlling a dual boot desktop from Home Assistant

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 11:47:00 +0100

I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro but occasionally I do need a Windows or Linux environment to test platform specific things and so under my desk is a reasonable powerful desktop which dual boots between Windows and Linux. I have it all set up for remote connections and a while ago I figured out a command to tell the Linux bootloader to boot to Windows on the next boot (but only the next boot). So by default it booted to Linux but when I wanted I could switch to Windows without having to connect a monitor to it.

Tests don't replace Code Review

Wed, 01 May 2024 23:02:00 +0100

I frequently see a bold claim come up in tech circles. That as a team you’re wasting time by doing code reviews. You should instead rely on automated tests to catch bugs. This surprises me because I can’t imagine anyone thinking that such a blanket statement is true. But then most of the time this is brought up in places like Twitter where nuance is impossible and engagement farming is rife. Still it got me thinking about why I think code review is important even if you have amazing tests.

Recording UK Gas and Electricity usage in InfluxDB

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 11:15:04 +0000

I’m not going to do the online recipe thing. Or at least I’m going to give you the thing you probably want before the context. If you want a free tool for accessing your UK smart energy meter readings you should install and register the Bright mobile app. Once you’ve done so my Rust crate can access their API to let you pull data from the command line for various uses including submitting the data into InfluxDB where you can build all kinds of interesting graphs and alerts.

Announcing LocalNS

Mon, 02 May 2022 20:07:21 +0000

I mess around with a bunch of different projects in my spare time but it’s been a long time since I’ve thought one was worth tidying up into an actual release. Maybe it will be useful to you?

The problem I faced was that I had a whole bunch of services that I installed on my network, some in docker, some as standalone servers, some behind a Traefik proxy. In the docker case I was using macvlan networking so each service had its own IP address accessible to the entire network. Once I learned how to do all that it became trivial to spin up a new local service, say InfluxDB or Grafana with a couple of lines in a docker-compose file.

Creating HTML content with a fixed aspect ratio without the padding trick

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 10:01:09 +0000

It seems to be a common problem, you want to display some content on the web with a certain aspect ratio but you don’t know the size you will be displaying at. How do you do this? CSS doesn’t really have the tools to do the job well currently (there are proposals). In my case I want to display a video and associated controls as large as possible inside a space that I don’t know the size of. The size of the video also varies depending on the one being displayed.

A simple command to open all files with merge conflicts

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 10:28:19 +0000

When I get merge conflicts in a rebase I found it irritating to open up the problem files in my editor, I couldn’t find anything past copying and pasting the file path or locating it in the source tree. So I wrote a simple hg command to open all the unresolved files into my editor. Maybe this is useful to you too?

[alias]
unresolved = !$HG resolve -l "set:unresolved()" -T "{reporoot}/{path}\0" | xargs -0 $EDITOR

Please watch your character encodings

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 13:38:01 +0000

I started writing this as a newsgroup post for one of Mozilla’s mailing lists, but it turned out to be too long and since this part was mainly aimed at folks who either didn’t know about or wanted a quick refresher on character encodings I decided to blog it instead. Please let me know if there are errors in here, I am by no means an expert on this stuff either and I do get caught out sometimes!

Bridging an internal LAN to a server's Docker containers over a VPN

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 13:07:13 +0000

I recently decided that the basic web hosting I was using wasn’t quite a configurable or powerful as I would like so I have started paying for a VPS and am slowly moving all my sites over to it. One of the things I decided was that I wanted the majority of services it ran to be running under Docker. Docker has its pros and cons but the thing I like about it is that I can define what services run, how they run and where they store all their data in a single place, separate from the rest of the server. So now I have a /srv/docker directory which contains everything I need to backup to ensure I can reinstall all the services easily, mostly regardless of the rest of the server.

Got bored, built a thermostat

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 10:22:59 +0000

Well sort of. The other week we had the fun of having most of our heating ducts torn out and replaced to get rid of some asbestos and add A/C. They also gave us a new thermostat for reasons that are beyond me, the old one has exactly the same functions but is slightly easier to use. These cheap thermostats are all the same, same functionality, almost identical controls and all terrible to use. This new one requires me to set 48 different values to set the schedule and then despite clearly having a basic micro-controller in there still requires me to flip a manual switch to select between heating and cooling.

Pop-free sound from a Raspberry Pi running XBMC

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:10:39 +0000

UPDATE: I’ll leave this around for posterity but a large part of this problem has now been fixed in the latest Raspberry Pi firmware. See here for instructions for raspbmc until that gets updated.

I’ve been in the process of setting up a Raspberry Pi in my office so I can play my mp3 collection through my old stereo. It’s generally gone well and I have to take my hat off to the developers of Raspbmc which makes setting up XBMC on the Pi ridiculously easy and fast. It didn’t take me long to have Airplay set up and running as well as being able to use my phone to remote control XBMC to play things direct from my music library sitting on my Synology NAS. Quite a nice setup really.

I made a thing to help with GPS in Lightroom

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 02:14:07 +0000

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!

How Crashplan breaks xpcshell tests on Windows

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:15:52 +0000

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.

Another 7 things…

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 02:43:13 +0000

Thanks to robcee you get to learn a little more about me. Much like him I’ve done this once before (perhaps it’s a sign of our age?) but it was over two years ago so let’s see if I can manage to rustle up a whole other seven things. I believe that the original meme said the facts had to be surprising things that most people didn’t know but I think I’ve used up all the surprising stuff about me already so most of this is probably common knowledge to those that follow my twitter stream.

Beating Bootcamp

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 20:44:59 +0000

I had a plan to go back to doing some more traditional Fractal work this weekend, unfortunately the best tools out there (UltraFractal is a fine example) tend to be on Windows and all my machines are Macs right now. So I figured it would be a simple task to use Bootcamp to install Windows onto my laptop, but like much else that I’ve tried to do these past few weeks it turned into a bit of a nightmare so I figured I’d document how I managed it.

Why does no-one make a mouse that I want?

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:18:00 +0000

As far as mouse types go you tend to find 2 different styles (lets ignore wired mice for now which are the spawn of the devil).

There are notebook mice. These tend to be small, making them uncomfortable for me to use. The big benefit with notebook mice though is that they can come with ultra-small USB dongles, or even better, bluetooth connectivity.

Then there are desktop mice. These are larger, ergonomically designed, with more buttons and all around nicer to use. However the USB dongles you get for them are generally a minimum of an inch long.

Hey Dreamhost, we use tabs now

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:35:39 +0000

I’ll be honest, this post isn’t about Mozilla or even really anything Mozilla related (beyond the fact that it is about a poor web application). However I know that lots of people in the Mozilla community use Dreamhost as their webhost and I figure some of them might want to know to watch out for this and avoid getting into the same mess that I did so I’ll include it in planet feed anyway.

I must be missing something in the clouds

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:38:18 +0000

For a long time now there have been web applications mirroring pretty much all the applications I use locally, email, calendar, spreadsheets, etc. I keep looking at these and feeling like I should jump on the bandwagon, after all lots of the people I work with use them and rave about them so they must be great right? The problem is I can’t figure out what I am actually missing, and most of the time I can spot immediately things I would miss by moving to them.

Daylight robbery

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:23:25 +0000

It wasn’t long ago that I was responsible for developing and maintaining a large number of websites. Like everyone in this role I needed a domain registrar I could trust to be cheap, efficient and most of all keep me updated about upcoming renewals. At the time I had a lot of love for Freeparking. They didn’t (and still don’t) look like much, but at the time I started using them they were all these things. No surprise I carried on using them after I left my last job when registering some personal domains.

7 things I know about me…

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:35:31 +0000

That pesky JOEDREW! has tagged me so I guess I have to participate in this thing.

Here are the rules for this particular meme

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

My seven things:

Making Gallery2 understand ogg and use video tags

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:13:30 +0000

One of the nice new features in the fast evolving HTML 5 spec is support for specific video and audio tags, replacing the more generic object and embed tags that have been used in the past. They have many benefits over the object tag such as a well defined JavaScript interface, controls provided by the browser and support for multiple formats for the browser to choose between for display. The current beta version of Firefox 3.1 supports this and includes support for playing the Ogg format with Theora and Vorbis codecs included. Opera has support underway as well and it looks like the latest Safari releases also have it (though it seems broken in some respects).

Over-obsessed

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:28:04 +0000

Apparently I’ve been talking a little too much about interfaces lately

Word cloud

Updating wordpress posts without updating

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:22:53 +0000

Dear web (I’m not going to insult you and call you lazy like some people I’d mention),

Why is it that even if I’m just adding a tag to a wordpress post it deems it necessary to update the date of the post causing places like planet to republish the post? Surely there must be some way around this that I’m missing?

Less technical

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 08:25:50 +0000

I’m going to be starting to post some more personal posts to my blog. Chances are these are not going to be very interesting to the average reader of planet so I’ve also tinkered with the categories so they won’t get syndicated there.

This means a couple of things. Firstly if you are actually interested in the posts then you’ll have to subscribe to the personal category on my blog. Secondly (and I’m guessing this affects no-one) the urls of the categories on my blog have changed a little so if you had direct feeds to them you’ll have to update.

Ruminations on a fortnight

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:28:32 +0000

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks for me and I wanted to touch on a few of the highs and lows before I forget them all.

It started with flights to get me to Toronto (for those of you that don’t know I live and work out of the UK). I was speaking at the Toronto Developer Day as well as attending a Firefox team work week (two things that conflicted more than I would have liked unfortunately). I normally manage to find direct flights but this time I had to connect through Amsterdam which wasn’t too bad, even if they seem even more mad for security than Heathrow. Incidentally terminal 4 at Heathrow is miles nicer than 3 where I normally come from, even if the 6 police officers armed with automatic weapons was a little disconcerting.

Meet the New Website, Same as the Old Website, Roughly

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:04:47 +0000

I’ve finally taken the plunge and switched my website to a more modern blogging software (WordPress) and a dedicated media gallery (Gallery 2). Hopefully through the magic of redirects most shouldn’t notice much difference. I just hope planet hasn’t decided to dump all my posts onto the front page, if it has then I apologise.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to move all my extensions to addons.mozilla.org. Most are currently still in the sandbox, hopefully they will come public soon. I’m also using the nice new AMO API service to populate details on the add-on homepages, means there is only one place I need to make most changes to.

Spam: The Neverending Story

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:58:23 +0000

Spam is one of those evils of the modern age. It looks less and less likely that a real 100% effective solution will be found which is a little sad but not a major deal to my mind. I’ve managed to turn off my old junk email accounts and train my filter to clear out 90% of the junk I receive. Surprisingly I’ve had more problems with spam comments on this site than I have in my email lately. Even with comment moderation turned on the Tab Sidebar extension was receiving a silly amount of junk comments. It probably still is but I’m now using a simple blacklist to catch it all.

Why would you want a decent password? It's only money!

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:22:41 +0000

I guess it goes without saying that I’m fairly technically literate and as such I’m pretty well versed in both what makes a strong password and actually using them. I actually have a pair of passwords, one that I use for what I consider my more important logins (company accounts, servers and the like), and another that is for lesser services that if I lost or it got hacked then it wouldn’t be a major compromise of anything.

Long Time No Post

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:52:13 +0000

Wow, it’s been a month to the day since my last post here, and quite a lot’s happened in that time. Those of you that keep up on Mozilla things might realise that I have changed jobs and I’m now working for Mozilla on the Firefox team under Mike Connor. I’m going to be putting work into the addons side of Firefox 3, in particular taking some of the main requirements as well as tackling some of the really irritating issues that have lain dormant for a little too long for my liking. Most exciting stuff for me right now (yes I know, I’m sad!) is that I’ve been working on doing unit tests for the extension manager component which makes testing new patches far easier to my mind as well as of course allow us to start catching regressions.

Muppet Parade

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:34:54 +0000

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:

First Post!

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:20:06 +0000

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.