Peter Evanoff’s Weblog

We Peters have achieved our initial Proof of Concept goals…Running Firefox from a USB key while reading and writing to the Profile which is also located on the USB key. We have combined a Windows batch file with Firefoxe’s built in command line switches to allow Firefox to run as a stand alone application from the stick. The initial challenge Chris Tyler made us aware of was to “capture” the batch file’s location so that one could execute the batch file from anywhere on the system, not just from the USB keys directory. We managed to come up with a bit of code using the FOR batch file command that cycles through all the files in a directory….this allows us to run the batch file from anywhere on the system while maintaining a correct “relative” path to find the Profile on the stick…

We have also confirmed that Linux and MAC can process the common Profile on the USB key ( using hard coded paths ) and hope to create a script for both that can manage the “relative” path for these systems.

Our next goal (v 0.2??) is to create the Linux/Mac scripts, and investigate/control Firefox writing data to the hard drive for extensions and such…
Our  project page with a few more details.

Well, i’ve been watching cbrady@mozilla.com for a week, and she is a little more managable, in terms of volume, than dietrich was…51 bug emails…he is involved/interested in the Trademark side of Firefox, and many of the bugs relate to possible trademark violations….such as “www.mozila.com”, which offers free firefox downloads to the “spelling challenged”.

This bug/User-watching features are excellent tools provided by Bugzilla, and allows the developer to keep up with issues he is not only directly involved with, but also those of general interest. A great way to stay in touch without sifting through all the bugs on a daily basis.

We Peters are looking at the project from a “packaging” perspective…Our main files of interest right now are the Linux Firefox startup shell script, and the creation of a  windows batch file to manage the directories required for the profile.  We have set up a common profile directory for Linux and XP, so that each version of Firefox ( Windows, Linux ) reads the same files.  We have had some success to date,  reading the same profile successfully from both Linux and XP.   We have faith that the Linux shell scripting can provide us the functionality to pull this off, and hope that the Windows batch environment provides us with the same capabilities. We plan on having a proof of concept script ready, and will provide an update shortly….

I have to agree with Lukas…

http://crashopensource.blogspot.com/2008/02/eric-raymond-peeved-me-this-morning.html

I think Mr. Raymond missed the mark slightly on this one point….its the “bright” people running the business who decide that support isn’t generating profit, and therefore don’t invest in it

….call Rogers or BELL to order a new service….great, prompt, expert SALES support

…call for technical support (Have a spare battery for your phone ready!) wait 1 hour on hold, then get transferred 5 times back to the original person who handled your call…

The biggest problem I see is that there is NOT any real competition for my dollars…be it the 5 Canadian Banks who let me choose between their same rates and service or the 2 ISP’s who also allow me the privilege of choosing to pay the same amount for the same service…or the Software industry dominated by a few companies…

So I understand now that we would all benefit if the Software Industry WAS a service industry, but I’m not so sure it is correct to say that it IS a service industry…

As part of our course , Chris has us watching a user for one week, and I thought with my infinite wisdom, that I would watch 2 users, and tried to pick active ones…….well, after 3 days, and 300 emails, I have regretfully( !!??) dropped dietrich@mozilla.com….I think I got the point on how busy some users are….is this ONE guy? I was gonna email him to find out, but I thought he had enough on his plate…

On the serious side, this is really a great way to see how things work with Mozilla…

Part B to come….

Sorry for the back to back posts, but I was a little excited… Just a quick update….my vmware appliance “CentOS-5.0-ref-tools-vm” appears to be good to go….successfully built firefox in about an hour while playing on XP…I will time it  after trying to tune my system a tad…CENTOS is currently about 5 GB, which is just fine……..

(Note: PeterC and I both bought the same 8GB memory stick for $37 BY COINCIDENCE, so we thought it would be handy if we could carry around our Linux builds on our sticks)

We had some fun in class using LXR/MXR….it was really great playing snakes and latters and THEN looking at the actual line of source code of a 10,000,000 line project…it was NOT so much fun spending 20 minutes searching and then ending up back where we started( sorta like the Blair Witch Project, if anybody saw it…)  Dave helped us walk us through it  and we found what we were looking for…so far so good…

I have successfully built firefox on my windows laptop…in about an hour…it was(is) an experience…still getting the hang of it…I have vmware installed, with a Ubuntu version which Peter and Peter attempted to build firefox on, but it seems our combined knowledge of Linux is a little lacking. I used VI in semester 2 for our Perl Web project and became very proficient with it, but it seems I have a memory leak(me, not my computer)…so there are some issues to be addressed…The Unix course we took was a good intro (Chris wrote the automated labs for SED and AWK, I believe) but not much in the way of Linux repositories and such…so the fun continues…the goal is to get a VMWARE version of Linux up and running, which can be stored on a memory stick so as to free up space on my rather packed laptop…I am currently trying it with vmware appliance “centOS5″, which Chris originally suggested…I will let you know how it goes…