March 2005
Tuesday 29 March 2005
- Dylan Thomas - And Death Shall Have No Dominion - And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Through they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.... (08:00 | 1 Comments)
Monday 28 March 2005
- Congrats to Bryner! - My congratulations to Brian for his recent move to Google! While I'm here I'll say thanks for the help you continue to offer when I get stuck on those really difficult build problems. Best of luck to you, man.... (22:40 | 4 Comments)
Tuesday 22 March 2005
- Wondering why there are no .zip files for the Fx and Tb 1.0.2 releases? - Some people have been wondering why there are no .zip files for the Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.2 releases. The reason for this is that the Mozilla Foundation has discontinued issuing them for our major releases to avoid the user confusion it was causing. During previous releases, a number of people grabbed the .zip package and used that in their Firefox installation directory. When Firefox 1.0.1 rolled around, they grabbed the .exe installer package. When they setup 1.0.1 using the installer, a lot of them chose the same installation location in which they'd unzipped the .zip file. This led to their Firefox 1.0.1 installation crashing repeatedly and (very!) mysteriously. We tracked down the cause of the large number of Talkback incidents we were receiving late-late-late into the night of the Firefox 1.0.1 release to being caused by misuse of the .zip and .exe packages. It was obvious then there was no quick fix. The smartest thing for us to do was reduce our configuration management/QA complexity while simplifying user experience by assisting those less savvy among us in selecting the correct file to use for their platform. For Windows, people should use the .exe package. If you're a Mozilla developer and love the .zip files, rest assured they aren't going away completely. While we won't issue the .zip package with the rest of the major release files, we will still issue these packages in their standard nightly form.... (17:13 | 185 Comments)
- Snow Crash - Photo courtesy of morgamic.... (15:30 | 0 Comments)
Saturday 12 March 2005
- Cross-compiling Mac executables from Intel x86 - In drawing up a vision for how to turbocharge the Mozilla Foundation's build farm, I've read many cool things that could lead to builds taking very little time. One of the cooler ideas (but not the coolest) is to cross-compile our Mac builds straight from Intel x86 boxes. I've asked around the office and while we all agree that this is intriguing, we wonder what drawbacks we might face. Do we lose a lot of optimizations we would otherwise get if we were compiling natively? Of course, the resulting binaries would need to be sent to a Mac platform for testing, but if we could more closely tie our build farm story to one type of hardware platform (instead of needing G4s, G5s, and/or Xserve G5s, as well), we would be able to go farther, faster, and do so at less cost. Anyone out there have experience with cross-compiling Mac executables from Intel x86? Did your build systems go mad and cause your hard drives to spin out of control? Did your Intel x86 box instantly take on the silver gleam of an Xserve? Spin your tall tales (with a dose of truth about whether or not it actually worked) here!... (20:59 | 17 Comments)