BuildMonitor v0.9.1 – Oui!

BuildMonitor v0.9.1 was released yesterday. This is the first version with French l10n bundled, thanks to Eric Lefevre who submitted the translations.

I added a new ‘Build’ menu to trigger the build of a particular job. This menu item only comes up on a job feed.

Another little improvement is a new option on the preference window to hide the feed name on Firefox status bar. This is useful when you need to monitor many feeds.

… starting to look like a weather forecast.

Shall I Twitter This?

... what goes through a geek's mind while playing sports.

I used to despise Twitter, but now I’m a fan. There’s something different in my daily life ever since I started twittering, nowadays I often ask myself if I should twitter something that just happened, or if my friends would find certain things funny/informative/etc.

…

So I went to a volleyball game last Sunday, and having been away from the game for a long time, I was excited to get back to it.

That’s me, wearing black t-shirt, jumping for a block. Back in junior high, I was on the school’s volleyball team, I could easily jump high and get my neck above the net. But now I’m at my heaviest ever at 88kg, and all these geeking around ever since I started studying computer science in uni obviously didn’t help.

I sprained my right thumb while setting up the poles for the net, and I was foolish enough to keep hitting the ball right where it hurted. That’s Tieh Ta Yao Gin covering the swollen area on my palm.

Yes, I twittered this.

XStringBundle NS_ERROR_FAILURE

I got this error message on Firefox Error Console after adding fr-FR locale to BuildMonitor, which caused it to fail initialising the status bar feeds.

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)
[nsIStringBundle.
GetStringFromName]"  nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)"  location: "JS frame
:: XStringBundle :: getString :: line 17"  data: no]
Source File: XStringBundle
Line: 17

Googling gave me some clues but still nothing obvious to solve the problem. At first I thought it has something to do with the non-ASCII characters, so I did a binary-replace on the property values, but still no luck. It’s only after I cat-ed the file then I noticed an empty space before the first property key. This empty space turned out to be a weird character that didn’t show up on Eclipse text editor, gedit, and vi.

I still don’t know what that character is. Here’s what Eclipse compare editor showed when I compared the cleaned up line with the original line, notice the non-ASCII character before monitor.init property key.

And BuildMonitor speaks French after that character is removed. Parlez-vous anglais?

Update (20/11/2008): This problem kinda irked me, so I investigated it further.

The weird character is actually the ISO-8859-1character for UTF-8 byte-order mark. It seems like XStringBundle expects ISO-8859-1 property file, hence interpreting the BOM as part of the monitor.init property key.

A handy tool to inspect the BOM is octal dump, where you should be able to see EF BB BF hex at the beginning of the file. And instead of manually cleaning up the property key, I should’ve used native2ascii.

BuildMonitor v0.9 – Usage Video

BuildMonitor v0.9 has been released, you can get it from the usual place.

The most useful improvement from this release is the ability to add new feed via right click menu of a link. Other improvements include the ability to remove the feed via status bar right click menu or from preferences menu. It’s also now possible to rearrange the order of the feeds via preferences menu.

I made a quick video (using recordMyDesktop) showing how easy it is to monitor Hudson feeds using the Firefox Add-on.

On l10n front, BuildMonitor has been translated to Japanese. Thank you, Sogabe-san.

I had to borrow a laptop with Windows to take this screenshot. I think Firefox 3.0.3 locale switching on Ubuntu is borked, the web pages do pick up the correct locale, but the add-ons ignore it.