Yeah, it’s still not over. We are still hard at work here. And we have big news today, let’s start with that:

• Mario finished his accessibility patches, all of them. This means that after proper review, Orca blocker bugs are gone from WebKitGTK+. He’s the guy in the photo, hug him, he won the internet.
• Martin gave a presentation about how he uses webkit-patch script, which I missed because I was fighting with Debian. Damn.
• Xan polished his API for querying information about plugins, this will enable us to have an useful about:plugins.
• Martin, the same cool guy, worked on much better plugin performance and polished his font fixes.
• Alex fixed spell checking, I might work on this tomorrow on the Epiphany side.
• After a long and painful distcheck I committed the nice error pages patch to Epiphany, they do look good now, you almost want errors to happen!
• Philippe kept spreading his cold and fixed more tests.
• Sergio is still polishing the cache code to make it rock solid and awesome.

Plus, Mario and Joone have uploaded their photos to flickr, check out their sets:

• Mario’s WebKitGTK+ 2010 hackfest
• Joone’s WebKitGTK+ hackfest 2010

Martin finished a task! YEAH! from diegoe on Vimeo.

It was quite cold today, but we managed to heat up the room by building WebKitGTK+ in all our machines at the same time, awesome functionality of the build.

• The Viewport metatag support is now integrated into WebKitGTK+ master.
• New font preferences are now in Epiphany master, minimum font size should be fixed too, a lot of introspection warnings are gone and I’m working on custom error pages.
• Xan finished his API for about:plugins, he’s now waiting for Dan to finish his part of the dance.
• Sergio (who asked why he’s not in the summaries; to whom I asked were was he when I was asking what everyone did) keeps working on cache fixes, there’s a tricky bug with limiting its size.
• Mario keeps hitting his head with accessibility work.
• Gustavo has started refactoring some private stuff and started work to get the web inspector to attach properly.
• Alex has been basically unbreaking everything that the others are breaking in their commit frenzy. Plus he’s fixing spell checking, yey!
• Alex and Gustavo gave love to the buildbots, the buildbots hugged back.
• Gustavo can’t play Street Fighter because zsnes doesn’t work on 64bits.
• Philippe kicked more media tests into the “passes” bin, this means more stuff is working as expected. YES.
• Dan worked on integrating the WebKitGTK+ cache into libsoup, so other applications can benefit from it.

Another day of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest, and a couple more stuff done.

• I finished my work to separate the profile migration code into a different binary, saving epiphany from a linking to NSS. Then Martin explained to Xan and myself how the points, pixels, logical sizes, etc mess works. Our conclusion was that 12 is the answer, points are responsible for lots of problems in society and that Epiphany is getting a new fonts UI.
• Dan and Benjamin have been working on stress testing gio-tls with the gvfs ftp backend, or so I’ve heard. Also, Dan seems to be preparing libsoup so we can add custom protocols to browsers, that means “about:whatever” can be back.
• Xan finished his oprofile support on JSC and started to work on a plugins API. The goal is to have an about:plugins page where you can disable individual plugins.
• Martin has been trying to ease the life of everyone by enabling precompiled headers.
• Alex and Philippe worked on updating our test runner script to be much faster and more precise, giving our more information about failing tests.
• Philippe advanced his custom widget to draw “progress ranges” for buffered parts of videos, like youtube does.
• Mario is still working on a really evil accessibility bug, he’s almost done I’ve heard.
• Gustavo fixed a complex bug where stuff that shouldn’t disappear was going away on page loads.
• Joone kept working on viewport support and the cache model
• Xan and Gustavo lost in Super Smash Bros against me, a lot of times.
• I lost to Gustavo and Xan in Street Fighter II, a lot of times.
• Gustavo likes the word “Cave”.

We also discussed a concept for GNOME 3 t-shirts, but we are keeping that one secret.

Finally, after seeing the presentation of Chrome OS and its sandboxes concept, we decided to implement it on Epiphany, so, here it is:

I’m happy about it, really really happy. I love this job, totally, completely!. I’ve had the chance to learn a lot. Here I’d like to share some things I have learned so far, I look forward to post again with more ideas, but meanwhile here you have two.

Different timezones are hard

The time when I find most of the Igalia crew online is between 2am and 12pm. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t find them past 12pm, but it’s already 7pm or 8pm in Europe then. I”m on UTC-5 and Spain is on UTC+1 or (now) UTC+2.

You probably agree that asking anyone to wake up at 7am in summer is unrealistic. Luckily, Igalia doesn’t make me pass a turing test everyday at a fixed time. This rocks.

Valparaíso, Chile

I love it when people understand that a happy hacker working at midnight is better than an unhappy hacker working on a set in stone schedule. Kudos to Igalia for that.

Your code should explain and defend itself

My written expression teacher says “Your text should be good enough to explain and defend itself”. This applies to code too. I confirmed this at the expense of Xan‘s patience.

It’s a common situation: when the maintainer reviews your patch you are not around to explain it, or present the rationale you put into the change. The solution? well, simple, your patch and commit log should explain by themselves.

I saw, after realising how much ping-pong Xan and I had to play to get a patch in, that my patches lacked a harder review by myself before being posted. You have to be your first reviewer.

Be a severe judge of your patch, ask yourself if you would accept such a patch, if you would like a commit message like that, if that variable name is really good, if someone could quickly grasp what’s it all about, etc. Get into the flippy flops of the maintainer, don’t assume everything is obvious to everyone.

So for my summer time (that’s freezing time for you all in the northern hemisphere) I’ll be joining Igalia doing an internship working on Epiphany and WebKitGTK+ . I’m really happy and excited about this!

Epiphany with match bolding, substring matching, unicode searching and above all, the geekiest thing for a location bar: regexp support.

Bug 517960 – Port the url bar completion func to GRegex