Tips and Tricks

Sadly, right now (and until bug 1169873 is fixed), it’s not possible to build Firefox for Android on Windows. That’s not nice, especially if you need to track down some Android-only failures triggered by your code 🙂 Until recently I was able to run my Android Virtual Device within my Ubuntu Virtual Machine (yeah, tricky). Then something broke in OracleVM (ticket 12941), preventing me from starting the Android emulator. Here comes the good news: there’s a way to spawn an Android emulator on Windows, build Firefox for Android on a VM and then run it....

On Linux and MacOS is quite normal to see the standard output in the shell when running Firefox from the command prompt. On Windows, this isn’t that easy, as the “-console” command line switch creates a new window that quickly disappears when Firefox shuts down. Luckily, there’s an interesting option that seems to produce the desired behaviour on Windows: “-attach-console“. As reported on MDN, “[…] use -attach-console to use the existing console....

Just imagine this scenario: one day you turn off your pc and you try to turn it on the following day. And it doesn’t or, more precisely, your trustworthy Maxtor/Seagate HDD (Model No. STM3320614AS) is no longer detected during the boot or shows a size of 0GB. You get mad, you get angry. Then you try to figure out how to get your data back. It appears that, due to a firmware bug, some particular Maxtor and Seagate HDDs lock up their SATA port (BSY bug) or corrupt show as 0 sized (0 LBA)....

Recently, the Mozilla Firefox build interface, aka mach, was enhanced with a great feature for Windows developers: the ability to generate Visual Studio project files. Such project files are not maintained in mozilla-central, hence the need for a way to generate them. Thanks to the awesome work done by Gregory Szorc, generating project files using mach is as simple as issuing the following command: [bash] ./mach build-backend backend=VisualStudio [/bash] The solution file will be available in your object directory, under the msvc folder (i....

Did you know you could synchronize your Windows Mobile device with Google Calendar without using any third party application? Amazing, isn’t it? 🙂 Simply follow this link: Set Up your Windows Mobile Phone