One of the important communication mechanisms in the Mozilla project is IRC. IRC is a great tool for instant communication among large groups of diverse people. However, it’s easy to mis-use IRC, so I’d like to propose some etiquette rules:

Think/search before your ask

Google can answer a fair number of questions. Keep the signal/noise ratio high on IRC by checking FAQs and google before asking questions.

Ask questions in the right channel

Some channels welcome newbies: #xulrunner and #extdev specifically welcome new XULRunner application authors and extension developers. Some channels (#developers) are used for serious/deep project communication, and don’t really welcome novices. If you’re not sure, feel free to silently watch the channel for a few minutes. If you don’t know which channel is right, feel free to ask “is this the right channel to ask questions about X”. The channel residents will let you know!

IRC is not good for some questions

Complicated questions are difficult to answer on IRC: “When I configure with –enable-XX while cross-compiling from YY, I have problem ZZ.” To answer this question you need to sort through all sorts of issues such as why you’re using –enable-XX, what the actual error message is, and details about the cross-compile setup. You’d be much better off posting this question to the appropriate newsgroup (mozilla.dev.builds in this case).

If I say to you “please post details about this question to the newsgroup”, it’s not because I don’t like you or don’t want to help you… it’s because IRC isn’t a good medium for answering your particular question.

IRC doesn’t take up my whole attention

Most of the people on IRC are also doing work (coding, reviewing, writing, whatever). If somebody doesn’t have time to talk to you right now, feel free to wait for somebody else to come along, or send email/post to the newsgroups. Demanding somebody’s attention on IRC is very rude. If you really need their attention, send email.

Don’t send uninvited private messages

Asking questions in the appropriate channel is nice behavior. Other people in the channel can look at the conversation and even provide help. By sending me a private message, you are demanding my attention (see above), and drastically limiting the number of people who can help you. Unless you know me really well, don’t send me private messages.

IRC is not email

If I don’t respond to you right away, don’t assume that I’ve seen your message. If I don’t respond to your message and you need to get in touch with me, please send me email. Please don’t ping every four hours until I respond to you.

In it’s basic form, JSON cannot serialize cyclic graphs of objects, or graphs where multiple paths can lead to the same object. In a project I’m working on, I wanted to move such a graph of highly-interconnected objects from JS to python. So I have invented a format built on top of JSON that can be used to serialize/deserialize such graphs.

Basically, the JSON comes across as a large list:

[
  /* list[0] is the base object at the root of the eventual object graph. */
  {
    /* string, number, true/false, and null properties are serialized directly */
    "stringprop": "stringvalue",
    "numprop": 3.1415,
    /* but lists and objects are not serialized directly. Instead, they are represented by an index
       into the base list. "sharp" is a nod to JS sharp variables, from which this was originally inspired */
    "complexprop": {"sharp": 1}
  },
  /* list[1] is referenced from list[0].complexprop. It also references itself, see below */
  [
    "simplestring",
    3,
    {"sharp": 1}
  ]
]

You can find JS for serializing these types of graphs here, and python for deserializing them here.

It turns out that I probably don’t actually need this code: I’ve found a simpler solution for my particular problem, but I wanted to share this solution in case other people might find it useful.

I was intrigued to read about a new search engine, cuil.com, which is being launched by former Google employees. So I tried it out by searching for XULRunner. The top hits were:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner
• http://wiki.mozilla.org/XULRunner:Roadmap
• http://blogs.acceleration.net/ryan/archive/2005/05/06/1073.aspx
• http://chatzilla.rdmsoft.com/xulrunner/
• http://wiki.mozilla.org/XUL:Xul_Runner
• http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/02/flickr-uploadr-open-source-xulrunner.html
• http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2007-05-15/xulrunner-what-we-are-doing/
• http://www.songbirdnest.com/node/1771

There were also suggested “categories”:

Mozilla

Mozilla Foundation, SpiderMonkey, MozillaZine, Mitchell Baker, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Public License, Bugzilla

Mozilla Developers

Asa Dotzler, Mitchell Baker, Daniel Glazman, Window Snyder, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, Ben Goodger, Tristan Nitot

Mozilla Extensions

ChatZilla, Adblock, Greasemonkey, CustomizeGoogle, DOM Inspector, Venkman, Flashblock, ColorZilla

Netscape

Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Netscape Browser, The Book of Mozilla, Daniel Glazman, Ben Goodger, Netscape Communicator, Tristan Nitot

W3C Standards

MathML, Resource Description Framework, XSL Transformations, Document Object Model, Cascading Style Sheets, Scalable Vector Graphics, XHTML, … (hidden)

I’m a bit disturbed by the pattern here: a search for XULRunner turns up interesting results, but the primary page on XULRunner (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner) is not present. Suggested terms for Mozilla has interesting results, but the most important (Firefox) is not present. The suggested categories are interesting, but the sub-results aren’t relevant to the specific topic I searched for: what I really want is “Mozilla Developers who do XULRunner”.

Is cuil.com built on a strategy of “list all the search results except for the one I really wanted”?

Oh, and a search for “tamarin javascript” turns up 0 results… something must be fishy with their search index.

I’m going to be at OSCON next week. Taras and I will be hosting a BoF session on using automatic analysis and rewriting tools for open-source projects on Wednesday evening. You’re welcome to come and learn about our tools, watch demos, or just just heckle and meet!

I’ve been to OSCON once before. I got a chance to meet people in person I only knew via email, and also meet some new people who had read my blog or otherwise knew of me. It was a blast. I hope to meet even more people this time around. Many of the official sessions don’t look that exciting to me, so I might spend a decent amount of time at OSCamp or just talking to interesting people. If you’d like to meet me and can’t make the BoF session, you can probably catch me at the Mozilla booth.

I’ll be staying the following weekend in Portland, so if you have recommendations of restaurants or sights that I shouldn’t miss while I’m there, comments welcome.

I am a relative newcomer to python, and have been blown away by the flexibility of some operations in Python. The string-formatting operator, %, is really wonderful and flexible. This is my attempt at implementing something similar in JavaScript.

Obviously, you can’t create a new operator in JavaScript, and in addition you can’t use % as a JavaScript identifier. So I went for the next-best thing:

String.prototype.format = function string_format(d) {
  // there are two modes of operation... unnamed indices are read in order;
  // named indices using %(name)s. The two styles cannot be mixed.
  // Unnamed indices can be passed as either a single argument to this function,
  // multiple arguments to this function, or as a single array argument
  let curindex = 0;

  if (arguments.length > 1)
    d = arguments;
  
  function r(s, key, type) {
    let v;
    if (key == "") {
      if (curindex == -1)
        throw Error("Cannot mix named and positional indices in string formatting.");

      if (curindex == 0 && (!(d instanceof Object) || !(0 in d)))
        v = d;
      else if (!(curindex in d))
        throw Error("Insufficient number of items in format, requesting item %i".format(curindex));
      else
        v = d[curindex];

      ++curindex;
    }
    else {
      key = key.slice(1, -1);
      if (curindex > 0)
        throw Error("Cannot mix named and positional indices in string formatting.");
      curindex = -1;
      
      if (!(key in d))
        throw Error("Key '%s' not present during string substitution.".format(key));
      v = d[key];
    }
    switch (type) {
    case "s":
      return v.toString();
    case "r":
      return v.toSource();
    case "i":
      return parseInt(v);
    case "f":
      return Number(v);
    case "%":
      return "%";
    default:
      throw Error("Unexpected format character '%s'.".format(type));
    }
  }
  return this.replace(/%(\([^)]+\))?(.)/g, r);
};
String.prototype.ø = String.prototype.format;

If you are at all familiar with the python string-formatting operator, this should be very similar:

"%s %s".ø("angry", "monkeys"); == "angry monkeys";
"%(key)s: %(value)s".ø({key: 'bananas', value: 'tasty'}) == "bananas: tasty";
"%i - %i".ø([1, 3]) == "1 - 3";
"%r".ø(['α', 'ω'] == '["α", "ω"]';

I know that there are many sprintf-like libraries out there for JavaScript: I just happen to like mine best. Caution: this code requires JavaScript 1.7… if you replace some “let”s with “var”s it may work in older browsers, but I haven’t tested it.

Being able to pass a function as a replacement in String.replace is a very powerful feature!

Today I set up a buildbot/tinderbox for the mozilla-central codebase built with static checking. This allows us to enforce annotations such as NS_FINAL_CLASS and NS_STACK_CLASS throughout our codebase. See the static-analysis-bsmedberg tree on the mozilla-central tinderbox.

Stack-only Classes

As an example, I today annotated nsAutoString as a stack class. If someone commits code which allocates an nsAutoString on the heap, the static-checking tinderbox will turn red.

I have a set of similar patches in the works which mark various helper classes as stack-only. These patches are needed because the XPCOMGC rewrites treat stack-only classes differently from regular heap-allocated types.

Help Wanted

A while back Dave Mandelin wrote an analysis of outparam usage. This is now running and producing warnings. I would like to find some help to go through the fairly large number of warnings this analysis produces and find the real bugs and fix the bogus warnings in the analysis.

The most important warning to check is

warning: outparam not written on NS_SUCCEEDED

This indicates a condition where the analyzer can’t prove that an outparam was written, but the method returned NS_SUCCEEDED anyway. This can lead to uninitialized memory errors and odd latent bugs. If you’d like to help, please hop over to the #mmgc IRC channel, and dmandelin or I can help walk you through the analysis/fixing process.

Local Machine

Because the dehydra/treehydra codebase is still in flux prior to the 1.0 release, I am currently maintaining this on one of my local machines, so if it goes down please don’t pester Mozilla’s IT or release teams. Once dehydra 1.0 is released, we will get turn on static checking on the main unit-test tinderboxes maintained by the Mozilla release team.

More in the occasional series of tricks you can do with the Mozilla build system.

Making Preprocessed Sources

If you have a compile error and you can’t figure out what macros are being expanded, you can make a preprocessed version of any C/C++ file:

$ cd $OBJDIR/some/directory
$ make nsMyFilename.i

Using Doxygen to Generate Documentation

You can use the documentation-generation tool Doxygen to automatically generate interface/class/method documentation from the Mozilla sources.

$ cd $OBJDIR
$ make documentation

Warning: doxygen isn’t especially precise. Your mileage may vary.

Displaying a Build Variable

Sometimes when hacking a Makefile it may not be obvious what the final value of a variable is. You can check this by using the echo-variable-% rule:

$ cd $OBJDIR/some/directory
$ make echo-variable-EXTRA_DSO_LDOPTS

Recently we opened up mozilla-central for checkins for Mozilla 1.9.1/Firefox.Next. As people on IRC have started using the repository, one of the major complaints has been that cloning the entire repository for the first time can take a very long time over a slow network… and for flaky networks, it may be impossible to clone at all.

There is a solution: instead of cloning directly from hg.mozilla.org (hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/), download a changeset bundle and unbundle it to create a local repository.

1. Download a mozilla-central bundle. For the moment, I’m hosting one here. I’m going to ask the mozilla release team to produce one nightly and host it on the mozilla FTP server. The bundle file is approximately 65MB.
2. Create a new, empty repository:

   $ hg init mozilla-central

3. Un-bundle the real mozilla-central changes to that repository:

   $ cd mozilla-central;
   $ hg unbundle /path/to/mozilla-central.bundle

4. Tell mercurial where you normally want to pull from by copying the following content into your mozilla-central/.hg/hgrc file:

   [paths]
   default = http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

5. Pull any additional changes that happened since the bundle was created:

   $ hg pull

6. Update your working directory to the latest change:

   $ hg up

   Happy hacking!

A helpful soul contacted me on IRC today: it turns out that the google cache for my homepage shows linkspam.

There is no linkspam just viewing the page. There is also no linkspam if I wget the page using the googlebot useragent.

But I’m not the only one affected by this linkspam. Very similar linkspam shows up on simplepie.org and svg-whiz.com.

The common denominator seems to be that we all use DreamHost for web hosting. I submitted a ticket with DreamHost yesterday: their support staff responded that this must not be a DreamHost issue, and it must be a problem with Google. I am extremely disappointed with DreamHost right now.

Has anyone heard of similar linkspam that only shows up for the Google webcrawler, but not for normal visitors? What other ways could it detect the googlebot, other than via useragent?

In Thunderbird, I frequently want to see a list of messages I’ve sent or received from a particular person. For people I talk with regularly, I can do this with a manually set-up smart folder:

• Match any of the following
  • From contains user@tld.org
  • To or cc contains user@tld.org

But really, I don’t want to set these up manually. I just want an easy context menu item to see all the messages from/to a particular person. I searched addons.mozilla.org but couldn’t find what I wanted.

Also, why can’t smart folders/saves searches in Thunderbird show a threaded view?