Contribution after the holidays

Merry Christmas! I have asked Eric for some more interfaces to document after the holidays as I needed some more contributions for the open source class. Eric responded quickly and I was up and running again after that small christmas break. It was another ideal experience as i get to read newer interfaces and see what they actually do. Click here to see the stuff i worked on the past few days. Its under the heading of "Contributions". Well... its time to get back into the holiday season as New Years is approaching. Happy New Years everybody.

0.3 Release

My final release for this project is a large one. At the beginning, Eric Sheppard gave us (me, AJ and Andrew) all the interfaces and we each split them up to work on them. I was appointed 18 interfaces and have completed my goals as of now. There are roughly three different categories including nsIDirectory, nsIAsync, and nsIAccessibile. These were all great interfaces with different coding styles. I learn a lot just from reading the code itself. At times, the code got very complicated where a class would inherit from multiple classes and I would get confused. I had to ask for help which made my life a bit easier. I felt I have contributed and teamed up with AJ and Eric nicely in this documentation project and was a fantastic experience for me. The list of interfaces I did can be found here.

0.2 Release

Due to some complications with my current project, I am currently altering my attention to another project that is similar which requires to perform documentation. The project i am contributing to is Interface Reference Documents with project leader AJ Rehman. Eric Sheppard from Mozilla is current assisting with this project and guiding us through step by step. I currently got a tutorial from AJ on how to create documentations from .idl files and it was very simple and straight forward.

Eric Sheppard gave me a number of .idl files to document and some of it was challenging. The .idl files at times were complicated and long so it took a while to document to the correct templates. The documentations that I have made can be found here under 0.2 release heading.

Fixing a bug in Thunderbird

WOW! Fixing a bug in ThunderBird. This sounds more complicated then it seems. I had trouble finding out what was wrong and where the source of the problem is. It took a LONG time... however I did learn how the process works. File a bug, fix it, post it, get a review, and is approved. Its a process that i was not fimilar with until now.

Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS)

I attended the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) 2007 at Seneca College this year and it was amazing. There were so many people attending from around the world and the session talks were very informative. After attending, i felt i learn a lot from what people accomplished and how the open source community operates. Other then attending this symposium, I volunteered and helped out with registration which was a good experience. I am already thinking of returning next year without hesitation.

Mozpad API Project Sample

This is how the results are gathered when the script is ran. The following are screen shots of GTK and Windows.

GTK



WINDOWS

Mozpad API Project - 0.1 Release

Its been a couple of weeks and for me, its been difficult. I have been trying to persue people in the community to run the script created by Matt and I got only a few to run out of many. I am still new to the community as my connection to other people are limited but with the help of Dave and Matt the project is slowly getting there. Matt told me he had a number of people he knew that might be able to run the script and from the results it looks like he got plenty of help. These results were created by running a script created by Jakub (Matt's acquaintances) so it can be easily read and analyzed. For now, this is what i have to report for the 0.1 release and to mention that this project is do-able and very fascinating.

Modifying the Browser Lab

WOW! Is this hard or what?! I went to Mozilla Cross Reference - SeaMonkey tool to search for how newtabs work and too many results came up. I refined my search to only results that deals with browsers as that was one advice i remember hearing about and I am still currently trying to find the root of this newtab function. This lab sure is technical!

Project Update

Its been a tough week as I am trying to get people in the community to run the script. I got one person to run it and emailed me the results. Matt is also trying to get a hold of some people he knows. As of now, I am STILL trying to find more people. Hope it works out at the end.

Current open source project

I am currently working on a project called "Improve Mozilla Application and Platform Documentation" with Matthew Gertner and Eric Sheppard from Mozilla. This project purpose is to "find out which APIs are being used and how, what is hard, what could be improved, etc." Currently, Matt has created a script that retrieves various results that can be used as valuable information for this project where I am trying to get a hold of people in big Mozilla project to run it. For more information, follow the link below.

http://www.allpeers.com/blog/2007/09/28/mozpad-api-project-update/

Real World Mozilla Source Code Reading Lab

I got my first hand experience on searching and reading Mozilla code using the mozilla cross reference website with the tool - sea monkey. I find this application to be very useful in finding ANY type of source code or functions that is available. My first attempt was to research how the Stop button for a browser would work. As a first timer, I trailed off and found the cancel button to stop file downloads. I thought it was the same concept using the same class but it actually wasn't as Dave (professor) told me. I continued to search for the correct one but it is harder then i thought it would be. You have to dig through a lot of code to find the source!

Building Firefox

WOW! I finally finish building Firefox. It took a little bit over 90 minutes on my laptop. My laptop is quite old (Pentium M 1.5Ghz, 512 ram). At first, i read over the instructions on how to build but i ended up encountering some errors. I re-read the instructions and i seem to have miss a key line... which was

mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

ac_add_options --enable-application=browser

which is needed. I thought it wasn't necessary so i spent some time figuring things out. My overall experience of building Firefox is pretty exciting as i have never build anything this BIG before. There are so much source code and files to process, i don't even know where to start reading. I am surely going to look at this browser in more detail down the road.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

I just finish reading this article and it really gave me a good impression on the concept of Open source development. The 19 points/highlights explained how to adapt/work in the open source community and for the success of projects. The 'fetchmail' project was a excellent example from the starting point to now, how people in the community collaborate together to develop something so powerful. At the end of the article, i am humble by this statement...

"I think that the cutting edge of open-source software will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest."

I think this is what open source is all about. I now know the importance of open source and hope to learn and work with these concepts.

First Post

First post for Seneca Open Source DPS909 class.