Tag Archives: cpow

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 15): OS X Printing Returns

In Episode 15, we kept working on the same bug as the last two episodes – proxying the printing dialog on OS X to the parent process from the content process. At the end of Episode 14, we’d finished the serialization bits, and put in the infrastructure for deserialization. In this episode, we did the rest of the deserialization work.

And then we attempted to print a test page. And it worked!

We did it!

Then, we cleaned up the patches and posted them up for review. I had a lot of questions about my Objective-C++ stuff, specifically with regards to memory management (it seems as if some things in Objective-C++ are memory managed, and it’s not immediately obvious what that applies to). So I’ve requested review, and I hope to hear back from someone more experienced soon!

I also plugged a new show that’s starting up! If you’re a designer, and want to see how a designer at Mozilla does their work, you’ll love The Design Hour, by Ricardo Vazquez. His design chops are formidable, and he shows you exactly how he operates. It’s great!

Finally, I failed to mention that I’m on holiday next week, so I can’t stream live. I have, however, pre-recorded a shorter Episode 16, which should air at the right time slot next week. The show must go on!

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1091112 – Print dialog doesn’t get focus automatically, if e10s is enabled – Notes

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 14): More OS X Printing

In this episode, I kept working on the same bug as last week – proxying the print dialog from the content process on OS X. We actually finished the serialization bit, and started doing deserialization!

Hopefully, next episode we can polish off the deserialization and we’l be done. Fingers crossed!

Note that this episode was about 2 hours and 10 minutes, but the standard-definition recording up on Air Mozilla only plays for about 13 minutes and 5 seconds. Not too sure what’s going on there – we’ve filed a bug with the people who’ve encoded it. Hopefully, we’ll have the full episode up for standard-definition soon.

In the meantime, if you’d like to watch the whole episode, you can go to the Air Mozilla page and watch it in HD, or you can go to the YouTube mirror.

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1091112 – Print dialog doesn’t get focus automatically, if e10s is enabled – Notes

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 13): Printing. Again!

Had to deal with some network issues during this video – sorry if people were getting dropped frames during the live show! I have personally checked this recording, and almost all frames are there.

The only frames that are missing are the ones where I scramble around to connect to the wired network, which was boring anyhow.

In this episode, I worked on proxying the print dialog from the content process on OS X. It was a wild ride, and I learned quite a bit about Cocoa stuff. It was also a throwback to my very first episode, where I essentially did the same thing for Linux!

We’ll probably polish this off in the next episode, or in the episode after.

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1091112 – Print dialog doesn’t get focus automatically, if e10s is enabled – Notes

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 12): Making “Save Page As” Work

After giving some updates on the last bug we were working on together, I started a new bug: Bug 1128050 – [e10s] Save page as… doesn’t always load from cache. The problem here is that if the user were to reach a page via a POST request, attempting to save that page from the Save Page item in the menu would result in silent failure1.

Luckily, the last bug we were working on was related to this – we had a lot of context about cache keys swapped in already.

The other important thing to realize is that fixing this bug is a bandage fix, or a wallpaper fix. I don’t think those are official terms, but it’s what I use. Basically, we’re fixing a thing with the minimum required effort because something else is going to fix it properly down the line. So we just need to do what we can to get the feature to limp along until such time as the proper fix lands.

My proposed solution was to serialize an nsISHEntry on the content process side, deserialize it on the parent side, and pass it off to nsIWebBrowserPersist.

So did it work? Watch the episode and find out!

I also want to briefly apologize for some construction noise during the video – I think it occurs somewhere halfway through minute 20 of the video. It doesn’t last long, I promise!

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1128050 – [e10s] Save page as… doesn’t always load from cache – Notes

  1. Well, it’d show something in the Browser Console, but for a typical user, I think that’s still a silent failure. ↩

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 11): Cleaning up the View Source Patch

For this episode, Richard Milewski and I figured out the syncing issue I’d been having in Episode 9, so I had my head floating in the bottom right corner while I hacked. Now you can see what I do with my face while hacking, if that’s a thing you had been interested in.

I’ve also started mirroring the episodes to YouTube, if YouTube is your choice platform for video consumption.

So, like last week, I was under a bit of time pressure because of a meeting scheduled for 2:30PM (actually the meeting I was supposed to have the week before – it just got postponed), so that gave me 1.5 hours to move forward with the View Source work we’d started back in Episode 8.

I started the episode by explaining that the cache key stuff we’d figured out in Episode 9 was really important, and that a bug had been filed by the Necko team to get the issue fixed. At the time of the video, there was a patch up for review in that bug, and when we applied it, we were able to retrieve source code out of the network cache after POST requests! Success!

Now that we had verified that our technique was going to work, I spent the rest of the episode cleaning up the patches we’d written. I started by doing a brief self-code-review to smoke out any glaring problems, and then started to fix those problems.

We got a good chunk of the way before I had to cut off the camera.

I know back when I started working on this particular bug, I had said that I wanted to take you through right to the end on camera – but the truth of the matter is, the priority of the bug went up, and I was moving too slowly on it, since I was restricting myself to a few hours on Wednesdays. So unfortunately, after my meeting, I went back to hacking on the bug off-camera, and yesterday I put up a patch for review. Here’s the review request, if you’re interested in seeing where I got to!

I felt good about the continuity experiment, and I think I’ll try it again for the next few episodes – but I think I’ll choose a lower-priority bug; that way, I think it’s more likely that I can keep the work contained within the episodes.

How did you feel about the continuity between episodes? Did it help to engage you, or did it not matter? I’d love to hear your comments!

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1025146 – [e10s] Never load the source off of the network when viewing source – Notes