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.

the unbearable slightness of seeing

Okay, so the icon isn't much. But it represents nsINotificationArea support for WebrunnerPrism under Linux (not complete by any means, but it actually shows/hides the icon and sets the tooltip, which at the very least is measurable progress). Most of the time was spent wrestling with the build system, which is about as surprising as something not very surprising. A hard-coded icon file extension in webrunner.js cost me more than a few minutes of sulking too. (And what's the deal with XPM instead of PNG?)

It uses GtkStatusIcon, which was introduced in GTK+ 2.10, but seeing as how e.g. the printing changes that went into the Firefox 3.0 nightlies also require 2.10 or later, I doubt it's much of a problem. If there's any interest in this stuff upstream, that is.

Also, I'm really happy there are XULRunner SDK nightlies. Tastes great, less building.