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.)

No comments: