RTFM (again)

When I first started pair programming it took me about 2 hours to come to terms with the fact that sometimes you need to ask for help, and that it's OK to look in a manual. You won't lose face with your pair for doing that.

It took our boss about 2 weeks to notice the increase in traffic on uk.php.net caused by my arrival.

So why is it that whenever I'm coding on my own I will tend to try to hack through the undergrowth with a pen knife to get to the solution rather than ask someone if I can borrow their chainsaw?

The latest example is a problem I was having with a firefox extension.

I wanted the user to be able to select a piece of text, right click, pick my extension and have a dialog box where one of the fields contains the selected text.

Since I already knew how to do this I flew straight in and spent ages fiddling round in the dialog box's code with parent.getSelection(), parent.window.getSelection, parent.window.context.getSelection() and every other combination including parents, windows and selections that I could think of. Not a chance.

For some reason I couldn't get the text from the parent window. I suspect that firefox does not regard the window the user sees as the parent window, but I've not bothered looking to find out...

Anyway, quite early on in I thought to mayself:

'This would be easy if you could just pass arguments into the dialog box. I could just get the selection in the code that kicks off the dialog box and there we go'.

But since I knew window.open I knew this wasn't possible.

An hour later I decided to take a look at openDialog, which is the call I was actually making to open the window. It turned out that yep, you can pass arguments into the child dialog box.

If only I'd just accepted that I don't know everything and looked at it an hour earlier I'd have saved myself a lot of stress.

Note to self... RTFM!

CSS Rules

We love CSS here, we try to use it as much as possible to ensure that the look and feel of our application is easily skinnable. We're pretty good at it, and we get by.

This guy though... now HE knows what he's doing :-)

UK Flag in CSS only

Hardware Tokens

In our office, we all sit around a couple of sets of desks. You may say that we're definitely not 'geographically challenged'. Each pair can pretty clearly see every other pair.

We don't store any source code on our local machines. Since we're developing a PHP application we need to deliver it though a web server and it access a nice big Oracle database, and guess what... we've got a whole department geared up to supporting web servers and databases. So we don't have local installs of databases and webservers, we don't administrate them, and none of us want to.

So our workspaces live on a network drive. Yep, Win CVS is a bit of a pain over a network, but for now we're living with it. Our PHP files live on a web server so we can access them without running any uploads or anything.

We've given our workspaces numbers, prefixed with the name of the project. The source code lives in a folder with the name of the workspace and the database lives in a schema with the name of the workspace. Your pair is working in workspace 'Laurel1', you get set of source code 'Laurel1' and database schema 'Laurel1'. Nice and simple.

The only problem is, if no one individual owns a particular workspace, then how do we know which pair is allowed to work in which workspace?

We have mutually exclusive hardware tokens. Or, to put it another way... we have paper flags that we put into holsters taped onto the back of our flat screen monitors.
If you've got the Laurel1 flag then you've got the Laurel1 workspace, and only your pair is allowed to change the workspace.
If you 've not got the Laurel1 flag then you can't change the Laurel1 workspace.

Since everyone's living so close, it's easy to see the flags. In the very rare situation where a pair is working remotely, they phone up a proxy to get their flag, a humorous effigy is made of one of the pair, and the flag is given to the effigy.

We have a spare workspace too...

We call it integrate*. It's the workspace where the integration takes place. In order to do a large scale commit you must have the integrate workspace token. If you don't then you don't commit. The pair with the token is the pair that's currently doing an integration. It has the advantage of a separate build machine since you're forced to check in from your dev space and check out to the integrate space and everyone can see you're doing it.

Our hardware tokens make it easy to see who's working where.

And they were fun to make.

Technorati Tags: Robert+Baillie, Extreme+Programming, pair+programming, workspaces, development


* actually, we call it autotest, but if we got a new one we'd call it integrate... honest.

The saddest post ever

One of the things that I had to come to terms with about 18 months ago was the fact that I needed to understand regular expressions.
The Oracle world has yet to really embrace these strange beasts, and so I was completely hidden from their glory.

Now, I've reached the point where I'm going to do possibly the saddest thing in the whole world. I'm going to post a recent regular expression onto this blog... here... now.

For a soon to arrive firefox extension, I needed to extract a number of complete sentences from a piece of text that numbered at least 100 characters in length. Here's how I did it:

     (.|\n){200,}?[\.!\?\)"\n\r]+

OK, if you use apostrophes as quotation marks it falls down a little, but then you deserve a slap anyway ;-)

For being so sad, I must now go and whip myself with a birch branch.

Updated: OK, so I'm hoping that it now deals with newlines properly as well ;-) Serves me right!

Extending in batch

Inspired by Andrew Beacock, with thanks to Brian Duff's post here and the cracking resource at XUL Planet, I've started to look at doing some Firefox extension development.

It all looks pretty straightforward. Produce a bit of XML in the guise of XUL and slap in some Javascript event handlers and you've got the idea. Early testing is easy since Firefox just lets you open XUL files as if they're HTML. It's all very easy to get going with.

The only issue I had at the start was the structuring of the source code tree and the packaging up of the .XPI file.
An .XPI file is a packages extension that Firefox can install. It's easy to run one, you can simply double click on it and firefox kicks of its extension manager. Packaging one up though, it a little trickier. Without wanting to get into the details of the how any why (again, Brian Duff's got the intro covered), I've found it's easist to develop within the directory structure that's ultimately required by the XPI package...

+YourExtentionName
|
|-- install.rdf
|
|-+ chrome
  |
  |---+ content
      |-- contents.rdf + other .rdf files
      |-- .xul files
      |-- .js files
      |-- .css files

Brian suggests dropping the chrome directory and having the content in the extension directory, but that's much of a muchness if you ask me. He also supplies an ANT task to package up the XPI file for you. I don't have ANT installed. I don't use it, because I've got no need for it at home (it's overkill for this, really). So in true Windows skript kiddi traditions, I've put together a batch file that'll do the same job.

It assumes the directory structure is the same as stated above, and it should be ran from the YourExtensionName directory.

Forgive me if it's not perfect, feel free to use and amend. It'd be nice if you posted a comment back here if you improve it.

Update:Just had my attention drawn here/ Shame I didn't spot that before I wrote my own Batch file based packager! Eerily similar they are too...

BUILD_XPI.BAT

@ECHO OFF

SETLOCAL

IF ""=="%1" GOTO :noparams

SET current_directory=%cd%
SET extension_name=%1

MKDIR build\chrome
DEL %extension_name%.xpi

CD chrome
CALL :createZipFile "%current_directory%\build\chrome\%extension_name%" *.*
MOVE "%current_directory%\build\chrome\%extension_name%.zip" "%current_directory%\build\chrome\%extension_name%.jar"

CD ..\build
COPY ..\install.rdf .
CALL :createZipFile "%current_directory%\%extension_name%" *.*
MOVE "%current_directory%\%extension_name%.zip" "%current_directory%\%extension_name%.xpi"

cd ..
RD build /q /s

GOTO:EOF


:createZipFile
  SET zip_file=%~1
  SET files=%~2

  REM Change the following line to one that runs your particular CMD Zip executable
  REM
  REM It should create a ZIP file, adding files recursively, keeping
  REM their directory structure

  pkzipc -add -rec -dir=specify %zip_file% %files%

GOTO :EOF

:noparams
Must specify a name for the extension

Technorati Tags: firefox, mozilla, development, extension, Robert+Baillie, Andrew+Beacock, Brian+Duff