Author Archives: William Lachance

Using the dm utility to interact with Android or FirefoxOS devices

Posted on October 18, 2012 by William Lachance

I promised a few people I’d blog about this, so here you go. To help with the business of making Android or FirefoxOS devices do our bidding, Mozilla Automation & Tools developed a Python library called mozdevice which allows you … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, Mozilla | Comments Off

Catching problems early with python

Posted on October 15, 2012 by William Lachance

Just a few quick notes on how to avoid a class of errors I’ve been seeing in Mozilla’s automation over the last year. Since python interprets code dynamically, it’s pretty easy for problems like undefined variables to slip through, especially … Continue reading →

Posted in Mozilla, Python | 2 Comments

Say hello to frof

Posted on September 25, 2012 by William Lachance

Inspired by the work I’d been doing with Benoit Girard to integrate the Firefox Profiler with Eideticker, I decided to create an easy-to-use python script to help with gathering profiles on Fennec, which I call frof. Frof pretty considerably reduces … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, Mozilla, Profiling | Comments Off

More Eideticker happenings: Profiling and startup testing

Posted on September 13, 2012 by William Lachance

[ For more information on the Eideticker software I'm referring to, see this entry ] Just wanted to give some updates on a few new Eideticker features which have landed in the past week. Profiling support While Eideticker is a … Continue reading →

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Oh hai, I upergaded yer Eideticker

Posted on September 5, 2012 by William Lachance

[ For more information on the Eideticker software I'm referring to, see this entry ] More on this to come, but just a quick note that the client-side URL schema for the Eideticker dashboard has been changed, as we now … Continue reading →

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The evolution of simulating events in Eideticker: from monkeys to orangutans

Posted on July 10, 2012 by William Lachance

[ For more information on the Eideticker software I'm referring to, see this entry ] I just merged a new approach I’ve been using to simulate touch events into the master branch of Eideticker called Orangutan. As I’ve mentioned before, … Continue reading →

Posted in Eideticker, Mozilla, Orangutan | 1 Comment

Mobile Firefox: Measuring How a Browser Feels

Posted on June 26, 2012 by William Lachance

A while back, I began work on a new test framework for mobile browsers called Eideticker, which aims to benchmark browsers by capturing them on HMDI video, then running image analysis on the result. I wrote about this in a … Continue reading →

Posted in Eideticker, Mozilla | Comments Off

Mass code relicensing with facebook’s codemod

Posted on June 7, 2012 by William Lachance

Recently the Firefox source repository (mozilla-central) was converted over recently to a new license with a lovely short boilerplate. This is great, but here in automation and tools, we have a fairly large number of projects that live outside of … Continue reading →

Posted in Mozilla, Technical Entries | 2 Comments

Ghetto retroscope with ffmpeg and the <video> tag

Posted on May 7, 2012 by William Lachance

So yesterday we had a small get-together at my place, which gave me the opportunity to try something I’d been meaning to do for a while: build my own retroscope. The idea is pretty simple: have a webcam record bits … Continue reading →

Posted in Mozilla, Video | Comments Off

Launching random web browsers on Android

Posted on May 4, 2012 by William Lachance

Ok, this is somewhat mundane, but I’ve already had to do it twice (and helped someone do something similar on #mobile), so I figured I might as well blog about it for posterity. For various automation tasks (notably the Eideticker … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, Mozilla | Comments Off