BSG

I started watching Battlestar Galactica this season and I just watched the season finale last night. They claim to have the best show on TV, and since they ended two weeks before Entourage starts up again, they might be right. I will definitely have to get caught up on the previous seasons.

Anyway, I just thought I would throw that out there.

While I am talking about work…

There has always been a real dearth of good books on Agile software processes. If you haven’t used an Agile process before, it really hard to understand what one is let alone trying to start one yourself.

I don’t know why I have never read this book before, but I bought Mike Cohn’s User Stories Applied on Friday, and I can’t put it down. (Man that makes me sound really lame, doesn’t it?)

I have never read a technical book that has been written so well, makes so much sense, and puts into words everything that you have thought but have been unable to put into words.

Anyway, I now understand the feeling that Oprah gets when she reads a good book. Pick it up.

Building Firefox 2.0.0.2 on Windows

Building Mozilla products on Windows has become so much easier with the new MozillaBuild 1.0 package.

I did run into a problem, however, building the Firefox 2.0.0.2 source with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (not the express version). During the build, I would get an error dialog saying that the program xpt_link.exe was unable to find msvcr80.dll.

This was because the xpt_link.exe.manifest file was not being copied into the objdir/dist/bin directory when the executable was copied.

The quick and dirty solution:

1. After you get the error, copy xpt_link.exe.manifest from objdir/xpcom/typelib/xpt/tools to objdir/dist/bin.
2. Start the build again using make -f client.mk

The trunk (and maybe the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH also) have a change to build the manifest file in the executable so this shouldn’t be a problem. But for those building from the release source using VC8, this is the easiest way around the problem.

I did a quick google search and didn’t find anything exactly on point, so I figure I write a short post in case anyone else has the same problem.