Have you ever crashed Firefox? We’re trying to make that as rare as possible, and we have a new tool under development to make that possible. Google and Mozilla are working in cooperation to replace the closed-source Talkback crash reporter with an open-source crash and defect reporting mechanism, called Airbag. Check it out!

I am excited about this project for several reasons:

• Developers and bug reporters can get immediate crash stack information on the client.
• Firefox and other Mozilla-based applications can combine symbol information from multiple sources, including the XULRunner runtime, application binaries, extensions, plugins, and perhaps even some system libraries.
• It will hopefully allow us to collect stack information from some kinds of runtime assertions, not just crashes.

Airbag itself is just a set of libraries that read symbolic debugging information from binaries, collect crash information on the client, and process the crash information on a server. Mozilla will be working on related projects to integrate the client and server libraries into our applications. I am hoping to have airbag included in XULRunner trunk nightlies within 8 weeks, release and collection infrastructure allowing.

Announcing the release of Atom 1.0 for WordPress, version 0.4. This release fixes some bugs in version 0.3 where the main comments feed wasn’t working, and a warning from the feed validator about same-document references.

Note: I am told that this plugin is not compatible with the feedburner plugin. I have never used feedburner, so I don’t know how to fix this. I am happy to accept patches. You can use SVN to check out the development sources anonymously.

After having mucked yesterday with my WordPress to add threading to my Atom feed, I found there’s a better way. I’ve taken James Snell’s Atom 1.0 templates, fixed them up a little bit, and packaged them as a WordPress plugin (instead of uploading them directly into the WordPress install, which makes it hard to upgrade WordPress). Installation instructions. Source code.

Update: James says his templates are public domain, and I am putting my changes and plugin glue into the public domain as well.

Update: go visit the WordPress plugin for Atom 1.0 here; it’s better.

After my rant about web fora, where I mentioned threaded Atom several times, I decided to make this blog produce threaded Atom. I’ve written a little WordPress plugin that will produce a single Atom feed for a blog which contains the entries and their comments, using the proposed Atom threading extension. I’ve put up a page with installation instructions and release notes.

I hate web fora.

I do not think I can adequately express the loathing that I have for web fora as a communication medium. Whenever somebody proposes that I must take part in a discussion on a web forum, I want to pull out the foulest curse words in my vocabulary. Which, thank goodness, look something like this.

For years, I have managed for the most part to avoid using web fora for interactive communication. For example, I have tenuously avoided the MozillaZine forums. But recently, some (well-intentioned) mozillafolk have proposed to move the Mozilla corporation internal discussions from a mailing list to a web forum. I hate the very idea. Perhaps I have been tainted by years of badly-implemented fora, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. I would like to identify, as precisely as possible, what about web fora engenders such vengeful feeling in my soul and what tools would be necessary to change my mind. (more…)

I’ve been having problems playing CDs on Windows: if I have Windows Media Player running and I switch (audio) CDs, WMP never recognizes that the CD has changed. I couldn’t figure out what was going on; I even upgraded WMP to the latest beta (which, it turns out, I intensely dislike), but that didn’t solve the problem. (more…)

I’ve prepared, documented, and released a production release of the Firefox+extension repackager tool I blogged about a while back.

I’ve been busy, but I’ve got some good XULRunner announcements:

• XULRunner 1.8.0.4 Released. Get it while it’s hot, it’s a security/stability update of the developer preview.
• With the XULRunner released, we’ve finally pushed out a Gecko 1.8 release of the Gecko SDK. Thanks for being patient.
• Darin’s machine that was hosting a number of XULRunner examples including MyBrowser and XULMine has died. He sent me the files and I am hosting them on this site for the time being, until the Mozilla Developer Center gets example-hosting capabilities.
• preed has agreed that it would be good to get a release of XULRunner 1.8.1 out, and he’s going to try to arrange for some build-team time to get tinderboxes set up for that. The schedule is going to be “sometime after Firefox 2”, but it will happen. Continued thanks to the build team for their efforts, and welcome TR to the vortex!
• Javier and I have finally fixed a couple bugs that make it possible to do universal builds of XULRunner. I expect that, build-vortex willing, XULRunner 1.8.0.7 will be a universal release, as well as the 1.8.1 release.

I’ve seen articles about the new “Places” feature in MacOS 10.5. I’ve even seen videos. But I still have one question that is make-or-break for me: is this per-window or per-app? Can I put one Firefox window in my “communcation” place and one in my “development” place? If not, this feature is worthless.

Of course, the most annoying thing about MacOS in general is how app-centric it is. I don’t usually care what application a window belongs to: I care what logical task it belongs to. This is one of the reasons I still find the Windows desktop most usable, for all of its flaws.

Update: it’s “Spaces”, not “Places”. Thanks, blogosphere.

Keynote: 5 a Day, and Session: Failing to Succeed

I know that Robert Lefkowitz has a following, but I had never seem him talk before. He is a dynamic speaker, fun to listen to, and obviously knows his stuff. The keynote was an extended metaphor about how open source is like tomatoes. I cannot possibly give it justice in a blog post, so I won’t. The session on failure was also very interesting (and packed); it is important to note that he’s not giving the trite “failure is ok” mantra that I sometimes hear from some speakers. It was a much more nuanced “failure is ok, as long as you identify and acknowledge the failure quickly, and learn from it”. I’ll try to blog more about this later.

Session: Python in Mozilla

Mark Hammond gave a straightforward summary of how Python could be used in Mozilla. There wasn’t really anything I didn’t know: basically the deployment problem is mostly unsolved, but there is at least a plan to have a single, separate Python install for the Mozilla runtime. We’ll have to figure out how to make this work in practice.

Lunch: Mark Hammond and other Python developers

I didn’t realize the extent to which, among some, python is a religion, not just a programming language. I must say I’m not impressed. Mark had a much more pragmatic approach than others at the table. And the animosity towards JavaScript was astounding, considering the extent to which, when coded properly, Python and JavaScript have common design patterns and object orientation.

Session: Building Internet Applications with Mozilla XULRunner

My own talk went well; there was a good and varied crowd, and they asked good questions.

BOF about the Mozilla platform

We had a small group of people interested in Mozilla, conversation wandered from Calendar and email apps to the use of the JavaScript language.