rstrong's blog
in search of ponies
my evil eye
May 11th, 2011 by rstrong
I got a chalazion about a month and a half ago which has repeatedly gotten better and then worse. They look fairly innocuous but they can leak infection into the eye and in my case it feels like acid. I have an appointment to get it fixed tomorrow during which I get to wear one [...]
Ownership
April 29th, 2011 by rstrong
For around 6 years back in the late 80′s through the early 90′s I managed (my first stint as a manager) a telecom and datacom department for a site with 10 buildings and at its maximum 1500 employees. One of my pet peeves was not having a UPS for the telecom system since if there [...]
Application Update File Fragmentation (update)
April 20th, 2011 by rstrong
Back on December 4th, 2010 I blogged about Application Update file fragmentation and the new lack thereof and wanted to write a quick update after checking both my Mac and Windows systems. On my Mac, using hfsdebug (download is no longer available), there were 199 files fragmented ranging from 5 fragments to 874 fragments with [...]
Why data is good and how it helped me deal with Firefox Frankenbuilds
April 14th, 2011 by rstrong
The updater has always had a problem on Windows (likely other platforms as well) where an update doesn’t update all of the files. The latest occurrence of this is on the Firefox 3.6 branch in Bug 639542 – Crash [@ js_DeepBail(JSContext*) ] at address 0×204 due to frankenbuild. Anurag Phadke was able to get data [...]
regarding new nightly name…
April 14th, 2011 by rstrong
I’ve always been kinda partial to “meanwhile,_little_orphan_annie_is_sitting_in_a_hole_by_the_roadside”
Firefox auto-pinned to the Win7 task bar
February 9th, 2011 by rstrong
Short version: Firefox will pin itself to the Win7 task bar when setting Firefox as the default browser. A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Firefox pinned taskbar shortcuts on Win7 and this week I landed Bug 621873 [Firefox] – “Pin to taskbar when setting as default browser on Windows 7″ for Firefox (Thunderbird, [...]
Firefox pinned taskbar shortcuts on Win7
January 21st, 2011 by rstrong
There is no official way to pin shortcuts programmatically to the Win7 taskbar and I completely understand why this ability wasn’t added. The issue I have with this is prior to Win7 Windows added the default browser to the start menu and with Win7 the only browser that is displayed in a prominent place by [...]
Windows safe mode and shortcut changes for Firefox 4.0 Beta 10
January 21st, 2011 by rstrong
As of Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 you can hold down the shift key while launching Firefox on Windows to start in safe mode. Also, the Windows shortcut to launch Firefox in safe mode and the start menu directory have been removed. For those wondering why these changes have been made, Alex Faaborg provides several good [...]
App Update / Win Installer status – 2010-12-17
December 17th, 2010 by rstrong
Mainly worked on backporting / landing mozilla-1.9.2 fixes and tests over the last couple of weeks. The combined size of all the 1.9.2 patches I landed on Tuesday were 433 KB and I still have 146 KB of patches for 1.9.2 waiting on review. Progress: Landed on mozilla-1.9.2 for Firefox 3.6.14 – Bug 601518 [Toolkit] [...]
Application Update file fragmentation and the new lack thereof
December 4th, 2010 by rstrong
Most of this last week I worked on backporting app update tests to 1.9.2 but there was one significant landing (Bug 570058). When updating with a partial update the files created when patching will be allocated before they are written to prevent fragmentation. This is done using platform specific API’s so the files have minimal [...]