By steve 
Jan 24, 2007 10:02 am
Seneca College has been offering a “Topics in Open Source Development” course for a few years now, and this year they are focusing on Mozilla as the open source project to study. The course wiki is a treasure-trove of interesting Mozilla bits, including:
- Guest Lectures
- This recent blog post by David Humphrey (the course’s professor) announced the availability of a series of guest lectures on Mozilla as downloadable media. The full list of lectures can be found on the course wiki. This post is how I originally found out about the course.
- Newsgroup Summaries
- One of the requirements of the course is to have students write weekly summaries of the activity in the Mozilla newsgroups. Unfortunately, this seems to have stopped as the class has ended.
- Project List
- The list of projects the students are involved in. Some projects that are relevant to us include Extending the Buildbot, XULRunner Guide, and XML 3D Project.
I wish my school had a class like this!
By ben 
Jan 17, 2007 7:49 pm
After working on Songbird for a year you would think I could have written at least a dozen blog entries and dazzled the world with my wit and expertise. The joke would be on you, of course, because I haven’t written a single one. Zilch. I’m lazy, I guess. Or shy. Or something.
So here we go, my first blog post… Ever.
I’ve recently been working to prepare Songbird for the fabled leap to Gecko 1.9 (aka “trunk”). Songbird 0.2 was based on Gecko 1.8 (two other apps you may be familiar with that were also built on Gecko 1.8 were Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0). See, Gecko 1.8 has been around for a long time now. It has been thoroughly tested and crashes only sometimes. Why move to 1.9 then? Well, check out this feature list to get some idea.
By steve
Jan 16, 2007 11:40 am
After many weeks of planning, I am finally back to writing code. I have been working mostly on the data model stuff and have just checked in a skeleton of directories, makefiles, and interface definitions to the trunk. The data model project spans three top level directories:
- library
- Contains the main library interfaces as well as the first library implementation, the local database library.
- property
- Contains the property manager and property type implementations. The property system effectively provides the schema to the metadata properties that can be attached to the resource in the data model.
- sqlbuilder
- Contains the implementation of the SQL builder. This component allows you to build SQL statements programmatically rather than cobble them together with a bunch of string concatenations.
I also generated a few templates to help people get started with new components:
Buildmaster Ben has blessed the makefiles, but he warns that the source directory makefile requires some platform specific hocus-pocus if you need to use the JavaScript or Unicode character utility APIs.
Update: So after breaking the build on Windows and Mac, I learned that I do indeed need those bits that Ben warned me about. They have been added to the template.
By mig 
Jan 12, 2007 8:45 pm
So Koshi gave me an image with the bird looking into a microscope.
And while it really is an amazing image, and I’m super lucky to work with such an amazing artist, I’m unfortunately woefully uninspired by it, tonight. I dunno, maybe I’ll have something tomorrow. Let me sleep on it.
So, instead, let me share a crazy webpage that you can load up in Songbird and be entertained by people who do crazy things with the laws of physics:
http://tbc.co.kr/tbc_sports/billiard_03_4.htm (Korean language! Woo!)
From wikipedia:
Artistic billiards, sometimes called fantasy billiards or fantaisie classique, is a carom billiards discipline in which players compete at performing 76 preset shots of varying difficulty. Each set shot has a maximum point value assigned for perfect execution, ranging from a 4-point maximum for lowest level difficulty shots, and climbing to an 11-point maximum for shots deemed highest in difficulty level.
Wow.
mig
ps: Oh yea, and if you didn’t read the last blog post, our development designs and tasklists are up on a new wiki server:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/ Czech-it!
By redfive 
Jan 8, 2007 10:11 am
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/
We’ve been pretty quiet lately, partially due to the holidays and people being out of town visiting relatives and such. But also because we’ve been working hard to clean up and solidify our architecture so that we are in a good position to move forward as quickly as possible. To that end we have written a document or two. You can check them out over on our new wiki page. We will continue updating them as we move towards the next release, and please add your comments in the discussion areas.
For my part I’ve been looking closely at adding tabbed browsing to the bird, and creating an API that websites can use to talk to the bird. It’s pretty exciting stuff as far as I’m concerned (as is most of the work we have slated for the next release). On top of that I have a couple of other tasks on my plate: build farm, for nightly releases; and unit testing, which we will be leveraging some of the capabilities of XULRunner to implement. No documents on those two, but there is a bug out for unit tests.
[edit -- We had to take the post down because the public wiki was a little too public... but it's up and edited and ready for everyone to read and wonder at! Enjoy it! -- mig]
