You are currently browsing the archives for the Software category.
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 10:38. 0 comments
A small caveat (and workaround) if you’re using doStepIf with buildbot:
The Mozilla RelEng team recently upgraded to buildbot 0.8.0. This has allowed me to start using conditional buildbot steps by specifying the doStepIf parameter and a small helper function to check whether given properties have been set. I love it, and it opens up a whole new ways of working with our builds.
Unfortunately, the doStepIf implementation is new-ish and still broken in some ways. If steps are skipped, the finished() code is called without start() ever having been run, leaving you with potentially uninitialized variables. In my case, this manifests if I don’t specify a description for my conditional build step. Buildbot attempts to build a description for me by walking the properties, some of which may not be set if doStepIf is false.
The workaround is, of course, to always provide a description for any conditional build steps (easy), or wrap everything in a try block.
Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 329 - Boom Jinx - 2010-07-16 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, Software
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 15:34. 3 comments
I realized the other day that I hadn’t done a post about my favorite add-ons since Firefox 1.5. The add-on landscape has changed a lot since that time, sufficiently so that I think it merits an updated post with a short blurb about why I love/need each extension. I’m using some add-ons for Thunderbird too, so I’ve included those as well.
Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year ago at 10:33. 2 comments
High on the lists of things you probably don’t want to try: moving your iTunes music library to an external hard drive while your iPod is connected. The library move (using Consolidate Library) works just fine, UNTIL the next time you try to sync your iPod.
Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year, 1 month ago at 17:46. 7 comments
The Mozilla RelEng team was having one of our patented digressional discussions in IRC yesterday when we got around to the subject of hg irritations. My personal annoyance was that I frequently need to check-in patches for other people who don’t have commit access, but I don’t always remember to check before pushing to make sure I didn’t miss adding any new files created by the patch.
Because Ted is more about solving problems than bitching about them, he suggested I write a hook to prevent myself from missing files. Here it is:
[hooks]
precommit = hg status | (! grep '^?')
Add that to your .hgrc file (and setup some good global hgignore rules) and you’re golden.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 23:45. 0 comments
One benefit of giving up WoW is that it has given me time to re-kindle my passion for arcade gaming. And by “arcade” I of course mean “MAME on my laptop,” because arcades don’t exist any more, even less so in rural Nova Scotia. Sniff.
I’ve broken out some of my old standbys, but I keep coming back to my all-time favorite quarter sink, Street Fighter II’ – Champion Edition. In honor of the game that captivated me so thoroughly between the end of class and the start of work every day for years, I’ve added a Twitter feed to my sidebar and given it an SF2-inspired title, Little Birdie Patterns.
The title won’t mean much to anyone who’s not directly related to me or who didn’t help me spend the GDP of a small nation learning Vega‘s air throw, but I think the web needs more self-referential crap and nostalgia, don’t you?
Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 263 - Cosmic Gate - 2009-04-10 | Filed under Gaming, Nostalgia, Pop Culture, Software
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 15:19. 1 comment
Nothing irritates me more than something that *almost* works.
I recently purchased a Razer ProType keyboard. On the whole, I like the keyboard feel and layout, although their claim of minimalism is somewhat laughable. It is easily the largest thing on my desk right now, and is probably 50% larger than the standard Apple pack-in keyboard. I didn’t buy it for its size though, I bought it for the programmable keys and application-switchable profiles.
e.g. I have one macro key bound to a piece of AppleScript that automagically queues up the entire album for the currently playing iTunes track while I’m in my Desktop, and the same key is also bound to my mount macro when I’m playing WoW.
On the far left-hand side of the keyboard is an innocuous little button named “Home,” that according to the manual is supposed to “allow user to access browser home page.” By “browser,” they of course meant Safari.
Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 18:36. 2 comments
Inspired by Jesse’s work on TidyBox, I’ve adapted his Greasemonkey script to do the same type of column/row collapsing for the buildbot waterfall.
I’ve gone to the extreme here, minimizing everything and putting the contents into pop-ups. With this script running, I can *almost* fit our entire staging buildbot waterfall onto a single screen. Almost.
The classnames used in the script should be universally applicable to any buildbot installation. Tweak away, if that’s your deal.
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 18:12. 0 comments
I’ve updated the Wow Realm Status extension so that it now properly parses both EU servers and RP-PvP servers. Kev offered me scotch. I told you that would work.
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 13:41. 1 comment
3 years later, I’m still playing WoW. With the recent expansion, we’ve seen a return to lengthy queues and frequent server downtimes as issues are patched. As the father of two small children, I don’t get a lot of time to play, so last night I went looking for a tool that would show me the status of my realm at a glance so I would know whether to even bother trying to log in.
Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Chicane - From Blue To Green | Filed under Firefox, Gaming, Open Web, Software, WoW
Posted 2 years, 2 months ago at 14:20. 4 comments
2 weeks ago, the Litmus servers were updated from RHEL4 to RHEL5. The dry run on the staging install was without incident, but soon after we upgraded the production server, we started receiving complaints about blank pages being served. A quick check of the error logs indicated that the blank pages corresponded to httpd child process segfaults:
[Sat Jun 14 13:39:18 2008] [notice] child pid 31570 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
Normally, this issue would have landed squarely on Mozilla IT’s plate, but they were a little busy last week. Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Richard Durand and Paul Van Dyk - Essential Mix - 2008-06-14 | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, Software
