Monday, January 14, 2008

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!

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