Don't Go IT Alone

I heard it over and over again but got a full understanding when I attempted to contribute to the mouse lock feature. I am starting to get used to feeling like I don't know anything. Every time I discover something, It opens up a new set of things that I don't know. So it goes on and on. I am encouraged in the fact that I am not alone, but In the midst of not knowing a lot, many things are still being done.

My approach will now be to join a group or to team up with someone with whom I can work and get more done. I can never be satisfy with just building Firefox or getting lost for days trying to find the proper way of implementing some feature. I must be able to have a piece of my code included.

0.3 Submitted(Disability-Pause Plugin)

Creating and Implementing a plug-in that works is very encouraging. It is an accumulation of all the knowledge gained in previous releases in a single plug-in that actually works. I doubted myself a little at the beginning but I didn't allow it to become my enemy. In fact, I wanted to do it because I was a little iffy. Thanks to "dseif" and the open source community. I can say taking on the challenges a little at a time works. It is amazing to know that even fixing lint errors makes you a little more familiar with the code and the file locations. The progress continues.

Please View Commit

Sticking to the task(Pause plugin and Mouselock)

I have made good progress on my plug-in. This feature has been a great learning experience for me because I started out trying to find where to add the necessary code for the feature. I found out and the code was added. It actually worked. I was asked to through it out and add the feature to an existing plug-in. That too was done. Again, I had to though it out to make it a plug-in on its own. I know that too will be done. I really like this stuff. When I am not writing code,it feels like something huge is missing.

I am still feeling my way through Mozilla-central. This is in addition to another ticket(t840) which has been assigned to me to fix more linting error but this time in the core as opposed to all plug-in which was my previous ticket(t607) which is being reviewed.

Overall is am making good progress considering having to do 5 other programming courses. It is frustrating at times because of not progressing in one area as I would like. I am at this very moment doing C#,C++ and JavaScript. I love it. The work continues. My 0.3 will be up later today or tomorrow.

Built at Last!

I had no doubt that it was going to be done. After three days of struggles trying to build Firefox on Windows, I finally did it.

I felt as though I have stumbled upon every possible error during the building process and wondered why me. Nevertheless, it was a great opportunity for me to learn from every single challenge. I now know a little more.

The biggest challenge was trying to figure out why a ".exe" file could not run. The reason was because the system had problems generating the file for some unknown reason. The solution was finding the source code, building it separately and putting it where it belongs. This was unique to my computer setup. It actually worked.

Well, I am all fired up and ready to go. Now is time to get that mouse lock feature implemented.

Mozilla-Build

Trying to build Mozilla was as big a challenge as the size of the actual code. I spent several hours trying to build the code on the school's machine. This was just to conserve on my bandwidth usage at home since it is limited.There were a whole host of challenges.

After figuring out how to get certain programs downloaded and installed which included installing some on my USB, I was finally able to run the Mozilla-build shell. Wow, this was a major hurdle which came with hours of research. On the positive side, I gained several hour additional knowledge and practice. I basically had to figure out a way to tell the start program, where to find Visual Studio since it had a problem doing so. I did it by adding the "NOT" and including the direct path the script:

if NOT "%VC10DIR%" == "" (.......

)
) else (
call "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Bin\vcvars32.bat"
)

I was able to cross the python hurdle and a few others including the line ending, I reached a point where the windows compiler was causing an error. At this point I had to refuel. I asked on IRC with just one response which did not help.

...........
cd obj-i686-pc-mingw32
/c/Temp/mozilla-central/configure
loading cache ./config.cache
checking host system type... i686-pc-mingw32
checking target system type... i686-pc-mingw32
checking build system type... i686-pc-mingw32
checking for mawk... no
checking for gawk... gawk
checking for perl5... no
checking for perl... /bin/perl
checking for gcc... cl
checking whether the C compiler (cl ) works... no
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot creat
e executables.
*** Fix above errors and then restart with "make -f client.mk buil
d"
make[2]: *** [configure] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/c/Temp/mozilla-central'
make[1]: *** [obj-i686-pc-mingw32/Makefile] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/Temp/mozilla-central'
make: *** [build] Error 2


What I am actually going to do now is to put the files onto my local machine and continue from there. I know I will eventually build it.

Success with Merge Conflicts

I have successfully completed another task of dealing with merge conflicts. This was my first experience dealing with this. The major challenge was having to go into several file after lint error correction. Sometime I don't feel like much is being accomplished but when I check what I know now compared to when I started, I have learned a lot. Its a lot of pieces involved but they are slowly coming together.

I have made some new commits for t607 and t308 for review after fixing the merge conflicts and fixing additional lint errors. Hopefully I can get something to land this time around but if not, the push continues.