Writing software, the wrong way

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Back on the yellow brick road

After a series of unfortunate events, things seem getting better. I got enough back that I can start working again.

I started looking through some of FirefoxADM and WetDog code a while back, and I have been grossly misjudged these programs. Neither of them actually turned out to be extensions. This isn't a bad thing actually. FirefoxADM seems to be a fancy visual basic script that reads the registry and makes pref changes. WetDog is some C++ code (I haven't analyzed it too closely).

One of the things that I was worried about early on was redoing the work that has already been done. That doesn't look like it's going to happen. However, now the thing is trying to get enough work done for the next release.

Mike Kaply has started doing some work on using overlays to disable certain functionality, and loading those overlays dynamically. I need another copy of that program, put it into an extension if it's not already, and lubricate the firefox tree and jam it in. I also want to be able to set those overlays based on some registry values (there is a big fuss in bugzilla on where these key/value pairs should be. But that seems to have gotten in the way of getting actual work done).

This will probably be a giant hack, but it will be a good start. And it can be refined later as the semester goes.

Also, Mike made a useful blog post getting comments from people who have enterprise experience trying to figure out what enterprises would like to see. This will do until I can find some enterprises to collaberate with.

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