Idle Hacking

This is a really great thing to see other people using XULRunner. Check out how jester can be used from inside an XPCOM Component by integrating with prototype.js. I wish I known about prototype when working on SimoHealth. Also for anyone interested I know the source repository for XULMusic is down and plan on having it backup over the weekend…

UPDATE:  SimoHealth was acquired by revolution health in 2005.  RevolutionHealth was acquired by waterfront media – SimoHealth was decomissioned between 2006 and 2007.  If you would like to get the source drop me a line, it’s pretty dated at this point.

Software Prototype.js, XULRunner

I was looking at my win32 machine tonight and realized I didn’t know what a few of the processes I had running were. I googled them and decided it would be really nice if I i didn’t have to type the process name into google. ProcTell is a little XULRunner app that will list all running processes and a google search box. When double clicking on one of the process in the list it runs a google search query in a browser frame.

Try it out

Software Win32, XULRunner

It was a pretty quiet release, but after many months we’ve release 1.2. It runs on top of XULRunner, the Firefox based runtime environment. We choose to use the XULRunner 1.8 tree instead of the 1.8.0 tree, so that we could make use of some of the new features like nsISAXMLReader.

New features in the product include it’s ability to manage multiple insurance plans per record. Meaning we support splitting a doctors bill between multiple insurance comapies – something our competitors don’t handle. Also, we reduced the footprint to only 6.9 megs from 8.04 megs. The download is free with registration.  UPDATE:  SimoHealth was acquired by revolution health in 2005.  RevolutionHealth was acquired by waterfront media – SimoHealth was decomissioned between 2006 and 2007.  If you would like to get the source drop me a line, it’s pretty dated at this point.

Software Health, Javascript, XPCOM, XULRunner

http://xullicious.com/jslint.zip

I started with this then decided to use xpcshell and finally a little nicely packaged ruby.

And now I can do this:

check.exe *.js

or

./check.rb *.js

Update:
you can get xulrunner for your platform here

Update:
With a little more googling it seems there is a very good tool already avaliable

Software Javascript, Ruby, XULRunner

For those interested I put together a Mac Build. I was in the middle of refactoring the playlist when I got side tracked with work and metro stop, so the current state of xulmusic is certainly not pretty… Anyway, I think this still serves as a pretty good example. So, here’s a link to the binary for Mac OSX for those interested. xullicious.com/XULMusic.app.tar.bz2 11M

Software C++, Javascript, Mac OSX, XPCOM, XULRunner

Music

On the music player front I’m reworking the playlist control. All the track data is going to be stored in a sqlite database. The displayed information will come from a custom nsITreeView implementation. This should make it possible to include some neat features like showing the playlist by artist or album. Also, it will make it easier to support other types of content like podcasting.

The biggest unknown I have is how drag and drop of rows will work, because I haven’t found any good examples or explanations about how that’s supposed to work.

I was able to greatly simplify playback by removing the separate thread that was being used to notify when playback had finished.

I also fixed the rounding issue that someone else had mentioned in response to one of my earlier posts.

The player now displays the time as you drag the position marker.

I found a bug in mozilla tree view, that I’m currently working on creating a patch for.

RSS/Atom

I haven’t had too much time to fool around with this code, but I did manage to improve the feed reader support for the upcoming simohealth release. Now, instead of scrapping news.google.com, it grabs the atom.xml feed from their site, caching it daily. I wonder if my asking about support for this at OSCON helped influence the support of a news feed from google. At any rate it certainly makes life a lot easier.

Mac Support

I’ve become much more fimilar with the mac over the last couple of weeks and now have xul music working on the mac as well as it does on linux and win32. I have to admit, I’m very happy with the mac, it’s a pretty cool environment. I’ve been without my linux notebook though for the last few weeks so i’m a little concerned about the state of the gstreamer implementation, but hope to get my linux system within the next few days so I can start working on it again. Heres a screenshot of the Mac xulmusic running:

UPDATE:  SimoHealth was acquired by revolution health in 2005.  RevolutionHealth was acquired by waterfront media – SimoHealth was decomissioned between 2006 and 2007.  If you would like to get the source drop me a line, it’s pretty dated at this point.

Software Mac OSX, RSS, XULMusic, XULRunner

I spent a good amount of time with the mac this past week and feel really down about progress so far… I have one bug assigned to me and was close to getting it finished when I ran into a nasty self inflicted linker error (thank you mento). That and the fact that once I did get things compiled again, I find a very buggy and crash prune XULRunner Before, I’ll be satisfied with Bug 300139, I need to do some more testing… Also, I think this can be done in JavaScript, rather then C++.

Well, it’s nearly monday again and this week I’ll be away from the computer clearing my head as I adventure off the coast of New England. When I get back next tuesday I have 5 days at home here in Maryland, then I’ll be traveling to Portland, Oragon – for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. While I’m not so sure what my purpose in going is, I expect it to be an interesting time. When I return, I’ll be moving/moved to Arlington, VA – while it’s not in walking distance to my new office it is just a few metro stops away. This means that by August 6th I’ll be starting my new life, putting my past behind me.

Software C++, Javascript, XULRunner