...thoughts on people and software
The latest privacy and security improvements in Firefox [This post originally appeared on Medium ] Firefox is the only browser that answers only to you , our users; so all of us who work on Firefox spend a lot of effort making your browsing experience more private and secure. We update Firefox every 6 weeks, and every new change ships to you as fast as we can make and verify it. For a few releases…
A few days ago I sent the following note to the Firefox devtools mailing list . The point was to start a discussion about where we want to take Valence (née Firefox Developer Tools Adapter) in 2015. I am reproducing the message below in an effort to broaden the audience, but I would encourage anyone who wants to participate in the discussion to post to the mailing list. However, if that sounds too…
A couple of days ago I started my 4th year at Mozilla and as with all anniversaries, it was a good opportunity to step back and reflect on my accomplishments during this past year and where I'm going next. And since Mozilla practices complete transparency, it also seemed like a good opportunity to sit down and write a blog post, as I never seem to get enough time nowadays to do so. Besides, what's…
There have been a lot of interesting developments in the JavaScript debugging front since my last update , so let me give you a brief overview of the most important changes. Let's begin with the eagerly awaited Firefox OS. Starting the debugger in Firefox OS has gotten way easier. There is a toggle in the settings app that will set or reset the devtools.debugger.remote-enabled pref, so that you…
A few months ago, long before the Firefox debugger had shipped, I had tried to see what it would take to get it to debug B2G, or as we call it now, Firefox OS . The hack proved successful and with time it grew into an important debugging target for us. I demoed it at JSConf last April, but at that time a lot of the debugger frontend functionality had not been available in nightlies. As of…
Last week we had a Firefox Developer Tools team get-together at the Mozilla London office. These meetups are an extremely valuable tool for the project to tackle hard problems, because when you put all of the experts on a particular hard problem in the same room, hard problems tend to run away screaming. We managed to attack a lot of hard problems this week: a profiler, source maps, the developer…
This week I had the opportunity to attend JSConf . I've been trying to make it to one of these conferences in the past without success and I now realize I was missing a lot! Chris and Laura Williams deserve special credit for the excellent job they are doing here. Even though I missed all the parties (because jetlag), the venue, the speakers, the tracks, and the conversations were all top class.…
Last week I posted an update on the progress we are making towards a functional JavaScript debugger in Firefox. We still have a ways to go before we get there, but the foundation this is based on, namely the Remote Debugging Protocol , provides a solid basis for debugging mobile browsers, and as it turns out, even mobile operating systems. Supporting these use cases is still farther down our list,…
tl;dr: Firefox nightlies now ship with an experimental JavaScript debugger. It's not ready for end-users yet, but we are feverishly working on filling in the missing bits. Debugging is always hard, especially when debugging other people's code. Adding a bunch of console.log() statements, becomes tedious after a while and that's assuming that you are familiar enough with the code in question to…
Six months ago I left my previous job, in order to join a product company and experience new things. The move was rewarding in many ways, but most importantly, because of the people I've met. We've accomplished a lot together and laid out the foundations for much more. As I've established before, this is not the right time to be moving on, but while in theory, theory and practice are the same, in…
About 10 years ago, I was invited to become employee No1 of a new software startup . I didn’t know much about startups back then, besides that they were supposedly cool, and employees weren’t treated like small cogs in a giant machine. Indeed, it felt really fun to build our first product in my 5 year-old laptop, running FreeBSD, of all things. That, and getting praised by our users, too. Things…
It has been a while since my last post on GSS / Pithos , and there have been quite a few important announcements that I have not blogged about, only tweeted: a shiny native iPhone client a brand new Android client a back-office application for statistics and admin tasks public folders for hosting static web sites a slew of performance, usability and bug fixes for the web & desktop clients new user…
This was originally posted in the mynetworkfolders.com blog . We live in a browser these days. E-mail , word-processing , spreadsheets , chat , are all occupying a browser window in front of me. Maybe not for everyone yet, but the trend is clear, and has been clear for quite some time now. This is a good thing. The Web of today bears little similarity to the Web of the millennium. It's fast, it's…
I had an exhausting but fun weekend at the Athens Startup Weekend a few days ago. Along with Christos I joined Yannis, Panagiotis Christakos and Babis Makrinikolas on the Newspeek project. When Yannis pitched the idea on Friday night, the main concept was to create a mobile phone application that would provide a better way to view news on the go. I don't believe it was very clear in his mind then,…
I just heard of Atwood's Law a few days ago. Apparently Jeff Atwood first published his discovery a couple of years ago, which is like a century in Internet time, but I can't keep up with everything. The Law states that "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript". As Atwood explains, it is based on Tim Berners-Lee's Principle Of Least Power :…
As I've described before , the GSS API is a REST-like interface for interacting with a GSS-based service, like Pithos . Using regular HTTP commands a client can upload, download, browse and modify files and folders stored in the GSS server. These interactions have two important properties: they store no client state to the server and they are not encrypted. I have already mentioned the most…
The method I described in my previous post about retrying transactions could use some improvement. A deficiency that will only become relevant in highly congested servers is the constant retry interval. When two or more transactions try to commit at the same time and fail, with the code from the last post they will retry probably simultaneously again. Random runtime events (like process/thread…
When building a web-based system, the most often encountered persistence solution is the use of a relational DBMS. This provides many benefits, but probably the most important one is that its behavior and usage are widely understood after so many decades of use. The simplicity of the ACID transactional model, coupled with the nice fit of the HTTP request/response protocol, make for a killer…
A few weeks ago I set out to upgrade Ubuntu on my EEE PC 901 from Intrepid to Jaunty. It was an, um, interesting experience, so I'm jotting down these notes for next time. Upgrading from Update Manager was not an option, because my root partition was not big enough to host the upgrade. The 901 has a 4GB SSD that I'm using as root and an 8GB (or 12GB) SSD that I've put /home on. It turns out that…
Application Programming Interface or API design is one of my favorite topics in programming, probably because it is both a science and an art. It is a science because there are widely accepted principles about how to design an API, but at the same time applying these principles within the constraints of a given programming language, requires the finesse of an experienced practicioner. Therefore it…
There are many ways to configure a JavaEE application. Among the available solutions are DBMS tables, JNDI, JMX MBeans and even plain old files in a variety of formats. While we have used most of the above in various occasions, I find that plain files resonate with all types of sysadmins, when no other administrative interface is available. For such scenarios, Apache Commons Configuration is…
Handling a large number of concurrent connections requires many servers. Not only because scaling vertically (throwing bigger hardware at the problem) is very costly, but also because even if an application can be designed to scale vertically, the underlying stack probably can not. Java applications for instance, like GSS , run on the JVM and although the latter is an excellent piece of…
During my recent work-induced blog hiatus, I've been working on a new software system, called GSS. I've been more than enjoying the ride so far and since we have released the code as open-source, I thought discussing some of the experience I've gained might be interesting to others as well. GSS is a network, er grid, er I mean cloud service, for providing access to a file system on a remote…
It's been a while since my last post, but I've been wanting to write about the interesting stuff that I've been working on. Unfortunately it took longer than anticipated, but now we're almost done and I'll be posting soon with the gory details. However, since I got tagged , I suppose I can throw in a not-so-interesting post, about my Linux application preferences. Which desktop manager do you use…
I've been in a hiatus from blogging lately, mainly because free time has been in short supply. It's not just the very busy days at work, nights have been even busier. Instead of churning out long blog posts, I've been banging on code instead, day and night. Unfortunately I only get paid for the code I write during the day, but surprisingly (or not) I enjoy the code I write at night the most. I…