Friday, January 30, 2009

Go ahead browser, make my day...

This command (I use OS X) takes the patches in my mercurial queue (which I tend to name bug-#) and opens a browser tab for each.

hg qseries | sed 's/bug-/https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=/' | xargs open

There's probably 94 better ways to do that but meh, and barely blog worthy perhaps... but this way I'll have a record of the command for when I forget. And smart people can add comments showing me better ways :)

I guess having FF restore my session is a good one.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

7 things

I think Steve Lee was first to tag me with this fun 7 things meme.

My Seven
  1. I lived most of my childhood on a family goat farm in rural Ontario, Canada. I loved fetching buckets of water for the goats and watching them drink deeply. One incredibly clever goat tried to murder me in various ways, but really it was sort of a Pink Panther - Cato relationship. Thankfully "Jody" was lousy at martial arts.
  2. I now live in Toronto, a male in a house dominated by 3 strong women.
  3. I'm a soccer player in the land of hockey.
  4. The first computer I touched was one of the very first IBM PCs which my friends father had brought home from Geac. That night I lay awake thinking of that cool monochrome text glowing on the display. After a few years of selling farm-fresh free range chicken eggs my first computer was a Radio Shack CoCo2, and some 'older kid' I knew from the store gave me his old 6809 assembler programming cartridge. He had started dating. I saved my programs on cassette tape.
  5. Yeah I was on the highschool programming team one year. Being the youngest, when we got our task list our leader gave me an easy one and I wrote out the algorithm on paper for when it came time to type it in (we shared one computer). We ran out of time working on the first task (the hardest). There is a lesson here somewhere.
  6. My career plan was to build strategy based computer games until a guest lecturer introduced me to the world of accessibility technology.
  7. I still have that country-boy trust in people.
The Rules
  1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
Passing it on, in no particular order:
  1. Willie Walker
  2. Pete Higgins
  3. Greg Wilson
  4. Simon Bates
  5. Chris Hoffman
  6. Jono DiCarlo
  7. Flavio Percoco Premoli

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Joining the Mozilla Accessibility Team

For my readers, all 5 of you, I want you to know the rumors are truthy. The Mozilla Corporation has come to an arrangement with the ATRC that will allow me to spend some time focusing on helping Marco and Surkov with Firefox accessibility!

We're scattered nicely. Marco works in Germany, and Surkov in Siberia. I'm working out of Mozilla's Toronto office where, in one week, I've managed to spill shawarma juice on Beltzner's chair, ramble irrelevantly and incoherently to Jeff Muizelaar about C++ object layout compiler differences[1], and order the sandwich melt instead of the dry rub ribs at CGL. What was I thinking?

Things I've learned: some spouses do in fact let their husbands brew beer in the kitchen, seriousness combined with fun is serious fun, having an espresso machine in the office is genius, the world stops for women's five pin bowling, if an Olympian uses chemical enhancements then they should compete in an evening gown, and finally, I'm going to learn a lot. I'm used to working with smart people... but these guys are sick!

[1] My current bed time reading is "Inside the C++ Object Model" by Lippman. I wish I'd read this 12 years ago. I recommend it to anyone interested in C++ object layout, compiler optimizations and so on... fantastic... but my next book choice will be fiction.