I've started compiling some links to Mozilla Foundation related stuff. Namely Extension and XUL stuff that I am finding helpful while I work on my Masters Project. It's over here, so go take a look. I will begin to write some documentation of my own as I go to try and clarify some of the confusion I find with having so many documentation sources.

Holy Crap. So it turned out that something bad in my extension was corrupting the profile and making it so I couldn't load ANY extensions, local or remote; xpi or flat file. Don't know why it took me so long to think of trying a different profile, but eventually it donned on me. Switched profiles and voila!

After successfully loading a remote, known-to-be-good extension I downloaded it and unzipped and loaded it as a flat file. Oh, it is the HelloWorld extensions available off of the Mozillazine website: here. Convienetly packaged already to the new standard for Mozilla trunk work. Beware, it WON'T work on 1.04 builds because it is set up with the chrome.manifest installation method.

Once I got that working I switched over and got my own example working again. Not sure where I had gone wrong, but when I made it look like the example, in structure at least, it worked. Now I've added properties files, dtd entities and have started poking around in JS. I'm totally excited to make this project!!

I remembered I had done some JS work back at mozilla in my web services days and will be looking that up to refresh my memory. I also ordered the latest version of the O'Reily Javascript reference (along with some Perl books and the latest Definitive CSS). But for now, it's off to pack for Yosemite as I'm leaving Friday morning and won't have time to pack all day tomorrow (building sets all day and then rehearsing in the evening). Maybe I'll get a little light reading in before bed though....Javascript or Perl....Hmmm......

The project is under way and I'm happy to say it is on schedule so far. I've started checking out the XUL documentation, particularly useful is Roachfiend's website along with a fabulous walk through the steps you need to take to get to a working extension.

I'm on my way to MozPM glory and finally finishing that Masters degree! Woot!

I've also updated some of the pages on my website to the new design, still some holes but it is coming along.

I've been doing a bunch of reading of Mozilla related pages on the web the last few days. Initially on mofo direction (roadmap) but then on the calendar work (sunbird) and then on some extension projects (mozdev). Interestingly I saw a couple projects there that I had wanted to do years ago when I was working at Netscape/AOL/TW and never got organized or motivated enough to do them. Namely an IDE to build mozilla based applications (jrex) and under that project the XUL parser project for java based XUL support. One of the other projects I've seen recently, and I haven't looked into it so I'm not sure if I have it right, is TypePad, over at the MoveableType website. I had a concept of web-based editing as an enterprise tool several years ago but never developed it. Not sure if TypePad is that kind of thing, but it sounds like it.

Anyway, the point of all this being the ideas I've come up with in the past all seem to be legitimate ideas and given enough energy I think they all would have worked. I allowed myself to be slowed by not seeing an immediate need or result for the work and possibly overwhelming resistance to the project.

Once again I have to say I am very impressed with the success Mozilla has had. I had all but written them off when they were split off from AOL almost 2 years ago. I wanted to see them succeed, but I had my doubts. I view their success as a direct result of the passion of the people working on the project combined with the guidance and foresight of those leading to pull in external help. In this instance it means evangelizing the proejct to IBM, Rehat, Google, whoever. By getting other companies to invest either financially or simply adding mozilla related technology to their roadmap or direction Mozilla was able to link their success with the success of other companies.

Where do I go with all this? Simply put I have another idea and I'm going to invest some energy into it. While it would be easy to latch on to some of these other projects from mozdev and put some work into them and complete my MS I want to have something of my own. So I'm going forward with my project management tool and who knows where it will lead me.

I have these ideas for adding project management functionality to mozilla, or rather creating a mozilla-based PM tool (for my Masters Project). So I've been setting up my home machines to build again and boy has it been interesting. I'm surprised at how much I've forgotten. Thanks to caillon and bryner for helping me out yesterday. I finally got stuff building on my WinXP box.

I always used the dosshell command windows to do my builds and just pathed out the cygwin tools and such. But now that the cvs pulls have to be done via ssh I was forced to use the bash shell. Took some time to convert all my scripts over and one of the final problems was related to differences in path styles bewteen unix and windows. Even though I was in a unix environment I had to use windows style paths for LIB and INCLUDE because it was the MSVC++ tools link, cl and rc that use those environment settings. So I had to use c: paths properly escaped (LIB=c:\\builds\\foo\;c:\\builds\bar ). What a pain, but it works now.

Next step is to get mozconfig files set up for all the different builds so I don't have to think about making sure my settings are right and editing files. Then clean up my .bashFOO files and transfer all my aliases (aliasi?) and shortcuts over. Then set it all up on my laptop.

So, I have been doing a bunch of AI research lately to wrap up an incomplete in a class so I can finish that elusive Master's degree. I've been writing stuff up over here if you want to stop by and check it out. In particular I've been trying to find stuff related to the use of AI in computer games.

So, it's time for me to stop futzing around and to get cranking on my MS project work. Currenlyt I am working on an AI paper or papers to finish up an incomplete. The overarching topic is Machine Learning and more specifically as it is applied to the gaming sector. So I'm doing research on things like the A* algorithm, state machines, pathing, neural nets and genetic algorithms. Haven't gotten too in depth yet, but that has to change since I only have 3 weeks left!!!

After that I will be working on the acutal project and am giving myself until the fall to wrap it up. Chico says I have until next spring, but I don't want to push it out that far (it's been 6 years already!). So I'll be presenting in the Fall. Still have to come up with a project, but that shouldn't be too hard, I have lots of ideas. The problem will be scoping it appropriately so that I can get it done in time.