jetpack

I'm in Berlin this week to attend this weekend's MozCamp EU; because I'm a dork I really really like having some sort of local data network access, in particular for using google maps on my unlocked Android phone. Having mobile data access has completely changed how I travel, I'm much more likely to just really explore a place than I would without access to google maps. So here's my process for getting cheap mobile data in Berlin:

1. took the U6 -> S line trains to Alexanderplatz to get to the Alexa Mall ( http://g.co/maps/rv2hz, see map below )
2. went to Media Markt ( think German Best Buy ), bought a FONIC.de 10 euro SIM card
3. back at the Tryp hotel where I'm staying, I registered online with fonic.de to activate the sim. There is no English localization of the site and my German is terrible so I had a second window open to google translate to get through it.
4. in order for the data plan to really start, I had to set my Android phone to 'data roaming' mode.

This will get you a flat rate of 500MB of data, plus relatively cheap text and calling! Sadly, you do need to jump online to register the sim, this is definitely less convenient than what I got last month in London, where they sell flat-rate data sims from vending machines at Heathrow.

Alexa / Media Markt:

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This past week/end I was fortunate to be able to attend Seneca College's awesome annual Free Software & Open Source Symposium ( FSOSS for short ). This year marked ten years of FSOSS, and I was really impressed with the diversity of talks presented, as well as the irrepressible energy of the Seneca students participating and volunteering. I'd like to thank all of the students and staff for putting in the time to produce a great event; I know how gruelling this can be but it was totally worth it!

On Friday I arrived early and met up with fellow Mozillian Armen Zambrano to set up and man the Mozilla table:

See all that swag on the table? It was gone quite quickly, especially the hacky sacks. Armen and I were at the table all day talking to students and attendees, engaging with them on questions ranging from Thunderbird UX and rapid release schedules to Mozilla's various student-focused programs such as internships, recent-grad positions and Student Reps. Rarely was it quiet:

On Saturday we decided not to man the table - because we were out of swag! Also, Armen and I were both speaking in the morning. For Armen's perspective, please check out his blog post here:

http://armenzg.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-fsoss-was-for-me.html

At 10AM I gave a talk to about 30 people introducing them to the SDK and it's various features. If you're curious the slides are here:

http://talks.canuckistani.ca/fsoss/

FSOSS volunteers recorded the talk, so hopefully I'll get a copy back to hook up with my slides using popcorn.js. As well, the demos included in the talk will only work if you are running Firefox 7+ and have installed this helper add-on:

http://talks.canuckistani.ca/fsoss/addon/fsoss-example.xpi

There were a number of other talks by Mozillians:

• Ehsan Akhgari: How Web Browsers Work
• Lawrence Mandel: XBMC
• David Seifried: Popcorn.js & Popcorn-Maker
• Armen Zambrano: How to ship Open Source software to half a billion users

On Saturday afternoon Ehsan, Lawrence and I helped facilitate a Mozilla-focused BOF session during the 'unconference' section of the schedule. The conference was interesting and free-wheeling, covering such topics as #OWS, rapid release, enterprise support and how Mozilla works with Linux distributions.

The thing that impressed me the most about FSOSS was learning more from the Seneca students & faculty about their programs; I wish more educational institutions would follow their lead and get their students working on open source.

A Raspberry Pi Alpha board

I'm excited to head out to Toronto ( what my mother refers to fondly as 'the big smoke' ) next week to give a talk on developing add-ons with the Add-on SDK at Seneca College's Free Software and Oopen Source Symposium. Looking over the schedule of talks I am amazed at the diversity of talks; it is refreshing be able to attend a single event and attend sessions on such diverse subjects as:

• Drupal theme building
• XBMC - using Linux as a media centre.
• OLPC Project work in Kenya
• Raspberry Pi a full Linux system in a tiny $25 package. DO WANT.
• Lots of other amazing stuff - really, I'm just scratching the surface!

I am also pleased that Mozilla has a strong presence at FSOSS this year; not only are we sponsoring but there are talks on Popcorn.js and Mozilla release management, and I am planning to organize a Mozilla BOF for Saturday afternoon.

So I'm in London. Yay!

I'm here ever-so-briefly with my fellow SDK team members presenting an evening of workshops at London City University. That's happening tonight, by the way!

Pro tip: if you're a nerd and you're looking for 3G access in the UK, do what we did yesterday and get the 1GB, 20 quid 3G data only SIM. Who are you going to call in the UK? Just get on Whatsapp or Groupme with your friends ( Gchat will do in a pinch ) and embrace the pure-data future. You ( well, I ) are going to want GMaps far more than a working phone.

Dietrich and I did some exploring yesterday afternoon around the Clerkenwell / Islington area and I was struck not just by the history implied by some of the architecture, but also how very obviously ancient things are situated directly next to very modern things.

Later we met up with my dear Londonite friends Dave and Jen, drank real ale and sampled rare whisky before finally turning in. I slept like the dead.

I've been picking away at this project for the better part of the week, mostly while watching playoffs hockey. Well, the Canucks lost tonight so I might as well release some code!

Komodo extension page

Github repo

This extension integrates the basic SDK commands of init, test, run and docs and represents a minimum viable integration. It's mentioned in the Github README. The official 1.0 release of the SDK is coming up next week so it seems at least somewhat timely. ;)

I've taken a sudden interest in Mozilla's Addons sdk ( otherwise known as Jetpack ). I'm a bit of an old hat with Firefox's extension technology from my time at ActiveState; back then it was a bit painful to author and build package Mozilla extensions and we tried to make it a bit easier with Komodo, both for Firefox extensions and Komodo extensions.

Jetpack is a quantum leap forward in ease of use for building Firefox extensions. I was immediately impressed by the straightforward APIs, extensive docs and great command-line-oriented tooling and debugging. After a few hours of reading the docs, trying out the simple example and fixing a bug ( nitpick, really ) in the SDK, I have implemented a highly derivative Url-shortening extension and posted the code on github. And it works ( on my box )!

The extension has a very simple workflow:

* Hit Ctrl+Shift+u to create a shortened goo.gl Url for the current page.
* The extension will copy the new url to your clipboard and bring up a notification bubble.
* if you click on the notification bubble, Firefox will create open a new Tab with the shortened url.

The one implementation detail that took a bit longer was the actual call to the goo.gl url shortening service. I noted that the Google request to create a shortened url requires a raw json post with a content type of application/json. Typically POST requests have a content type of multi-part/form-data with url-encoded key/value pairs, and so without reading the jetpack docs closely I just implemented a typical xhr-based solution because I knew I could jam raw JSON content into the request:

Yesterday I went back to see if I could get the request working with Jetpack's APIs, and it turns out the solution was pretty simple:

In particular it's really flexible to be able to simply set the content body and content type header directly; given the diverse ways in which different online data providers are implementing their apis it's nice to be able to tie into externals in a simple and flexible way. Jetpack's hjgher-level apis also make it much easier to detect error handling, etc. You can also test asynchronous code like this using Jetpack's test framework:

The async features don't feel quite as slick as qunit's implementation to me, but they're easy to understand and implement. My next target is what seems to be the secret sauce in Jetpack: the ability to create HTML user interfaces and wire them into Jetpack code by posting events back and forth between the DOM code and the extension code.