Oxymoronical

I attended a bird of prey photography workshop with my photography club over the weekend which was a fantastic experience.

I was on a work trip to Boston recently and one of the benefits of jetlag is that you wake up early enough to be able to get out and take photos on the sunrise.

Normally what I look for in photos is sharp focus.

I took this from the Empire State Building on a recent trip to New York.

I’m hearing this question asked a lot lately.

While I’ve spent a quarter of my life in the US I still grew up in the UK and got used to the wildlife here.

One of my favourite things to photograph is birds.

Many animals seem to be creatures of habit.

I was staying near the O2 Arena in London for a conference and went out for a stroll one evening.

I’m currently joining a couple of new projects and the inevitable first step is introductions over Zoom and the usual questions: who are you, where are you based, and what is your role on this project.

Now that Firefox has switched to git as its canonical source code repository a number of us have been longing for all the nice features that Mercurial used to provide that are much more awkward with git.

As you probably know AI tools are here and expectations range from “This is going to destroy the environment and make everyone unemployed” to “This is going to usher in a golden age freeing humanity from drudgery”.

It’s been many years since I went to the gym regularly.

I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro but occasionally I do need a Windows or Linux environment to test platform specific things and so under my desk is a reasonable powerful desktop which dual boots between Windows and Linux.

I frequently see a bold claim come up in tech circles.

Many years ago me and my family used to live in Ventura County in California.

I’ve always enjoyed photography.

I’ve always struggled to find a graphical merge tool that I can actually understand and up until now I have just been using merge markers along with a handy Mercurial command to open all conflicted files in VS Code, my editor of preference.

I’m not going to do the online recipe thing.

I mess around with a bunch of different projects in my spare time but it’s been a long time since I’ve thought one was worth tidying up into an actual release.

It seems to be a common problem, you want to display some content on the web with a certain aspect ratio but you don’t know the size you will be displaying at.

When I get merge conflicts in a rebase I found it irritating to open up the problem files in my editor, I couldn’t find anything past copying and pasting the file path or locating it in the source tree.

I started writing this as a newsgroup post for one of Mozilla’s mailing lists, but it turned out to be too long and since this part was mainly aimed at folks who either didn’t know about or wanted a quick refresher on character encodings I decided to blog…

I recently decided that the basic web hosting I was using wasn’t quite a configurable or powerful as I would like so I have started paying for a VPS and am slowly moving all my sites over to it.

Please join me in welcoming Bianca Danforth to the set of peers blessed with reviewing patches to Firefox and Toolkit.

So Mozilla is going all-in on Phabricator and Differential as a code review tool.

I spend most of my time developing flipping back and forth between VS Code and Searchfox.

Please welcome the latest new peers to Firefox and Toolkit: Johann Hofmann Nihanth Subramanya As you might gather I’ve been updating the peer list a lot lately trying to catch up with reality.

So you want to know how someone becomes a peer?

Please join me in welcoming another set of brave souls willing to help shepherd new code into Firefox and Toolkit: Luke Chang Ricky Chien Luca Greco Kate Hudson Tomislav Jovanovic Ray Lin Fischer Liu While going through this round of peer updates I’ve rea…

Please join me in welcoming three new peers to the Firefox and Toolkit modules.

For a long long time Mozilla has governed its code (and a few other things) as a series of modules.

A few things are happening which means there are a bunch of new Firefox/Toolkit peers to announce.

It’s that time again when I get to announce a new Firefox/Toolkit peer.

My little tool to help folks track when changes are made to files or directories in Mozilla’s mercurial repositories has gone down again.

I got bored over the weekend and decided to try my hand at fractal art again.

It has been over eleven years since I first wrote a patch for Firefox.

I’ve been acting as the owner for the add-ons manager for the past little while and while I have always cared a lot about the add-ons space it is time to formerly pass over the torch.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve just made Andrew Swan (aswan on IRC) a reviewer for Firefox code.

Well sort of.

It took me a long time to publish my last post.

Today those polite folk from up north have been talking about mental health and how it affects them and those around them.

The add-ons manager has a dirty secret.

One of the projects I’ve been really excited about recently is getting ESLint working for a lot of our JavaScript code.

ESLint becomes the most useful when you get warnings before even trying to land or get your code reviewed.

Over time Mozilla has been trying to reduce the amount of time between developing a feature and getting it into a user’s hands.

As Firefox increasingly switches to support running in multiple processes we’ve been finding common problems.

The offending changeset that broke hgchanges yesterday turns out to be a merge from an ancient branch to current tip.

My handy tool for tracking changes to directories in the mozilla mercurial repositories is going to be broken for a little while.

I have been a little lax in my duty of keeping the list of peers for Toolkit up to date and there have been a few notable exceptions.