Tape 004 - Clip 2
Short_Description:
Greg working on the mac version of Netscape
Vimeo_:
TranscriptText:
Im trying to get the Mac version of Navigator up and running its been not working for
the last month or two an um its something really really wrong is going on and
trying to figure out why cant quite figure out why
Urn first try and reproduce it so that can try to get feel for it If do this then this
happens and can then Ill know where in the source to start looking But the problem is
right now have yet to get to that point where know where to start looking And uh so
Imjust trying whole bunch of different things just trial and error to see if something
will look weird or look funny or catch my eye and can start investigating the So
things you know things in the application look wrong because nothings drawing and
were not getting events and the clock up here is stopped solrnean things have gone
horribly horribly wrong but when try to step through into the debugger dont see
anything necessarily thats so bad Were getting some strange events and Im tryin to
figure out where theyre coming from But as of yet Ive been unable to figure it out.t
Uh one officially which is cleaning up the artwork which Ive done urn the other
unofficially is getting Navigator running so that when we put the source code out the Mac
conmiunity actually has product that they can Which we sort of find to be little bit
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
important at least the Mac group here finds that to be very important Uh so were trying
our hardest working long hours to get this thing off the floor but were running into some
road blocks and its being very difficult Bad Navigator oh well
Actually it hasnt been so bad recently this past weeks been kinda bad because my wifes
been out of town feels like ..my wife is on business trip so decided to put in some
extra hours It happens to be very good timUkt these next couple weeks are probably
going to be pretty bad though because we have all of this work we just discovered
whole bunch of new problems that we knew about but that we hadnt been tracking and so
we just realized how doomed we were this morning and uh with Navigator misbehaving
like it is urn were not as far along as we thought we were yesterday Urn we all got that
warm fuzzy at the Michael Toy meeting You know whoo hoo we only got bugs
were set to go now its we only have 5N bugs and were nowhere close So things are
changing on daily basis which is sort of how things have been going on for the past
couple of months
/1
Urn most of the bugs that were dealing with now are getting the source code cleaned up
Were not for the most part were not actually fixing anything urn the thing with
Navigator most of us around here normally build Communicator and since it is the free
source world were not shipping Communicator were not shipping mail and news we
had to resurrect Navigator which wed sort of go by the wayside wed been doing 5.0
developrnentfwe figured oh well just pick it up again when we get close to shipping and
we let
ityt
little too close because no one expected this 3-31 deadline to sort of come up
and bite us on the rear um so weve had to rush and try and get it off the floor and UNIX
and windows seem to do pretty well with it the Mac version is being stubborn
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
You pretty much need to be Mac person You know if the problem was in the XB code
like maybe security or NSPR or something then other platforms might be able to help
cause theyd probably be seeing the same problems but urn this is pretty obviously in the
Mac front end its just something somewhere isnt getting set right or isnt configured
right or we missed something in trying to fix everything and its hiding pretty well
Oh of course mean its liourkeys are always the last place you look when ou\
find them Theres always this moment of of course thats obviously what it is Ive
beep
so stupid for the last three weeks you know chasing down this problem but you know --
that sort of aggravation is gone in an instant because youre so happy that well fixed it
now now know what the problem is theres greater understanding of how the things
work its sort of just you get mad at yourself in jest because its so easy of course that
anybody you know anybody could have found it if theyd just spent three weeks looking
for it but
Right. .yeah definitely mean when when doing new development what try and do is
keep list as go of things that you know instead of just making rnental not that oh
yeah OK this doesnt work have to go back and fix it or you know such and such wont
work write it down so that because know will forget it and know it will then later
become bug that some customer will find because weve cornpletely forgotten about it
you know its just lapse and through development you get whole bunch of these you
know Ive got list 50 long in my Newton of things that need to go back and fix at some
point because you get into certain situation and youll encounter that problem And with
Navigator since we have been building and working primarily on Communicator we
make all these fine little tweaks little assumptions here and little assumptions there and
change this resource here and if those arent all perfectly duplicated on the Navigator side
you know in all of the Navigator files then you run into the problem that we were in
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
here where youre not getting events and things arent thawing correctly nd so its
some lapse of me forgetting to do something somewhere in million lines of source code
on the Mac front end that uh thats causing this problernnd
dont think with this
problem dont think any amount of writing things down would have helped because we
knew we were going to have to do this at some point but the rush time frame isnt really
help in
think late last night well it wasnt five in the morning we found like 35 new bugs
think that we always theyd been reported but we wed been tracking them incorrectly
theyre target fix date was set wrong so we though we had 50 r60 or something then
Don and Michael Toy ran sequel query through the database and found that there were
about 35 or so bugs that werent put into the database correctly people had left out
information that we needed to track them for 3-31 and in typical Don fashion he went
berserk because this is very obviously problem that uh we need to solve but it was
humorou
Urn dont going house hunting this weekend sol have can put tWs hell
aside and take on new hell of trying to find house in the Bay Area dont know which
Id rather have think well know Ill find this bug eventually dont know Ill find
house lets put it that wayjA couple of the guys will probably be here lot of people will
probably be here this weekend1t think Im nna take this weekend off normally
take weekends off dont want to kill mse
In March last March and the photographer he got all artistic and he took every single
coke can in the lab and lpfe put in on my desk and he said this is what college student
desk should look like was like duny desk doesnt look like that hes like yeah but
people tell me you drink coke and that II just set the mood and theyll buy this picture and
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
theyll put it in the magazine And Im like OK whatever so.. you know you saying
that its like all right here we go again lets get all the junk stuff...
So as you can see this is not well Navigator
Hmmmmwhy do keep getting these images
How big is the file Which company is it again Golly Laughs Uh...what the
hell...you here for while all right Paul and will be back in well slap each other
around ..thanks Greg
the last month or two an um its something really really wrong is going on and
trying to figure out why cant quite figure out why
Urn first try and reproduce it so that can try to get feel for it If do this then this
happens and can then Ill know where in the source to start looking But the problem is
right now have yet to get to that point where know where to start looking And uh so
Imjust trying whole bunch of different things just trial and error to see if something
will look weird or look funny or catch my eye and can start investigating the So
things you know things in the application look wrong because nothings drawing and
were not getting events and the clock up here is stopped solrnean things have gone
horribly horribly wrong but when try to step through into the debugger dont see
anything necessarily thats so bad Were getting some strange events and Im tryin to
figure out where theyre coming from But as of yet Ive been unable to figure it out.t
Uh one officially which is cleaning up the artwork which Ive done urn the other
unofficially is getting Navigator running so that when we put the source code out the Mac
conmiunity actually has product that they can Which we sort of find to be little bit
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
important at least the Mac group here finds that to be very important Uh so were trying
our hardest working long hours to get this thing off the floor but were running into some
road blocks and its being very difficult Bad Navigator oh well
Actually it hasnt been so bad recently this past weeks been kinda bad because my wifes
been out of town feels like ..my wife is on business trip so decided to put in some
extra hours It happens to be very good timUkt these next couple weeks are probably
going to be pretty bad though because we have all of this work we just discovered
whole bunch of new problems that we knew about but that we hadnt been tracking and so
we just realized how doomed we were this morning and uh with Navigator misbehaving
like it is urn were not as far along as we thought we were yesterday Urn we all got that
warm fuzzy at the Michael Toy meeting You know whoo hoo we only got bugs
were set to go now its we only have 5N bugs and were nowhere close So things are
changing on daily basis which is sort of how things have been going on for the past
couple of months
/1
Urn most of the bugs that were dealing with now are getting the source code cleaned up
Were not for the most part were not actually fixing anything urn the thing with
Navigator most of us around here normally build Communicator and since it is the free
source world were not shipping Communicator were not shipping mail and news we
had to resurrect Navigator which wed sort of go by the wayside wed been doing 5.0
developrnentfwe figured oh well just pick it up again when we get close to shipping and
we let
ityt
little too close because no one expected this 3-31 deadline to sort of come up
and bite us on the rear um so weve had to rush and try and get it off the floor and UNIX
and windows seem to do pretty well with it the Mac version is being stubborn
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
You pretty much need to be Mac person You know if the problem was in the XB code
like maybe security or NSPR or something then other platforms might be able to help
cause theyd probably be seeing the same problems but urn this is pretty obviously in the
Mac front end its just something somewhere isnt getting set right or isnt configured
right or we missed something in trying to fix everything and its hiding pretty well
Oh of course mean its liourkeys are always the last place you look when ou\
find them Theres always this moment of of course thats obviously what it is Ive
beep
so stupid for the last three weeks you know chasing down this problem but you know --
that sort of aggravation is gone in an instant because youre so happy that well fixed it
now now know what the problem is theres greater understanding of how the things
work its sort of just you get mad at yourself in jest because its so easy of course that
anybody you know anybody could have found it if theyd just spent three weeks looking
for it but
Right. .yeah definitely mean when when doing new development what try and do is
keep list as go of things that you know instead of just making rnental not that oh
yeah OK this doesnt work have to go back and fix it or you know such and such wont
work write it down so that because know will forget it and know it will then later
become bug that some customer will find because weve cornpletely forgotten about it
you know its just lapse and through development you get whole bunch of these you
know Ive got list 50 long in my Newton of things that need to go back and fix at some
point because you get into certain situation and youll encounter that problem And with
Navigator since we have been building and working primarily on Communicator we
make all these fine little tweaks little assumptions here and little assumptions there and
change this resource here and if those arent all perfectly duplicated on the Navigator side
you know in all of the Navigator files then you run into the problem that we were in
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
here where youre not getting events and things arent thawing correctly nd so its
some lapse of me forgetting to do something somewhere in million lines of source code
on the Mac front end that uh thats causing this problernnd
dont think with this
problem dont think any amount of writing things down would have helped because we
knew we were going to have to do this at some point but the rush time frame isnt really
help in
think late last night well it wasnt five in the morning we found like 35 new bugs
think that we always theyd been reported but we wed been tracking them incorrectly
theyre target fix date was set wrong so we though we had 50 r60 or something then
Don and Michael Toy ran sequel query through the database and found that there were
about 35 or so bugs that werent put into the database correctly people had left out
information that we needed to track them for 3-31 and in typical Don fashion he went
berserk because this is very obviously problem that uh we need to solve but it was
humorou
Urn dont going house hunting this weekend sol have can put tWs hell
aside and take on new hell of trying to find house in the Bay Area dont know which
Id rather have think well know Ill find this bug eventually dont know Ill find
house lets put it that wayjA couple of the guys will probably be here lot of people will
probably be here this weekend1t think Im nna take this weekend off normally
take weekends off dont want to kill mse
In March last March and the photographer he got all artistic and he took every single
coke can in the lab and lpfe put in on my desk and he said this is what college student
desk should look like was like duny desk doesnt look like that hes like yeah but
people tell me you drink coke and that II just set the mood and theyll buy this picture and
Page
Netscape Documentary
Tape Don Milton Interview
theyll put it in the magazine And Im like OK whatever so.. you know you saying
that its like all right here we go again lets get all the junk stuff...
So as you can see this is not well Navigator
Hmmmmwhy do keep getting these images
How big is the file Which company is it again Golly Laughs Uh...what the
hell...you here for while all right Paul and will be back in well slap each other
around ..thanks Greg
