help wanted on Oxymoronical

Do I need a new camera?

Sun, 15 May 2011 21:53:49 +0000

It’s been about a year since I last went through this. The result of my last plea for help was a number of recommendations and I ended up buying the excellent Canon Powershot S90. It really is a great point and shoot and I think pretty much exactly what I needed at the time to help me learn a little more about photography. I always figured it would be good test to be able to play with and figure out whether I eventually needed to move onto something more. I guess the main thing that disappoints me a little about the S90 is its slow speed, it can only take about a shot a second in RAW. I often could do with something faster. Also while its low-light performance is better than anything I’ve ever used before it still isn’t as good as I’d like. I could certainly do with a longer optical zoom but that’d have to be combined with something that used faster shutter speeds I guess.

What's next for the Add-ons Manager?

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:52:14 +0000

Firefox 4 is just around the corner and it’s great to look back over just how far the Add-ons Manager has come since Firefox 3.6. In fact if you want to see the full history look at my earlier post that shows its evolution since Phoenix 0.2. We set out with some pretty lofty goals for Firefox 4 and I’m pretty excited at just how many of them we achieved. I hope everyone appreciates the hard work that Blair, Boriss, Justin, Henrik, Ben, myself and all the others put in to get us to where we are today.

Don't miss an exciting opportunity to shape the future of Firefox 4!

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:31:11 +0000

You might have heard of this web-browser. It’s called Firefox. You may have also heard that a new version is due out soon. As my part in its development I have helped completely reshape the way the add-ons manager looks. The good news is that the large bits of the changes are pretty much done, pretty much all that is left is a bunch of UI tweaks and some small behaviour changes.

Where is the updated Nightly Tester Tools?

Mon, 17 May 2010 02:39:00 +0000

Many of you nightly testers may have noticed that Nightly Tester Tools’ compatibility override feature doesn’t work with the new add-ons manager and may be wondering when I’m planning to issue an update to fix that. The more astute of you may have noticed that there hasn’t actually been a real code update to Nightly Tester Tools in 2 years, barring a couple of simple app compatibility fixes. Those with a sharp memory will remember that I said just under 2 years ago that I was ceasing work on my extensions in my spare time. I suggested that Nightly Tester Tools might still receive the odd update but obviously that hasn’t happened and the truth is that I can’t see it happening anytime soon. I’m too busy with that whole real life thing to even be able to work on projects I do enjoy, let alone maintain old stuff that no longer really interests me.

Time for a new Camera

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:54:19 +0000

I’ve never been terribly impressed with my current digital camera. It’s an Olympus FE-280 that I bought on the spur of the moment in Boston a few years ago when my previous camera decided it didn’t want to stay charged any longer. Feature-wise the Olympus probably has almost everything I want, but its menu system is so convoluted that I can never find how to enable the things I’m after in a reasonable amount of time. In the past few years it has slowly developed some bad pixels (both on the view screen itself and on the CCD cell and now the battery charger is starting to flash ominously suggesting that the battery is about to go to a better place so I think it is about time to start looking for a replacement and this time I want to do some research.

Throwing xpcom docs out into the wild

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:50:41 +0000

It’s been quite some time since I last worked on my prototype XPCOM component/interface viewer and I have to face facts, it’s likely to be quite some time till I do again. I haven’t even had time to update it with the data from the latest 1.9.2 and trunk interfaces. Since I’m not likely to go anywhere else with this I’d love for someone else who thinks it is worthwhile to pick it up and run with it. I’ve just done a final commit adding a README on how to use the code (though I’m sure it is lacking in key ways so be prepared to have to experiment a bit) and the full source is available in my hg repository. The code is MPL tri-licensed so you should just be able to fork and go do your own thing. I should be able to answer any questions and would love to see it get finished and really usable somewhere.

What is the most useful way to present interface lists?

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:30:51 +0000

I’ve just rolled out a small update to the interface cross reference, nothing major, just fixing a few bugs and I’ve put up what looks like the final set of interfaces for 1.9.1b2.

I’ve now figured out the best way to gather the interface lists and so the cross reference now includes all interfaces used in all 3 major platforms of Firefox. It is relatively simple for me to add the interfaces for other applications now but this got me thinking about what kind of uses people are making of this and how the multi-OS, multi-app interfaces should be presented. A few ideas came to mind:

Improving the API references

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:21:01 +0000

I forgot to add to my last post some information about what I currently had in mind to improve about the API reference I’ve been working on. Any further suggestions people have are very welcome, but here is the current few ideas I have.

Currently it only indexes Firefox and Gecko interfaces, in fact it only indexes those used by an OSX build of Firefox. It would be nice to be able to index interfaces for all the main applications and for all the platforms. There are a couple of issues with this. Firstly I’d want the UI to work so people viewing it could select what set of interfaces they wanted to see. Secondly actually building the lists of interfaces for each application and OS is going to be pretty tricky I think. So far I’ve resorted to building Firefox then looking in dist/idl. This works but it is time consuming. Possibly I might be able to come up with some clever nonsense to make the build system only compile idls but we’ll see.

Dividing the labour

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:19:39 +0000

Faaborg has started a discussion on the newsgroups on the relative importance of polish and blocker bugs (I’d provide a link bug Google Groups seems to be refusing to acknowledge existence of the post). I have been for quite some time now very focused on the in-depth blocker issues, partly because that is where all the interesting work is for me, but also because I think it makes more sense for me or one of the other guys with good understandings of how the extension manager works to be making these changes rather than throwing others in at the deep end.

The great bug triage

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:14:12 +0000

I was very excited to learn at the Firefox Summit that Rob Strong was handing over ownership of the Extension Manager module to me. He did great work making the extension manager what it is today but has lately had to be more focused on Installer and windows integration issues.

Last week I spent a large part of my time trying to get myself up to speed on all the old filed bugs, clearing out things that clearly aren’t going to happen and trying to consolidate others. In particular I made the effort to go over every single unconfirmed bug and either resolve as appropriate or request any additional information from the reporter. It is rather sad that many of these were issues that noone commented in after the initial report or even worse the reporter responded with additional information but people (including me) dropped the ball and nothing further happened.