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

I’m taking a quick “vacation” from Summer of Code and traveled down to San Diego for my first time. 😉 Actually, officially I’m here with my UIUC research group for the Federated Computer Research Conference (FCRC) to attend the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) – also my first time at one of these types of conferences (but there’ll be plenty more as I continue the Ph.D. program). FCRC is a combination of a bunch of other conferences, so there’ll be sessions about programming languages, theory, and more – it’ll be interesting to hear about the exciting new research in those fields as well.

The flight from San Jose was just over an hour, and we landed in the Commuter Terminal (so if you ever have a short flight out of SAN, make sure to go to CT and not Terminal 1 or 2). I met up with another of my advisor’s Ph.D. students, and we taxied to the hotel/convention center and took the trolley to Old Town to find some dinner.. mexican food! I’m sure there’ll be plenty more in the days to come before I leave Wednesday night.

About to land at SAN – flying past the baseball stadium