2007

Tuesday October 16, 2007, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I spent the last week pawning bugs off on other people while I come up to speed with Firefox development. Alex Faaborg wrote a blog entry about Firefox and Miro which piqued our interest. The result of the conversations around that blog entry launched me into Firefox development.

My first impression is that Mozilla has a massive code base. They've got a lot of code for a lot of products and they're managing it with an intricate series of make files and scripts. It has taken a while to come up to speed and I'm still spending time figuring things out. I've written some loose notes about getting started with Firefox development on my other blog. As a side note, it's tough having two blogs.

Today Alex formalized the issues into bug 400059.

I spent Saturday at the Ubuntu Massachusetts Install Fest which went fantastically. I talked to a bunch of people about Miro, Ubuntu and Free Software. Most people I talked to either hadn't heard of Miro at all or had heard of it, but didn't realize we had changed the name. I'm not sure what that means in the grand scheme of things, but everyone was pretty interested in the current state of the project.

This coming Friday is the start of PodCamp Boston 2. Dean, possibly Chris, and I are going to attend some/many/most of the days and talk to people about the Miro ecosystem. Dean's also talked to Chris Brogan about making the sessions available as a feed somewhere so that we can turn it into a channel and put it on the Miro Guide. I'm not a big fan of tech evangelism, but I think telling people about the Miro ecosystem is generally a good thing for everyone involved. It's good for us for the obvious reasons. It's good for content producers because it's important for them to understand the publishing side of the equation and that they don't have to be tied down to a host/publisher. It's important for the rest of the world because the more people realize they have options, the more those options continue to exist and the less likely it is that unpopular voices are muted. That's some serious stuff.

I think I'm going to spend the coming week continuing work on the Firefox patch and poking around with the Firefox code base. I suspect things will slow down a bit as I start asking more questions and waiting for answers. That'll give me time to continue working on the Mediabar.

As a side note, I'm now using Firefox 3.0 dev--it's pretty interesting.

Updates:

10-21-2007: I got this weekend confused with next weekend. Not quite sure how I did that. Next weekend (26th-28th) is PodCamp and FOSSCamp. It was a good thing, too, because I spent this weekend pushing out 0.9.9.9 rc0 and upgrading my laptop to Gutsy.

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