Blog

Launchpad bug titles are everywhere!
A while back, I wrote about smart autolinkifying in bugs. Last week, at the urging of Brian Murray, I built on top of the work that I’d already done. This time, it grabs all the bug links and sends to the linkchecker and, in addition to the set of invalid bugs, it also returns a set of valid bugs with bug titles! The after effect is a ‘bug 1245’ link in the body of Launchpad like in bug tracker, merge proposals, etc, where bug 1245 is a valid bug number will have its ‘title’ attribute set to the bug title.

2011-09-20
Write more beautiful python code
Contributing to more Python projects like Launchpad has also taught me about writing PEP8 compliant code. One is expected to run make lint and fix lint errors.

A major part of the code I write at my day job consist of scripts, which I most often prefer to write in Python (second only to bash). I hate to admit it, but my code is rarely pretty. I just write hacky scripts. I now use pep8 and pyflakes on all the python code that I write. It does look nicer, although occasionally painful to fix 😉 Almost all the time pyflakes help me catch an error in the script even before I run the script.
2011-09-12
32-bit binary arrgh
Running 32-bit binaries on 64-bit machines and it refuses to work? Over the last one month this happened to me several times. Sometimes even disguised as something else. Finally, figured out the solution and noted it down all over the place so I don’t forget.

The magic words are libc6-1386 and ia32-libs. Oh, and to check if a binary is 32-bit or 64-bit, use the file command.
2011-09-10
Hello Mozilla!
Hello Planet Mozilla! I was added to the planet about 2 weeks ago and never actually got around to writing a hello post. I’m Nigel and I contribute to a few of the WebDev projects, most notably input and socorro. I’m also currently writing a patch for firefox to help SUMO, which I seem to work on when I’m sleep deprived. I’m also an active contributor to Ubuntu and Launchpad and often blog about my work there, however, my posts to the planet will exclusively be the work I do on Mozilla projects. Hopefully, I shall have lots to write soon!
2011-09-06
Some new improvements to Launchpad
I’ve been hacking on Launchpad for a while now and I’d like to announce some of the new things I’ve added. The first 2 are in production now. The last two, however, will need a few more days to get into production.
Smart autolinkifying in bugs
As evident from the screenshot, it greys out the bug if the bug does not exit (or is private). I wrote in detail about fixing this earlier.

UTC offset along with timezone
We now go the extra mile and display the UTC offset as well to help in some play plan out meetings, etc.

Edit sprite for attachments
Long time frustration of mine. The edit URL for attachments is in a portlet on the right side, not easy to spot. Once this fix rolls out, however, it will be much more friendlier.

Better blueprints validation
Earlier, I’d just get a ‘… is already registered by another blueprint’, this fix, once rolled out, helps ease out and find that blueprint.

To repeat again, the last two fixes are not in production as of me writing this post. Perhaps by next week or the week after, it should be.
2011-09-02