Escaped Thoughts

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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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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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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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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