Categories
Mozilla Personal

No really, I’m still here

I’ve been doing a lot of work, which takes away from time I could actually post something interesting here.

That, however, is exactly why I am writing now! I’m embarking on something new yet again (did I mention I like being busy and have a lot of projects ongoing?). As many of you may know, I have been fixing bugs in the Mozilla Code base. Primarily, those bugs are dealing with the DOM Inspector, which is a wonderful tool that can solve a lot of weird issues you might come across. I find it especially useful dealing with large documents because the DOM is often too complex to just understand by looking at the source code. If you haven’t seen it before, I strongly suggest you at least take a look.

Anyway, what I am wondering is how many people actually have heard and use the DOM Inspector? I know a lot of my friends didn’t even know about it when I asked them (these are my technical friends, so I kinda expected them to know), so this is somewhat of a feeler. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

Categories
Personal

Who needs updates…

Well, it’s been almost two months, but that dry spell has been a rather productive one for me. Today I launched the newest version of the OOSL‘s web site. There’s still a little bit of work to be done with it, but I’m rather happy with the way it turned out.

I ended up using a WordPress back-end for it, and made a very simple template. We don’t have a need for comments, or at least not yet, so I didn’t have to worry about them at all. Makes for a really easy template :)

Work on RTSE was going great, and then I realized that there was a big problem with how we were doing something, so as of this week I had to scrap most of the code I’ve worked on over the past month or so. Yeah…it sucks.

I hope to get a resume posted up soon. It’s going to be a bit different from my one I would give out at a job application, as this will have links to bugzilla bugs that I’ve taken care of for Firefox (which is something I’ve recently picked up – more to come later on that). I’ll end this here as I have a lot more work to do, but updates will start coming a bit more frequently.

Categories
Firefox

2.0’s “Addons Manager”

I just got the latest build of Bon Echo, the alpha build of Firefox 2.0, and noticed a nice new feature called the ‘Addons Manager’. For what I can tell, it is a combination of the theme manager and the extension manager from previous versions of Firefox. I imagine that this could be expanded to include things just as the Flash plugin, Java plugin, etc. This is all a part of the visual refresh that is planned for Firefox 2.0. Here’s a screenshot:
Screenshot of the Addons Manager

The nicest thing about it is that there is now an options button associated with the extension, instead of down below. People always seemed to miss it before, so now it’s a bit more obvious.

Categories
Code Firefox

My First Bug

That’s right! My first bug reported for Firefox, bug 331807.

The bug has to deal with a security error that isn’t an error in the current version of Firefox, but is an error in Bon Echo, the alpha release of Firefox 2.0. It’s a good thing that I test these things, as that would have been a big monkey wrench once 2.0 came out. I’ve found a workaround for it, but I fear that the workaround leaves the same security hole open that was patched in Bon Echo.

Regrettably, it also happens to be bug that kills the main feature of my most popular extension, RTSE. It will also kill the main feature in an extension I’ve been planning to make. Can we say ‘Curses’ anyone? Of course, this won’t affect Firefox 1.5.0.*, so those of you who uses the stable builds of Firefox will have nothing to worry about for some time.

I’ll keep updating this in the comments for anyone that is interested.

Categories
Technology

DRM has some serious flaws

I just got done with a philosophy assignment that required me to pick out an article and do an argument analysis on it. I picked a short and simple article from PCWorld regarding how DRM is seriously flawed. The article didn’t leave me much to go off of, but drawing from my past knowledge I put together a nice argument supporting this claim.

Anyway, the article is a pdf, so if you don’t have Adobe, you can get it here.
DRM Logical Analysis