Working on Mozilla Bug 601535 [0.3 Release]

So I had somehow disappeared from the blogging space for a while now. More likely, I didn’t disappear, but the Pointer Lock API test took so much of my time that I literally stopped on my other courses. Hence I took some time off from open source to bring my other course up to speed.

For reader that is not in my open source class and is wondering what 0.3 Release means, you can ignore them. It is used so that my professor can track my progress and grade me. 🙂

For this blog, I will be discussing my troubles with Bug 601535, which I mentioned a little bit in one of my earlier blog.

 

Pointer Lock [Mouse Lock] API – Adding a Patch and the Troubles we got (0.2 Release)

This blog the Pointer Lock patch came out a little bit late, mainly, because I got sick the other weekend and I went to class to find out that I have this paper to write. The paper talks (or is going to, since I am almost halfway through it) about the internet sharing of research journals and the ethical and financial issues at stake.

So approximately two week ago, the people working on the Pointer Lock API [Dave, Diogo, Raymond and Me] decided to update the bug with a patch. The path to this patch had been a huge challenge to the team.

In short did we manage to finish of this API, the answer is “NO!”. However, are we close to finishing it? I feel we are close. However, it was not an easy task. Over the past few weeks, we were being slaughtered by the code from all directions. It seems like after we fix one problem, five more emerges from different locations. The more we tried to tackle an issue the more overwhelmed we felt. It is like a never ending uphill battle.

In this blog, I will talk about what we managed to accomplish and what else is left.

 

PointerLock [MouseLock] API Test – Part 2: Crashing the Test

This blog is a continuation of my previous blog on the PointerLock Tests and I initially didn’t even planned for a two part blog. This happened due to a failure of the test which caused it to crash.

The Crash

Overall, the crash was caused when a HTML element tag have CSS styling for the “display” attribute. In some of our test cases, we had CSS styles that looked like this:

<div id=”content” style=”display: none”>

The problem with having the “display” attribute set to none is that when trying to lock the mouse, the underlying code tries to get the element “rectangle”. This causes a problem when the “display” attribute is set to “none”, as there is no “rectangle” to be obtained. Thus the crash occurs. If the display is left in it’s default value, that is, the “display” attribute is set to “block” then the rectangle exists and the test does not break.

 

MouseLock API Test Update [0.1 Release]

Over the past week, I had been pushing myself to get the test for the MouseLock API up for review over the weekend or early next week. At the time of writing this blog, almost all the test are good to go. Like I just said, ALMOST!!

I was working with Raymond Hung to get these test completed. I mentioned in my previous blog about how I was struggling while trying to read other people’s code and make sure they work properly. Well, I am still fighting that war. It will be a war (with numerous battles, of course) that will not end until the day I retire. While reading other people’s code block, it does not just becomes a matter of getting the code to work. I involves a lot more work like making it readable so other people who will review my code will not have to go through what I went and also if they don’t understand, they’ll just throw my code back. It also involved ensuring that all the test follow a consistent format.

In this blog, I will talk about almost all the test we have worked with.

**Note: All the test being linked in this blog is on my GitHub account and as such, the files will be updated from time to time and some of them may even be taken down. It is also good to note that the MouseLock API Draft Specification had changed it’s name to PointerLock and I will be referring to PointerLock throughout this blog and any that may follow.

 

Software Developer vs. Programmer: Which category are you?

To an individual who is involved with the technical industry, namely the Computer industry, they know the difference of what it takes to be a developer and a programmer. If they don’t, they SHOULD!!!

Every software developer start out as a programmer (really, they do!). Programmers spend a bulk, or almost all, of their time writing code and fixing bugs. When a person start referring to themselves as a programmer, non-technical see them like this:

Credited to: http://www.wildliferanger.co.uk/

 

Mouselock API Test – Fixing and Reviewing

This blog is a continuation of a series of blog on the test suite for the MouseLock API (For those new to this API, please refer to the API specifications). Sometime last week, Dave (Professor at Seneca College) posted a new patch to the MouseLock bug that had all the changes (I think) that was suggested by the reviewers. Now for the bad part, the new patch caused all our test cases to fail. This reminds me of the small note Dave suggested (the following were not his exact words, but somewhere on those lines):

The longer you linger on a bug with no patch, the more changes you have to make as other people post their patch.

This made a lot of sense as other code patch may cause crashes on the section where I am working at. It feels like the “survival of the fittest code”.

 

Pros and Cons of Working with Multiple Bug

Having picked up two bugs simultaneously, I am now kinda swamped with a lot of work. I have the test suite for Bug 633602 and the re-factoring of the content/media code in Bug 601535. All this in addition to four other courses for my current semester and working at two places. Now the question arises, “why in the heck do I have so much on my plate?”

 

Working on Bugs for Mozilla

If you read my previous blog post, I wanted to pick up bug 716107, which involved the suppression of warnings when users hit different keys when the browser is on fullscreen mode from a specific element. However, this bug proved too complicated for me to tackle. It does not only involve fixing code, it also involved haggling with folks from security as enabling new key strokes may open up other security bugs. (I DID cc myself on this bug and would like to see how they proceed, 😛 ).

So for the past few weeks I picked two bugs on bugzilla.

1. Bug 601535 – This is a refactoring bug, where I had to go through all the code in the content/media folder for cases where arithmetic operations can cause overflow and make use of a “helper class” called CheckedInt.h to check the overflow. (This bug was partly finished by Kyle Huey)
2. Bug 633602 – This is more of a continuation of what I did in the last four month. I will be continuing to contribute to the test suite (once a new patch on the mouselock core is reasonably done).

 

Hacking on Mozilla: Take Two, Year 2012

So here we are in 2012, hopefully another exciting year, and no; I will not be put back by some ancient Mayan prophecy regard 2012 to spoil it.

The last four months of 2011 had been really exciting while hacking on real open source code (this does not mean the first half was boring). I had actively contributed to the MouseLock API on Firefox, which is still a work in progress and I will continue further in polishing them out. However, that will be one of the project that I will be working on this semester. I hope to be able to spread out my scope and try to pick up other bugs as time pass.

 

Optimizing CubicVR Performance Test – 0.4

It have been a while since I got back to optimizing the Performance Test in CubicVR, as I was tied down with working on the MouseLock Implementation on Firefox (bug 633602) which is up for review with Mozilla at the moment (further blog will be made available on their status).

As part of my optimization, I was trying to recycle the canvas tag as running numerous test with their own canvas tag and scene object would demand high system resource. Additional technical details can be found on issue 21 of the issue tracker for CubicVR.