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Mobile on the new try server!

John Ford — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:55:22 +0000

Mobile support for the new try server has just landed! Any push after now will have an Android, Maemo 4, Maemo5 GTK and Maemo5 QT build done. I have also added support for two magic files ‘mobile-repo’ and ‘mobile-rev’. Both of these files should be in the root directory of your mozilla-central clone. The ‘mobile-repo’ file should contain a string with no whitespace or newlines that is a path relative to http://hg.mozilla.org/ referencing a mobile-browser repository. The ‘mobile-rev’ file should contain anything that can be used with the –rev flag to mercurial. In-repo branches or changeset identifiers work great here. Just like on desktop try, you can also have a special mozconfig for your mobile platforms. In the top level directory, create a mozconfig-extra file which contains options that are added to *all* platforms and a mozconfig-extra-android-r7, mozconfig-extra-maemo4, mozconfig-extra-maemo5-gtk and/or mozconfig-extra-maemo5-qt. I could add a check for a mozconfig-mobile that would add things to all mobile builds if that is desired.

An example of a push to try session to build against my user repository copy of mobile-browser might look like:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central
cd mozilla-central
rm README.txt
echo 'users/jford_mozilla.com/mobile-browser' > mobile-repo
echo 'default' > mobile-rev
hg add mobile-repo mobile-rev
hg commit -m 'Testing to see if we build without a readme file'
hg push -f ssh://hg.mozilla.org/try

With this marks the end of the old try server. It also means that we have fully transitioned our try server build infrastructure to Buildbot 0.8.0.

Mac OS X Screensaver Hang

John Ford — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:03:54 +0000

I was trying to get into my personal Macbook a couple minutes ago but the screen was black and I had a spinning beach ball. I couldn’t remember if I had anything important open so I didn’t want to force a reboot. I hadn’t used the computer for a couple hours so I guessed that the screen saver had hung or VLC froze in full screen. I logged into my Macbook through ssh and ran ps -e. VLC wasn’t there, so I looked for screen-saver-y things and found 5827 ?? 0:00.22 /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine. I ended up killing it with sudo killall ScreenSaverEngine which immediately brought me back to my desktop. I am guessing I won’t have a screensaver back until I reboot. Hope this helps! Oh, and make sure that you already have SSH enabled (Remote Login in the Sharing preference pane) and know the IP/Domain of your laptop. I used johns-macbook.local which the OS set up for me automatically. My guess is that it is some sort of bonjour/zeroconf to dns bridge.

Credit Card Fraud

John Ford — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:09:12 +0000

I checked my Visa account tonight and found out that my bill was $2100 more than it is supposed to be. Turns out that someone though it’d be fun to order a $1500 Vacation from something that looks like a front and $600 from Rogers Wireless. I have spoken to RBC and Rogers Wireless and explained the situation. RBC is reversing the charges and conducting an investigation. Rogers Wireless is launching a fraud investigation.

I also did an Equifax and Trans Union credit check tonight. The Equifax one comes up clean as does the majority of the Trans Union one. Unfortunately, the Trans Union report shows that Rogers has done a credit check on me. This negatively impacts my credit rating and is the last thing I need right now. I called the non-emergency number of the Police to report the fraud and was greeted by an apparent wall. I wasn’t speaking to an officer though. This person informed me that even though I live in Toronto normally, and that BOTH charges on my card show as Toronto, ON it isn’t a matter for Toronto Police unless I am physically in Toronto. Nice to see my tax dollars hard at work! This numpty suggested that I visit the local police here to give a report. I don’t understand this. Why on earth would a Mountain View police officer be the one to deal with a crime committed against a Canadian, in Canada with Canadian companies. I doubt that it would even make its way up to Toronto.

This couldn’t have come at a worse time. I wonder if the false credit check will be removed from my credit history as I absolutely didn’t request it, the $600 charge or the $1503 charge! As I sit here, I wonder what I can do regarding this situation.

Wisdom Teeth

John Ford — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:44:00 +0000

I am getting my wisdom teeth taken out this reading week. They are partially impact and need to go. I am going to be having it done an an Oral Surgeon’s office using sedation. This makes me a little nervous as I have never been sedated before. Anyway, I snapped a shot of my smile

Today

John Ford — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:55:00 +0000

I just found an application called Today and wanted to share it. It is unfortunately freeware, but it addresses a key complaint I have with the included groupware applications. iCal has a horible interface for adding tasks and Mail.app is such a strange place to have task lists, but no calendars. Today gives a view very similar to the “Outlook Today” interface in Outlook 2007 which I am accustomed to and love. I am currently using the trial version and will have to decide soon if I want to spend $15USD for this product. This is one thing I dislike about the Mac, there are tons of really neat applications for sale but each one costs enough that it isn’t worth it to buy each one. It is better than in the windows world, where there are tons of choices, all not doing what you want them to. It would be great if they could do an “App Store” for the mac platform for all these neat to have applications that are done by companies I don’t know if I trust with my credit card

Installing VMWare 6.5 in Fedora 10

John Ford — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:47:00 +0000

I decided to install VMware 6.5 on my Fedora Rawhide (just about at Fedora 10) machine. The binary kernel modules that are included with VMware are of little use to me because I don’t run an ancient version of the linux kernel. I used the .bundle installer to install the program. I let it run through and when it finished i was left with a problem of not being able to start VMware or VMware player because of the required kernel modules. You are going to need dependencies to build a kernel module. In Fedora, I beleive this is yum groupinstall "Development Tools" and yum install kernel-devel.

To fix this I ran the following commands:
cp /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/ ~/vmware-modules – So as not to pollute the program’s installed versions of the module source.
For each tar file I untarred it and ran make in the resulting directory. This compiled all the modules i needed. After this, it is just a matter of copying the kernel modules to the appropriate place: sudo cp `find . -name "*.ko" | xargs` /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc, running depmod -a and sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart. After this, starting and running VMware now works. The downside to this is that you have to recompile the modules every time your kernel is updated, unless you write a script or turn those tar files into akmod rpm packages.

I don’t know if i like VMware more than VirtualBox or KVM, but if I do, I will consider writing some specfiles to automate this.

Also, if you are going to be running on a host with PulseAudio and want sound in your guests, vmwaredps-1.3.tar.gz is really helpful!

iTunes Store Arrows in iTunes 8

John Ford — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:29:00 +0000

I hate the little arrow links that take you to the iTunes store. I could disable them in iTunes 7, but now apple seems to think I should choose between locking myself from the iTunes Music Store and seeting those anoying things. If it weren’t for the automatic cover downloader, i’d do that in a heartbeat, but it is really useful. I found a bunch of articles about how to do this on a Mac, but I am not running a mac. I ended up finding this article on how to remove the links and I also found one on the same site that gets rid of the genre column from the browser. Why on earth did Apple remove these settings? This is why over-simplifying UI can be a bad choice in my opinion.

In case the original article dissappears, here are the basic steps:
Open %AppData%\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml in a proper text editor, the article’s author recomends Notepad++ then right underneath. Note: the

add

show-store-arrow-links            AA==

and/or

show-genre-when-browsingAA==

HP Battery Degredation

John Ford — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:18:00 +0000

I just realised that my battery is only holding 91% of its designed charge. This laptop is less than 9 months old and it came with a 12cell battery. I am the following values from acpitool -B

[jhford@dv2727ca mozilla]$ acpitool -B  Battery #1     : present    Remaining capacity : 8042 mAh, 100.0%    Design capacity    : 8800 mAh    Last full capacity : 8042 mAh, 91.39% of design capacity    Capacity loss      : 8.614%    Present rate       : 0 mA    Charging state     : charged    Battery type       : rechargeable, LION    Model number       : Akita    Serial number      :  2945

I was just on the online chat with their agent was telling me that i have to have something called HP Total Care Advisor to be able to diagnose the problem to their satisfaction. The catch: You have to have the pre-installed version of vista!!! The same version that has a million trials and adware things, the vista that has a 400pixel tall yahoo search bar! Then they tell me that you can’t download a setup program for this thing!

This is insane! Why would you ever buy an HP Computer with ’support’ like this?

Luckily, the agent was nice enough to send me a link to download this application
hp tca but i just hope that everything works and i don’t have any issues with this. What irks me is that this happens after i just purchased 3 hp laptops for me and family members!

Useful links:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=c00821536

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?docname=c00817650&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN