Use Tables!

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!

For those who didn’t know, I picked up a brand new shiny black Apple Macbook last thursday. I bought a black one because it meant I could get it three weeks earlier (that is, I would have had to wait 3 weeks to get a white one for an actually lower price). (more…)

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.

So, first stop: I finally got and pointed the domain name www.gijsk.com to this site. Wordpress has been updated to that effect, or so I think, and hopefully all you people’s DNS servers will be, too, within a few hours/days.

Seconds stop: I’ve published a convenience page with my patches and some handy-dandy xpi files. You might find it interesting, or so I hope :-).

Now I’m off to go packing and do some last-minute shopping for my holiday. I just checked in (and picked perfect seats) from my desk chair - SAS are great so far!

Yesterday someone rang my doorbell, asked if I wanted to buy dvd’s from him, and upon my negative answer forced the door open wider (I’d only put it ajar) and pointed a knife at me. Me being unarmed and not much of a fighter, I didn’t do much but trying to stay calm, and he eventually left with my digital camera, an mp3 player and 40 euro in cash (but not my wallet (bank cards, creditcard…) or my laptop (which had been hiding under an empty shopping bag, by pure chance)).

Obviously I called the cops later on, and spent much of yesterday recounting the story to various people, roughly half of them police officers. I didn’t sleep much tonight, and I’m taking a break for two days to calm down and such… James Ross found a small Venkman bug that I want to squash on sunday if I feel more normal psychologically. In the meantime I’m at my parents. Mail will reach me.

Task List

And I’m happy. But it doesn’t end here, I still want to fix 2 more things on that list, and obviously I need to get all those patches reviewed and checked in. After which, right now, things look as if I’ll end up with 2/3 of my original list finished (the security issues popped up during the whole thing, and in the end turned out to be out of my league for the most part), and 3/4 of it resolved (1 worksforme, 1 wontfix). Additionally, it’s the top 15 items, so that hopefully means I’ll have stuck to my priorities pretty well.
I hope people feel that’s enough (for now), and we’ll see how things work out, won’t we?

On a separate note, I’ll be going on a holiday to Sweden the early morning of August 22 (yes, that’s the day after the deadline). Speaking of deadline, I have a little counter on my home pc that I’ll try to hack into this wordpress thing. By the time you read this is it should hopefully be there.

I’m back from my away time. I still have to get into a good daily rhythm after so much time in what’s really a different world, I suppose, but I’ll be alright within the coming week. I’ve caught up with email and such, just need to start being productive again.

As of tomorrow morning 4am I’m on holiday, vacation or sabbatical if you prefer that word. I’ll be off to France and will be without internet access in the coming week. I will return on July 16, and you can expect me to start replying to email (and generally being alive in the ‘net sense of things) again on July 17. If you need me for Summer of Code or Mozilla stuff, you can send me email and I’ll get back to you ASAP on July 16 or 17.

bug 341764 is now fixed on both trunk and the 1.8 branch, meaning you can now debug from the slow script warning dialog if you have a debugger like Firebug or Venkman open. Woo!

On the title: The Dialog of death just sounds so much better than the “Slow Script warning”. Regardless, if a developer encounters a dialog like it unexpectedly, it generally means they screwed up. Unfortunately, right now they can’t in any way check why that happened. If they stop the script, then that’s just that and they have no way of going back into the slow state. If they choose to continue running the script they won’t get anywhere either because usually in cases like that all other UI is hung.

Solution? Add a debug script button to the dialog if and only if there’s an active debugger open. The debugger can be Firebug or Venkman, but it should work just as well if an external debugger is in use (like the ATF one that you get when developing XUL stuff in Eclipse). There’s a patch for branch and for trunk on bug 341764, but I would definitely prefer if this solution only ended up on branch (permanently), given that creating an optional dependency in DOM on JSD seems not that right (in this case optional means that DOM will still build fine without JSD (–disable-jsd) and will just use it if it can).

So now the waiting is for the review people to notice my requests and hopefully have time soon.

technorati tags:javascript, soc, mozilla, slow-script-dialog, google, jsd, venkman, firebug, webdevelopment