Sunday, March 16, 2008

dbus with all the fixin's

I was a bit bored, so I fixed up the marshalling code for mozjs_dbus and now it speaks Unicode. To be fair, my changes were only a couple dozen lines. Credit where credit's due, the XUL and JS stuff is all Eric Butler, and I think most of the C++ is too (though the marshalling code looks nicked from now-defunct DBuzilla). Since it's a JS-centered approach, I think one could rejig the whole C++ component to tap into JS directly (like js-ctypes does). That saves going through nsIVariant, and allows the back-end to chew on the JS objects directly. It would probably simplify the JS slightly as well (it is already a nice, modular design).

And I'm pretending the 3 hours spent looking for the reason why my Fx build didn't pick up the mozjs_dbus extension never happened. (The install.rdf ID field said mozjsdbus. One underscore. Three hours. In theaters now...)

Saturday, March 15, 2008

exacerbate and incapacitate (and, apparently, progress)

Ah, software. S for stupid, O for OMGWTF?!, F for [expletive deleted] etc.

Weird, weird bugs. Profoundly weird. So, converting from .ico to .png causes the same buffered stream bug(?) to throw a hissy fit and explode ze Prism into tiny shards of glass that hurt your soul. But, the other day when testing I chose a local .ico file, and for some reason it actually converted without crashing. To top things off, the /etc/mime.types entry for .ico was "image/x-ico" which isn't a standard MIME type. So, using a local .ico file caused the MIME service to report "image/x-ico" which in turn actually made Prism convert the .ico to a .png. Even though there is no decoder for "image/x-ico"!

Furthermore, adding a ~/mime.types file (overrides the global in /etc/) and putting the correct "image/x-icon" type there caused the thing to explode once again.

[some time passed here when I started fooling around with my imaginary girlfriend an idea, instead of writing this blog post]

My hunch paid off. Increasing the buffer size for the nsIBufferedOutputStream from 1024 to 4096 (larger than the size of the file that's being converted, it's 1920 bytes) magically disappears the crashiness (this is for .ico to .png with the correct MIME type). And, trying to convert a larger file (21941 bytes) with that 4096 byte buffer still causes a crash (this is from .png to .png). I'd allow myself to call this progress.

I might just add that this crashes a nightly Firefox when using Refractor, so it's not just my XULRunner tree that's covered in ectoplasm. Naturally, I can't recall if all this actually worked earlier.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

I now have a debug XULRunner build, so I started poking at the odd crasher that bug 420777 acts as a workaround for. Converting from PNG to PNG (which should work, even though it should never be done) causes the whole shebang to SIGABRT when trying to close the buffered output-stream. Turns out it's nsBufferedStream::Close() that is the bad guy, and not nsStorageStream as I previously had guessed. More specifically the line nsBufferedStreams.cpp:109. Cesar confirmed on IRC last week that it affected him as well, so either it's a glibc bug that's in both OpenSUSE 10.2 and Ubuntu 7.10 (IIRC), or it's a Mozilla problem. I have no idea at this point, but I'm leaning towards the latter.

(A partial stack trace is available here.)

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

it's not a long way to Tipperary if you live on the outskirts of Tipperary

Hopefully we'll get some neat stuff done for Prism this week (we talked on IRC about menus for tray icons and the dock, and if that doesn't happen it's just a matter of triggering plasticmillion's Pavlovian response by filing a bug and it'll be done). There's also a couple of bugs to fix, I'd love to get the icon handling going smoothly (possibly whip up something based on imgLoader that can auto-detect the MIME type based on something else than what's supplied in the <link> tag or file extension -- content uses imgLoader so maybe one can do it without having to write a binary component [imgLoader's methods aren't scriptable]). At the very least, we need more graceful failure modes.

It's a really fun thing to be involved with, I feel like I'm turning into somewhat of a Mozilla evangelist. Becoming a part of the Prism team was very natural and I have to say if every single person who got started with Mozilla in some way had a Mark Finkle or a Matt Gertner (plasticmillion) as the first point of contact, there would be notices of proverbial cups overflowing with happy geeks all over Planet Mozilla. (Two really super guys, I spent most parts of Friday night vicariously getting Mozilla building using the iPhone SDK with/through Matt. The most pure nerd fun I've had in quite some time. Yes, I am easy to please.)

I've also started prodding a bit at the half-arsed JS-Dehydra thing I began back when the leaves turned last year (use SpiderMonkey to spid out the JS AST as JSON and massage in Python and make Dehydra run on that). Static checking (or, even better: automatic rewriting) of JS would be cool.
Reading all the incredibly cool posts by Dave Mandelin and Taras Glek really gets my mouth watering. I mean, a blog post like this. I don't understand half of it, and that's a blast. Learning something new implies not understanding it first. (Yes, I am a huge Feynman fan.)

Sunday, March 02, 2008

flossing

It is surprisingly more satisfying than I had thought filing bugs, poking at the code and sometimes seeing p=nossralf in a check-in log. I mean, it's like a little buzz, more than a few synapses going "wheeee".

I've decided to learn a bit about the xpcshell HTTP server and writing unit tests for Mozilla in general, since Prism needs some lovin' in that department. Using the HTTP server makes sense, since it enables testing things such as the favicon downloader (and possibly aspects of Refractor as well). It may be too late to impact 0.9, but getting good unit test coverage won't make 1.0 kick any less ass.

And I need to get one of my other little projects, Tnedor, finished. It's a Python-based xbindkeys replacement with per-application settings (mouse buttons only for now). With an associated GUI application for setting up the configuration. Mouse settings on Linux suck. Bad. And reducing suck should be the goal of all software. (It's called Tnedor because Esuom sounds too Finnish and that's just wrong!)