Back in Beantown

Getting up this morning wasn’t as difficult as I had expected, I guess my sleep schedule didn’t get too wacked out in Rochester. I had a great time seeing all the CSHers again, and graduation was fun as well. My family came up for the festivities, and they seemed to enjoy getting to finally see me walk across the stage. Many thanks to all the family, house members, and friends who cheered me on as I walked across the stage. The Dean commented on the size of my cheering section as I shook his hand. :)

So that phase is now unarguably complete now; no longer can people argue that “well, you haven’t really graduated yet”… It was nice seeing everyone, but living like a nomad is always a little uncomfortable for me. I am glad to be back in my own place again. :)

Supposedly we are going to hear some “really good” news later on today, which makes me curious.. I hope it is good enough to keep me from worrying about looking at Monster for a year or so. :)

There is a new feature in the Mozilla nightly builds, the “-turbo” command line flag (Win32 only). If you pass this switch, it will start mozilla in a windowless mode, running in the background. The next time you start mozilla, it will pop up almost instantly, since it is already residing in memory. This will be a nice retort to the people that believe that Internet Explorer is so much faster because M$ pulls the browser into memory on startup (since it is “part of the OS”…)

NSPR is Neat

Ok, I was here until around 7pm last night, which was a terrible choice, because there are home games at Fenway all this week… It was hell trying to walk the block between work and the Kenmore station against the baseball sidewalk traffic… I came into work later today planning to leave some time after 7:30p.. Hopefully the commute will be a bit simpler then, but who knows…

NSPR is pretty interesting, even if I am only using a limited subset of its functionality. I am working on modifying a load test client for one of our server packages. Originally, the test client compressed the data using Zlib, then sent it out over an SSL client… This put a lot of strain on our servers, and to see if there would be a benefit in using one of the hardware SSL accelerators out there, we decided to remove SSL from the client/server. Unfortunately, SSL and Compression were tied together pretty tightly in the test client, so I am rewriting quite a bit. One of the cool things about the I/O part of NSPR is that it allows you to add layers to the sockets, so I am adding a compression layer, and later I will remove the compression from the old SSL layer. Then we will be able to add the 2 layers in any combination with any other layers we dream up in the process.

1 degree of separation

So I was amidst my morning wake-up ritual (which involves reading all of my daily newspages), and I get to mozillaZine. I notice a story about a modification of Mozilla’s modern skin, and I click on the screenshot. It definately looks better, but I also noticed where that screenshot was hosted: joehewitt.com. Neurons fire: “Hey, I went to highschool with Joe Hewitt”. I look at the main index for the site, and eventually the Bio, and it turns out that my friend from high school is now in California working for Netscape. So I dropped him a note because I haven’t talked to him in a few years..

Good Night….

….or Morning…. I was in a pretty decent code groove tonight. When I surfaced from it it was 6am and I had reasonable functionality. There were distractions along the way, but they never managed to fully derail me.

I did start watching Strange Brew in the background, but it was sucking away too much of my attention so I had to stop it. :)

While I was working I had Mozilla building from source in the background. I have had trouble building it under FreeBSD in the past (mostly to my ignorance), but I had a successful build tonight that hauled ass. :)

Mozilla

Mozilla. For all the shit it catches in the press, I am amazed at how stable and useful it is. I have been grabbing the nightly builds for some time now, but since I have been home on my dad’s machine, I have been using it exclusively (because my dad doesn’t want NS installed; he is an IE weenie now).

Anyway, it rarely crashes on me (remember, it isn’t even beta yet), and it screams. I can’t wait until this is rock solid.