Some fine fellow has written some Javascript that runs one of my favourite games in the browser. I just watched the opening cutscene of Monkey Island in Firefox!
It’s still a bit buggy, but it’s a start!
Sync Thunderbird with your Google Contacts
There are a bunch of add-ons out there to help you sync Thunderbird with your Google Contacts.
I want to share my favourite one with you.
Simply named, “Google Contacts”, this add-on automatically detects if you have a GMail account in your profile, and does the rest of the heavy lifting for you.
Honestly, it’s as easy as falling off a bike.
So a big thank you to the add-on developer, H. Ogi!
My Thunderbird / Firefox wallet – one of a kind
My friend Joel Beck is kind of a badass.
When he’s not designing / building reactors for Atlantic Hydrogen in New Brunswick, he’s learning all sorts of cool skills.
Skills like leather-working.
Look what he gave me as an early Xmas gift:
[shashin type=”photo” id=”812,810,811,809,808,807,806″ size=”medium” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”center”]
This is a one-of-a-kind, hand-made leather wallet, made by my good friend Joel Beck.
Thanks Joel.
Build Thunderbird Faster on Windows
There’s no denying it: the vast majority of Thunderbird users are using some flavour of Windows.
So it’s a bit strange that I do most of my development on Linux, and use Thunderbird most regularly on Mac OSX.
Therefore, I’ve recently gotten a hold of a new, super-powerful Windows 7 box. Furthermore, in an effort to better understand what my users go through and experience, I’ll also be using Thunderbird on Windows as my primary mechanism for reading my mail.
So that’s all good, but there’s one problem: building Thunderbird on Windows takes forever.
But it doesn’t have to.
So the Simple Build Instructions for Thunderbird instructs developers to get the MozillaBuild package, which includes a bunch of the tools you need to get Mozilla stuff up and building on Windows. One of those tools is “make“, which is a tool that originates from the world of UNIX and Linux.
The problem with the make included with MozillaBuild is that it doesn’t take advantage of multiple processor cores on Windows. So even if you have a crazy-powerful 8-core machine, when you just use the vanilla “make -f client.mk” command, you’re only going to be using one of your cores.
Enter pymake. Pymake is a Mozilla-maintained mostly-compatible implementation of make in Python. The advantage? On Windows, we can finally use all of our cores.
So here’s how to set that up.
- I assume you’ve followed the instructions for setting up your Windows build environment, laid out here.
- I also assume you’ve checked out a copy of comm-central, have set up your .mozconfig, and have run “python client.py checkout” to grab Gecko, etc.
- If your Windows username has a space in it, like “Mike Conley”, you might want to create a new Windows account for the stuff we’re about to do. I use “mconley”.
- You’re going to want to alias pymake – open up an editor, and create a file called .profile under C:/Users/[username]/ (I assume you’re on the C drive anyhow, and are using Windows 7)
- In that .profile file, put in the following line: alias pymake=/c/Users/[username]/[path to comm-central]/mozilla/build/pymake/make.py
- Restart your shell, and ensure there are no errors in the first couple of lines that spring up at the top. If you type pymake, it should say towards the bottom “No makefile found”.
- Go to the parent of your comm-central directory, and create a new directory for your obj-dir (where your binaries and executable will eventually end up).\
- In that directory, run the command: “../comm-central/configure” – so we’re invoking the configure within the comm-central directory, but within the obj-dir folder we created
- The configure might fail while looking for the compiler. Just try it again until it works. *sigh*.
- Once the configure command is done, within your obj-dir folder, type: pymake -sj4 (or 8, if you have 8 cores)
And blam, now you’re cookin’!
I can get a debug build done, from scratch, in about 22 minutes. Woo!
UPDATE
You can also replace steps 8 – 10 with the following:
- In your objdir, type: MOZCONFIG=../srcdir/.mozconfig pymake -sj6 -f ../srcdir/client.mk
- Eat sandwich while build completes
Still Alive
Once again, I’ve let my blog gather dust. And the comments have been piling up. And the emails have been rolling in. And I’ve been silent.
Sorry about that!
I’ve been pretty heads-down lately – here’s what’s going on:
- The address book work I was talking about has been put on a tiny bit of a backburner as I deal with two more pressing Thunderbird projects, namely, finishing up the Account Provisioner (a service that offers you email addresses if you don’t already have one) and Tabs on top (a part of the general UX refresh that Thunderbird is working towards)
- A few weeks ago, I was knee-deep in sound design for a show called FIREraisers being put up by the red light district.
- UCOSP has been going strong, and our Review Board students have been pluggin’ away.
About the address book – I’ve received a bunch of email making suggestions and asking for things. That’s great! I’ll comment on that shortly – I just need a little more time to clear Account Provisioner and Tabs on Top off my plate.
More soon.