Hudson BuildMonitor v1.5.5

FIFA World Cup 2010 update: Australia was demolished by Germany 0-4.

After ten months since the last public approval (v1.0.2) and four review rejections from the Mozilla editors, Hudson BuildMonitor v1.5.5 was finally approved a couple of weeks ago.

This version contains a major refactoring effort, attempting to separate the generic JavaScript code from the Firefox specific code. The goal was to make it easier for me to create a Chrome extension version of Hudson BuildMonitor, but of course I never had the time to do it and by now there are already two Chrome extensions out there, Hudson Extension by sanitz and Hudson Monitor by Henning Hoefer.

What I didn’t know back then when I started the refactoring effort was that Mozilla introduced an add-on verification suite about a month after v1.0.2, and that the Mozilla editors started working on reducing global namespace pollution. Those two things were good of course, it’s just that I had to put more sporadic efforts to work on those changes, which then stretched this release even longer.

Some of those changes are:

• Everything is now namespaced, and I really mean everything. The editors even picked up un-namespaced external libraries, which means Dean Edward’s Base is now name_edwards_dean.Base .
• setTimeout usage should be replaced by nsITimer.
• Login details management should use *drumroll* nsILoginManager.
• Datejs can’t be used anymore because it extends native Date, I replaced it with Matt Kruse’s Date library.

Out of the bug fixes included in the 1.5.x releases, I’m particularly happy with:

• Finding a workaround for HUDSON-2979, a problem that has been a blocker for OS X users. I bought a MacBook Pro about six months ago and was finally able to investigate this error myself.
• Fixing the mysterious error with French translation files. It used to work in older versions prior to v1.0.2 because the property files were UTF-8 without byte order mark and they contained non-ASCII characters, then at one point it was accidentally encoded as ISO-8859-1 while still having those non-ASCII characters which then broke the add-on. To avoid this problem from happening again in the future, I decided to take the safer option and unicode-escape those non-ASCII characters.

Working on Hudson BuildMonitor on and off for the past two years (the first release was on 8 June 2008, wow, has it been _that_ long?) has been a good opportunity to revisit JavaScript, a language many developers used to look down at. I agree with Douglas Crockford that JavaScript has been misunderstood, checkout his talk on JavaScript: The Good Parts at Google, and with the emergence of server side JavaScript, I believe this language is going to take off next year.

And to those who are still using Hudson BuildMonitor, thank you.

Introducing Wordnik Search Firefox Add-on

For those Firefox users who often need to look up for a word.

Having lived in Australia for the last decade or so after the first 18 years growing up in Indonesia, I’m now at a point where I’m fluent enough in English but still occasionally need to look up for the definition of rarely used words and phrases, while at the same time I lost track of the more recent Indonesian slang and, again, I have to look for the meaning on the Internet.

I used to rely on multiple web sites like Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, and Google, to find out the definition of a word and how it’s supposed to be used. A simpler solution is long overdue, and I finally found out about Wordnik early last week. Wordnik provides the definitions of the word, examples with links to quality articles, Twitter messages containing the word, and also pronunciations, etymologies, and sample phrases, all in one convenient page.

Here’s how Wordnik page looks like for some English words: dissonances, crystallography. The tweets are instant win for Indonesian slang: jayus, jomblo. Pretty handy, eh? It would be even better if Wordnik can expand their dictionary to non-English languages.

Now, Firefox is my primary browser, how do I use Wordnik on FF? There are three options I can think of (1) search the word on Wordnik.com, (2) add Wordnik search engine to Firefox, or (3) use a bookmarklet. Each of these options uses too many mouse clicks, too many mouse movements, or too many keystrokes for me.

So I decided to scratch this itch and wrote Wordnik Search Firefox Add-on.

All you need to do is highlight a word or a phrase, right click, and select ‘Search In Wordnik’ option. A new tab with Wordnik page for the highlighted word/phrase will then appear.

If there’s no highlighted text, you can still right click and select ‘Search In Wordnik’, a search dialog window will appear and you can search for any word/phrase you want.

You can install this add-on from Mozilla.org, but it’s still currently beta so you have to tick the ‘Let me install this experimental add-on.’ checkbox. Any question? Please leave a comment. If you find any bug, please raise an issue.

Update (12/5/2010):

The add-on has been approved for public access by a Mozilla.org editor. Translation: no checkbox ticking is needed, install away!

BuildMonitor v1.0

It’s been a long time since the last one (v0.9.2 – November 2008), but I’ve finally managed to release Hudson Build Monitor v1.0 .  This add-on is still in the sandbox, I’ve been waiting for approval from the Mozilla editors for the last 9 months, so unfortunately you still have to login to download it.

A new feature in this release is build executor monitoring. This feature will work only on Hudson instance feeds (non-job feeds), and you have to enable it via Prefereces window -> Feeds tab -> Enable executor monitoring check box.

The executor status will be displayed next to the build status. It’s blue when one of the executors is running a build, red when one of the executors is stuck, and grey when all executors are idle or offline.

Another new feature is the support for HTTP Basic Authentication, this has been requested by a number of users with password-protected Hudson feeds. You can set the username and password in Preferences windows -> Network tab -> Username and Password fields.

Thanks to Jason Meridth who helped with testing this feature and wrote up his experience.

Other minor changes in this release:

• ‘Add Link To Hudson Build Monitor’ menu only appears when you’re right clicking Hudson feed links (for all, for failures, for just latest builds), and no longer for all links.
• Preference window is now tab-ified as seen from the above screenshot.
• Hudson icon tooltip on Firefox status bar now displays a message that recommends user to add Hudson feed link via right click menu instead of manually adding the URL to Preferences window Feeds section. This feature was already implemented in v0.9 (released in November 2008) and documented on the wiki page, however, there are quite a number of users who are still not aware of it and keep adding the feed URL manually following the old tooltip message.

As usual, translations have been updated thanks to Eric Lefevre-Ardant and Seiji Sogabe. Unfortunately I had to temporarily disable the French translation in v1.0 due to something wrong with the file/text(s) which breaks the add-on. I’ll do a patch release when it’s all sorted out, in the mean time, users with French locale on Firefox will get the default English texts.