Taras’ Blog

As the outside temperature reached -10C, the DIY heating system at hackerspace.be proved insufficient. On Wednesday the Perf/Snappy workweek was relocated to BetaGroup Coworking Brussels. We’ll be here until FOSDEM. Betagroup Coworking Brussels is an industrial-strength coworking space with lots of desk space, internet, kitchen, ping-pong and a bunch of heavy metal…

DXR is now uber-fast. See bottom of search pages for timing info. Give it a try. We have a few more bugs to fix before we jump into fixing the UI.

We just started our Perf/Snappy workweek in Brussels, Belgium. hackerspace.be let us use their space. If you are also performance hacker in the area, why not drop in for some beers? See Dietrich’s post for more details.

One of the challenges of a growing organization is that people become managers and have less time for coding. A scary proportion of module owners are managers now. We were discussing this with Dietrich and he came up with a really simple solution: module owner’s entire team should be able to review patches for that [...]

I would like to see Firefox developers switch to 24hour review turn-around times. Note that in my definition review turn-around means any of the following: r+/r- unset/reassign r? to someone else It is ridiculous in our recent faster release cycle if a patch takes half (or more) of the cycle loitering in the review queue. [...]

Mozilla requires a unixy dev environment. Makefiles, hg, patches, ssh, irc, etc. Unfortunately Windows lacks in terminal abilities. No tabs, crappy cut/paste, limited size, slow, etc. Emacs has a wonderful shell-mode(ie my bottom-left buffer). This means that windows can now do proper command history, cut/paste & use multiple emacs buffers(like tabs in a more sane [...]

The JavaScript error console is a relic from the Mozilla stone age. There are two problems with it: It lives in a separate window It is not helpful I’ve been drooling over the new Firefox Web Console, but unfortunately it doesn’t have chrome privs [yet?] so it isn’t a replacement for the error console since [...]

Linux Plumbers A few of us attend LinuxPlumbers last month, I gave talk. Basic summary: kernel + toolchain could add a few straight-forward features to make Firefox and other apps start faster and use less memory. Performance Team I am no longer alone on my quest of performance whack-a-mole. Since spring I’ve been growing a [...]

Firefox 7 marks a turning point in how we measure Firefox performance. Traditionally we measured Firefox performance on individual developer machines and our build & release infrastructure. However it turns out synthetic benchmarks do not correspond to real-world Firefox usage: it is difficult to model a “typical” computer in a lab environment. Surprisingly slow consumer [...]

I like having guests who bike. So when Brian came over I decided this would be a great opportunity to explore going to the coast and back by bike (velodirt style). The following is a map of our trip (190miles, 2 nights). The gravel roads were somewhat challenging. It was hard to climb in the [...]