Today I officially began my Mozilla internship where I’ll be playing around with ActionMonkey [wiki.mozilla.org] for the Mozilla 2. This new monkey is a combination of two monkeys: SpiderMonkey (current JavaScript engine used by Mozilla created by Brendan Eich [wikipedia.org]) and Tamarin (VM and JIT for ECMAScript 4th edition donated by Adobe).

Eventually, this new engine will speed up Firefox, which has a front-end that is mainly controlled by JavaScript, as well as web applications using JavaScript. It’ll be able to do runtime optimizations instead of just interpreting the code – similar ideas to what can make Java faster than C++ code.

As for the Summer of Code project, I’ll need to finish up the Link Fingerprints Internet Draft and wait for comments. Code-wise, I have a working implementation with patches in bug 377245 [bugzilla.mozilla.org], but it seems like things are waiting on the standardization of the Link Fingerprints concept. And the side project of coding up Download Manager changes might take a back seat for now. (Well, the main big thing here was using bytes/KB/MB/GB units when appropriate [bugzilla.mozilla.org]. 🙂 )

Status Update:

[RFC] Writing draft for #hash(type:data) syntax with a specific type of sha256
for all mime types.

[Code] Updated code from reviews + strictify syntax and made big patch
available in bug 377245. (grab v2 bug 385599 with the #undef if you want to try
things out)

Last week (2007/06/17 – 2007/06/23):

– Get code reviewed and update from comments
– Add flag to turn on/off (bug 385599)
– (Interview for platform internship)
– Not get responses from various people about drafts, RFC, IETF
– Outline and draft the internet draft

This week (2007/06/24 – 2007/06/30):

– Continue writing draft and review/submit before July 2nd
– (Start internship?)

Status Update:

[Code] Things are working fine for me. Waiting for reviews.

[RFCs] Contacting people on how to draft Link Fingerprints for IETF’s July 2nd meeting.

Last 2 weeks (2007/06/03 – 2007/06/16):

– Done initial coding to support Link Fingerprints for HTTP downloads/pages
– Open various bugs to break the patch into pieces – waiting for reviews.
– (Submit to MICRO; Attend FCRC for ISCA, PLDI, HOPL – majority of last 2 weeks)
– Fix related download manager bugs (and other random bugs..)

This week (2007/06/17 – 2007/06/23):

– Draft Link Fingerprints.
– Write. Write. Write.
– Contact Borden and St.Laurent about their type-independent #fragment-id

Status Update:

[Code] Got automatic hash checking working in the channel so it gives an error status on Link Fingerprint failure, so loading bad hash pages results in an error page, and some images (gif, bmp) show up as a broken image.. others like jpg progressively load and show whatever they have on failure (i.e., the whole thing).

[RFCs] Looking into other #fragment-id uses (XML XPointers and PDF) and references from Wilde and Baschnagel’s text/plain paper in HT 2005 (Sixteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia).

Last week (2007/05/27 – 2007/06/02):

– Implement hash comparisons and pass on an error code from OnStopRequest to listeners downstream
– Add a new network error pages for Link Fingerprint failures on page view (need a better string..)
– Discuss implementation details on m.d.t.network clarifying my current implementation just provides a new error code after the transfer finishes
– Attend Google Dev Day (Thursday)
– Invite Erik Wilde to discuss RFC stuff and Link Fingerprint issues
– Begin handling of Link Fingerprint failures in the consumers like download manager (vs webbrowserpersist/exthandler)

This week (2007/06/03 – 2007/06/09):

– Remove/delete failed downloads cleanly from the download manager
– Refactor added code in HttpChannel so adding Link Fingerprints to other channels is clean/simple
– Look into the image library to handle Link Fingerprint transfer failures
– Figure out what interfaces to provide (for extensions) e.g., exist?/get fingerprint from URI, check fingerprint against file/stream
– Note: Next week I’ll be out – attending FCRC 2007 in San Diego 9th to 13th