May 23, 2017

PyCon 2017

I recently attended PyCon for the first time in several years and thought I’d write a bit about my favorite sessions, the videos of which are already online.

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September 30, 2010

Twitblob

Over the past few years, I’ve made a number of little Web applications that are actually just HTML pages. Building things this way is really fun and really simple. It’s easy to understand and remix because there’s no custom server-side infrastructure to complicate matters. In some ways, it’s just like writing my first Web pages in the 1990’s, only now I can use JavaScript for more than just image rollovers. ... Read more

September 11, 2009

Coming At You Like A Pydermonkey

Since learning JavaScript over a year ago, it’s become one of my favorite dynamic programming languages alongside Python. And as I’ve mentioned before, I think the two languages actually complement each other pretty well. Python, at its heart, is a platform that’s built to be extended. The evidence for this is plentiful: there’s modules and packages out there that offer practically any functionality you want, from web servers to 3D game engines to natural language processing toolkits and more, all instantly accessible through a simple command or an installer download. ... Read more

February 27, 2009

Automatic Bug Reporting for Firefox Extensions

We want to make Ubiquity awesome at reporting errors. In our original release, a transparent message with JavaScript exception information was displayed, which wasn’t very useful to the average user, and was downright annoying when dozens of exceptions were logged in the same instant. At present, running a command that raises an error just results in that message being logged to the JS Error console, which very few people know how to access—so most people are left scratching their heads and wondering why their command is taking so long to run. ... Read more

February 11, 2009

PyXPCOM vs. jsbridge

Yesterday Tempura left a good question as a comment on my blog post concerning Ubiquity’s experimental support for Python: What about http://pyxpcomext.mozdev.org ? They bring Python in an xpi for all major plattforms, without the need of an local installed interpreter. Using PyXPCOM was actually a potential option we had considered, but we ended up going with jsbridge for a number of reasons: PyXPCOM uses XPCOM as its means of communication between Python and the Mozilla platform. ... Read more

February 10, 2009

Ubiquity's Python Feed Plugin

A few weeks ago I wrote about Ubiquity Feed Plugins, which are basically just a way of separating the user interface of subscribing to a new feature from the implementation of the feature itself. As I’ve written about before, one of the things I’ve missed about the Mozilla development environment is its support for the Python programming language. Aside from being humane and having a great community, it has functionality that could complement the Mozilla platform quite nicely. ... Read more

July 30, 2008

Towards Inter-Community Trust

In my recent post on Trusting Functionality I alluded to a socially-based framework for trust that would allow software to be generative and safe at the same time. When trying to figure out a solution to this problem, I realized that there are already communities on the internet that have built-in social mechanisms for trust. Python, for example, is a language notorious for its lack of protection against untrusted code. Yet we don’t see much concern that a Python script may contain malicious code, even though it has the ability to do whatever it wants to our computer. ... Read more

July 27, 2008

Mercurial Woes

Over the past few days my friends Ben Collins-Sussman and Jim Blandy and I have been having an interesting conversation about the use of Mercurial for development collaboration. Eventually one of my email responses got so long-winded that I figured it’d be best to make the conversation public. So, here’s my take on Mercurial, and some reasons for why a HG birds-of-a-feather session at the Mozilla Summit coming up next week would be very useful for me. ... Read more

July 23, 2008

Trusting Functionality

One of the major challenges we face with the design of our new linguistic command-line project is that of trust. As Zittrain mentions in The Future of the Internet, this is really the fundamental problem of generative systems, and also their most valuable asset: the ability for a user to run arbitrary code is simultaneously what gives the personal computer its revolutionary power, but it’s also its greatest vulnerability. At present, because our project is still in the prototyping stage, we’re opting for freedom of expressiveness and experimentation over security. ... Read more

July 3, 2008

Running C and Python Code on The Web

Last week, Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a toolchain he’s been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were pretty impressive. Before reading this post, readers who aren’t familiar with Tamarin may want to read Frank Hecker’s excellent Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin post from 2006 for some background on its goals and why it’s relevant to Mozilla and the open-source community in general. ... Read more

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