Willie Walker's Weblog

Sure, building Firefox from sources is easy. Just choose the right compiler, put a good ~/.mozconfig file in place, check out the sources, and build it. Here's what I needed to do on my Solaris Express Developer Edition 01/08 box.

Get the right compiler. The compiler that comes with SXDE 01/08 will croak on the beloved jsinterp.c file as mentioned in the Solaris Build Prerequisites page. The problem is trying to figure out how to patch the compiler. It turns out that the Sun Studio compiler that comes with SXDE is not done via pkgadd, so you cannot really do much to patch it. Instead, you can just grab a Sun Studio Express build and untar it. Then, point your $PATH to the bin directory where you untarred it and set up some other environment variables as well. Here's some cut/paste from my ~/.bash_profile. I was lazy and didn't make a variable to hold the path to the place I unpacked the Sun Studio Express build. If I end up grabbing another build, I'll be more diligent and will probably just set up a symbolic link to point to my latest SUNWspro. Note also that I use JDS CBE, so that by the time this code snippet is used, PATH has already been modified to find all the JDS CBE goodies (e.g., like a 'make' that works):

export PATH=$HOME/StudioExpress/2008-02-25.ii/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH:
/usr/openwin/bin:/usr/demo/jds/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/sbin:/opt/sfw/bin:/usr/bin/
X11
export CC=$HOME/StudioExpress/2008-02-25.ii/SUNWspro/bin/cc
export CXX=$HOME/StudioExpress/2008-02-25.ii/SUNWspro/bin/CC
export LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/StudioExpress/2008-02-25.ii/SUNWspro/lib -L/usr/sfw/lib -R$HOME/StudioExpress/2008-02-25.ii/SUNWspro/lib:/usr/sfw/lib"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/StudioExpress/2008-02-25.ii/SUNWspro/lib

Create your ~/.mozconfig file. Yeah, easy, once someone else gives you the contents of their file:

ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig 

Checkout the Firefox sources:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous-AT-cvs-mirror.mozilla-DOT-org:/cvsroot co mozilla/client.mk
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous-AT-cvs-mirror.mozilla-DOT-org:/cvsroot co mozilla/browser/config/mozconfig
cd mozilla
make -f client.mk checkout

Build it. This worked fine on my box. Took about an hour:

make -f client.mk build > make.out 2>&1

Run it. Here's what I do:

~/mozilla/dist/bin/firefox

If you want to build Thunderbird, everything is pretty much the same, except you need to do a global substitution of 'browser' with 'mail' in your .mozconfig file and your cvs checkout.

That's it. I wrote this more for me than you, but I hope you find it helpful.

Last fall, I was headed out for a bike ride and saw this crazy young chick flying by with a contraption on the top of the car she was driving. I figured it was for Google Maps Street View, but I gave up looking for my picturesque chiseled body after a while.

Last week, I was doing various things and ended up on Google Maps, so I decided to try again. Well...looky there! I made Google Maps Street View. I'm famous. If you use Street View to search around the area, you'll see several different poses of me. Print 'em out. Hang 'em on your wall. Surround them with hearts and kiss them before you go to bed at night.

After this past season of bicycle racing as a pack finishing Cat 4, I've decided the sport is too dangerous. In the last race of the season, I took a look around me and saw scarred legs, people in slings, and multi-thousand dollar bicycle frames that were on their way out due to crashes. The captain of my team broke his collar bone and two ribs in a race that I signed up for, but had to miss due to last minute commitments -- had I gone to the race, I would most definitely had been in that crash. In the road race stage of the Longsjo Classic, the guy next to me went off the road while we were doing a 55+ MPH descent. He survived and beat me by a wheel at the finish, but the thought of being so near to death or permanent injury really did a number on my head.

I had to face it -- I'm never going to be a Lance, and I mostly likely never will make my way up to a Cat 3 without being involved in some sort of severe crash. But, I love the sport. So, I've decided to take a safer route and work on triathlons. I did them in college and had fun at them. The intense thrill of being in a tight pack flying 40+ MPH down a winding back road, bumping knuckles with people on each side of you, dropping people (and being dropped), and hurling after a hard sprint won't be there, but at least there will still be some competition.

Almost this entire year, I've been going to the Y and doing laps for 45 minutes to an hour one or two times a week. Swimming is good cross training and I like it a lot. Over the course of this year, I tended to find the 'right' times to go swimming -- not too many people and if you had to split lanes, the people you were splitting lanes with knew how to swim. The cool thing is that this includes Sunday mornings; my wife and son can come and we can swim as a family.

To make a long story even longer, one of the regulars I saw at the pool turned me on to this concept of Total Immersion Swimming. I swam on the high school swim team (did the 500 free and the 100 fly), but never really had any formal coaching. The coaching back then was "swim fast....now swim faster...now do it again." Since I was thinking about actually needing to become competitive as a swimmer again for triathlons, I thought I'd check out Terry Laughlin's book.

Wow! After reading through the book and applying some of the most important concepts (swimming long, swimming down hill, rotating the body, etc.), I dropped my typical lap time by 5 seconds with no extra effort. Cool! I'm going to spend the rest of this year working on techniques from the book and will probably start speed work in January. I'm so psyched by this 'new way' of swimming that I'm going to try for a 20 minute mile next year. That might be a bit of a stretch, but you gotta have goals.