Nigel Babu

Author: nigelb

  • Summit improvements and bug fixes

    ‘If I do that, I might break Summit!’

    That’s something often heard at UDSes by organizers. Indeed, Summit has historically had stability issues, especially during the high-usage week of a UDS. But Summit is starting to outgrow it’s troubled youth, gaining better code, better testing, and most importantly, more stability.

    The Summit team, consisting of Michael Hall, Chris Johnston, and I, has been hacking on Summit much more this cycle than ever. We even had a few new contributors this cycle. Our focus this cycle was to make it more stable first, and then more usable. There are lots of UI fixes that people have requested. We only haven’t gotten to them because we want Summit to be very stable this cycle. If you’d like to help us make Summit more awesome, please file bugs on things that you think Summit should do or places were Summit sucks. We can’t promise anything, but its great to nail down things we should fix.

    The Summit team has fixed a whole bunch of bugs this cycle. Big shout out to Chris Johnston and Michael Hall for setting the speed of development early on. Before I reached home back from UDS, there were I think 4 MPs for Summit (!?!). We’d also like to thank Maris Fogel for helping us setup a test framework. We’d like Summit to be more stable and having unit tests drives us in this direction.

    We’ve been busying making Summit much more awesome!

  • Helping with breakpad

    Wednesday was a fun day. I finally decided to take the plunge and step in and help with Breakpad Fine day to make that decision too, since the Breakpad status meetings are on Wednesdays at 11 am Pacific Time. I ended up being on the call via Google Voice. (Side note: Skype on linux had problems with Mozilla toll-free number).

    Gift Box by Ken's Oven

    I now have editbugs privilege on bugzilla and I already fixed my first bug on Breakpad!

  • Nailing a localization bug

    As I wrote in my last post, I’ve been working on Mozilla input. After the first 2 weeks of my work, I ended up finishing almost all of the easy bugs on the project. On Monday, I decided to tackle one of the more challenging bugg, bug 614535. The situation in Input is interesting because we often show LTR text in RTL localized pages. This bug was about problems with that.

    A Sign of the Times by NazarethCollege

    My solution to the problem was to use the locale that’s associated with each ‘opinion’ and mark the text and the name of the locale itself with the correct direction. I had sat down thought about this earlier and also brainstormed with a friend. Our conclusion was to have a list in the settings that would be a list of locales that are Right to Left. I discussed this solution in #webdev, and Fred Wenzel told me there already is such a list (Doh! I should have checked). With the general agreement that my solution did make sense, I started to implement it.

    Screenshot of Input

    The above picture is a screenshot of input searches before the fix. Some of the opinions have punctuations slightly messed up. And the locale, English (US), isn’t displayed properly. Fixing the opinions was easy, I created a new class with property ‘direction: ltr’ and applied that class if the locale of the message was not it the RTL_LANGUAGES array. Fixing the locale name was slightly more challenging because its an item in <ul> list. Simply adding a class to the <li> made the bullet point to also switch. This, may be technically correct (because that’s where you’d expect the bullet point in an LTR text), but it wasn’t an elegant or good-looking solution. I tried to put a span around the locale name, that didn’t work either. Eventually, with help from #webdev, I went with the Unicode left-to-right mark.

    I still can’t say nailed it, my pull request is pending review.

  • Pair Debugging with Byobu

    Lately, I’ve been contributing to Mozilla Input. After writing a few small fixes, I started picking up the slightly not-small ones. My fixes ended up breaking tests. That’s when I ran into trouble. The Mozilla webdevs I’ve been working with use Mac and I use Ubuntu. With help from kumar and davedash, I tried debugging my setup to no avail. Long story short, we wanted to all be the same session and try to see the errors and use pdb.

    Eventually, davedash gave me a user on an Ubuntu VPS where I set everything up. Since, the whole point of it was debugging this together, we debugged over byobu. Dave and I both logged into the same byobu session. It was just great for pair debugging. He waited while I setup everything and I watched how he was debugging. Perfect when your teammate is half a world away.

  • Lighting Talks at UDW

    Since the last Ubuntu Developer Week, we’ve been having a session dedicated to project lighting talks, if you have an interesting project that you’re working on, talk about it for 5 minutes. Show case your project and maybe ask for new contributors in this quick 5 minutes per project session! If you’re interested, please add your name and project name to the Lightning Talks page or come find me in #ubuntu-devel or #ubuntu-motu and let me know. I’ll add you to the list!