Went to the Toronto Mozilla office today. Spent the afternoon reviewing add-ons and I also got to put some faces to names. Since last Friday when we got training from Alex Polvi to be editors for AMO, I’ve reviewed 14 extensions and I’m learning a lot about the process.

Ted said he’d be reviewing my patch tomorrow and we’re hoping to land it in the next few days. As far as I can tell right now, the only issue should be that my error handling is currently just printed to stderr and doesn’t actually change the srcsrv flag.

So fingers crossed – there might be source server on the debug builds by the end of the week. This means the rest of term can be devoted to pdbstr.exe. I have yet to communicate with Timeless who is the recommended contact to discuss things of this ilk.

Over reading week I should be able to do some more digging into those hex dumps as well as start testing the source server once it’s on Tinderbox.

Well as reading week approaches and I wait (again) for feedback on my patch, I am trying to keep busy in Mozilla activities.

One of my recent activities is helping out with Live Chat user support. It’s amazing! A very small team of dedicated people are helping individuals in real time with their wide variety of issues. I’ve been learning tons about the issues that users face – right now firewalls and security updates seem to be a frequent problem. I’m also jumping headlong into another thread of the vast Mozilla community, this one mostly volunteers, and getting to know some folks. The EST hours for Live Chat are from 4pm – 9pm and from 10pm – 12am. I mostly have been able to pitch in on the later shift because that’s about when I am tired of doing my homework 🙂

Getting involved with Live Chat was super easy – I read the documentation, created and account and was shadowing experienced helpers less than an hour later. One week later and I’m in on a phone conference to discuss what the priorities are for the next 3 months. Again, I say amazing.

I encourage all Mozilla or open source involved Seneca students to jump into Live Chat and try helping out people in real time. It’s intense, and can be challenging (I think my success rate is only about 50%) but it’s an eye-opening experience for how the other half lives. The half what don’t have #seneca for all their questions.

Although my goal was to have the symbolstore.py patch approved for committal by week’s end, I am very close. Today I spent about 5 hours tweaking the patch as per the most recent comments.

What was done:

* Makefile now checks for the environment variable of PDBSTR_PATH to be set before assigning the flag to source index
* Several minor logic changes to the symbolstore.py like removing redundant file path fixing
* I finally understood what Ted was saying about using a temp filename before checking for VCSinfo. This small change made it possible to remove 3 lines of work-arounds that I had been doing 🙂
* The hard-coding of the path to the pdbstr.exe executable is gone and has been replaced by whatever is in the environment variable

A few glitches:

* Making changes to the Makefile that resulted in errors left me with a makefile that couldn’t update itself and Ted pointed me to doing a make -f client.mk configure which regenerated the Makefiles and cleared that up
* I had to look into how to get the environment variable in python – thanks to web search I found the os.environ.get() function

Other than that, it’s all working and I’m very happy to be awaiting another review.