Releasing PW 0.4

Not too much thats exciting in this release but I did just file a bug with the PW 0.31 patch. I'm hoping this will start the ball rolling towards v1.0 and provide me with lots of new ideas and suggestions. Click here if you would like to see the bug and please don't hesitate to leave a comment or two of your own if you have any remarks, suggestions or any criticism at all - all of your feedback is valuable and highly appreciated!

Rebuilding firefox and starting OSD700

So this has been a hectic first week of school but things finally seem to be calming down a little. I thought I would take this time to (a) let you know what I have been up to and (b) describe what I hope to achieve in the next 4 months in OSD700.

So regarding part a - I decided to rebuild minefield last night on my home desktop. I did this partially because I still have not been able to checkout an XPS laptop from ORI but perhaps primarily because I had recently upgraded my computer from 1GB to 3GB of ram and was curious to see how that might affect the build time. As some of you may recall, when I first tried building the source tree on this machine it took no less than 10 hours, so I was rather curious to see how much shorter the process will be with the new hardware. Unfortunately however, I got an error during compilation and therefore I can't report on any improvements for now. I will be trying again shortly though and will post here if you are curious.

And as far as part b goes - I have given it some thought and came up with the following list of things I would like to achieve for my 1.0 release:

• File a bug with my 0.3 patch and get some feedback for the code.
• Work on the code in accordance with the feedback I receive.
  
• Get the code to work on macs.
• Get the JS portion out of the browser and into a proper extension.
• Improve the heuristics of the front end extension.

I have also thought of some other things that I could do - outlined below - but whether these goals can actually fit into the schedule remains to be seen (I assume this would largely be dictated by what sort of feedback I receive for the code on Bugzilla):

• Provide more information about the plugin that is causing the issue.
• Provide a way to disable the plugin.
• Add code to the front end JS that will collect and display statistical information about plugin runtime.
• Do plugin benchmarking and publish the results.

As always your comments are welcome!