Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Closing down Bugzilla? · 2008-11-12 12:16 by Wladimir Palant
I mentioned this in my MAOW presentation already — Bugzilla isn’t exactly a very useful tool when it comes to the Adblock Plus project, at least not any more. All people who want to help others hang out in the forum and I am usually the only one who looks at bug reports in Bugzilla. As the time I have available varies (and I prefer to spend it on development anyway), some questions go unanswered for quite a while. And almost all of those questions are filter issues or Firefox bugs anyway, so they don’t really need my attention. Even for the real bug reports, I’m not the only one able to request additional details from the bug reporter.
Managing locales - now the generic way · 2008-11-05 17:44 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, my previous post gave some people the impression that I am pushing my scripts as a generic solution for all locale validation problems. That’s certainly not the case, what I’ve done there is a quick and dirty solution for a problem I was having with Adblock Plus. I tried to detect as many of the common locale problems as possible even if the solution only works for Adblock Plus.
Managing locales · 2008-11-05 02:00 by Wladimir Palant
Managing locales is painful. Babelzilla is a big help but with 49 locales around (of which nine are incomplete) making sure that all locales included in the release are functional takes lots of time. With a new release coming up, I decided to invest some time into improving my scripts to automate as much as possible.
EasyList downloads moved to MozDev · 2008-10-29 14:01 by Wladimir Palant
EasyList has been doing great lately, its user base is constantly growing. The downside of this — tens of millions of download requests arriving at easylist.adblockplus.org each month, amounting to hundreds of gigabytes in traffic. And while the server can easily handle these requests, the bandwidth use of my account is dangerously approaching the limit. Yes, a merely 8 kB small file can do that to you if downloaded sufficiently often.
Fake "hg rebase" implementation · 2008-10-24 11:13 by Wladimir Palant
After doing two merges in Mercurial when I couldn’t push my changes due to totally unrelated changes in the remote repository, I noticed that mq works great but having a fully automated solution instead of running several commands manually would be desirable.
Adblock Plus goes Mercurial · 2008-10-23 14:58 by Wladimir Palant
After all the bigger projects already announced their move from CVS to Mercurial, it is now my turn. A Mercurial code repository for Adblock Plus was created at MozDev yesterday (thanks to Doug for the fast response), and now I am done updating the scripts and instructions on the web.
Generating JavaScript documentation · 2008-10-21 10:05 by Wladimir Palant
After years of neglecting code documentation I finally came around and added JSDoc comments to much of the Adblock Plus core. The next problem now — what tool should I use to extract these comments and generate documentation? Problem is, none of the off-the-shelf tools know JavaScript 1.8.
Dealing with source code in Mercurial · 2008-10-20 13:00 by Wladimir Palant
Dear Lazyweb,
I like it a lot that checking out XULRunner code is a simple hg clone command now rather than a special checkout script — but how do you check out the source code of a specific release?
MAOW presentation slides · 2008-09-22 10:47 by Wladimir Palant
I was invited to give a talk at the Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Paris this weekend so I tried to give people an idea what it takes to maintain an extension project that already got rolling. The presentation went fairly well even though I could have told much more and I had to scrap the slide on security because the time has simply run out. My slides can be viewed here (note that FullerScreen extension messes the slides up badly, as we discovered just before the presentation).
Making modal dialogs work on Mac OS X · 2008-09-15 22:49 by Wladimir Palant
If you ever tried TomTom HOME, you probably noticed that its user interface is “unusual”. It tries to mimic the user interface of a navigation device meaning among others that all messages (“dialogs”) replace the entire window content and require you to dismiss them before you can continue doing whatever you have been doing. There are some advantages to that kind of user interface but it was also a constant source of irritation among our testers (and, no doubt, users). In particular, you could still use the menu despite the dialog, with strange results.