Project List

Seneca College is working on many joint research and development projects with Mozilla and Fedora. These projects are listed below. Many of the projects below are part of the DPS909 or OSD600 courses or the LUX Program.

For more information about what Seneca is doing with Mozilla, Fedora, and other open source projects, see the Main Page.

Introduction

This page lists many of the research and coursework projects that are being done between Seneca faculty, students, and various Open Source communities, including Mozilla, Fedora, and OpenOffice.org. All of these projects are open source, and you can get involved with any of the current ones, or look at the list of Potential Projects. To claim a project, move it from the Potential Projects page to Active Project table below and create a link to a new project page based on the Sample Project page.

Active Projects

Project Name	Description	Leader(s)	Community or Communities
Thunderbird Draft Scheduler Extension	Write an extension for Thunderbird so that the user has the ability to mark a draft email for sending later. This is not the same as having to save emails in your DRAFT box because users would have to remember to go back in and click Send later. What is different here is that users could set the date and time for each email to be sent.	James Evangelista	Thunderbird
Canvas3D XUL Runner App	Installing a test version of Canvas3D has been a logistical nightmare. This project aims to create a XUL Runner version of the Canvas3D extension which will be easy to download and run, and can update itself as the project progresses.	Leonard Lee	Mozilla
Canvas3D JS Library	A project to add JS APIs on top of the canvas3d element in order to support 3D and game development.	Cathy Leung	Mozilla
Mozilla Developer Resource Kit	A project to create a resource kit (i.e., DVDs) containing the tools, documentation, source code, and learning materials necessary for a new developer or student to begin developing Mozilla.	David Humphrey	Mozilla
Create Local MXR	Many developers without highspeed network access would like to be able to use MXR but can't. Build a lightweight, installable Windows package that gives the full functionality of MXR locally. Create a Prism front-end specific for the task of using this local MXR.	David Humphrey	Mozilla
Add an Infobar style warning for window resize/move	Many (poorly behaved) web sites attempt to move and/or resize your browser window. It is possible to stop this behaviour (cf. dom.disable_window_move_resize) but it would be nice to have an infobar that informed the user that a web page attempted to move/resize the window, and allow it or ignore it (default). This behaviour is similar to the current Pop-up Blocker already present in Firefox. NOTE: it is not clear whether such a feature would be accepted in the tree or if this would need to be done as an extension.	Tony Lai	Mozilla
Contribute to Private Browsing Tests	The new Private Browsing feature (see bug 248970 and the test plan) needs thorough tests written in order to insure its proper functionality. This will involve collaborating with those writing the patch and tests in order to develop a full suite of tests.	Aaron Train	Mozilla
Profile the build system	It's a well known fact that it takes longer to build on Windows than on a comparable Linux or Mac machine. We don't know exactly why, however. There have been many theories, but no real data. Profiling the build system would allow us to figure out where all of the time is being spent. The best place to start might be by adding some profiling to GNU Make, to figure out which targets in our makefiles take the most time. From there, depending on the results, profiling could be added to other parts of the build system to narrow down specific bottlenecks. References: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/BuildSpeedup - OpenOffice.org did something similar Resources: ted	Patrick Lam	Mozilla
Thunderbird Image Auto-Resize	Write an extension for Thunderbird that gives functionality similar to that of Outlook, where image attachments in an email can be automatically re-sized to one of a set of smaller sizes. This is helpful for users who would otherwise try to send megabytes of image data, when they can safely scale the images down and still share their pictures with friends. References: #maildev	Zaid Ghansar	Thunderbird
NetworkManager Web Authentication	NetworkManager knows how to connect to many different types of networks, both wired and wireless, and can auto-authenticate to WEP and WPA networks. However, it can't auto-authenticate to networks that require a web-based login, which includes many wired and wireless networks such as SeneNET and AirYork. Modify NetworkManager so that it talks (though dbus) to a Firefox extension for automatic login to a web-authenticated network. Resources: ctyler, (roc, callion for dbus)	Jason Tarka	Fedora/Mozilla
Make Ubiquity Work In Thunderbird	Ubiquity is a cool extensible natural language front-end to Firefox. It could do wonders in Thunderbird as well. Aza Raskin and other Ubiquity hackers are happy to help someone do that with their Ubiquity knowledge, and #maildev will be happy to assist w/ Thunderbird knowledge. Resources: aza, ubiquity-firefox mailing list)	Scott Lunel and Thomas Brown	Thunderbird
Add Bit Torrent support to Songbird	Songbird is the best music player in the known universe! Unfortunately, it does not have support for importing media directly from a torrent to the user library. This project will provide that support. Resources: stevel, mook, mfinkle, preed, mossop, Mozilla Developer Center, Songbird Developer Center )	Anthony Hughes	Songbird
Fix nsIProcess	Create a new spec for the nsIProcess API and implement interprocess commmunication. The current API is not fully implemented and lacks ipc. See this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442393 Resources: humph, bsmedberg	James Boston	Mozilla
Import sqlite test suite	Mozilla uses an embedded version of SQLite extensively to store data such as bookmarks, history, etc. To insure that it runs properly within Mozilla, it would be good to add the entire sqlite test suite to Mozilla's tests, so that testing the browser also means testing sqlite. The sqlite test suite is written in TCL and needs to be ported to JavaScript. Some work has already been done, but more is required to get full test coverage. Resources: sdwilsh)	Park, KiWon	Mozilla
Colour Management Tests	Write reftests to compare images in order to deal with floating point tolerance. This includes dealing with things like Monitor Profiles, profiles in JPEG (i.e., JPEGs get changed based on colour profile info). See discussion of colour profiles in Firefox 3 here. It would be useful to be able to compare to PNGs with a reftest, perhaps creating an image diff tool, where pixels outside a floating point tolerance (> 0.n) would somehow be highlighted so you can see what is different. Little CMS (lcms) needs test coverage too. Done. This will require some graphics and image knowledge (i.e., Photoshop, what colour is on a computer, etc). Resources: #gfx, joe, vlad, bholley, [http://bholley.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/so-many-colors/ discussion of Mozilla colour profiles	Ezadkiel Villarico Marbella	Mozilla
Bugzilla Unit Tests Using Test::More	Add SQLite Support for Bugzilla. Then add unit tests using Test::More for every method in every object. For v.0.1-0.3 adding SQLite Support is a priority.	Irina Sh.	Bugzilla
Add Offline Support to an open source web app::More	Firefox 3 supports offline abilities, such that web developers can write their apps so they work even when no network is present. Good headway has been made already porting Zimbra. Pick another web app and add offline support, for example: Moodle. .	Nino D'Aversa	Mozilla
Package JBoss	JBoss is a Java middleware project with a large number of sub projects. Packaging JBoss and maintaining them is a challenging task and would require several weeks of full time work. Since OpenJDK and a number of Java components is already in Fedora 9, it should help get started.	John Ford	Fedora/JBoss
Per-Site/Per-Tab User-Agent Modification	Create an extension that lets a web developer modify the User-Agent string on a persistent per-site, per-tab basis. There's already a user-agent-switcher in the FF-addons (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59) but it doesn't isolate the user agent per site or per tab. Strong features might include a separation of the browser identification and language support, optional persistence across browsing sessions and a UI that by default hides the UA string behind the name/version of the browser it represents. See this discussion of the UA's history.	Johann Manzano	Mozilla
Func/Network Automation	Func is a network applications framework that allows for powerful remote manipulation and scripting of very large numbers of Fedora machines. This idea is to expand Func by writing lots of useful modules to do all sorts of powerful remote things, making it into the world's best API for remote scripting Fedora over lots of machines at once -- with an emphasis on integrating Func with other tools we already have in Fedora. This would be a particular good project for someone who had an interest in networking, clusters, automation, or security related topics. Contributions to Func wouldn't be limited to just writing modules, as anything networking/automation related is fair game.	Gregory Masseau	Fedora
Func/Network Automation	Func is a network applications framework that allows for powerful remote manipulation and scripting of very large numbers of Fedora machines. This idea is to expand Func by writing lots of useful modules to do all sorts of powerful remote things, making it into the world's best API for remote scripting Fedora over lots of machines at once -- with an emphasis on integrating Func with other tools we already have in Fedora. This would be a particular good project for someone who had an interest in networking, clusters, automation, or security related topics. Contributions to Func wouldn't be limited to just writing modules, as anything networking/automation related is fair game.	Milton Paiva	Fedora
Mercurial history browsing	We're just starting to use an exciting new distributed version control tool: Mercurial.One of the exciting things about Mercurial is that the history—the list of all the changes that have ever been checked in—is not linear. It frequently has branches and merges. This is actually a good, important feature, as you know if you've read a little about distributed version control. The downside is that the history becomes a maze of twisty little passages. Benjamin Smedberg's demo shows the history of a repository with lots of merges (each box is a check-in; you can click on the boxes to move around).There have been a couple attempts at showing history in an intuitive, graphical way. Mercurial comes with a web UI for browsing the repository, including history (here's what it looks like). It also comes with an "hg glog" extension that draws history as ASCII art, and an "hg view" extension that does roughly the same thing with a little GUI. Sadly, none of these applications qualifies as awesome.Your mission is to rectify this sad situation by writing an awesome browser-based UI for navigating Mercurial repository history.	Siddharth Kalra	Mozilla
PGO Related Bugs	On Windows, Mozilla has begun using profile-guided optimization to make execution of the browser faster (i.e., you run your binary and see how it is likely to run, and optimize for those code paths). Currently, there are parts of the Mozilla source code that have bugs or crash when run in PGO builds. This project will mean trying to isolate these bugs by doing PGO builds of these components, creating test cases, debugging, and hopefully fixing things. Resources: ted, sdwilsh, and others based on component.	Chris Bishop	Mozilla
Implementing an Archive Method for Auto-saving Mail	(Bug 451995) Currently in Thunderbird, there is no way to archive emails. This project will implement an archive method to save messages so that they are available for searching and other uses but are no longer visible in the users Inbox. Instead they will be moved to a archived folder.	Bartosz Barcicki	Thunderbird
XUL Application Packaging	Help to develop an automated packaging system for XULRunner applications. Resources: plasticmillion, mfinkle, #mozpad, #prism	Joshua Doodnauth	Mozilla
	Add DTrace Probes and scripts for Mozilla Code base DTrace was created by Sun in OpenSolaris to allow developers to write simple scripts in order to probe and instrument executing programs in a way not possible otherwise. One of the advantages of DTrace is that it allows you to turn on probing when you need it, but not incur an execution penalty with regard to performance (i.e., when probes aren't being scripted, they aren't run). This requires developers to add "probes" to their source code. For example, if you wanted to know when a particular function is entered/exited, get info about what happened, etc. you could add probes to the particular function. Writing the probes is not difficult, however there are hundreds or thousands of probes that Mozilla would like across its code base. Resources: sayrer	Chris Cameirao	Mozilla
Finish Weave/Thunderbird integration	Weave is Mozilla's services project. It currently allows different Firefox installations to synchronize bookmarks, etc. We'd like Thunderbird to be a full-fledged Weave client as well. Some [??? work has already been done], but more is required to get utility. Possible scenarios include: * thunderbird accounts synchronized (configure once, use everywhere) * automatic bookmarking in Firefox of URLs sent to/from friends * access to Thunderbird address book from Firefox References: bug 446444 Resources: dmose	Chinmay Patel	Thunderbird
Firebug "linting" for portability problems	Lots of web developers use Firebug and Firefox for building their applications, but we want those apps to work well in other browsers as well. If Firebug knew about JS or CSS patterns that could cause problems in other browsers, it would make it much easier to have those applications work in all browsers. Resources: mfinkle, robcee	Piratheep Mahenthiran	Mozilla
Func/Network Automation	Func is a network applications framework that allows for powerful remote manipulation and scripting of very large numbers of Fedora machines. This idea is to expand Func by writing lots of useful modules to do all sorts of powerful remote things, making it into the world's best API for remote scripting Fedora over lots of machines at once -- with an emphasis on integrating Func with other tools we already have in Fedora. This would be a particular good project for someone who had an interest in networking, clusters, automation, or security related topics. Contributions to Func wouldn't be limited to just writing modules, as anything networking/automation related is fair game.	Varinder Singh	Fedora
Wubi port to Fedora	The Windows Ubuntu Installer: Wubi make trying out Ubuntu Linux as easy as possible. Unlike a regular dual-boot configuration, Wubi doesn't require users to create a partition on their hard drives for Ubuntu. When Ubuntu is installed with Wubi, it can be uninstalled directly from the Add/Remove Programs utility in Windows. This project is to have a Wubi style install for Fedora.	Louis Daly	Fedora/Ubuntu
Apport port to Fedora	Apport is a bug-reporting tool for Ubuntu. When a program crashes, it catches information about the program and what happened, and then sends that information off to the developers, so that they can (hopefully) fix the problem. This would be a useful thing to have in Fedora, since it would help developers gather information about bugs, and it allows users to have a simple, user-friendly way to contribute bug reports and whatnot.	Stephen Carter	Fedora/Ubuntu
Manage downloads to Temp Directory	Often files downloaded by the browser are put in a temporary folder that is emptied on close. Users (and especially novice users) should be protected from inadvertent data loss as a result of important files being saved to this temp folder. This project will add fixes to the browser so that users are protected. Ideas include: * Make Firefox aware of common productivity file types (e.g., .doc, .pdf) and whitelist these types so they aren't deleted * Have office type files download automatically to a documents folder instead of temp * Firefox could check the timestamp of such files and delete them only if the timestamp is the same as when it was originally saved by the browser (i.e., has not been edited) * Warn the user on closing the browser that files are going to be removed * Assuming files still exist on start-up (see above), alert the user that these files are still there (similar to "New Session or Restart Existing?" dialog) * Have the browser pop-up a Save As dialog instead of automatically saving to temp, and use a documents path Resources: mfinkle, ted	Clifton Fernandes	Mozilla

Historical Projects

See the Historical Projects page for projects which were previously active.