Well, that was part of the plan, anyway.
The other part was to see if I could build Mozilla on Win98SE with my hard disk partition retrieved back to Windows. After all, I really went to Linux only to build Mozilla in the first place. Having a dual-boot system turned out to be not the total joy I thought it would be.
With the help of my non-idiot roommate, I got to about step two of the process of installing needed tools when a dialog told me it just wasn't going to happen.
Now, before I get a bunch of people scrambling to help me fix this, bear in mind I don't care much about this machine anymore. After several years in my possession, it's just not up to my requirements. It's just time to get a new computer, that's all. Probably within the next four weeks. So don't worry about it.
I just turned 27 on Dec. 21. Apparently, in the past year, I've started growing again.
Ever since I was 18, I remember being 5 ft 9.5 in tall. (That's 176.5 cm for those on the metric system.) I was always a little shorter than Dad, who is 5 ft 11. One of my younger brothers ended up 6 ft 4, and the other 6 ft 1. (Give or take an inch for both of them. I don't really remember.)
This past July, I went up to Vancouver, WA / Portland, OR for the Open Source Convention 2004. I was startled to realize I was eye-level with Dad.
Then, at Thanksgiving, another friend of mine who I remember being eye-level with is suddenly shorter than me.
Finally, I met my parents at the airport on Dec. 13 (which in itself is a funny story), and I'm clearly at least a half inch taller than Dad.
Now, since I haven't been to a doctor in several years, I decided to see if there was any context for this. Google wasn't entirely helpful -- I didn't see any meaningful results until I typed in "mid-twenties growth spurt". Apparently, it isn't all that common, but it isn't quite unheard of either.
It's also something Dad says runs in his side of the family.
The last few days, it feels like everything in my room is a little lower again. So I might definitely be brushing six feet (182.9 cm).
Overall, I'm not complaining, since I'm still fairly lean (190 lbs, give or take five, and wearing the same size pants I've worn for years). I can't explain it though.
Other than to say that I'd better take advantage of this growth while I still can. As a kid, I hated exercising. As an adult, I find it refreshing and something I don't do quite enough of. So I'm thinking of joining a gym club when I have a little money stashed away.
Can anyone find other references on this?
I know XUL, fairly fluently. But knowing how to make functional user interfaces, and knowing how to make obvious user interfaces, are two different things.
I'm very painfully having my nose rubbed in this.
The JSObject panel UI I created is functional. So is the UI I created for Abacus (mostly). So are a lot of other XUL hacks I do.
But functional and obvious are not easy to achieve at the same time. In the wake of the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 work (not to mention Sunbird, N|Vu, and friends), it becomes more and more apparent how necessary this is.
So this is an official cry for help. If there's anyone who knows how to write some XUL (even basic), wants some projects to get involved in, and fairly good at making UI's that others can understand, please comment here. I can answer any questions you have about work I've done.
I'm really sorry that I can't offer any money for this kind of help. I don't have it to give, as I'm not being paid to work on the projects that I need UI help on. These are after-hours, spare-time projects. One bit of good news, though: there are no deadlines you don't set yourself. :)
If you don't feel like helping, or aren't that confident of your own abilities, don't let that stop you from commenting. It doesn't stop the spammers.
"No power. So I rewired it!" -- Tim Allen
Please bang away on the demo and give me your feedback. Find bugs in the demo? Comment to the main bug. Think the UI stinks? Comment to the main bug. Have other ideas for features? Comment to the main bug.
If you just want a direct link, try out the new, improved, mostly-working DOM Inspector JavaScript Object Viewer.
One neat feature is that, at least for now, you can manually reset the subject of the viewer (what the target is). Try this in your Mozilla location bar with the demo loaded:
javascript:viewer.subject = window;
I know I've asked if eval() is evil() in chrome before, but in the context of DOM Inspector and this object viewer, I don't think that matters too much. You have to be pretty knowledgeable to trick someone into breaking their computer with this.
On a side note, I think this might be powerful enough to be a standalone chrome application. If enough people like it, I'd probably fork it off to a chrome://objectviewer/content/ URI, and have DOM Inspector use it as an overlay. (Although even I have to admit I'd have to see a lot of demand from the community for mozilla.org to justify it.)
There are a few Mozilla-based products I know of which I have a great interest in, and I personally would like to see a deeper interest from the Mozilla community in 2005. They are:
Disruptive Innovations has made some good progress along these lines, I think. Their spinoff of Mozilla Composer should reach version 0.7 next week, per a brief comment by Daniel Glazman. Personally, I await the day that N|Vu supports the tools mozilla.org does (lxr for the public most especially) and/or starts checking their code into the Mozilla tree... so I can rip it to shreds and start offering bug patches for issues that irritate me. (In an earlier weblog, Mr. Glazman implied N|Vu 0.7 would potentially be stable enough for the community-at-large to work on, or localize, or something like that. I hope he still thinks so.)
Something else Disruptive Innovations is apparently working on, but hasn't made any releases on. I remember this from a weblog comment Mr. Glazman made, and I am waiting fervently to sink my teeth into whatever he's putting together. (I've been of the opinion for a little while now that XML editing in Mozilla is a Holy Grail type of application.)
I haven't followed this one that closely, but from seeing the 0.2-ish releases, I can tell this will be a "mosaic killer app" (pun intended) for the future. I briefly evaluated it for a previous employer, and concluded that at the time it wasn't capable of handling the important application of group calendaring. This one is hosted and sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, and I would strongly encourage everyone who's looking for the next big thing to hack to go after it.
Although I wanted to plug products I am personally involved in, such as my own abacus and serverpost projects and DOM Inspector, I felt that would not be fair. These projects have at best minimal involvement from the community, and they truly are developer applications not meant for the end-user. Abacus might reach that end-user-targeting someday; the others never will. Abacus and N|Vu combined would be really slick, but I can't quite get them to work together and I haven't spent the time to figure out why.
Bugzilla is a really wonderful tool. mozilla.org uses it, Linspire uses it for N|Vu development, mozdev.org uses it, the company I work for uses it. That's four distinct installations of Bugzilla that I know of.
So if someone files a bug in one Bugzilla that really belongs in another...
Put another way, someone files a bug in mozdev's Bugzilla against Abacus, my MathML editor. I do some research, and discover that the underlying platform, N|vu, is not doing what it should. So it isn't my fault.
So, I go to file another bug against N|vu, and mark the Abacus bug invalid.
Tristan Nitot gets the bug, does some more research, and discovers I was wrong: Mozilla's to blame, thanks to a regression the Aviary-1.0 landings had on the trunk. Oops. Well, how would I know? Abacus isn't intended directly for Mozilla Firefox. So he marks that bug invalid, and files a new bug on b.m.o.
Another scenario: Mozilla is crash-happy with Abacus 0.1.1 installed on Windows. (This is true.) Someone files a bug against Abacus for crashing. (This didn't happen.) Well, crashes are ultimately the responsibility of mozilla.org, not any extension I write. So I mark that one invalid and file a new bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org for the crash.
What's my point? We might need a way of cross-referencing or moving bugs between Bugzilla installations.
From my standpoint this is initially a user-interface question. Currently, the Bugzilla database is one-dimensional, at least with regards to bug indexing:
Bug 179621 depends on:
Bug 179621 blocks: 109682
Wouldn't it be great if we had:
Bug 179621 depends on:
Bug 179621 blocks: 109682 8117@mozdev
See also 7113@linspire
Also, it'd be nice in bug handling features to have an "export bug" feature, where the user clicks a link and gets a window to a specialized enter_bug.cgi from the current Bugzilla reflecting another Bugzilla. Of course, it would help for me to know if one CGI script can send out another HTTP request to a third-party server.
Features like these would require some serious examination of the Bugzilla source code and a good understanding of Perl. I'm not even sure what bugs I would need to file to be specific enough for Bugzilla developers to work on. Just testing & developing this would require two independent Bugzilla installations running on the same box...
Feedback welcomed.
After much thought, I've realized that the internationalization efforts of editing MathML (not the application, but the generated markup) is really a waste of time. Not that many people in France will care to have markup in documents they edit to have, say, Mandarin presentations of the mathematics.
This means that a lot of the code I struggled to write will be rewritten and simplified. The end-user won't notice, really, and the code will be easier to maintain. It's also a big enough change that it's a challenge, and I like challenges. They drive me.
So, Abacus is going to get a sizable rewrite in the next few weeks, and you'll see a version 0.1.2 based on it, most likely.
Talk back! Comment please which Mozilla-related weblog entries by anyone were most interesting to you this year. I'll probably offer MozillaZine or MozillaNews a freebie article summarizing your opinions.
No, not really. I just need a good incentive to work on it again.
My incentive for working on version 0.1 (and 0.1.1, which I released when I realized 0.1 was broken) was the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2004. Since then I've received e-mails about it from about a dozen people. That's over the past six months.
It's a little disheartening. :)
I've had other things take up my time, and not a lot of motivation to get Abacus going forward again. No one has filed bugs or offered patches to it, and no one's indicated they're actively testing it. (I've had a couple people, including one today, who said they want to see it working in N|vu, but there's a N|Vu bug with XPInstall that stops Abacus in its tracks.) All the work I did on Abacus was on my dime. Nobody's really reviewed the code.
Abacus is stagnating because it's a community of one.
In a way, I suppose that's my fault. Editing mathematics isn't as "sexy" as IRC chat, user-friendly browsers and mail clients, Gmail notifiers, etc. I picked a niche, and I got a niche community. :)
(I should note my serverpost widget, which seems a lot more immediately useful to the Mozilla app developers crowd, is also a community of one...)
Oh, well. At least I haven't gotten any real complaints about Abacus, either.
Gervase Markham responded well to yesterday's blog.
Unfortunately, he took my original statement way out of proportion... <grin size="huge"/>
I was simply (1) acknowledging his own respect and love for our Lord, and (2) reflecting very briefly on one of the issues I had in the U.S. Navy.
On that latter bit, let me set the record straight: the Navy's personnel are not always paragons of virtue, by any means. Being a devout Christian in the military is not easy. Honestly, after nearly two years in the service, and a year of that onboard a ship which had a distinguished record of service (we earned the Battle E the previous year), I was starting to feel my own morality slipping away, the core of my behaviors and ethics starting to crack. You have to bear in mind that when you are in the Navy as an enlisted person, you are literally living with 20+ guys in the same berthing, guys who will throw all sorts of peer pressure and other adolescent behavior at you all day long.
Missing the Mass, while important to me personally, is nothing compared to starting to think that some of what these people do on a regular basis is okay. That way, for any Christian who is truly dedicated to God, lies madness. A madness of a sort that I will be happy to explain to Gerv or anyone else by private e-mail, but not in a public forum.
It is a madness which continues to trouble me to this day. A very personal madness, and quite literally another miracle that I am still alive to talk about it or anything else.
I found a nice place to rent at a very reasonable rate. The only question I had that my landlord couldn't answer was whether there were any Catholic churches nearby. Like Gervase Markham, I am a Christian, and pretty serious about it.
Now, when I was in the U.S. Navy, there were times when we weren't able to celebrate Mass for a month. In fact, it was the Navy that (inadvertently, but nonetheless) came between me and God, and that drove me absolutely batty.
So here I am yesterday about 2:30 pm-ish, I've just agreed with the guy to rent a room, and I'm walking down the street. There's a huge place with pink walls and a lot of trees growing over. I think it's kind of funny to have a city park enclosed in pink walls. So I walk to the gate.
It's a Carmelite monastery. It's two blocks from my home. It has Masses every day of the week at 7:15 am, and a Sunday Mass at 10:30 am.
When you put together all the things that are happening for me at once, there's only one explanation. God's been working another miracle.
Maybe he's giving me a glimpse of Heaven on Earth, because that's what I felt that afternoon.