Jon Hicks: Installing Summerboard Themes

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 16, 2008 07:48 PM

I recently had a go at installing the excellent Wood Shelves Summerboard* theme on my iPhone, but found the process of adding a theme manually a blind stumble. It involves using SFTP to connect to the phone, but various tutorials had outdated information, and I had to cobble together the various snippets until I got it to work.

So, just in case this is useful for someone else, here’s how I got it to work. This assumes you’ve already jailbroken your iPhone, and have installer.app and Summerboard installed, ready and waiting for you.

How to connect to your iPhone (1.1.4) and add a Summerboard theme:

1. Via Installer.app, install BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH (found in the ‘System’ Category)
2. Go to Settings> Wi-Fi > (Network Name) and click on the blue arrow to get your IP address.
3. In Transmit (or other SFTP capable app), enter the following information to connect:
   • IP Address
   • Username: root
   • Password: alpine (not ‘dottie’!)
   • Mode: SFTP
4. Once connected, navigate to /private/var/mobile/Library/Summerboard/Themes. There are, it seems, 2 locations for Summerboard themes, but for the 1.1.4 iPhone, this is the one SMB prefs reads from – iPod Touch may be different.
5. Upload the theme folder and change permissions on the folder (and its contents) to 755

The theme will now show up in the SMB prefs menu! Hurrah!

Vishal Parpia reminded me that you should disable SFTP by removing OpenSSH afterwards, otherwise your iPhone becomes eminently hackable. If you can work out how to change the root user password, so much the better!

*(a theming app for the iPhone and iPod Touch’s ‘Springboard)

 

Nick Kreeger: Thinking Chiefs

Posted by Nick Kreeger at May 16, 2008 05:51 PM

NOTE: This post is 100% NFL


It's only May and I'm already pretty excited about the upcoming NFL season. The Chiefs had a terrific draft, and I think it is the initial turning of the tide for the organization. First off, Herm Edwards is committed to bringing in youth and playing them right away. His philosophy towards free agents ("helmets-for-rent") is something I think is pretty true these days. Most free agents come across from another organization and take big chunks out of a teams cap - and aren't always a lock for success.

People will quickly overlook the Chiefs this season, and maybe the next. However, think about these facts:

- They have a solid game changing receiver in Dwayne Wade
- The defensive line with the addition of Glen Dorsey should make it very difficult for teams to run.
- With the pick of Brandon Flowers, Bernard Pollard, and Jarrad Page - the secondary has youth, speed, and talent. Watch out for Flowers and Pollard because they are big time hitters.
- With a revamped offensive line and Chan Gailey the offense should have spark again. With a healthy Larry Johnson coming back, I expect the Chiefs to be much more productive on that side of the ball. Also, giving Brodie Croyle some time in the pocket will allow him to develop and the organization to actually analyze him.

Another note on Croyle - I'm a big fan of the kid. He's got a strong arm and is coming out of a big time program in the SEC (Alabama). The players (at least most of the younger ones) all seem to really like and click with him. If you remember, Chailey was the offensive coordinator of the Steelers when they had Kordel Stewart - and he made him very productive (and look at Stewart these days). I think Gailey will be able to adjust the system for Croyle. The previous coordinator (was the offensive line coach during the Vermeil era) just didn't seem to have a very good strategy and approach to running the offense. I think some of the blame for Croyle's slow start can be blamed on him. But if Croyle struggles again this year, I won't be surprised for the Chiefs to go after a big time college QB in the draft next year (Chase Daniels?).

Anyways - back to reality in May on the west coast. But it's getting much closer to giving DirectTV a call for the Sunday NFL package!

 

Samuel Sidler: Talkback Data Loss Coming Soon

Posted by Samuel Sidler at May 16, 2008 01:13 AM

Talkback is getting huge. Most people don’t realize that the size of Talkback (the database and the amount of processing needed) has grown immensely in the last couple of years as the userbase of Firefox has grown. Talkback wasn’t made to scale in the way we’ve needed it to. This is one of the (many) reasons it’s being replaced in Firefox 3 with Breakpad/Socorro.

The Talkback database is now around 500 GB, which is way too large to be manageable. As a result, the scripts that removed old data are unable to complete and, thus, unable to lower the size of the database. There are several ways we can “fix” the issue:

1. Let the size of the database grow infinitely until Talkback is replaced.
2. Manually run clean up commands to (hopefully) keep the database in good shape.
3. Remove a bunch of data to all the scripts to run and move to keeping 60 days worth of data instead of 90.

There are advantages and disadvantages of all of these, but after some discussion, we’ve decided to do #3. Removing data will allow us to have a manageable database and will allow us to keep the database in shape for the long term by lowering the amount of data we keep.

Sadly, as a result of this, we’re going to lose some (critical) data. Namely, remove this data will affect full stacks, topcrash reports, and smart analysis reports.

Tomorrow we plan to take Talkback down for a few hours and do a full cold backup of the database. After the backup, next week we plan to remove full stacks from existing crash reports. If you have a stack you want to save, please put it in the relevant bug.

New reports will, of course, generate full stacks, but all stacks from old crash reports (about 90 days worth, give or take) will be gone. Because full stacks will be gone, the main topcrash reports will not necessarily be correct and the smart analysis reports will be completely broken (they rely on full stacks to generate properly). This will last for a period of 10 days, then both reports will return to normal.

Note: The removal of full stacks does not affect the stack signature. The signature will remain.

We know this situation isn’t ideal, but it’s just yet another reason to convince your friends to upgrade to Firefox 3.

If you have comments or questions, please email me.

 

Caminol10n: Camino 1.6.1 l10n status

Posted by Caminol10n at May 15, 2008 11:02 PM

The Camino team has recently finalized an RC for Camino 1.6.1. Unlike other dot-dot.x updates, this one carries a small amount of strings to update, along with the usual release notes work. Moreover, this time the localized updated description showing up through the Sparkle framework should go live.

Release notes can be found at Bug 431626, or directly inside the RC build.
The update description for Sparkle can be found (the original) and uploaded (the translation, as file, please) at Bug 433072

read more

 

Jon Hicks: M83 - Graveyard Girl

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 15, 2008 11:57 AM

Last.fm recommendations have turned up trumps for me this week. M83 turned up with the new album “Saturdays = Youth”, and I’ve been playing it on loop ever since. Incidentally, I’ve been buying music from Play.com. MP3’s, no DRM and 320kbps, it’s a great deal (and sadly I don’t get any commission for pimping them).

Graveyard Girl is a luscious 80’s flavoured song from the album, and while the video isn’t all that great (except for the floating dogs – GENIUS!) it’s enough to give you a taster.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Please turn off the Flash

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at May 14, 2008 03:06 AM

Flash is already ill-regarded by Mac users for its wretched performance, detested by Linux users for its proprietary nature, and disliked by millions of web users for its general annoyance factor.

The larger problem, though, is that Flash breaks the web and defies established conventions that make the web usable. There are no hyperlinks per se (only clickable spots), no way to determine where clicking will take you, and no way to get back there (that is, no URIs or URLs). Even worse—and one of the reasons Flash is so beloved by certain types of content creators—Flash is a black hole; nothing comes out, which makes Flash entirely inaccessible for reuse, collaboration, or whatever the next great idea on the web is.

Case in point: we’re headed to Oslo this summer for a wedding, and the happy couple are registered at (surprise, surprise) a Norwegian retailer of fine table- and kitchenware. Part of the registry website is plain-old HTML, which means the non-obvious Norwegian words and phrases I encounter can magically become mostly-intelligible English words and phrases thanks to the wonders of Google Translate.

The other part of the store’s registry website, unfortunately, is a series of Flash objects. These are completely opaque to anything that reads the web. Google Translate can’t translate the “button” labels, and I can’t hover over the buttons to see where clicking them will take me (or even inspect the page source to learn the destination, which slightly crazy people have been known to do in order to get useful information). I can’t copy and paste the “button” labels into Google Translate, because, for all intents and purposes, they’re bitmaps, so if I persist in my efforts to have Google Translate decipher the site for me, I have to manually enter some Norwegian text (no non-ASCII characters on these buttons, thankfully). It’s painful, and it’s frustrating that what would “just work” in standard HTML has become a chore that only the most crazed or desperate among us will actually stick with through completion. What’s worse, there seems to be no compelling reason for the “buttons” in question to be Flash; unless the site intentionally desires to obfuscate the destinations of each “button,” the only “functionality” provided by Flash is a hover effect. :hover, anyone?

Perhaps you’re thinking, “this is an unusual/rare/contrived situation; there’s no real-word applicability here.” Unusual or rare, sure, but why cut yourself off from the opportunity to be useful/profitable from every situation presented (Occasionem oblatam tenete —Cicero), when you could just as easily (or perhaps even more easily; surely HTML+CSS is easier than writing a Flash applet?) be open to them? Norwegian retailers don’t have to worry about making their sites accessible to non-Norwegian speakers; Google can do it for them, if only they would use real text, the real web, HTML. No expenditure at all would be required to get this added market, but the retailers could reap the benefits of a scenario they never expected.

Every day on the web, use-cases you haven’t thought of are appearing and becoming mainstream, and in the rapidly changing world of technology, do you really want to be left behind or have to spend extra time and money re-working your site to become compatible with the next great movement on the web?

Please, turn off the Flash.

 

Jon Hicks: Esso Maps

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 12, 2008 08:08 PM

These Esso maps from the 1960’s were a great ebay bargain find. I particularly wanted the London map, as the cover illustration was just stunning.

Collecting motoring maps from the 30’s onwards has become a bit of a hobby of late, and I’ve started uploading photos of some of them to Flickr.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Big Fall

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at May 11, 2008 11:14 PM

I'm disgruntled about having to wait until Fall for season three of Big Love. Apparently it's due to the writer's strike, which does make some sense, but it'll have been well over a year by the time it airs from the time it went on hiatus. Surely there should have been some writers around somewhere outside the strike.

 

Jon Hicks: The Poison Sky

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 10, 2008 08:46 PM

I’d missed this the first time I watched the Poison Sky last week! I know, I’m probably the last person to notice it…

In the Tardis, just before Donna looks at the monitor, there is a brief flash of Rose calling the Doctor – just for a few frames. Often the ‘story arcs’ throughout the season get on my pip, usually because they’re loud and obvious, but these brief flashes of Rose are really well done. Yay!

 

Samuel Sidler: Weird Fishes

Posted by Samuel Sidler at May 10, 2008 08:44 PM

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

My mind has mixed feelings, watching this video. Is it trippy? Is it beautiful? All of the above? I can’t stop watching. Whatever adjectives describe the video, it was made with Processing. Which is both impressive and insane.

High quality version is available on the blog post.

 

Mike Pinkerton: My eyes and ears?

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at May 10, 2008 04:29 PM

I've settled on just using the display modes on my TV to squeeze 4x3 DVD content. It's unfortunate since there's no way to automate that. I guess I'm just expected to tell the non-AV-savvy members of my household to press the buttons when the people look horizontally challenged.

The other thing I can't really explain is that I seem to be hearing a lot more from my surround channels now. I can't understand why, I know everything was set up correctly before and the only thing different (besides the source device) is an optical cable vs. coax. The pre/pro is doing all the decoding and signal processing so there's really nothing the PS3 can be doing to affect the signal. I don't get it.

Yes, I'm late to the game, but I finally saw "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" last night. Hysteric! Now one of my new favorites. The bait wearing the Fight Club tshirt was the best. If you haven't seen it, go rent it now. Oh, yeah, and Brad and Angelina are hotties.

What am I watching these days? Real World, Deadliest Catch, How I Met Your Mother, Big Bang Theory, PTI, Idol, Americas Port, Hells Kitchen, 30Rock (season's over, booo!), Scrubs (end it already!), Law&Order, Last Restaurant Standing, Survivor, Ace of Cakes, and, last but not least, PLAYOFF HOCKEY!!!! Jo's mad that her Sharks lost, but I'm so used to the Caps losing that there's no point getting upset about it.

 

Josh Aas: Gecko 1.9.0 Key Handling Postmortem

Posted by Josh Aas at May 09, 2008 09:30 PM

 

Samuel Sidler: A Sign of the Times?

Posted by Samuel Sidler at May 08, 2008 06:10 PM

Monthly vehicle-miles on U.S. highways from 1983 to today. Times are changing…

(via John Battelle.)

 

Samuel Sidler: Camino Advertising on The Deck

Posted by Samuel Sidler at May 06, 2008 11:42 PM

Through the generosity of various people, Camino is advertising on the Deck this month. This is the second time we’ve participated in advertising on the Deck. The first time was noticed by Jon Hicks mere hours after the ads first appeared.

For the months of May and June, we’re running two different ads. Be sure to check them out.

As an aside: If you’re a designer who would like to help us design advertising, we have the option to change advertisements at any time and would be very appreciative of any help you offer. And, as always, we’re looking for designers to create graphics for our website. Contact me for more info.

 

Josh Aas: Recent Fun, Jay-Z, Mary J and SF

Posted by Josh Aas at May 05, 2008 09:34 PM

 

Jon Hicks: Richard Hawley - Coles Corner

Posted by Jon Hicks at May 04, 2008 08:08 PM

Last August, I was in a pub near Lindisfarne (The Lindisfarne Inn no less) when Richard Hawley and two members of his band came in for a drink. At that time, I had never seen a photo of him, and had only downloaded a few tracks from 3hive. All I knew was that he looked very cool, and that I kicked myself a few weeks later when I saw him perform on Jonathan Ross and realised it was him.

It became the catalyst for discovering his wonderful music. Echoes of Scott Walker, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash often make his songs seem suited to late nights and rain soaked streets, much like this title track from his previous album Coles Corner. I’m guessing not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s most definitely mine!

Download Richard Hawley – Coles Corner. In addition to the tracks available from 3hive, there are more at Last.fm.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Fat people

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at May 03, 2008 03:04 AM

As a DVD player, the PS3 is insistent on stretching all 4x3 DVD content to fit 16x9. Who ever thought this was a good idea!? I don't want fat people! Show me the content as intended!! I've been through the menus 5 times, I don't think I'm missing anything. Terribly, terribly disappointing.

UPDATE: Setting the "DVD Upscaling" to any value does nothing (it's not upscaling at all, it's still 480p). I called Sony, per their support docs, and they are not taking support calls for the PS3. Period. None. Don't they like having my money?? Because they may not have it for long.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Ooooh, Aaaah

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at May 02, 2008 09:54 PM

Ok, I got the PS3 yesterday. It's surprisingly slick. Using component outputs it unfortunately doesn't upscale DVDs to 1080i, but it still seems ok so far. I'm going to give it a workout tonight on a couple of movies at 480p and see how it stands up to my Panasonic RP-91. We shall see. As far as a remote, you can use the controller for everything and it has a nice on-screen display. A regular hand-held remote just for the PS3 seems like a total waste, esp. given its lack of backlighting. I still want to run it with my Pronto remote, which some have pointed out (thank you, though I already knew) is possible with extra parts. Maybe I'll give it a try at some point.

Bluetooth controllers? OMG I love them! No cord. I can sit on my couch and just play. No cord!!!!

Grand Theft Auto IV? OMG Awe-some! I played some of the earlier versions and they were fun, but nowhere near as entertaining as this one. The girl at the checkout asked me "Now you know this is rated 'M' for 'Mature', right?" Um, yes. I wouldn't want it any other way. Thanks for your concern, I hadn't heard.

We're putting together a date for this year's Camino Shin-dig the weekend after WWDC. I'll keep everyone posted as details firm up, but it'll only be one day compared to last year's two. I'll just have to talk fast.

 

Desmond Elliott: On The Move

Posted by Desmond Elliott at May 01, 2008 07:46 PM

This blog focuses on the work I did during the summer of 2006 with Mike Pinkerton and The Mozilla Foundation.

I am on the move to a self-hosted Wordpress blog at http://www.desmondelliott.co.uk/ so why don't you join me there?

 

Mike Pinkerton: Input

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at April 30, 2008 02:08 AM

The new Grand Theft Auto looks awesome and from everything I read, the PlayStation3 is actually a really good BluRay player. It's less than the price that I'd probably pay for a good videophile-quality player, plus I can play some games on it.

Unfortunately I'm out of component inputs on my Denon. It has three, which are taken up by my DVD player, AppleTV, and satellite box. So I have to pay an extra $250 for a component video switcher just to get to use it. Argh.

Then there's the lack of a remote. No, you can't use a typical universal remote -- it's all Bluetooth! There's no IR port on the PS3! Ok, maybe I'll suck it up and buy the Sony BT remote. Wait a minute, it's black keys on a black remote, with no backlighting. How the #%@!& am I supposed to read that in the dark!? Hello? Sony? How about using some of that R&D on your remotes!? Argh.

I may still impulse-buy it anyway. GTA4 is just too damn cool.

 

Mike Pinkerton: Go Speed Racer

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at April 28, 2008 12:21 AM

With Speed Racer's impending arrival at theaters, I wanted to share a bit of Camino trivia that I doubt anyone but a select few of us would remember.

There was a time, long long ago, when Camino was in its infancy and Netscape was still working hard on a product they'd eventually call "Netscape 7" (code named Mach-V). Jinglepants kept calling our little Cocoa browser "Chimera" but just to piss him off I'd call it "Chim-Chim". Back then, Camino was still a skunk-works project at Netscape and I thought it made perfect sense that it hid in the back of the Mach-V and caused everyone problems. Hilarity then ensued. Alas, my name never caught on, but if you could go back in time and find the initial public webpages for "Chimera", you'd see images of Chim-Chim and Speed Racer (put there by yours truly, shamelessly violating all applicable copyright and trademark law). Good times.

A screenshot of what Chimera 0.2 looked like, for those who never got to see it. Remember when we thought pinstripe was cool? Remember when we thought Member's Only was cool? Man, what we were smoking?

Go Sharks! (and I'm not just saying that cuz Jo made me.)

 

Samuel Sidler: Wii Tennis Champions, #1

Posted by Samuel Sidler at April 27, 2008 12:49 AM

Wii Tennis Champions

Also on YouTube.

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 1.6 Spanish is coming

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at April 22, 2008 07:47 AM

Many of you have noticed that we shipped Camino 1.6 without a Spanish localization.

Let me assure everyone that both the Camino development team and the Camino localizers were unhappy about this, too. However, all Camino work—development and localization—is done by volunteers, and schedules of volunteers do not always line up. This was exactly the case with our Spanish localization; it wasn’t going to be ready in time for us to ship Camino 1.6 as planned last week. We knew this in advance, and while we always hate to ship a Camino release without a language included in the previous version, we needed to ship 1.6 and we did have 10 other languages ready.

As of this evening, the Spanish translation is nearly complete, and the first review indicates there is not much more work to be done. I can’t promise you a new Camino 1.6 Multilingual build that includes Spanish by the end of the week, but it is safe to say that you’ll see Spanish in the Multilingual build very soon.

As always, if you’re concerned about the status of the translation of Camino in your language, please stop by the caminol10n project and see how you can help. You don’t need to have many computer/software skills, and some languages just need reviewer/proofreaders—the only skill required for that task is your language and the ability to use Camino!

We thank all of our Spanish-speaking users for their patience, and we do hope to deliver the Spanish localization very soon.

 

Josh Aas: Clark Park

Posted by Josh Aas at April 21, 2008 05:21 PM

 

Jon Hicks: From Design to Deployment

Posted by Jon Hicks at April 20, 2008 08:22 PM

Now that I’m back from Future of Web Design, I’ve got a chance to do more of a write-up.

The FOWD sessions were great, with sponsored Microsoft slot aside (“Please make the bad man stop…”). Andy Budd particularly engaged me with his presentation of the “User Experience Curve”, and Steve Pearce from Poke had the slides I wish I’d done. It was the first time I’d heard Paul Boag outside of the podcast, and I think he did a tremendous job of chairing the event.

My first duty of the day was the ‘live Photoshop Battle’ which I had a few misgivings about. The team weren’t keen on the ‘battle of the sexes’ idea, so we’d decided to collaborate in teasing Andy Clarke instead. It was a bit of an experiment, especially in the “people still wandering back in from lunch” slot, but afterwards I think all involved agreed that it didn’t really work. I saw one comment on Twitter that said it was “Cliquey in-jokes” which I think was fair-comment!

I had been asked by Paul to talk about the nitty gritty end of design – taking a design through to launch, which I was concerned would be teaching people to suck eggs. After all, this would be the bread and butter of everyones everyday work.

For those of you that weren’t there, I decided to do this via Cheesophile- a demo site to highlight a few of the choices we have make while creating a website. It was never intended to cover such things as dealing with Content Management Systems (where would you start?!), fluid vs fixed or ems vs pixels. In 50 minutes, you have to focus and I wanted to cover some topics like excluding certain browsers from seeing CSS, typography tips and image creation. Yes, it did turn into a bit of a Fireworks advert, just be glad I didn’t go on about how much I love Coda!

In the end, I realised that I had cut out about 15 minutes of the talk. Not intentionally, but once I got up there, I found I wasn’t looking at my notes and missed a few key points I wanted to make!

So, here are my slides in Deployment.pdf (21.9 MB PDF) for the talk. The demo page of Cheesophile is also live, with the accompanying files available to download (includes the layered Fireworks PNG files). Cheesophile is far from perfect – it’s not bulletproof and lacks some basic things (like a search field) that you would expect from a site, but it is what it is – a demo for the purpose of the talk.

URLs mentioned in the talk:

• MAMP
• Headdress
• Yahoo Graded Browser Support
• Matthew Pennells Grid Calculator
• Grid Layouts.js
• Firebug
• Position is Everything

I missed out on the last 2 talks, and the post-party as I felt as rough as 2 badgers – but I was really sad to miss out on meeting people that evening. The following day was not only my son Daniel’s 5th birthday, but it was our 10th wedding anniversary, so it was definitely time for the family!

Many thanks for the kind comments about the talk. If you have any constructive feedback, positive or negative, please leave a comment. I feel that I am gaining my confidence as a speaker, and I’m genuinely interested to hear any suggestions on how to improve.

Finally, as the PDF doesn’t include the movie clip, here’s the scene from Father Ted that was used in the talk!

 

Jon Hicks: Camino 1.6

Posted by Jon Hicks at April 20, 2008 07:31 PM

While I was away at FOWD, Camino 1.6 was released, with lovely new features like the find bar (at last!), OpenSearch support, and many more. Wonderful stuff!

In particular though, I had a lump in my throat at the new homepage screenshot, that apparently was taken for me:

Very touching! :D

 

Mike Pinkerton: Playoffs!

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at April 20, 2008 02:42 AM

There's nothing better than playoff hockey. Except perhaps playoff hockey in HD. Tonight's Bruins/Canadians game was amazing. I'm not sure if hockey translates well outside of North America (heck, most of the USA has lost interest after the last lock-out) but it really is a great sport to watch.

Please please please, ESPN. Please bid on it next year! Don't let NBC and Versus hide it from everyone. It needs to be back on a channel that everyone watches.

 

Stuart Morgan: Where Do We Go From Here?

Posted by Stuart Morgan at April 19, 2008 04:07 PM

I've been looking around at reactions to the release of Camino 1.6, and a lot of it could be summarized as: “So?” The points are generally valid; amid the hype around the upcoming release of Firefox 3 (and to some extent, all the WebKit hype), releasing a new version using Gecko 1.8 (as seen in Camino 1.5 and Firefox 2) is hardly ground-breaking. But then, it wasn't meant to be, which is why it's Camino 1.6, rather than Camino 2—that would have been more clear if we'd released it last November as we had originally hoped, but such is the nature of trying to do scheduling in a volunteer project. Camino 1.6 is, as it was intended, just an incremental improvement; nice if you were already using Camino, but not nearly as exciting to read about as Firefox 3. (Here's a hint for the people wondering why we didn't use Gecko 1.9 by the way: Gecko 1.9 development is very, very closely tied to Firefox 3 development, and Firefox 3 isn't out of beta yet.)

If it were just the unfortunate timing of releasing amid flurries of stories about how Firefox 3 is just around the corner and will bring about world peace and cut through tin cans without getting dull, having press coverage like “Good news for those of you who are part of the ever-shrinking community that still uses Camino” (thanks for the love, Ars) would be easy to ignore, but I think the real issue is a more lasting one: the change in Safari's place in the web.

In the past year or so, WebKit has made very significant advances in compatibility, the iPhone has raised WebKit prominence, site authors are finally starting to get the idea that locking out the browser that comes installed on the machines of 5+% of their potential visitors (as well as the only one available to iPhone users) is probably not a good idea, and Safari is available for testing (and with Drosera, potentially development) on Windows. All that adds up to far fewer people finding themselves in need of a browser other than Safari to use all the sites they need to, which used to be a big part of why people turned to Camino.

That leaves us competing almost entirely on browser features and UI. But things have changed there too: with Safari 3, Apple changed their approach and actually back-ported a new version of Safari to the previous OS, rather than just back-porting WebKit as they had been doing. Assuming that continues, historical OS X adoption rates tell us that new versions of Safari will be available to almost all Mac users, rather than only about half, and so we lose another large uncontested (by Safari) user base. In a head to head match between Apple and a handful of very-part-time volunteers, it wouldn't take much effort on Apple's part to move fast enough that we wouldn't be able to keep ahead of them.

To be clear, I'm not complaining. Camino is about giving users a sleek Mac browser that Just Works; if Safari is equally good at being the browser that we have been working to build, then users win, because the browsing experience we wanted to provide is pre-installed on their machines. And it's not like we are in this for the money. I'm also not saying I'm ready to hang up my hat just yet (nor am I in any way, shape, or form speaking for the Camino project; this is all just my own musing and opinions); just that I spend a lot of time recently thinking about what might be next for Camino. Certainly, in the short term, we work to get Camino 2 out there soon, based on Gecko 1.9 and with a few new features that we've ween working on tossed in for good measure. Beyond that, the path is (to me, at least) unclear.

Writebacks (8)

 

Josh Aas: Flowers

Posted by Josh Aas at April 18, 2008 11:29 AM

 

Smokey Ardisson: This ✈ has reached its cruising altitude

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at April 18, 2008 03:32 AM

If you’re reading this, it means we’ve survived yet another major release of Camino. Today we released Camino 1.6 (codenamed ✈) after about 10 months of development. Our fearless leader has already written about most of the major new features in the release, but you can also check out our freshly-updated Features page. It has been a long(er-than-expected) journey, but we’re proud of all the work and are pleased to offer you a new stable release.

The road to Camino 1.6 began in May 2007, when Mark Mentovai cut the CAMINO_1_5_BRANCH for Camino 1.5 security releases and the first fixes for 1.6 landed on the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH even as we finished work on Camino 1.5. Over the course of nearly a year thereafter, Camino contributors fixed nearly 400 “bugs” (problems or new features), and 18 different people contributed patches for this release (with Stuart Morgan leading at 153 fixes). Big thanks to the half of that list of patch contributors who aren’t regular Camino developers; every little (or big, like multiple accounts support for the Keychain) fix helps make Camino a better browser.

If you remember back to my Camino 1.5 wrap-up, the number of bugs fixed in Camino 1.6 is lower, but this was designed to be a smaller release. The fact that the number is not that much lower shows that Camino 1.6 ended up being a bigger release than you might otherwise expect from a 0.1 increase in version number (we played the late-stage version number “game” before, but we opted not to do it again). No matter which way you look at it, Camino 1.6 is another major accomplishment for our all-volunteer, all-free-time development team.

Thanks to the efforts of our fabulous localization teams, Camino 1.6 is available in 10 different localizations in addition to US English, with Spanish expected to join that list soon. Sadly, we had a few languages that shipped in Camino 1.5 disappear on us, so if your language is missing, please stop by the caminol10n mailing list and see how you can help bring these localizations back. (The work doesn’t require much specialized computer/software knowledge, and some of the existing localizers have volunteered to mentor new or revived localizations. Last year new contributors successfully revived the Norwegian localization, which was in Camino 0.8 but disappeared from Camino 1.0; you and a friend can bring Camino to thousands of users in your language!)

Again this year I went to bed last night while our fearless webmaster Samuel Sidler stayed up to put the finishing touches on the home page, the Features page, and dozens of other bits around the website. Aside from some afternoon connection issues, the website update felt like it went more smoothly than 1.0 or 1.5 did (I guess it helps when you’re not completely re-designing a site or adding tons of new support content ). Special thanks to Stuart for his last-minute debugging and testing during today’s release.

What’s next? Those of us who have been working on the website and other release details are going to take a rest for a while. Most of the development team, which had only a few things left for 1.6 after last month’s Beta 4, have been slowly ramping up to work on Camino 2.0. There’s not much visibly new over Camino 1.6 in the nightly builds yet (lots of Gecko changes, and Tabsposé is there but hidden), but there are some great new features already in progress that you should be seeing in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, enjoy Camino 1.6 and let us know what you think!

 

Mike Pinkerton: Camino 1.6 Released!

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at April 17, 2008 11:28 PM

We released Camino 1.6 today, congratulations to the entire team of developers, testers, localizers, bug helpers, irc hangers-on, and supporting fans! As always, it's a bit behind schedule (we talked last Summer about a 2007 release), but we managed to stick to our plan and nail just about everything we wanted.

New features include:

• Improvements to toolbar search - now it's even easier to add new engines to the search bar, with auto-discovery
  
• New find bar - my own personal contribution to this release. No more red-headed step-child Find panel
  
• Scrolling tabs - life really sucked before with a lot of tabs. Now it's much better (but it's still not Tabspose, we're still working on it!)
  
• Software Update - finally! Always stay up to date.
  
• AppleScript support - a contribution from my Google Summer of Code mentee.
  
• Save passwords for multiple accounts - finally finally!
  
• Web-based Feed support - want to use Google Reader (like I do)? Now it's even easier!
  
• ...And tons of bugfixes and improvements so the web works better!
  

I'm quite impressed with this release. Give it a spin for yourself at caminobrowser.org. Now onwards to 2.0 and the new Quartz graphics layer like Ff3.

 

Camino Blog: Camino 1.6 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at April 17, 2008 08:00 PM

 

Josh Aas: Abandoned

Posted by Josh Aas at April 17, 2008 06:49 PM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Counting commands

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at April 15, 2008 06:06 PM

Just because I need a break right now and sometimes it’s fun to play along with Planet Mozilla: what does a Camino QA lead/website peer/tester/sometimes-hacker’s command-line history look like?

[Qalaat-Samaan:dev/trunk/mozilla] smokey% uname -a
Darwin Qalaat-Samaan.local 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
[Qalaat-Samaan:dev/trunk/mozilla] smokey% history | awk ‘{a[$3]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
24 make
11 cvs
10 cd
8 open
6 history
5 edit
4 patch
3 diffscrape
2 touch
1 svn
1 ls
1 cp

Notes:

1. This is the sum for my six current active Terminal tabs from the tail end of One License to Rule Them All (Phase 2) on (I had to quit Terminal once I had the fix mostly complete because of some sort of corrupted environment setting). For the morbidly curious, there are another 11 open tabs for other branches and trees I haven’t built since restarting Terminal.
2. If there were some way to track Coda saves and MediaWiki edits…that would tell the tale!
3. Pretty much every launch of Camino to test something goes through Troubleshoot Camino these days, so all of those would-have-been open path/to/one/or/another/Camino.app commands are also missing.
4. Thanks to bz for tcsh variant; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to play along and take this needed break.

 

Josh Aas: Pile It On

Posted by Josh Aas at April 15, 2008 03:43 PM

 

Samuel Sidler: 16×16

Posted by Samuel Sidler at April 13, 2008 08:25 PM

Last week, Alex started work on a new idea. At first, I didn’t “get” it. But now, I think it’s pretty cool.

The basic gist is to collect a bunch of favicons from sites around the Web. By installing the extension (in Firefox 3b5 or later), you can help contribute to the ongoing collection. Alex is already thinking of some awesome ways to use the icons, the number of them has doubled since Friday.

 

Josh Aas: Philly Spring

Posted by Josh Aas at April 13, 2008 06:51 PM

 

Smokey Ardisson: One License to Rule Them All (Phase 2)

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at April 11, 2008 05:40 AM

Over a year ago, I filed bug 368091 to make it possible for Toolkit’s copy of license.html (about:license) to serve as a licence file appropriate for all mozilla.org projects, not just the then-Corporation Fire/Thunder pair. (That bug was itself the result of a September 2006 bug to fix the XPFE copy of license.html to stop telling Camino and SeaMonkey users their official binaries were released under the Corporation EULA, which in turn was the result of a June 2006 bug to clarify the licensing references for Camino.)

For a long time bug 368091 sat unloved, with the neglect punctuated by brief flurries of activity which generally ended with exasperation and stalemate over seemingly mutually incompatible requirements. In the meantime the two copies of license.html grew to three, and every change to about:license had to be made either three or six times across mildly-forked copies of the file. This was no fun for anyone involved, including branch drivers approving changes for licensing compliance. Finally, after Stefan Hermes filed a bug last month about bad redirects on mozilla.org (and indirectly about bad URLs in SeaMonkey following its switch to Toolkit), I decided to post an interim patch for 368091 just to get the discussion moving again. Several weekends (and two additional patches for 368091 and one for Thunderbird), we’re down to only two copies of license.html on the trunk, and the Toolkit copy is now suitable for all mozilla.org applications. Phase 2 is complete!

For the curious, toolkit/content/license.html is now pre-processed before being packed into toolkit.jar, which ensures the copy of the license in toolkit.jar is devoid of application- or organization-specific EULA blocks. Firefox now takes toolkit/content/license.html, pre-processes it to include the Mozilla Corporation EULA block, stuffs that file in browser.jar, and sets up a chrome override so that about:license’s chrome URL (chrome://global/content/license.html) is overridden with the chrome URL for the Firefox-specific version. Thunderbird currently strips out the “about:license” fragments of all of the anchors in toolkit/content/license.html and ships a stand-alone file instead of shipping a stand-alone forked copy of license.html; after bug 428144, Thunderbird will also post-process in its EULA block. If you’re building a browser-type application, you can use the Firefox model to build your own license file; if you’re building a non-browser application, the Thunderbird model (most of Phil Ringnalda’s original “ship a stand-alone file” work in bug 339117 plus my patches from bug 427316 and bug 428144) should work well for you.

When I started filing these bugs back in June of 2006, I never intended that “one license to rule them all” would turn into what appears to be an obsession (at that point, I certainly didn’t expect I would fix any of the bugs along the way, let alone most of them). For over a year bug 368091 has been my #2 tab—perhaps that should have clued me in to the borderline obsession—and I’m delighted that I can finally close that tab. We’re not quite done with the quest to drive the number of license files on the trunk to one—XPFE (and thus Camino) still has a copy, but its days are numbered once I’m done with Camino 1.6 release work—and there are a couple of other follow-ups to finish, but we’ve completed the hard part of the trek.

This has been an interesting journey for me, and I extend thanks to everyone who helped out along the way—Gerv Markham and Frank Hecker at the Foundation, Robert Kaiser, Chris Thomas, and Stefan Hermes from SeaMonkey, Phil Ringnalda from Thunderbird (who, among other things, kept reminding us that any solution had to work for non-browser apps), Reed Loden on the www.mozilla.org side of things, Benjamin Smedberg for finally driving me to the correct solution, code review, and the SunOS tinderboxen bustage fix, and Samuel Sidler for getting things rolling (perhaps I should be cursing him instead? ).

Stay tuned for Phase 3, coming in a few weeks, and then our long international nightmare will be over.

 

Nick Kreeger: Ubuntu 8.04 Beta

Posted by Nick Kreeger at April 10, 2008 04:12 PM

For writing the inotify version of my XPCOM file system observer service, my linux flavor of choice has been Ubuntu. So I had bootcamp set me up a good slice of my mac books HD and installed 7.10. It was working fairly well, especially after following this guide. However, there is an issue with the kernel version that shipped with 7.10 that makes resuming from a suspend work like 20% of the time. This hold up got pretty annoying considering I like to just put my mac book to sleep and carry it to a local cafe, so I started to look into options. It looked like my options were to downgrade the OS or the kernel, or try the new ubuntu 8.04 beta.

Well I like fancy new things, so I decided to switch and use the beta. So after some quick hiccups, the system is running fairly smooth (and suspend works). I'm really starting to like Ubuntu, and if I could fix up a few things, I'd probably use it on a day-to-day basis. For instance, the alleged new auto-screen detection thing doesn't work on my third gen macbook. I like to hook up to my big screen at home so I don't have to hunch over. If anyone has had any success with getting this feature to work, please contact me (nick at nkreeger dot com).

 

Nate Weaver (Wevah): Still here!

Posted by Nate Weaver (Wevah) at April 10, 2008 07:05 AM

 

Jon Hicks: Urgent: I need Icon Designers!

Posted by Jon Hicks at April 09, 2008 10:19 AM

Update: I’ve had such a great response to this! It looks as if I’ve already got the job covered, but please do send in your details and samples. I promise I will look at each one and keep your details for future projects. Thanks!

I need help! Are you icon designer, experienced in creating application and interface icons for Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista? Can create icons from 16px up to 512px? Yes? Now, are you free this month?!

I have an large-ish icon project for a software application (can’t say more than that at the moment) on with an urgent deadline of the end of April, and I need your help! If this sounds like you, please drop me an email (see the footer) and let me see your portfolio, either online, or as attached samples. Even if you’re not contracted on this project, I’m always looking for good designers to recommend clients to, and work with.

 

Samuel Sidler: Thunderbird Taking Flight

Posted by Samuel Sidler at April 08, 2008 07:16 AM

Scott posted his thoughts on the moving of Thunderbird from the Mozilla Corporation to a new home. I had some more thoughts, but haven’t been able to articulate them well, as of yet. I’ll have a longer post coming in the near future.

In any case, if you are someone who at all cares about the future of mail and, more specifically, Thunderbird, I encourage you to read over those two posts and participate in the discussions.

(Stealing my title from Ben since it’s “oh so good”.)

 

Samuel Sidler: I ♥ Coda

Posted by Samuel Sidler at April 08, 2008 07:13 AM

I meant to blog about this yesterday, but lack of sleep made me forget and, realistically, I’m not sure I could have given it the attention it deserves.

Back when Jon Hicks started working on Camino’s new site, he did it using Coda, the new web development app from Panic. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know this. Coda was still in beta and Jon had no reason to tell me he was using it. After Coda was released, I realized that working on Camino’s website would be a perfect excuse to try it out.

And man, I’m glad I did.

Coda is awesome. It’s really that simple. Almost everything about Coda makes it a perfect web development app. Throughout the entire development process, I’ve been using Coda. I purchased a license for it a while back and just can’t stop using it. It actually made me want to build websites more.

It’s funny, really. I thought parts of it might be useless, like the “Books” section. Boy, was I wrong! I’ve queried the books quite a few times, mainly related to CSS issues that I’ve found. Without them, it would have take a while to google for the answer to my problem.

The one thing that I found I missed in Coda was Gecko. There’s no way for me to preview what the website I’m working on will look like in Camino, Firefox, or other Gecko-based browsers. Maybe that’ll be changed one day.

I also got a crash within a day of first using it. I reported the issue and Cabel replied back personally. I tracked down the issue to a webkit crash and reported the bug (which turned out to be a dupe that was fixed on their trunk). While Coda did crash, it was most definitely the fault of webkit.

So what I’m trying to say is… Coda is awesome. I highly recommend it to anyone who does manual web development. Even if you’re PHP-based (which, some of cb.o is), if you’re coding by hand, Coda is for you.

 

Samuel Sidler: What Thunderbird Means to Camino

Posted by Samuel Sidler at April 08, 2008 07:13 AM

Since the initial Thunderbird announcement, a few people have contacted me, specifically asking what this means to Camino and other mozilla.org projects. The general impression of the people who contacted me seemed to be that Mozilla somehow provides significant financial support to the Camino Project.

Just to clarify things… Camino receives no monetary support from the Mozilla Foundation or Corporation (with a couple exceptions; see below).

But surely, you say, Camino is somehow supported by Mozilla. We most definitely are. Camino has received support in the form of legal protection (trademark registration, EULA), a tinderbox (cb-xserve01 was donated by MoCo), bugzilla presence, disk space on production machines for mirroring and nightlies, CVS access and hosting, help with build machines, and other related services. In addition, many developers are more than kind and give us a heads up when they’re about to make a change that will “break the build”. Support like this is vital to our existence.

It’s been clear for a while, however, that Camino will not receive any significant support in the form of funding for developers and other related activities. There are exceptions to this — notably, the recent matching of funds for a second Summer of Code project by the Foundation; or the donation of a tinderbox; or paying the cost to get the Camino logo trademarked — but more often than not, the default answer regarding funds is “Firefox is the focus”.

It’s actually not possible to donate money to the Camino Project right now due to this. Any money donated to the Mozilla Foundation goes to a general fund which, likely, won’t benefit Camino. (An attempt to make it possible to donate specifically to Camino failed.)

All of the above is true for any project under the Foundation with the notable exception of Firefox and, at least right now, Thunderbird.

Let me again be clear… Firefox is a critical focus for Mozilla to have. I, personally, believe that focusing on Firefox helps the open web, including web standards. Having a company like Mozilla at the forefront of development, keeping Microsoft accountable and helping to protect users is truly wonderful. I’m proud to work for such a company.

In the end, the Thunderbird announcement has virtually no effect on how Camino is doing and has always done business. The Camino Project will continue to operate in the same manner it always has.

 

Samuel Sidler: Camino: Now Accepting Donations

Posted by Samuel Sidler at April 08, 2008 07:13 AM

(This is a re-post of a blog post on caminobrowser.org.)

The Camino Project is pleased to announce that we’re now accepting donations.

Up until now, when someone asked how they could contribute to the Camino Project, we directed them to our Contribute page our website. However, this leaves out those without time on their hands to participate in the development, quality assurance, or localizing of Camino. (Of course, everyone can promote Camino. Please do!)

Today, that’s changed.

Through the Mozilla Foundation, we’re now able to accept tax-deductible donations that will go toward the development and advancement of Camino. What’s more, through the end of the year the Mozilla Foundation will match 2 to 1 every dollar donated (up to $10,000). Donating now makes your dollar go three times as far as it normally would. You can read more about their new directed giving program from Frank Hecker’s blog post.

We want to thank the Mozilla Foundation for making this possible and thank any users who donate to Camino. Your contributions are greatly appreciated.

 

Samuel Sidler: Coming Soon: A 10.5 Camino Tinderbox

Posted by Samuel Sidler at April 08, 2008 07:13 AM

Since the release of Mac OS X 10.5, a lot of work has been done to get Camino building on that platform in a variety of configurations. Many Camino developers have already worked their way to 10.5 and definitely appreciate the work. In spite of this work, it’s often hard to know if the build will break on 10.5 without a tinderbox dedicated to running that platform.

One part of Mozilla’s evangelism team focuses on providing resources to the Mozilla community, including projects like Camino, Sunbird/Lightning, and SeaMonkey. (This is sometimes called the Community Giving and Empowerment Program.)

A little over a month ago, I approached the evangelism team and they’ve graciously provided a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.5 for use as a Camino tinderbox. (The process actually went a lot faster than that, I’m just bad at blogging.) It’s still being set up, but soon you’ll see a new box reporting the build status of Camino on 10.5.

Thanks again to the evangelism team for providing this box and to the IT team for getting it installed in place for us!

 

Nick Kreeger: One thing done...

Posted by Nick Kreeger at April 07, 2008 07:32 AM

Well, this weekend was pretty busy thanks to an awesome trip out to Tahoe to ride the wall at Kirkwood! The conditions were pretty sweet even for April!

However, I did manage to find a few cycles this weekend to take out the security prompts out of Correo - and start the new auto-login prompts! I'll try and put some more time in this weekend (outlook good so far) so that I can get a test-build out to the community. While I'm at it - I'm thinking of ways to bundle up a pre-build version of the 1.8 branch. I think this will help get the source in other devs hands much much easier. I need to set up some scripts to build Correo against XULRunner anways, so now is as good as a time as ever to start a custom build setup!!!

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 2008 Week 13/14

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at April 07, 2008 03:41 AM

Just a brief reminder that the student application deadline for the 2008 Summer of Code is Monday, April 7.

• Since the last update two weeks ago, we’ve released two new betas. As usual, Stuart Morgan was chasing down the last bug fixes, Mark Mentovai did the build-wrangling, and I handled pushing all the changes to the website and to software update.
• In addition to chasing down the last few beta blockers, Stuart has also been alternating between working on the few remaining code bugs for 1.6, starting to clean up regressions on the trunk caused by Core changes, triaging the 2.0 bug list, and doing other fun code cleanup. He also snuck in a patch to support a couple of multi-touch gestures produced by Apple’s new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro trackpads.
• Chris Lawson, working with Philippe Wittenbergh’s river of error reports, got Camino trunk building again with the 10.5 SDK (we last verified 10.5 SDK compatibility before we made compiler warnings fatal, so the problems were only warnings about deprecated functions).
• Our fearless leader, Mike Pinkerton, wrote a brief note in honor of Mozilla.org’s 10^th anniversary. For more of his remembrances of the decade, you can read (or listen to) his interview with the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank or watch his Google TechTalk.
• Sean Murphy finished his work to prevent Camino from completely overwriting corrupt WebSearchEngines.plist files and continued his investigation of a new feature we’re tentatively planning for Camino 2.0.
• In addition to my work on the two betas, I worked on finishing up the set of files that our localization teams will need to translate for the ✈ release (Mark had the final word on the text, as always). In between working on updating the website so that it will be ready for the release of 1.6, I’ve written a few small patches to Gecko’s Mac font defaults. I also spent some time this weekend working on the “one license to rule them all” problem and made Thunderbird generate its license.html file from the shared Toolkit file, reducing the number of copies of the license file from three to two. Once we make the shared Toolkit file sufficiently generic, we can reduce that number down to one.

As the pilots say, we’re going through our pre-flight checklist right now, and we expect ✈ to be cleared for takeoff in about a week, depending on the schedule for the next Gecko release. In the meantime, please let us know if you find any problems in Camino 1.6 Beta 4.

 

Nick Kreeger: Things I want to work on

Posted by Nick Kreeger at April 05, 2008 12:36 AM

I've been fairly busy at the new day job, but I've been compiling a list of things that I would love to work on. Hopefully I'll have a free weekend or some slower evenings to punch these out:

Correo:

• Get rid of the annoying security prompts. These got carried over from Camino and suck now that I have to work with a mail server that uses SSL.
• Automatic log-in of folders at startup. I have three accounts that I have to manually go through and "get-mail" for when I launch the app.
• Mailbox searching - the only real reason I ever pop back to Thunderbird for a few minutes

Camino:

• Wouldn't it be cool to have a browser sync like Google's Sync extension for Firefox? I know it would help me out since I have a bad ass Mac Pro at work that I can't take home everynight....
• Pickup and finish off the embedding cleanup work that I started.

Songbird:

• Prototype and attempt to build a native media-list CD-burner using the existing Cocoa framework provides ripping and burning functionality.

Mailnews:

• Get the module to compile under XULRunner. This way I can move Correo to embed on XULRunner and take advantage of the great stuff that is on the 1.9 branch.

Other:

• Create a server-side proxy to bluetooth robot controller for the Lego NXT kit. This would be freaking cool. We'd totally use it to drive it around the office!
  

My side project that I've been working on lately has been a XPCOM native file-system observer service. So far I have the Mac (kqueue) and the Linux (inotify) almost done. We shall see how windows goes.

Side Sports Notes:

• It's nice to see the Royals dealing! How does that feel Detroit? If the starting pitching can stay consistent through out the year, I expect the Royals to make a run at the American Central (not joking).
• I'm stoked for the final 4 this weekend, the first time ever that the number one seeds all made it. The matchup I'm looking forward to the most - Kansas vs. North Carolina!
  

 

Mike Pinkerton: What would Ben Franklin do?

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at April 04, 2008 03:00 AM

I have been growing increasingly frustrated with Rosetta Stone for trying to learn Japanese (you've seen the kiosks at the mall, I'm sure) as I enjoy the immersive method in theory, but I have a heck of a time trying to figure out what the pictures actually mean in practice. After enough repetition, I can learn by rote memory, but I don't really understand what they're showing me. Are they telling me that the dog is jumping or running? Is the boy falling or tripping? Are the women walking or dancing? Beats the heck out of me, I just learn the words that go with the picture, but really that's not viable in the long term. Let's not mention that Rosetta Stone costs about $350 if you buy it at the store (my local library offers the online version for free; many do, you should check yours if you're interested).

After a suggestion from peeja in irc last week, I took another look at JapanesePod101.com, which I had in my podcast list but hadn't really given serious thought. It's pretty amazing, actually. All of their podcasts (oh, about 4GB worth) are available for download for free, but they have a tremendous amount of education material available if you give them some money (subscription-based). It really does seem to be worthwhile after listening to some of their podcasts, it's rare you find something that justifies the cost. I'm definitely going to ditch RS and switch over here. If you dig some more on their website, you find there's a whole team behind it, from developers to "on air" talent, so I don't expect it to vanish.

I do also enjoy the podcasts from Japancast.net, mentioned a couple of posts ago. Yes, I did finally solve my forum problem. It's there, but hidden. Very well hidden. Here's a hint, if you have Flash disabled, you can't find it. Heck, even with Flash enabled, it's pretty hard to find. That said, it's clear it's a labor of love from a couple who aren't in it for the money. Sure, you can donate, but it's more a way of saying "thank you" than to recoup development costs. It bothered me, when listening to one of their podcasts a few weeks ago, to hear that they'd received some critical feedback about the amateur nature of their podcasts. Gah.

It reminds me of the people that come into the Camino forums or send us email blasting us for this or that. Hello!? Do you see an overpaid development staff? That's right, we don't have one. It's about doing something we love, not about the Benjamins. Why do some people just not get that? I hope Paul and Hitomi keep podcasting and just ignore all the idiots. They are few and far between, but they seem to stick in your mind more than the thousands of well-wishers. You just gotta focus on the positive.

(Seriously, I haven't donated my house to the local animal shelter nor have I taken up herding alpacas.)

 

Jon Hicks: Cabel Sasser: Coda Confidential

Posted by Jon Hicks at April 02, 2008 08:06 AM

I spent a thoroughly fulfilling hour last night watching Cabel Sasser’s presentation for C4 on how Panic started, developing my favourite tool Coda, and generally interface and icon design. I’ve never heard Cabel talk before, although I got an impression of his voice from his blog, but the reality was better than I had imagined.

 

Camino Blog: 2008 Summer of Code Deadline Extended!

Posted by Camino Blog at March 31, 2008 09:25 PM

 

Mike Pinkerton: 10 years old, with thoughts as bold as thoughts can be

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at March 31, 2008 09:13 PM

Happy birthday to Mozilla (org, not com!). You've come a long way baby! Yet another reminder that I've been at this browser stuff for far too long. Back when we released the source, it was still destined to be Netscape5.0. Long before Gecko. Long before XUL. Long before we decided to ditch the entire thing and re-write it from scratch (I mean, how long could that possibly take, right!?). The Source331 project (as we called it) was one of the most fun I've been a part of during my (brief) career; watching everyone come together behind an idea and pull out all the stops to make it happen.

Google's Summer of Code program is one popular way that you can get directly involved -- and get paid. Over the past two years, we've had several projects for Camino specifically. If you're interested, check out the ideas, submit your own (or volunteer for one), and come talk to us in #camino.

 

Jon Hicks: Mac Mini Media Centre

Posted by Jon Hicks at March 31, 2008 07:11 PM

(This post is a work in progress, that I will continue to update and tweak. The comments are great, with a whole variety of suggestions and details of other setups. I’ll try and keep the comments open as long as I can)

Apple TV or Mac Mini?

No getting away from it – I still yearned for a Mac based media centre. I’d hoped Wii Transfer would fit the bill, but the quality of the video streaming isn’t good enough (yet?).

That meant either a Mac Mini or an Apple TV, but that’s a hard decision. Apple TV has the ease of use that makes it ideal for the home. No fiddling about, but no PVR functionality either. In the end, I went for the Mac Mini’s potential over the Apple TV ‘just works’, and using FrontRow and EyeTV to provide the interface.

But, I’d dabbled with a Mac Mini media Centre a couple of years ago, with a G4 Mini hacked to use FrontRow. I gave up on it a few months after, but recently decided that the time was now right. So what’s different this time around?

Front Row built into Leopard – rather than tied to particular machines and requiring a hack to make it work. Front Row 2 also adopts the plugin ‘appliance’ architecture of Apple TV, as well as supporting sharing from other macs. As far as I can see it only lacks the YouTube feature of the Apple TV.

Screen sharing – After using other VNC clients, the inbuilt screen sharing facility is easy and responsive. I can barely notice a difference in performance between administering the Mac Mini and working on my MacBook Pro.

Intel Mac Minis – Compared the original G4 Mac Mini I was trying to use, the new Intel Mac Minis are faster, have larger hard drives and Bluetooth and airport as standard (which the G4 didn’t have). They also come with a built in remote and receiver. I previously used a bluetooth phone and Salling Clicker, which works, but it isn’t the kind of ‘slick solution’ you can hand to someone else and expect them to want to use it. The Apple remote works very well, and isn’t too simple (it is easier to lose though, and you can’t ring it to find out where it is.)

Leopard brings everything you need to run a media centre, with the exception of a PVR, and an automagic system for adding new content to the Mini. Finally, I was trying to run the last system through our old CRT telly, that only had 2 scart inputs. It looks like ass. Now that we have an LCD, it doesn’t.

So after studying the Apple Refurb Store for a few weeks, I picked up a good deal:

So, onto the setup…

Preferences

One of the first things you’ll want to do is minimise the possibility of the OS giving you messages, so go to System Preferences > Bluetooth, and make sure this option isn’t ticked:

Otherwise you’ll get interfering messages, worrying about the lack of a keyboard attached. Likewise, go to System Preferences > Software Update and make sure it isn’t checking for updates.

Hardware

This is how my hardware is setup: A Mac Mini sends video to the TV with a DVI to HDMI cable, while the sound is sent through my stereo with a headphone to dual composite cable. If I wasn’t playing music, I would just send the audio to the TV. I’m using a Western Digital MyBook external drive to store everything on, but I’d like to replace this with something larger, quieter and (if possible) no blinking lights! The only other piece of hardware is the EyeTV Hybrid dongle.

Essential Apps and plugins

You probably have a different list of essentials, but having tried a lot of potential apps, these are the ones I’ve settled into using:

Perian

A plugin that allows playback of .avi, .flv (amongst many others) in Front Row. Installs as a System Preference.

Syncopation

I use this to automate the adding of new content from my MacBook. You set the Mac mini to subscribe to however many Macs you want, and as long as its open on both, it will suck in any new tracks, movies etc. Works really well, I just wish it had some way of letting you know on the MacBook end that all new tracks have been imported. For Movies though, I’m finding it easier to share the Movies folder on the Mini and just drop the files in there, rather than try and get them into iTunes.

Handbrake

For ripping your DVDs, everyone should know about this!

EyeTV

Along with an Elgato Hybrid stick, this provides the PVR functionality, along with more recording features than my DVD Recorder does. Being able to set up smart recording schedules is genius, and I tend set every recording to automatically export as Apple TV, which adds it to iTunes for me.

PyeTV

A ‘Front Row Appliance’, which adds an EyeTV menu item to Front Row. This has now reached version 1, is easier to install, and the transitions between EyeTV and FrontRow are smoother.

Also, I haven’t tried it yet, but Sapphire looks interesting.

Moving the iTunes Library

I soon ran out of space on the Mac Mini, and while I was loathe to add yet another bloody plug to the overloaded adaptors behind the telly, it had to be done. (An external hard drive doesn’t tend to be as quiet as the Mac Mini either!). Relocating the Movies folder to the external hard drive was as easy as using an alias, but the iTunes library is a bit more troublesome. It should be as easy as choosing the new location in iTunes Preferences > Advanced, but I couldn’t manage to do this and retain paths. Everytime I wanted to play something, I had to select the new path to the file.

Instead, I created a folder on the hard drive, and rather than copy across everything manually, I chose this new folder as the library location in the advanced preferences, and used ‘consolidate library’. This not only copied everything across, but this time updated the paths to the media files, and everything plays as it should!

Switching between FrontRow and EyeTV

Everything works well in this setup, with the exception of navigating between the 2 applications – Frontrow and EyeTV. There are a few ways around this:

1. Before launching FrontRow, I make sure that EyeTV is open, and on fullscreen mode (see below). Then I can go back to EyeTV by pressing the menu button on the FrontRow main screen. Pressing and holding the menu button in EyeTV shows it’s onscreen menu (in which you can do almost all the work that you’ll need to do). Pressing menu once will return you to FrontRow. Sometimes it can be annoying if you don’t remember to press and hold in EyeTV, and you get whisked away to FrontRow.
2. The Pye TV plugin for FrontRow adds an EyeTV menu, from which you can launch FrontRow, its recordings, or the programme guide.
3. Setting recordings to automatically export to Apple TV means that they will appear in FrontRow’s ‘TV Shows’ menu a few hours afterwards (depending on the length of recording, processor speed etc).

Finally, you’ll want to make sure that Syncopation, EyeTV and FrontRow are all set to open at startup. If EyeTV is set to ‘Start EyeTV in full screen’ (Preferences > Full Screen), then when the Mac restarts everything is ready to go.

Downsides

When it works, it’s great. The trouble is that 15% of the time something happens – EyeTV crashes, iTunes has been updated and won’t let you play anything until you’ve accepted terms and conditions, or another app is telling you that an update is available.

For these times, I don’t have an easy solution, other than to screen share and sort it out with the MacBook. Sometimes (like in the instance of EyeTV crashing) you just have to restart.

I’ll add more detail and photos when I can…

 

Mike Pinkerton: Play Ball!

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at March 31, 2008 01:04 AM

It's the start of a new baseball season here in Washington D.C with a brand spanking new stadium to go along with it. It's a beautiful park, and everyone in the town is energized about the team finally getting their own digs. The problem is, well, it's baseball. Yawn. Wake me up in October.

I realized today that the standard DirecTV package has now increased to $51/month. Ouch! That doesn't include receiver lease fees or any HD content. Makes me enjoy the free content on my AppleTV even more (though last week it ran out of memory on me, grinding to a halt then locking up).

 

Mike Pinkerton: Real things

Posted by Mike Pinkerton at March 30, 2008 03:00 PM

In an effort to make my blog seem less self-indulgent, I'm going to actually talk about real things. I am now about to tell you the following thing.

I noticed DirecTV has started to roll out a beta of video on demand to the HR20-style receivers. It requires, oddly, that your satellite box be hooked up to your broadband connection to do the downloads. Some content will be free (tv shows) others will cost (PPV movies). I couldn't tell if any of the content is HD, probably not. Tune to channel 1000 for more details. Why not trickle down over the satellite? I guess that's too slow, but relying on the competition (cable or FIOS) for delivery seems asking to be throttled. Oh yeah, Comcast doesn't do that anymore. Riiiiiiight.

I've recently been stumped by something and I'm convinced that I'm just stupid. I'm trying to teach myself Japanese and stumbled upon the excellent podcasts at Japancast.net. They make many mentions in the podcasts about their forums and how everyone should participate. Go ahead, try and find them from the homepage. Can you find a link? Sure, there's a chatroom link, but I know for a fact that's not it. The forums are actually here, on a totally different site. I know these folks aren't in this for the money, but...am I missing the obvious here?

While I was typing this, I accidentally invoked Spaces and switched to an empty screen. I thought all my work was gone. I guess if your machine isn't fast enough, it doesn't do all of the animation, so if you're not watching closely, you'll miss it. Do I just not understand anymore, or are people making more bad decisions about usability than they used to?

Oh, and just so you don't think I've gone and shaved my head and bought a beet farm, The Real World Hollywood starts in 3 weeks! Wahooo!

 

Smokey Ardisson: Here we go again (or, odd-numbered betas hate us)

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at March 28, 2008 03:39 AM

You might have noticed that Camino 1.6 Beta 4 has just made an appearance, only two days after 1.6 Beta 3. In what seems to be a unpleasant case of history repeating itself, there was a fairly commonly-hit crash in 1.6 Beta 3, so we decided this morning to release a Beta 4 to make the beta experience as pleasant as possible.

I don’t remember much about the Camino 1.0 betas (it seems like ages ago!), so they were probably mostly “major crash”-free. Many of you will recall, though, that Camino 1.5’s sole beta was particularly plagued by a random crash, and while we did urge everyone to move to a new build, we didn’t release a new beta (which, in hindsight, we should have done). More recently, Camino 1.6 Beta 1 had not even officially been released when we replaced it with Beta 2 due to a just-fixed Core crash. Thanks to software update, it’s much easier to release a new version and ensure everyone gets notified and upgraded in a timely fashion, though we don’t want to do so too often and induce “update fatigue” among our users.

Yesterday a user reported a crash when clicking on a <select> during pageload, and although I couldn’t reproduce the crash and hadn’t seen it in my testing and use of Beta 3, his crash log was plausible. However, Stuart Morgan was finally able to reproduce the crash on one of his Macs, and he worked up a fix right away. When early reports indicated that a large number of users could be hitting this crash, we decided earlier today that we should release a Beta 4 to fix that crash (and another, much less common, crash that Stuart had also fixed on Wednesday). As far as we can tell, the Beta 4 release has gone a bit better (no crashes in Talkback yet!)—knock on wood—and it seems that I managed not to flub any of the website changes this time around, too.

Thanks go again to Stuart Morgan for the bug-fixing, Mark Mentovai for the build-wrangling, and Mozilla Corp’s Nick Thomas for getting us in Bouncer right away.

Special thanks to everyone who reported this crash, either in Bugzilla, the forum, or in via Talkback (for those using PPC Macs), and we apologize to everyone for the inconvenience. (And I hope this is the last release I write about before Camino 1.6 ✈ itself!)

 

Camino Blog: Camino 1.6 Beta 4 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at March 27, 2008 09:00 PM

 

Camino Blog: Camino 1.6 Beta 3 Released!

Posted by Camino Blog at March 26, 2008 05:29 AM

 

Smokey Ardisson: Camino 1.6 Beta 3 now available

Posted by Smokey Ardisson at March 26, 2008 01:21 AM

This afternoon, we released Camino 1.6 Beta 3. If you’re using Camino 1.6 Alpha 1 or newer, please let software update notify you of the new release or or choose Check for Updates… from the Camino menu. If you’re not using Camino (why not? ), you can visit our preview site for more information. The automatic updates are now using Stuart’s new script, which allows us greater flexibility and which will facilitate a completely localized update experience for users of Camino 1.6 Multilingual.

There’s not a “by the numbers” this time around, but it feels like the release went pretty smoothly. So far (knock on wood). Sam was pretty busy all day with tod