Pink asked me to take a look at a bug causing Camino to open very slowly for people with a lot of bookmarks (read: way too many) to see if I could find any low-hanging fruit. Some profiling pointed at most of the time being spent posting system notifications to other components of Camino, telling them that a bookmark had changed and to update appropriately.

Only, those other components don't exist while bookmarks are initially loading. They haven't been set up yet. The upshot being that the bookmark-reading part of launching Camino will be about 6-7x faster once my patch lands. It doesn't hang much lower than that.

Note: the only people likely to notice this are those insane enough to have bookmark files that are, like the one I was testing with, 3+ Mb. (For reference, mine, which I consider reasonably-sized, is 100 Kb.)

Category: Camino

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Imagine, if you will, a very large island (or a small continent if you prefer). On this island there are horses, but for various evolutionary reasons they are all brown. Every last one of them. Also on the island are people, who develop completely isolated from the rest of the world. They develop language, writing, and eventually create dictionaries, all without interacting with any other civilizations. Not unsurprisingly, their dictionary defines their word for horse basically as a large, brown, four-legged, hoofed animal.

One day, a boat arrives with people from another island/continent. Cultural exchanges of various kinds ensue, and eventually one of our island-folk visit the other island. Shortly after arriving, he sees someone riding a black horse. "What's that animal?" he asks his guide. "Why, it's a horse," she replies, confused. "I've seen many people riding them on your island." "Ridiculous," replies the man from our island, "horses are brown!" "But surely," says his guide, "you can see that it is in every practical way identical to the horses on your island, except that it happens to be brown." "Perhaps," says our islander, "but it's clearly not a horse. As you can see, it says right here in this dictionary that horses are brown, so that creature must be some entirely different animal."

At this point, it should be apparent that our islander is rather foolish. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how this story applies to people who try to base their primary argument against gay marriage on the fact that marriage is defined to be between a man and a woman.

(For those of you already compiling a list of reasons why this is a terrible analogy, I invite you to consider the definition of "person" at the drafting of the US Constitution, and what bearing that has on the validity of the civil rights movement.)

Category: Society

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Anyone unsure about Blizzard's target audience should take a look at their wallpapers. These artists are clearly all people who grew up on the old D&D books, which teach us the important lesson that fantasy-genre women wear basically no clothing. I always felt sorry for the women depicted in these books, on the covers of fantasy novels, and in now in many video games. Don't they realize how doomed they are? Their male fighting companions get full suits of plate armor, or at least a nice hauberk or something. What do the women fighters get? Chainmail bikinis, and if they are really lucky some thigh-high boots. Helmets? No way. So basically, they will be fine if their opponents attack only their breasts (or rather, the third of their breasts that's protected), but otherwise that they are SOL.

On the other hand, heroines are better off than evil women, who often don't get any clothing at all. I guess the fact that she's not human makes the nudity ok? At some point, they should give up the pretense and just strap feathers to some women's arms and legs and film porn to sell to teenagers.

Category: Society

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Camino 0.8b is out, which should help put down the greatly exaggerated rumors of the Camino project's death.

The release was picked up by several mac sites. So now the feedback is starting to roll in on each of these sites, which is a mixed blessing. Yes, we want feedback. And people are using it and trying it out, which is great. But the problem is that most people online are 1) stupid 2) rude or 3) both. I'm not saying I want all the feedback to be positive, but a basic level of respect for others wouldn't hurt.

Good: Feature X would be very useful, and I really hope it can be included in one of the upcoming releases.

Bad: WTF is wrong with you?!! A brain-damaged monkey wouldn't make a browser without feature X!!! Every idiot knows that! I've been saying Camino needs it for weeks, and no one has done anything about it! What are you slackers doing?!?! Oh, and it's the slowest and ugliest POS browser I've seen in my life! If you weren't all so st00pid, maybe you could make a something that doesn't _SUCK_!!!!!

I exaggerate (slightly), of course, but plenty of comments and feedback have elements of the latter. Even if we weren't volunteers doing this in our spare time, that would still be very uncool. Given that we are, it's just totally beyond the pale. Yes, I mostly ignore those sorts of comments. But I like to dream of a world where I don't have to start every day with the assumption that many people I interact with are going to to be stupid, rude, and aggravating, and adjust my attitudes accordingly.

So for anyone wondering why I'm an arrogant elitist who thinks he's better than most people, all I can say is: spend some time on the internet.

Category: Camino

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I picked up my degree today, so it's official! Now all I have to do is wave it around wildly, and hope I can flag down a job with it.

Category: School

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So Case's alumni services are launching an exciting "new feature" which allows alumni to use their alumni.case.edu email address as a forwarding account forever, absolutely free. That sounds great in their marketing-speak announcements, which conveniently gloss over the fact that this is replacing the old system where we all kept fully-functioning email accounts forever, absolutely free.

I think I have 180 days to transition to a new email address (I haven't seen any announcement to current students, just a teensy blurb in the alumni newsletter I've been getting since I got my BS last year). Currently alumni, however, get a whopping month and a half before they are cut loose. And anyone who doesn't read the alumni news will be screwed, since there hasn't been any big "your email account will be going away in a month" warning. Perhaps their goal is to reduce the number of alumni donations they get?

I guess it's time to set up my EECS email account for general use, since my department shows a little more loyalty to its alumni than the university as a whole.

Category: School

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I spent a three days in Chicago last weekend, and I can summarize it as follows: it's big. Or at least, its buildings are. I came back to Cleveland and one of the first things that struck me is that here I can count the big skyline buildings on the fingers of one hand, and still have enough left over to snap my fingers. That's really not the case in Chicago.

Things I liked best:

• Having drinks at the top of the Hancock building, and watching a lightening storm over the Chicago skyline.
• The Art Institute of Chicago. Among other things they have (to quote a stupid tourist Laura and I once overheard in the Musée d'Orsay) "a pretty good impressionist gallery".
• Seeing a big hipster district. These people were, to paraphrase, cool enough to keep a side of meat in for a week, and so hip they had trouble seeing over their pelvises. This is a neighborhood consisting primarily of used bookstores, used music stores, chic cafés, and stores selling $3000-$4000 chairs by famous designers. Interestingly, hip and trendy fashions and furniture are all almost directly out of the 70's. Disco and bad hair should be back any day now.
• Much better public transit than we have in Cleveland
• And, of course, seeing my brothers, which was the point of the trip.

Much fun was had by all. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.

Category: Travel

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That's right, I'm famous now, so you can all give interviews and say, "Yeah, I knew Stuart back before he was a famous software developer".

Ironically, I didn't find that bug to be "the most visible rendering glitch on Panther"—in fact, I pretty much only saw it in the test cases (apparently I don't visit cool enough sites). I would much rather have fixed a completely different bug, which drives me crazy on a more or less continuous basis (yes, I'm enough of a loser to still be on dial-up). I had hoped that underlying cause was the same, and I could fix both bugs at once, but alas no. It continues to taunt me by rearranging pages in modern-art-style ways as I scroll. Maybe it's a feature? "Camino: the only browser hip enough create modern art on the fly" We are looking for ways to set Camino apart from other browsers, after all. Who wants a boring old browser that does nothing more than spit out what it's given anyway?

Category: Camino

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So I definitely want to set up at least a few categories (one for Camino, and at least two or three others so that the Camino category won't get lonely), but the trick is finding appropriate categories. I don't want to go crazy, and have 30 categories with a post or two in each. At the other end of the spectrum is just one category ("Huge Geek") that encompasses all my posts, but that's a bit too broad.

There's a reason things mostly stay scattered around my desk in a chaotic jumble, and this is it.

Category: Geek

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I've installed 10.1.5 on my long-disused beta OS upgrade partition (I knew it would come in handy again someday!) so that I can try to help make Camino 0.8 rock-solid (or at least firm-dirt-solid) for 10.1.5 users before we leave them behind. This gives me the dubious distinction of being (so far as I know) the only Camino developer with 10.1, and thus the equally dubious privilege of owning all the 10.1-specific bugs. So, if you have any 10.1.5 Camino bugs, let's hear them!

Oh, and for anyone with 10.3 asking themselves, "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to switch back to 10.1?" the answer is: No. No it wouldn't.

Category: Camino

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