Use Tables!

It’s been way too long since I posted anything here, for which I apologize. There are a couple of things that deserve mention here at the present time.

SightCity

I recently got back from visiting SightCity in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The conference experience was excellent, and I had a great time with Steve, Ben and Marco, all of whom have written more pleasantly and/or extravagantly about our experiences there than I ever could. So this is all you’re getting from me, here.

ChatZilla Releases

ChatZilla 0.9.82 was released, quickly followed by ChatZilla 0.9.82.1 after a couple of nasty regressions. Almost all of the releases’ features and fixes fall squarely into the “polish” bin (eg. dragging tabs for channels named only “#” now works, and doubleclicking a user in the userlist opens a query tab, some minor accessibility and localizability fixes, etc.), except for one: CEIP, short for Customer Experience Improvement Program. Customer not being very apt, I suppose, but it’s a standard name for what is essentially a data collecting tool.

Data collecting?! Yes, data collecting. I wrote a Privacy Policy about what we do. Please read it first, before flaming me/us. Really, read it - it’s quite short! As you will have read by now, I hope, we ask first if it would be OK to collect anonymous statistics. Without consent, ChatZilla doesn’t save anything you do, nor (consequently) does anything get sent. We never collect anything personal, and both in the policy and in the UI, which is accessible from the Help menu in ChatZilla, we indicate a bunch of things we specifically won’t collect. So what can we collect, then, and how is it useful? Well, examples include the length of sessions (do people run ChatZilla for days at a time without interruption, or only five minutes?) and how tabs are handled. We can already, after just a few days, see that many people seem to be closing lots of network tabs, which may lead us to prioritize bug 249188, for instance.

So I hope that this post helps clarify that we’re not turning evil. If you disagree, and had already turned it on, you’re free to turn it off again, at your leasure. Do let us know what you think we’re doing wrong, though.

Venkman trunk issue

If you’re using Venkman with a Gecko trunk product (eg. Firefox 3 RC1, Thunderbird Shredder 3.0a1, …) you may have found that viewing source code stopped working a while ago. This happened because of a change in the way unprivileged content, like the source view itself (which is plain old HTML) is allowed to access chrome content (like the stylesheet for the source view, unfortunately). Fixing it properly is not trivial. Right now, I have suggested a more or less wallpaper fix, because I am too busy to do something nicer, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else is willing to go and fix it instead. This basically allows unprivileged content to access the chrome content again. A better solution would be to channel the stylesheet through the jsd protocol. If anyone wants to step up to the plate and fix that, that’d be awesome. In the meantime, the wallpaper patch is waiting for review. If you’re in need of a working Venkman, I uploaded an XPI to bug 428848.

Misc

I’m nearing the end of my BSc degree. I’m working on my thesis at the moment, and finishing off the two courses that remain. Perhaps I’ll write more about the thesis once I have something I can demo or screenshot in-action. For now, I’d just like to happily announce that I was conditionally accepted into the 1 year MSc Advanced Computing course at Imperial College, London. So, if you know of a good place for a grad student to live in central London (South Kensington), let me know!

ChatZilla 0.9.80 is now available from addons.mozilla.org and the homepage.

Notable new features include:

• Draggable chat tabs.
• Automatically going /away when your OS indicates you’ve been idle. (the timeout for this is configurable, but unfortunately this feature is only available on newer Gecko 1.9 builds, so newer XULRunners or Firefox 3 alpha, beta, or nightly builds)
• Proper handling of WALLOPS and mode prefixed (such as op-only) messages.
• Better userlist implementation (which will no longer lose as much state when you switch tabs back and forth).
• Bugzilla comment linking (in addition to bug linking which we already did).
• Warn before doing a /list.

Notable fixed bugs include:

• Some style parsing bugs.
• A major accessibility issue in the Options/Preferences window.
• Various small polish fixes which were really annoying people.

There is a full list for the curious among you.

Thanks to Silver’s hard work, current ChatZilla trunk now features draggable tabs! Due to a slightly older patch the userlist is now much faster, and there’s some other API backend work going on to make things (even) more stable, fast and usable. Don’t hesitate to grab a nightly build and try things out!  As always, bugzilla is there for your bugfiling needs.

In other news, I will be away until January 2nd, I’m off to Taizé’s European Meeting in Geneva.

List of things on my mind, because I can’t be bothered (and don’t think you guys can) with separate posts for each of them.

• Trying to find time to co-write a paper and to get it accepted for a student conference on AI in Utrecht.
• Trying to find time to modify a paper on Ethics (specifically, Moral Relativism) that I wrote some time ago and submit that to ’something’ Dutch / UvA.
• Doing regular coursework, which involves
  • reading about 200-300 pages every week
  • writing summaries and questions for speakers on the subjects for all of them
  • working on a project with students from Stanford University and a Fortune 500 company in the tech industry. Can’t say much more than that, though for once it doesn’t involve engineering.
  • writing language processing tools in Python.
  • trying to catch up with lost classes from last block about Statistics and Stochastics.
  • writing knowledge processing tools and representations using Prolog and OWL.
• Working on my Mozilla project. I meant to write about this earlier, but the Mozilla Foundation has sponsored me to work on making the ChatZilla IRC client accessible (as is clear from that link, it also needs a better website, we’re working on that on the sidelines). In fact, I have a conference call concerning that starting in 10 minutes, so I’d better finish this up.
• Working on other Mozilla-related issues
• Trying to get some work done on some other Firefox extensions of mine.
• Figuring out what university I’d like to attend for my MSc.
• Visiting junks drug and alcohol addicts. We need to stop calling people garbage - things are garbage (see also the post title) but people never should be. Also, Amsterdam is strange in the sense that I just went to a church service done by the Drug section of the pastoral care (not sure if that’s the right way of putting it in English) and atop of us (ie, in the room above us) some snobby people were having champagne, for the opening of some exhibition or whatever. Stark contrast…

That will do for now. Off to that conference call!

I haven’t really written anything of late, so let’s fix that. Bullet points in topic-centered posts. Here we go:

• I will be attending FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium, arriving friday (february 23rd), leaving sunday (25th). I will be staying at the NH Stephanie.
• Thanks the Mozilla Foundation’s sponsoring, I will also be attending the CSUN Conference, in Los Angeles, CA. I will be staying at one of the conference hotels (room’s booked) from Saturday (march 17th) to Saturday (24th). If you’re in the area and want me to say hi, send mail. (I’ll be arriving late and I’ll probably knackered from flying for 17 hours or so, so don’t count on me being approachable before sunday/monday at least)
• I have finally released some of my extension stuff which in some cases I’ve been sitting on for something like a year now. I thought I’d better start putting some of it online lest I become another Hurd. For now, these are:
  • Chrome List, which allows you to browse chrome:// urls as if they were a normal file tree. This is also up on the Mozilla Addons site.
  • Show Menubar, which adds a contextmenu item for windows without a menubar to show the menubar anyway. This is handy-dandy if you need to change character sets, print, or if it’s the only Firefox window you still have open. I haven’t submitted this one to the Mozilla Addons site yet because I only wrote it the day before yesterday and AMO (as it’s known to the insiders) will be updated soon.
• I should probably put my Graphing Calculator extension online as well, but I think there are alternatives for that by now, and it might not be worth putting there anyway (it can also be slow, and I’ve always been too lazy to create a preference panel for anything I write, meaning it lacks GUI for some of its options).
• I wrote my first XPCOM interface, and wrote Windows and GTK2 implementations for it.
• I wrote a small ChatZilla tutorial on SSH Tunneling. This is the first tutorial I’ve written, and it still needs pretty screenshots. Other than that I’m happy about it.
• There’s some ChatZilla things I desperately need to finish, but have been too busy/lazy to. I will try to get to them this week (but I’m not telling you what I mean by ‘them’, so don’t get too hopeful just yet). There’s also, hopefully, another announcement in that respect due ’soon’, but I’m going to keep my mouth shut on that for now.

I think that’s about it. If anyone/anything feels left out, poke me. I won’t bite.

Apologies for the lack of any real substance. It’ll hopefully get better soon. Or something :-).

Meanwhile, I just noticed I missed the deadline I’d set myself, since we’re stuck at 119 bugs filed for ChatZilla, and I still haven’t finished the damn message filter thing. Well, at least I have a usable build with the filter squirmed into __display, so I guess we’re going places. Hopefully.

Ah, also… if you check out my location, and use the Sattelite view, you’ll notice there’s blank land there. That’s because my home has only been there since July last year (though construction was underway before that, obviously) and the sattelite photos aren’t all that recent, apparently. If you scroll down a tiny bit though, you can spot a Russian sub in the harbour. No idea what it’s doing there, it’s been there since I first came here, and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon.

[29-12-2005 23:12] <Hannibal> before may 1st, land 0.9.68.x stuff so we finally lose the code split, have < 100 bugs and fix the display filter bug.
[29-12-2005 23:12] *Hannibal thinks that should be quite enough to be going on with

Bug 299458 is now fixed. That leaves the < 100 bugs one and the filter bug.

119 Open Bugs

Done!

T minus 3 days (one day in reserve for updates/regressions/checkins)

122 bugs left

5 bugs with patches and review? set.

Alright. T minus 7 days.
I filtered the list to stuff I actually
care about fixing, and think I can get done:

bug 166929 ChatZilla doesn’t have online/offline icon
bug 203264 “Hankaku kana” should be converted to zenkaku
bug 257728 Error: CEvent is not defined on /quit
bug 312931 Logging to the wrong view due to date changes.
bug 109993 Chatzilla scrolls with new input even when in scrollback
bug 293230 Do not copy “important” (stalk) messages to network tab when present and active in channel they occur in
bug 291723 Typing into a network view should say “Please do not type…
bug 278763 ChatZilla’s kick-ban command should put * at the end of a…
bug 317435 ability to drag nick from user list and drop into input area
bug 319628 Talkback-IDs should be clickable
bug 320103 In <prefs.js>, “Warning: reference to undefined property client.host”

Together with the bugs that already have review+ and those that still await review, I’m still giving myself a chance at making it :-). Of course, there is the problem of obtaining review in such a busy time of year, but we’ll see how that goes I suppose…

Edit: 123 bugs left. 4 with review? pending. Wooooooo!