The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 33/2008 (August 11 - 17, 2008):

• Vacation Catch-Up:
  I spent a huge amount of time this week catching up on things that happened during my vacation and partly the Mozilla Summit, am done with all my digging through bugmail, newsgroups, planet, pushlogs and most of the normal email and started some real work again.
• Mercurial Move Followup:
  Catching up my the pushlog feeds on the mozilla buildsystem files we've copied in modified ways to comm-central, I ported recent fixes to our versions already, with more under review.
  Additionally, --disable-compile-environment should work now (used in some L10n docs).
• Build/Test Machines:
  I've made a patch that should allow us to have our unit test boxes go green even though we have known leaks. We'll set thresholds to allow the current amounts of leaks without failure so we at least reliably catch when leaks increase. We'll adapt those thresholds values as possible when leaks get fixed, so that we'll hopefully only go down but not up with what we allow.
  We're also working on getting Justin Wood (Callek on IRC) access to our build machines, so that he can act as a backup when I'm not around (like recently, when they broke while I was on vacation).
• Bugzilla's SeaMonkey Product:
  Now that the big bugzilla.mozilla.org reorganization has been done and we have a product named "SeaMonkey", we still need to see that component info gets updated and missing components are created.
  Also, we have new bug triage targets and would like people to participate in killing off and/or improving our bug reports!
• xpfe Cleanup:
  With the new situation of only toolkit applications being based on trunk, I started work on cleaning up xpfe/ again, the first patch removes all but one file of xpfe/global and xpfe/communicator from mozilla-central.
• German L10n:
  I worked on resyching the German hg repo with hg trunk code together with my de team colleagues, along with fixing linebreak error made obvious by the new MozillaTranslator version and a typo.
  Also, I could verify that the existing Makefile targets produce working German langpacks and tarballs for SeaMonkey - I hope we'll have the buildbot infrastructure soon to do automated localized SeaMonkey builds again.
• Various Discussions:
  Message view pane, separate DOM inspector repo in hg, planning of upcoming milestones and releases, SeaMonkey Status Meeting, etc.

As a fun side project, I have started work on a new version of my old "Mandelbrot" application I did for my final paper in school, back then in Visual Basic. The application renders images of the Mandelbrot set fractal, the original application had nice zoom functionality and could even render the very similarly calculated family of Julia set fractals.
The difference this time is that this is a XULRunner application, rendering images into a <canvas> HTML element.
After getting rid of a number of early bugs in my code, this is (a thumbnail of) the first image I rendered with the color palette I ported from my old code:

The application is still quite primitive and unfortunately the JavaScript/canvas combination isn't the fastest way to do the math and paint the picture - the default 300x300 overview picture currently takes ~90 seconds of one of my Conroe cores being busy until it displays. When I get farther down the road with what I want from this app, I probably will open-source the code under the tri-license. This is mainly an educational project for me to learn how to do such a XULRunner app. Don't expect a finished app and/or something to try out yourself too soon though, this is just a fun side project - my main focus is of course on SeaMonkey!