Something very unfortunate happened last Friday. Do to some lack of intern foresight, we actually lost a good to great intern perk. I think all the interns came out of that meeting shaken up a bit, maybe even a bit angry for losing something that they weren’t responsible for.

But that got me thinking about all the perks that Mozilla does gives. Indeed, they don’t have to supply interns with an apartment for the summer. They don’t have to give us transportation to take us to and from work, and let us drive it where ever on the weekends. And they don’t have to stock the place with free beverages and snacks, and a wii console and a ping pong table. But they do, and it’s often easy to take for granted something that is a privilege.

For a good moment, I forgot what this internship means to me, and how lucky I am to be back. While I don’t think any of my mentors will start a start-up with me, it’s great to witness part of the process which makes a great company. So while the lost intern perk was unfortunate, it’s a very small price to pay considering what we’re still getting in return.

I’ve spent a few hours working with, and trying to figure out how to best incorporate some of the bonsai features into the json output of tinderbox. Bonsai output seems to be restricted to HTML only, at least initially. Searching devmo proved fruitless, so I asked in #developers where Mossop had a program he made a while back that parsed the HTML and found what he needed. While talking, someone (I can’t recall, and I apologize) mentioned that bonsai has XML output and pointed to a buildbot script, and after some analyzing came to the part I was looking for. It seems that that any bonsai query can output to XML by adding “&xml=1″ to the end of the url string.

Rock’n. I got a few more things out of the way, and hopefully have something out soon!

You probably guessed by my last post what I was working on. Well, here is a screenshot of what it’s starting to look like (this is an old tinderbox log, and options obviously isn’t yet synced with the UI just yet.

Click for a larger image

There is already an extension that does something similar, hidden within the tinderbox page. But I’m still happier with this result, since anything that saves a trip to the tinderbox page is a nice thing to have!

I have also been debating between the license I want to give this program. I am basically limited to around three choices, MIT/GPLv2/{Beer|Donation|Charity}ware. Each with its own unique traits. I can’t really see anyone commercializing this or putting into some sort of binary extension, so I don’t think the GPL would really benefit me. Nothing is set in stone. There is still time to make that decision.

This weekend, some of the interns (Gary and Armen) did sightseeing throughout the California area and clocked in almost 170miles. Almost all the places I went to I already went last year, except Watsonville which is some obscure town south of Santa Cruz. We passed pigeon point lighthouse again, but didn’t stop by. Here is the route we took for some beautiful scenery on Saturday :

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iPod much beloved once you get on the road near the trees/mountains and the reception gets very poor to listen to anything other than hee-haw music. When we arrived in Half Moon Bay, we stopped at a beach for a bit and Armen went for a dip in the freezing Pacific water. Gary managed to get a shot of Armen’s “Baywatch moment”. I was cold with a light jacket on, I can’t imagine how bad it must have been for him.
We also made a stop at a vista point to look over the landscape and seascape. It was actually quite beautiful. A few of bugs hit our windshield and made a squishy sound.

Today, on Sunday, we met with Anthony and did some San Francisco sightseeing. The route we took can’t be plotted on google maps properly because of one-way streets. But here is the best I could do :

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We walked around, a lot. To the point where it was shorter for Anthony to walk home rather than go back to the van with us. The trip back was long when you have to climb steep hills. We also passed the crooked road that SF seems to be famous for. We were going to go down, but the lineup of cars was huge and didn’t seem worth it.

I have pictures of both adventures. I just want to upload them to the website. Stayed tuned for pics.

Both trips were a lot of fun, but very exhausting. The exhausting part doesn’t make it feel like a weekend. We’re already planning the next weekend! So I guess I’ll have to rest on the weekdays

Update 1: I upload our San Francisco pictures.

So I have been on vacation for less than a week and I’m already disappointed with myself.

Firstly, I haven’t been keeping up with my AMO responsibilities. I really need to do this, but I find myself being distracted every few hours.

Secondly, I haven’t gotten anywhere near as much work done with Prism as I wanted. I want to fix three bugs, two of which I already assigned to me :

1. Adding Preferences as an extension
2. Installing a webapp should automatically fill in the name with the title of the website if not already present
3. Lastly, I want the extension to search for .js files in the .webapp file and load a security warning, as webapp.js files have chrome level privileges

And there is more stuff obviously. This website. Shopping for summer clothes. Getting paperwork out of the way. Hanging out with friends.

Damn you Playstation and Wintendo!

So while I await the final marks for my courses, it has finally given me some time to relax without having something in the back of my mind bothering me. I got the playstation back in my room and played a few games of Warcraft on my Wintendo box. Unfortunately, I have got a bit ill during exam week with a sore throat and fever. It seems to have picked up after exams (of course) accompanied with coughing.

I finally set up my website. I plan to put up a bunch of stuff here, but wordpress would have to do for now.

There is still plenty of stuff that has to be done for the next few weeks. The only thing that’s going to keep this blog working is if I keep busy.