Silverlight?

On my OS X box? How the fuck did that get there? I sure don’t remember installing it. Grrrr!

A little web searching later, and I found my answer. It’s silently installed with Flip4Mac (a set of Quicktime components to allow playing Microsoft proprietary media formats on OS X), which I had installed a week or two ago to try something, and then promptly forgot about. The installer doesn’t have a word to say about it, unless you click a little “Customize” button on the 5th screen on the install:

That really annoys me. Silent, sneaky software installs are evil, evil, evil.

At least Flip4Mac includes an uninstaller, so I ran that. It’s actually a package, so you’re confusingly prompted to “Select the disk where you want to install the uninstaller software.”, but it was otherwise painless. Now to just restart my browser, check about:plugins, and…

GAHHHH! It’s still there. Their uninstaller uninstalls the Flip4Mac bits, but not the Silverlight plug. Solution:

rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin/

It’s finally dead, Jim.

The old progress bar behavior had always seemed a bit odd to me — it would do nothing for a bit, move to about 15% point, and then suddenly finish. I didn’t get around to looking at why it did that until I used the updater on a Windows CE netbook. The device is a lot slower than a normal system, so the unusual progress bar movement could appear frozen for over a minute! That’s really poor UI feedback, so I set about fixing it.

You can read the gory details in bug 517102, but the end result is that the progress bar now tracks progress more accurately, and the updater runs 3 times faster too!

This was probably announced somewhere, but 3 other developers also didn’t know this was the case. So, I figured a blog post was in order.

Tinderboxpushlog already includes both sets of data, and I’ve just updated isTheTreeGreen.com to use both sets as well.

Result: Theory Busted.

Without disk compression, a full build took 23 minutes. With disk compression, 24 minutes. [Drive formatted between tests.] I’d guess some combination of not being IO bound plus disk seeks dominate, so compression doesn’t really help and just adds overhead. I also tried disabling “write-cache buffer flushing” to no effect, although I’m curious if splitting my build across two drives will help at all [src on one, objdir on the other; currently it's in a RAID-0 config].

One thing that would be nice is if parallel make worked correctly with Mozilla on Windows. If I build with anything higher than MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=”-j1″, the build hangs at random (?) places. Seeing as this is a quad-core box (8-core, if you count HT), that makes me all sad and frowny.

Update: Mitch on IRC pointed out bsmedberg’s pymake work. With -j1 it’s about 30 seconds slower, but with -j10 it did a full build in 11 minutes (without hanging like a gmake build did!). Yay! I should also note that until now I’ve been doing Windows builds in a VM, which can take well over an hour to finish.

A couple weeks ago, someone on IRC pointed out that jorendorff had created a simplified set of instructions: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_build I think this is great!

There are still multiple steps (especially if you’re on Windows), but it’s a lot more streamlined than other documentation and is geared towards doing cut’n'paste. In a nutshell, it’s a lot less intimidating.

Everybody say “awwwwww!”

I finally found a use for my N800 (which has been been sitting unused for some time). It’s now perched on my desk, under my monitor, giving me instant, up-to-the-minute status of the tree… Yep, that’s Fennec and http://isthetreegreen.com.

Sadly, the main observation from this is that the tree is almost never green these days. :-(

This weekend I decided to make a bacon persona. It was really easy to do; I just made a couple of JPEGs and submitted them to the getpersonas.com site. Result:

If you want to try it out, just:

1. Install Personas from getpersonas.com.
2. Select “Bacon” from the Personas directory. It’s under the “Other” category. (At the moment, it’s also at the top of the “Recent” subsection.

Mmm, bacon.

Which brings us to the question frequently asked by Mozilla developers. Is the tree green? Ta-da:

Some random factoids about isthetreegreen.com…

• It’s using a cross-site XMLHttpRequest to fetch the tree status from Tinderbox. This is a neat way to generate the answer in the browser (instead of scraping the status from a cron script on my webserver), but it means you’ll need a recent browser (like Firefox 3.1!) which supports this.
• It’s surprisingly snappy. The HTML is about 7K, and the XHR status is about 2K. Compare that to the normal Tinderbox page, which weighs in around 220K.
• The page polls the Tinderbox status every 2 minutes and updates the displayed status. The first time the state transitions from not-green to green, it will trigger an alert(). I think this will be rather useful if you’re waiting for the tree to turn green before checking in a patch.
• It doesn’t check if the tree is open or closed. (Yet?)

Thanks to Jesse for the original idea, and to Reed for helping to get the Tinderbox server configured to allow XS-XHR.