Things to remember:
1. When you post your patch you select review ? and not review + (I had been confused about why I couldn't put my reviewer's email address in next to the +)
2. When your previously working code stops working suddenly and print statements galore are not helping, and you know what part isn't working but not why...Stop poking at the code and go to MXR -- Thank you MXR for helping me catch (through a line by line comparison) that I had accidentally deleted a key line thinking it was my own addition. I think this calls for an editor that does coloring on text not for syntax but for diff'd text.
Tomorrow should be a big day. I'll be in a little box office at the Royal Cinema all day and night working for Cinéfranco - if anyone wants to see a French movie, I can hook you up - and I'll be anxiously awaiting a review result because this is it people, these are the tweaks that should net me a test version of a nightly build.
Fingers crossed that one particular Build guy will be working on Saturday...
Friday, March 28, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Some of my favourite things
I'm still learning how to get the most out of my system set-up. Since I've recently become an Editor for AMO, I've started a list of add-ons that are of interest or could be useful to me. Here's the list so far, in no particular order:
That last one, BugMeNot, really impressed me because it's such a great idea. I complain all the time about how many times I need to create a user account with a site I may never visit again, or a site to whom I do not want to provide my information. BugMeNot is a simple idea that has a huge impact. I get to share the username/password of "nobody" with everybody.
As well as add-ons, I've installed Quicksilver
so that I can do more from the keyboard. I don't know why I never looked into this before but apparently you can go to the spotlight search with command + space...nice to know. Quicksilver is spotlight on steroids though, and I'm looking forward to exploring the capabilities. The only glitch I had on starting up was that the hotkey wasn't working how I thought it should. In the end, I set my preference for hotkey to modifier activation only, single, control. To pull up Quicksilver I just tap the control key twice. Perfect.
The last thing is BBEdit - I'm still trying to find a text editor that I feel comfortable with. For some reason XCode scares me...perhaps this summer I will try it again. My favourite editor on the PC was Crimson, which sadly has no Mac support. BBEdit looks like it's got everything I liked about Crimson, namely the ability to work on files over FTP/SFTP. This morning when I was working on a patch for tinder-config.pl though, it did some weird things to line breaks. So I'll have to check the preferences more closely before I use it for another patch.
Time to go fix that tinder-config.pl patch.
- GTDinbox (gmail functionality booster)
- GButts (google services buttons - and a handy reminder to blog more often)
- Firefox Accessibility Extension
- Regular Expressions tester
- Web Developer Tools - Finally updated for Firefox 3!
- BugMeNot (sign into sites with user submitted passord/username)
That last one, BugMeNot, really impressed me because it's such a great idea. I complain all the time about how many times I need to create a user account with a site I may never visit again, or a site to whom I do not want to provide my information. BugMeNot is a simple idea that has a huge impact. I get to share the username/password of "nobody" with everybody.
As well as add-ons, I've installed Quicksilver
so that I can do more from the keyboard. I don't know why I never looked into this before but apparently you can go to the spotlight search with command + space...nice to know. Quicksilver is spotlight on steroids though, and I'm looking forward to exploring the capabilities. The only glitch I had on starting up was that the hotkey wasn't working how I thought it should. In the end, I set my preference for hotkey to modifier activation only, single, control. To pull up Quicksilver I just tap the control key twice. Perfect.
The last thing is BBEdit - I'm still trying to find a text editor that I feel comfortable with. For some reason XCode scares me...perhaps this summer I will try it again. My favourite editor on the PC was Crimson, which sadly has no Mac support. BBEdit looks like it's got everything I liked about Crimson, namely the ability to work on files over FTP/SFTP. This morning when I was working on a patch for tinder-config.pl though, it did some weird things to line breaks. So I'll have to check the preferences more closely before I use it for another patch.
Time to go fix that tinder-config.pl patch.
Patch updated - now with double slashes
On the edge of my seat as I wait to see if my patch to tinder-config.pl will be checked in and a source indexed build will come down the pipe. I just tweaked the one line addition with double \\ in the file path. Small things hold up big things...
Soon I will be testing the nightlies, grabbing screenshots and putting together my demo/docs.
Soon I will be testing the nightlies, grabbing screenshots and putting together my demo/docs.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Source Server Demo
So I am still waiting for the install of Windbg. The timing is kind of terrible because everyone's all a flutter with Firefox 3 and I'm twiddling my thumbs a bit. As I can't test the source server from the user end yet, I must turn my attention to documentation and also to planning my final "knock your socks off" demo. Instead of 2 demos which would be ridiculous in the short amount of time that is left, I will do one super demo where lots of people (you dear readers?) will come and test out the source indexed builds. This should happen in the week before exams, more info to come soon. If anyone is looking for contrib points (is that like karma?) please come to the demo.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
It's quiet...too quiet
Things have calmed down significantly since the big check-in a couple of weeks ago. Time flies when you're waiting for someone to install on the ref platform for you. This is the part of Open Source development that I'm not so good at: patience.
What have I done? Well, I filed a bug asking for the install of Windbg on the ref platform/tinderboxen so that we can start pumping out source indexed nightly builds. Once those are coming down the pipe I can download and test them to be sure that everything is working as expected. Based on the few tests from last semester, I anticipate some tweaking will be needed to where the files are stored and possibly to the cvs set up.
In the meantime it's time to think about what the next few releases will look like. Oh, and I have a demo on Thursday (/me prays for the install to happen before then so there's something worth demo-ing).
Here's what I'm thinking:
0.8 - all tests and tweaks for the user side of source server builds
0.9 - docs and tutorial about the source server and how to use it
1.0 - ? need to think more about that.
In a perfect world 1.0 is a pdbstr replacement but that is starting to seem like something out of my league. I really don't even know where one begins with hacking into a microsoft hex file to deposit information.
Perhaps there will be unforseen bugs or other features that can be added to make the 1.0 of this project sharp and professional.
Okay, it's time to go pester the build guys some more for that install.
What have I done? Well, I filed a bug asking for the install of Windbg on the ref platform/tinderboxen so that we can start pumping out source indexed nightly builds. Once those are coming down the pipe I can download and test them to be sure that everything is working as expected. Based on the few tests from last semester, I anticipate some tweaking will be needed to where the files are stored and possibly to the cvs set up.
In the meantime it's time to think about what the next few releases will look like. Oh, and I have a demo on Thursday (/me prays for the install to happen before then so there's something worth demo-ing).
Here's what I'm thinking:
0.8 - all tests and tweaks for the user side of source server builds
0.9 - docs and tutorial about the source server and how to use it
1.0 - ? need to think more about that.
In a perfect world 1.0 is a pdbstr replacement but that is starting to seem like something out of my league. I really don't even know where one begins with hacking into a microsoft hex file to deposit information.
Perhaps there will be unforseen bugs or other features that can be added to make the 1.0 of this project sharp and professional.
Okay, it's time to go pester the build guys some more for that install.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Google search FTW
Here's reason 1,000,001 why I love the internet:
The VMware Fusion Windows XP vm is pretty important to daily life for me and today it decided to hang. Halfway through a "Restoring Virtual Machine State", the progress bar just stopped moving and I had to force quite Fusion. After many restarts, and other experimenting, I was starting to worry that I was in for a long Saturday of re-creating an XP vm instead of working on a job I'm doing.
Instead, a quick Google search for "restoring virtual machine state hangs fusion" turned up this little nugget of wisdom that I bet will come in handy again someday for me, and maybe for anyone else out there who also depends heavily on Fusion.
This gets rid of the session state and when you restart the vm it will boot up as if it was not saved in mid session.
Lose the session, no biggie - lose the vm...well that would be much much worse, right?
The VMware Fusion Windows XP vm is pretty important to daily life for me and today it decided to hang. Halfway through a "Restoring Virtual Machine State", the progress bar just stopped moving and I had to force quite Fusion. After many restarts, and other experimenting, I was starting to worry that I was in for a long Saturday of re-creating an XP vm instead of working on a job I'm doing.
Instead, a quick Google search for "restoring virtual machine state hangs fusion" turned up this little nugget of wisdom that I bet will come in handy again someday for me, and maybe for anyone else out there who also depends heavily on Fusion.
Go to ~/Documents/Virtual Machine right click on the .vmwarevm that is causing the issue, right click on it and "Show package contents" then delete the .vmss file.
This gets rid of the session state and when you restart the vm it will boot up as if it was not saved in mid session.
Lose the session, no biggie - lose the vm...well that would be much much worse, right?
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