Skip to content

{ Author Archives }

Localized Firefox Shirts

Building off the success and fun that was had with the Firefox 3 T-Shirt Design Contest Mozilla has just launched a new Community Store. This store will let anyone upload shirt designs and print custom Mozilla shirts. If you’ve got good taste but designing isn’t up your alley you’re welcome to browse and customize the [...]

Tagged ,

High-level Verbatim plan

Looking over what I’ve written about Verbatim I realize that I’ve never talked about the overall plan on here. Even though we’re well into it at this point it doesn’t hurt to review. The original plan for Verbatim was to branch Pootle and continue to merge code between the branch and trunk as features were [...]

Tagged , , ,

Your signature matters (sometimes)

Some quick background for those who don’t live in Oregon: In Oregon we do our governmental voting by mail and we’re given the option of sticking a stamp on it and mailing it or dropping it off at any of the ballot drop boxes scattered around the counties. What we mail back consists of the [...]

Tagged ,

SQLite more laid back than the D-O-double-G

SQLite only supports a simple set of data types and the only one that really matters is “INTEGER PRIMARY KEY” so you can have it auto-increment. In fact, by default, I can declare the columns as anything I want and it doesn’t even throw a warning. sqlite> CREATE TABLE t2(c1 wtf, c2 yomama); sqlite> INSERT [...]

Tagged ,

ThreadBubble going the way of the dodo

I got the chance to try out the latest version of Shredder last night which recently celebrated it’s Alpha 3 release fixing an impressive number of bugs. Among the heap of bugs is our very own bug 262319; “sort by thread fails to resort on new message.” Two weeks shy of celebrating it’s fourth birthday [...]

Tagged , , ,

Thoughts on branching an open source project

I think any good manager will tell you that looking back over the choices you’ve made is an important step to improvement. In an effort to improve myself (and help anyone in a similar situation) I wrote this post with a few thoughts about branching an open source project (in this case branching Pootle to [...]

Tagged , , ,

Verbatim Alpha Release

Last week I connected Verbatim to the addons.mozilla.org SVN repository and with great help from #verbatim on IRC the blocker bugs have been ironed out. Special thanks to Rubén Martín (Nukeador) for making the maiden commit. The server is a bit more unstable than I’d like[1] but it’s usable. If you’d like to give it [...]

Tagged , ,

Committing to SVN securely from a web application

Verbatim is the second project I’ve been the lead on recently where the requirements included people committing to SVN as themselves via the application. At first glance this means storing the authentication tokens of the user in plain text since we’ll need to pass them along to SVN whenever they commit. I wasn’t happy with [...]

Tagged , , , ,

Planning your API is important

I’m upgrading some code I wrote to talk to a new version of the Citrix NetScaler‘s API. The NetScaler’s manuals (that’s right, plural) weigh in at a combined 1114 pages so documentation isn’t a problem and their implementation is a breeze using WSDL over SOAP. However, some of the core changes left me scratching my [...]

Tagged , , ,

Any Firefox fans in Morocco?

I’ll be in Morocco at the end of next week and noticed there wasn’t a single Mozilla Party in the country! There were over 36,000 download pledges though, so there must be Firefox supporters somewhere. If you’re in Morocco and want to meet up send me a message. I’ll see if I can get Mary [...]

Tagged ,