We had our first night out on the town here last night (thanks Deb!), having
dinner, watching a comedy group do old-style radio drama, then listening to an
indie folk group, all at a small bar in Hollywood. Occurrences that brought
home the fact that we really do live in L.A. now:
- When we arrived and joined the others in line, we came into the middle of a
conversation with the couple behind us, one of whom owns the house that served
as Dr. Horrible's lair (and had a cameo in the party scene at the end). It turns
out that it wasn't a set—the house actually looks like that all the
time (giant chair and all) thanks to
Monster House.
- A small part in the comedy group was played by Danny Strong.
- One of the members of the band was Adam Busch.
- The comedy show had a guest appearance by Kevin Pollak, who sat a booth over from us most of the evening (not that I would have realized at the time had it not been pointed out to me).
Not big name star sightings, sure, but all together on our first foray into
the big city's night life it definitely made an impression. The fact that it was
largely Whedon-themed made it oddly surreal.
I'm also getting used to the fact that just as most conversions end up being
about software in silicon valley, most conversations end up being about TV
and/or movies here. I feel like I'm going to need to spend a lot more time with
pop culture to avoid looking ignorant most of the time here.
Category: Life
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That's right, we're all moved! We've been here for two weeks now, and we're
close to being settled in to our new apartment as measured on the
boxes-on-the-floor scale. Soon we may actually have some time to explore our
surroundings a bit!
I have a couple posts of material built up (and I intend to actually post
them; crazy idea, I know), but to tide you over until then, a random tidbit
that occured to me shortly after we arrived here: I've moved 6 times now
(counting dorms), and every time I've moved further south (even if only
a very short distance). So my options for future homes are getting pretty
limited now, assuming I don't want to learn a new primary language.
On the bright side, I'm told Austin is nice...
Category: Life
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As I started storing more and more of my data in the cloud, I really missed the
ability to find and launch those documents using Google Desktop the way I would
local files; it's hard to beat being only a handful of keystrokes from any
document, and I didn't want to have to trade that for the convenience of accessing
my documents anywhere and sharing them easily.
That's where Precipitate—my
first contribution to the Google Mac
Developer Playground—comes in. Precipitate is a little app
for OS X that automatically creates proxy files for things stored in Google
services (Docs and Bookmarks so far) that are indexed by Spotlight and will
jump right to the document in your browser when they are opened, so that cloud
data is as easy to find and launch as local files. In short: “Tastes
great—and just look at that shine!”
Category: Geek
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If you are a Camino user, and you've encountered WMV video or audio online in
the past couple of years, you've probably seen pages inexplicably scramble
themselves as you scroll, type, or select text (although you probably didn't
realize that it was because of WMV content in another window or tab). This is
due to an old bug in Telestream's Flip4Mac plugin which, since it's a
third-party plugin, we rely on them to fix.
Six months ago, I had the opportunity to talk to a Telestream engineer about
this issue. To make sure I could describe the problem as accurately as possible
I spent about an hour testing pages with WMV content and looking at what exactly
happened to other tabs and windows (that was the first time I'd personally
looked into it, since I knew that others involved with Camino had talked to
Telestream and been told that it was being investigated at their end). After
that hour, without looking at any code or having any special knowledge beyond a
basic understanding of how plugin drawing works on the Mac, it was clear how
they were corrupting the graphics context: the plugin was changing the location
of (0, 0) out from under us.
I had assumed that they already knew this, and that the problem was figuring
out how to fix it, but as it turned out, the step from knowing that to finding
and fixing the bug in the Flip4Mac plugin was tiny. So I found myself wondering:
if it took me an hour to do essentially all of the work necessary to get this
bug fixed, just by looking at the behavior, how much time could
Telestream—with access not only to their code, but to the specific changes
that they made in the version that first introduced this bug—have put into
investigating in the year and a half since we had been assured that they would
look into it?
If it were just that, I would write it off to a communication failure and
think nothing more of it. Perhaps it was never made clear to them just how
severe the problems this bug caused were, and certainly we should have followed
up with them regularly to ensure that the bug didn't fall though the cracks by
accident. The important thing was that now they had a fix in hand, and they
understood the severity of the issue, so surely a fixed version would be
available soon.
But here we are, six months and two releases of Flip4Mac later, without a
fix. I was disappointed that the 2.2.0.49 release at the end of December didn't
have the fix, but not too surprised; there's a whole release cycle to go through
to get fixes out to users, and a month-long cycle isn't at all
unreasonable—although it certainly suggested that they didn't take this
issue as seriously as we do (if somehow Camino were making the entire system
unusable for 2% of our users every time they launched it, and we had a fix, we'd
risk slipping a release slightly to get it in, without hesitation). We followed
up, just to reiterate that we viewed the fix as critical, and why: that it was
not only damaging the WMV experience for hundreds of thousands of their users,
but that it also crippled the entire browser for those affected,
creating widespread problems for users, and offloading the large support burden
of their bug onto us. We made it clear that this was by far our most frequently
reported bug. We've made these points to them a number of times over the past
six months.
Earlier this week, there was a new Flip4Mac release (variously labeled in the
download as 2.2.0.49A, 2.2.0.49R, and, confusingly enough, just 2.2.0.49 again),
the second since they have had a fix. It didn't include any release notes (the
release notes they link to are the original 2.2.0.49 notes), so we don't know
what they did fix, but it definitely didn't include the Camino issue.
A release process where an important fix takes more than six months to get
into a release isn't plausible, so the only possible conclusion I can reach is
that Telestream's management has made the explicit decision that fixing a
problem that affects every single Camino user using their product isn't even
moderately important: not important enough to slip into a release that was
winding down, not important enough to get its own tiny bug-fix release in a span
of five months, and not even important enough to put into a release that could
not realistically have been assembled until well after they had this fix. So
users continue to suffer, and we continue to shoulder the support burden and the
negative publicity of their bug, because they apparently don't think that Camino
matters.
Since Telestream is choosing not to fix the bug, I'm releasing a stop-gap
fix: this tool will modify the released version
of the Flip4Mac plugin to remove the problematic code, so that it will no longer
corrupt drawing throughout Camino. I can't easily make any complex changes, so
unlike a real fix to this bug it won't be selectively applied to Camino; as a
result, WMV content may behave differently in Firefox once you run it (Safari
uses a different plugin, so should not be affected in any way).
Hopefully, Telestream will reconsider the importance of this bug, and the
workaround won't be necessary for long.
Category: Camino
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This post is mainly for the benefit of my Fox Hollow French School cohort
(that's right, we had none of this
“Charlemagne”
nonsense; we didn't need a snooty name to know that we were better than
other children), but perhaps it will be interesting to others who are just
curious about the strange influences that shaped my childhood.
For years, I've been carting around a bunch of cassette tapes from my youth.
Mostly I ignore them except to feel that I have to keep them out of vague
sentimental attachment, but there is one that I have periodically rediscovered
and always had to listen to immediately: the tape of French songs from 2nd
grade, which miraculously has not been lost or destroyed along the way. Each
time I've though that it was a shame that they weren't easier to listen to,
so finally something had to be done.
And so, for your listening pleasure: the songs of
2nd grade French, converted to MP3s. I did my best to clean up the sound,
but there's only so much that can be done with a 20-year cassette that was a
home-made copy to start with. Still, what they lack in audio fidelty, they more
than make up for in nostalgia; if you grew up with these songs, I'd be willing
to bet that you'll find yourself singing along at some point—à
moins que tu aies dans les oreilles deux gros haricots!
Category: Life
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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.
Category: Camino
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Coming back to Cupertino from our visit to L.A., I was struck by how green and
residential it felt here by comparison—much like the feeling I get when I
visit Eugene, but very odd to feel in Cupertino. It really makes me wonder what
it would be like visiting Eugene after living in L.A. for several years.
Speaking of which, we are moving to L.A. in a few months (well, Santa Monica
hopefully, which sounds nicer but still seems to be covered in
smog).
Category: Life
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Lost Cities came
today, much to my enjoyment (even though Laura promptly creamed me, despite her
never having played before). It's a fantastic two-player game, with the right
combination of simple rules and gameplay, but interesting strategy and
variation. It's nice to find a good game that doesn't require getting a bunch of
people's schedules to mesh in order to enjoy it; a big thanks to Josh for
introducing me to it while I was visiting.
Speaking of lost things, I apparently haven't posted here in over seven months. I
hadn't realized it had been quite that long (although now that I think about it,
it's possible that one or two people may have mentioned the lack of posts...).
But I thought about posting fairly regularly over these silent months,
and I've always been told that it's the thought that counts, so no harm
done.
Category: Random
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