Yet another Spider update is available

The major change is to script-loader.js which no longer uses the subscript loader to load external user hook functions.

After a great week in Mountain View with the rest of team I returned to find that not all was well.

When I tried to boot my trusty Dell Precision, nothing happened. Upon inspection, I found the video card had been pushed in and “bent”. I have been assured that no unauthorized vacuuming occurred during my absence, which leaves Miss Kitty as the likely suspect. I tried to re-seat the card to no avail. I think Miss Kitty actually did me a favor since I found a number of capacitors on the motherboard are bulging with “crap” coming out of their tops. I guess I am reaping what I sowed in my last post.

On Monday, I’ll try to find someone who might be able to replace the motherboard and possibly video card for a reasonable price but it looks like I’ll be needing a replacement for my personal computing soon.

PS. If you wish to comment, don’t forget to answer the challenge-response question!

I sit here typing this on a 4+ year old Dell Precision while my trusty 3+ year old IBM Thinkpad stands by waiting for me to hit the road. The Dell has never needed a repair while the Thinkpad has been to the shop once. I like the Thinkpad so much, I even went for the extended warranty when the original 3 year warranty expired.

I’ve been jealous of the really sweet MacBook Pros that I’ve seen other mozillian’s packing and was planning on upgrading both my workstation and laptop to some really killer Macs sometime in the first half of next year. However, I am having second thoughts after seeing the kind of experience others are having.

Norm Walsh has been having problems recently that raised my concerns a bit.
Dave Winer has also been experiencing his share of the pain, but his experience with the Apple Store has left me flabbergasted.

What other choices for a really fast workstation and laptop do I have? For what its worth, I’m running Fedora on both my workstation and laptop and don’t want Windows on either machine. Suggestions very much appreciated.

I updated the DOM Test Suite
to use the latest JsUnit and reran the full set of tests to determine
which assertions are still being fired.

The test results are nothing new from what I can tell and are probably already included in the mochikit
version of the DOM Test suite. The assertions are relatively minor and known.

• Assertion Count

• Test Results with rough location of assertions

Yesterday, Pratap Lakshman of Microsoft announced the publication of the first draft of “JScript Deviations from ES3″

The document covers not only JScript as implemented in IE, but JavaScript as implemented in Firefox, Opera and Safari. This should make for some interesting reading!

Thanks Pratap!

Assert This! - Top Site Assertions, October 27, 2007

No matter where you go, Jesse’s been there already.

During some top site testing of about 7,500 pages with a debug Minefield build on Linux over the weekend, I ran into the following assertions ordered by decreasing count. This should give some idea of the frequency of each in the wild.

Spider 0.0.2.11 removes the auto update functionality due to bug 378216. You will need to update Spider manually until such time as I have a secure method for automatic updates.

Yet another Spider update version 0.0.2.10.

This version reworks the external script loader used to load user hook scripts to work around issues with the Gecko 1.8 branch and trunk. Due to changes in how eval works on the trunk, the previous version 0.0.2.8 changed from using XMLHttpRequest to load external scripts and scope.eval to evaluate the script in the appropriate scope to using the JSSubScriptLoader. However this caused problems on the 1.8 branch where the scripts were not always loaded. I’ve therefore moved to a hybrid approach where XMLHttpRequest/eval are used on the 1.8 branch while JSSubScriptLoader is still used on the trunk. Let me know if you have any issues with this release.

If you are already a user of Spider in Firefox, you can simply update the extension via the add-ons menu, otherwise you can download it.

Housekeeping

I’ve changed the category for Spider on this blog to be a top level category which is no longer part of the Mozilla category tree. This should keep YASU announcements from polluting Planet Mozilla where they are out of place.

Spider 0.0.2.8 replaces the use of scope.eval(...) with JSSubScriptLoader to work around recent changes to eval on the trunk.

My shell account at Dreamhost was compromised and this site was vandalized. It appears this was a wide spread event and a number of other sites hosted at Dreamhost were affected. If you have an account at Dreamhost, I recommend you change your passwords for your shell and email and check your web content for modifications.

I’ve cleaned up the mess (I think). Although as far as I can tell the Spider.xpi was not modified, I have generated a new version of Spider 0.0.2.7 to force an update to any Spider users.