Projects: buildmonitor byte-order mark firefox l10n stringbundle utf-8
by Cliffano Subagio
1 comment
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.
1="[Exception..." 2="Component" 3="returned" 4="failure" 5="code:" 6="0x80004005" 7="(NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" 8="[nsIStringBundle." 9="<div" id=":sd" 10="class="ArwC7c" 11="ckChnd">GetStringFromName" language="Error:"]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: XStringBundle :: getString :: line 17" data: no] Source File: XStringBundle Line: 17</div>
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-8859-1 character 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.
Projects: buildmonitor hudson l10n recordmydesktop
by Cliffano Subagio
7 comments
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.
BuildMonitor v0.8
BuildMonitor v0.8 is finally here, you can download it from Firefox Add-ons page. This release has a number of nice improvements…
Multiple feeds monitoring
Now you can monitor multiple Hudson instances by configuring their feeds in BuildMonitor preferences. All feed status icons will be displayed on the Firefox status bar, you can mouseover or click each icon to get the build details for the corresponding feed.
Feed status display
The way BuildMonitor uses the orbs to represent the health summary of the feed in v0.7 has been a source of confusion to the users. Many users thought that the orb indicates the latest build status, and not the overall health of the feed.
Another source of confusion is the fact that some users use a Hudson feed with multiple projects, some use a Hudson feed with only 1 project, and some use job-specific feeds, which led to different expectation of what status should be displayed.
With that, I decided to (1) make the status icon configurable with an option to display the overall feed health or the latest build status, and (2) use the weather icon for the overall feed health, while the latest build status keeps using the orbs.
Sound and alert window notifications
v0.8 now has configurable options to enable sound and alert window notifications when there’s a build failure.
When enabled, BuildMonitor plays a shattered glass sound (kudos to The Freesound Project) following a build failure. While alert window notification is enabled by default, it shows an alert a la Growl at the bottom right corner of your desktop.
Note that alert window on OS X only works since Firefox 3.
Green is the new blue
Quite surprisingly, I got asked a number of times about why Hudson uses blue to indicate success (to which I just pointed to this thread and that thread) and why can’t BuildMonitor uses green instead.
I was quite reluctant to add green-for-success as an option in BuildMonitor considering that Hudson still uses blue and the option to use green is not there yet. But I guess if the users want to use green by configuring via BuildMonitor’s preferences menu, then at least they’re aware of the difference, so this option is included in v0.8 . Blue is still the default though.
Personally, I like blue better :p.
Crisper icons
I added several new icons from Tango Project in v0.8, and updated the existing icons with new PNGs having transparent background.
Open page in new/current tab
Now you have the option to open build pages in a new tab or the current tab.
The preferences page now looks like this in v0.8…
Firefox add-on status
The add-on is still listed as experimental on addons.mozilla.org’s sandbox, it has been 4 months since I nominated it for approval. The AMO editors are still working on clearing up a huge list of add-ons to approve, I don’t know when BuildMonitor will be approved. I agree that the approval process can scale, but it doesn’t.
With almost 400 active BuildMonitor users (according to addons.mozilla.org), it would be very nice to auto-upgrade all of them. But since we’re still waiting for approval, you have to login again to download, sorry.
Please let me know what you think about this new release. Any comments? suggestions? criticisms?
Multiple Feeds Monitoring
Patrick Struhs left a comment on Hudson Build Monitor page, suggesting “A nice feature would be to be able to monitor more than one server easily,” and that’s what I’ve been working on sporadically this week. I started with the statusbar panel, the goal is to keep the UI minimal but still provide enough information. I’ve also got the multiple feeds processing pretty much done.
This is how the statusbar panel looks like in 0.8-SNAPSHOT. I used Tango Icon Library to keep it consistent with Hudson. The above screenshot shows the status of six feeds, the first one is a Netbeans feed with a warning, the second and fourth ones show an error icon indicating a problem with the urls, the third one is a JBoss feed – currently downloading, the fifth one shows the no-build icon, and the last one shows that the feed is currently queued waiting to start the download.
Next up… preferences and right-click menu revamp.
Projects: buildmonitor firefox hudson jcaptcha kaptcha
by Cliffano Subagio
3 comments
Kaptcha v2.3 And BuildMonitor v0.7
Jon released Kaptcha 2.3 which includes a patch I submitted about 2 months ago. This patch replaced imaging library with pixels. If you look closely at the new kaptcha image…
you will notice that the water effect (at the centre of the image) is now visible with pixels, whereas it wasn’t at all with imaging library in the original simplecaptcha implementation. I tested various settings of the water effect, and opted to minimise the effect so lowercase letters on a small font size are still easy on human eyes. Another change with 2.3 is the ripple effect on the characters. It’s not too obvious on the above image, but it’s more visible on uppercase letters with larger font size.
All in all, I think Kaptcha is a nice simple library that does the job. I started using it with Blojsom SCode Plugin, and contributed some improvements back to Kaptcha. Another (more popular) java-based captcha library is JCaptcha, which is also used by SCode Plugin. I’m not a big fan of JCaptcha for the simple reason that their generated captchas are hard to read. It’s interesting that similar comments were made on Hudson mailing list.
Now, on to Hudson Build Monitor. I just released BuildMonitor 0.7 last night. This version is compatible with the recently released Firefox 3.0.1, and it includes id-ID l10n as the first translation. Next version will have build executors monitoring. I’ve started working on the UI, but the data feed is yet to be added to Hudson core.
As you can see from the add-on page over at mozilla.org, this add-on still hasn’t received an approval for public access. I understand that the AMO editors (which all/mostly are volunteers) have been working hard with the crazy number of submissions per day since Firefox 3 release, but I believe that the current approval process will keep facing the same problem every time there’s a sudden jump in the number of add-on reviews, unless Mozilla allocates additional editors to help out. This is not a rant or gripe towards the editors, on the contrary, kudos to them for the work that they’ve been doing.
If I can suggest a change to the approval review process, I think it’s better to distribute the review tasks to the submitters by specifying a detailed list of tests that must be done by those submitters, and keep the tasks that the editors must do as minimal as possible. For example, if AMO provided me with 50 things to test, then I would go through the list, record the tests as a video, and put them on youtube. The reviewers can then just review the video, and still perform only the really really necessary checks, like scanning the source code for any obvious security issues.
So, Hudson users, please be patient, you have to keep logging in to add-ons.mozilla.org to download the add-on for now :).