Iceweasel ESR in squeeze-backports
In case this went unnoticed, Iceweasel ESR has been available in squeeze-backports for a few weeks, now. I highly recommend anyone using Iceweasel on the Debian stable release to upgrade to that...
View ArticleA new Jemalloc has landed
… disabled by default. Firefox 3, released close to 4 years ago, came with its own memory allocator: Jemalloc. Jason Evans (original author, and to this day, still upstream maintainer) and our own...
View ArticleAttempting to close a LinkedIn account
Following the trend, I attempted to close my LinkedIn account. Closing a LinkedIn account involves confirming and confirming and confirming again. Once it’s all done, you’d expect to, well, be done...
View ArticleThe tale of a weird crash, and a 2.5 year-old bug
10 days ago, I landed bug 616262, and Windows Mochitest-Other immediately turned perma-orange on an a11y test, in the form of a crash. It hadn’t happened when I was testing the patch queue on Try, nor...
View ArticleComment spam
Three weeks ago, I slightly modified the comment system on this blog for an experiment. This blog is a standard wordpress installation. Comments are normally directed to the wp-comments-post.php script...
View ArticleBuilding a Linux kernel module without the exact kernel headers
Imagine you have a Linux kernel image for an Android phone, but you don’t have the corresponding source, nor do you have the corresponding kernel headers. Imagine that kernel has module support...
View ArticleThe DEPTH of me
When adding a new directory to the Mozilla codebase, one usually needs to add a Makefile.in file, with some magic incantations at the beginning of it: DEPTH = ../.. topsrcdir = @top_srcdir@ srcdir =...
View ArticleForget about autoconf.mk.in
When you add a flag somewhere in configure.in and need to use it in code or in the build system, you use AC_SUBST or AC_DEFINE. While using AC_DEFINE in configure.in is usually sufficient for its...
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Android Debug Bridge for Firefox
I uploaded an experimental add-on on AMO that adds some kind of support for the Android Debug Bridge to Firefox. It requires the adb/adb.exe executable from the Android SDK. Disclaimer: the add-on is...
View ArticleFun with weak dynamic linking
Dynamic linkers, at least in the UNIX world, usually allow to load libraries in a process address space at startup. On Linux systems, you load such a library with LD_PRELOAD. On OSX, with...
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Debian EFI mode boot on a Macbook Pro, without rEFIt
Diego’s post got me to switch from grub-pc to grub-efi to boot Debian on my Macbook Pro. But I wanted to go further: getting rid of rEFIt. rEFIt is a pretty useful piece of software, but it’s...
View ArticleHooking the memory allocator in Firefox
Supplanting the system memory allocator usually involves some tricks. In a cross-platform software like Firefox, this involves different tricks on different platforms. Firefox uses such tricks to...
View ArticleUsing distcc and clang on Linux to build Firefox faster on MacOSX
Apple makes nice hardware, until you look into the details. As it turns out, my Macbook Pro has issues with heat. So much that when building Firefox, the CPU decides it’s too hot and throttles its...
View ArticleFirefox in Debian?
Got your attention? Don’t hold your breath, we’re not there yet, but we’re a step closer: it’s now possible to build Firefox from the Iceweasel package, since version 17.0.1-2 in experimental as of...
View ArticleTen years
Ten years ago, this very day, my first Debian package entered the Debian unstable repository. It was an addon for Mozilla Composer, Daniel Glazman’s Cascades. On the same day, my second Debian package...
View ArticleGoogle Reader death, or how the cloud model can fail you
If you’re a Google Reader user, you probably read in one of your subscriptions that Google is pulling the plug on Google Reader. It is yet another demonstration of why putting data in the cloud isn’t...
View Articlesignal() doubly considered harmful
When you want to set signal handlers on UNIX systems, the typical choice is to use signal (specified in C89, C99 and POSIX.1-2001) or sigaction (specified in POSIX.1-2001 and System V r4). Quoting the...
View Article日本へ引っ越し
Today, May the 30th, was my last day as a Mozilla employee. In a couple weeks, my wife, my cat and I will be on board of a flight heading about ten thousand kilometers east, and most of our stuff will...
View ArticleFaster builds for Firefox front-end developers with make
There’s a trend of blog posts about faster builds, so here’s another one. There is a trick that allows to skip most compilation from the tree, but it only works if the only changes you make are under...
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