01.27.09
Posted in Camino at 1:08 am by Smokey
Earlier this evening I checked in Ilya Sherman’s patch to enable Growl notifications for downloads in Camino. It’s been four months since Ilya first appeared on irc asking about reviving Ben Willmore’s old patch, but beginning with January 27’s 2.0b2pre nightly, Growl users will be greeted with notifications when downloads begin and end in Camino. (We’ve gotten several other good patches out of Ilya in the meantime.)
Thanks to Ben Willmore for starting the process off with his patch in October 2006, and especially to Ilya for seeing it through to completion.
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01.26.09
Posted in Camino at 2:09 am by Smokey
Not a lot happened this week in the Camino world, with travel and holidays and inaugurations and so forth.
- After discovering his review request feed was broken, fearless leader Mike Pinkerton checked his queue the old-fashioned way and gave his stamp of approval to a half-dozen patches.
- Several of us (led by Philippe Wittenbergh’s crack webdev skills and regression-range hunting) teamed up to investigate two nasty Gecko regressions that were discovered this week, one that breaks tab-switching on www.whitehouse.gov and another that causes a hang when trying to book a flight with Lufthansa.
- Christopher Henderson continued work on his unescaped UTF-8 patches and was again pressed into service to point out details of Cocoa to me. He also started working on a patch to add “Allow Flash From This Site” to the context menu when clicking on a blocked Flash animation.
- Ilya Sherman received a coveted sr+ on his Growl integration patch, and he posted a final version that includes proper localization support.
- With help from Chris Lawson and Nick Kreeger, I spent some time trying to debug our 10.3-only OpenSearch ampersand-parsing bug so that Sean Murphy can fix it for 1.6.7. I also hooked up the Growl framework to the build in support of Ilya’s patch (which will land as soon as my patch is reviewed). I also took a quick detour back into Cocoa and posted a patch to make our tooltips to display URLs in unescaped UTF-8 form.
That’s it for the fourth week of January!
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01.20.09
Posted in Life, Travel at 1:13 am by Smokey
Since Olso’s been stalking me lately, I thought it would be appropriate to post this, the one thing you need to know if you’ve been invited to a Norwegian wedding without being filled in on the details of a traditional Norwegian wedding reception:
If you’re lucky, you’ll find this sign adjacent to your table. 
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Posted in Camino, Life, Software at 12:37 am by Smokey
Ilya asked the other day in #camino what sort of tool we used when dealing with bizarre cvs merge conflicts. After explaining my TextWrangler hunk differences routine, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to mention the tools (and some of their tricks) that I use when working on Camino and Camino-related software.
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TextWrangler (and edit) – BBEdit’s little brother, this text editor is my all-purpose tool. In addition to editing source files and creating HTML test cases, I use it for all manner of comparisons; I’m fond of the character-level granularity it will show (via selection highlights) in file comparisons, letting me account for whitespace changes or verify that a merge failed solely because of changed context—perhaps even changed whitespace in the context. 
Also handy are the multi-file find-and-replace abilities; I actually wrote all of the regexps for bug 394105 by running them through multi-file find-and-replace in TextWrangler and paging through the files to verify. In Terminal, TextWrangler is only a word away with edit. I find myself frequently piping a bunch of output to edit; if it’s not my most-frequently used command, it’s a close second to open.
Before Coda (q.v.) and post-PageSpinner (which I adored in the Mac OS 8 and 9 era but which, sadly, has yet to make it to the UTF-8 world), TextWrangler was also where I did all of my HTML writing; now, however, I only use it for one-off test pages.
Everybody swears by their text editor, but I’m not out to tell you mine is better than yours, and so forth. It does what I need it to do, it doesn’t get in my way, and it didn’t cost me a dime.
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diffscrape – This is a little Cocoa command-line utility that Ian froodian Leue wrote for me (or at least after a conversation with me about better ways to handle files in a diff) a couple of years ago. diffscrape outputs all the files contained in a patch (diff), and I use it to ensure I’m not missing a file when committing or re-diffing to create a new patch. Once I became the low man on the check-in totem pole, it became more useful than I had initially envisioned. (Alas, edit always treats piped input as text, so opening files in a patch with diffscrape and TextWrangler is a little more convoluted than with some other Mac text editors, like Ian’s favorite, TextMate.)
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Coda – Jon Hicks and Samuel Sidler developed the current Camino website in Coda, and as I’ve taken over more website duties, I’ve found Coda a joy to use. Before having received as much regexp knowledge from mento as I now have, I found the tokenized find-and-replace quite helpful, and for some tasks it’s still quicker and easier than writing a normal regexp. There are still some minor missing items, but Coda’s a far better way to work on websites than anything else I’ve used in the past decade-plus.
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Script Editor – The language I consider myself most adept at is AppleScript, warts and all. I’m not an AppleScript superstar by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever I need a quick tool to help me accomplish some task, I pop into Script Editor and whip up an AppleScript (sometimes my AppleScript dabblings even become part of Camino).
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Troubleshoot Camino – I wrote it myself (yes, in AppleScript), but it’s probably the tool I use more than any other when doing Camino work. Whether triaging bugs, testing patches, or just getting a copy of Camino running quickly without restoring my tabs, Troubleshoot Camino is always on the job. It has also become our de facto troubleshooting tool for end-users, since it provides a simple way for them to temporarily start with a fresh profile without touching their current profile in any way.
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Mouseover DOM Inspector (MODI) – Someone in the Mozilla community discovered this little bookmarklet several years ago, and it has been in my toolbox ever since. Camino is not designed to be a browser for web developers (though we’re thrilled that many do use Camino in spite of that fact), but sometimes you do need to poke around in a page’s source or DOM to figure out what bizarre things are going on with the page.
I employ a number of bookmarklets (many from Jesse Ruderman’s collection) to examine the subtleties of web pages, but MODI is the most useful general purpose bookmarklet I’ve found, and it’s a convenient way to perform my investigations. Beyond that, I can often get all the information I need for ad-blocking changes just from MODI, no manual poring through the source required. I’ve just learned of Firebug Lite, so I’ll be trying that out, but MODI has been my workhorse up to this point.
So there you go; if you’ve ever wondered what sort of applications and tools a QA/website/documentation/sometime-developer finds useful, you now have an answer (sample size of one). If you weren’t curious about that, maybe you’ve learned something new about one of these applications, perhaps even something that can improve your workflow or ease your life. If not, well, I tried. 
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Posted in History, Life at 12:36 am by Smokey
Prior to 2008, I had never voted in person in a presidential election. Prior to 2008, I had never voted for the winning candidate in a presidential election. November 4, 2008 changed all that.
Today the hard work begins.
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01.19.09
Posted in Camino at 2:28 am by Smokey
Welcome to 2009 and the first, albeit belated, Camino weekly update of the new year! Unlike the odd start to 2008, when we were committing fixes as fast as mento could spin in his chair, we’ve started 2009 at a more relaxed pace.
- Stuart Morgan kept us moving over the holidays and the beginning of the year by taking point on the review/superreview queues.
- Sean Murphy has been working on some polish to the draggable tabs; he’s posted a patch which improves performance, and he also started looking into the drawing bug on Mac OS X 10.4.11.
- Christopher Henderson also helped keep us moving by performing reviews and providing patch assistance. Once he finishes his UTF-8 display bugs, Christopher plans on investigating some potential avenues for improved AppleScript support.
- Ilya Sherman has continued pounding away at his Growl patch, producing six new versions to meet review comments in the past few weeks. Fans of Growl will be happy to hear that the patch has now passed review from both Stuart and Christopher, so the last hurdle remaining is superreview.
- Chris Lawson likewise was part of the patch-review fun over the past few weeks, and he recently wrangled with code related to
feeds:.
- Philippe Wittenbergh has been busy taking care of our graphics and CSS needs. He’s produced another half-dozen or so mockups for the full-content zoom icons and helped us keep up with the Google “site icon-of-the-week” merry-go-round.
- For me, the past few weeks have been marked by the absolute lack of release-related craziness, which has been a great relief after November and December. Early in the new year I landed my patch for the Aqua
<select> override; since then I’ve also updated ad-blocking and, this weekend, put together the project and Makefile changes to support Ilya’s Growl patch.
Most of the big landings for Camino 2 are now behind us, so the “exciting” code changes won’t be as prominent in the weeks to come. However, we hope to apply some nice polish to the nightly builds on our way to bringing you a shiny Camino 2 in the weeks to come!
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01.01.09
Posted in Camino, History at 8:38 pm by Smokey
Yahoo!
For the second year in a row, Yahoo! is the winner of the annual “we break our site for your browser when the new year rolls around” broken browser-sniffing prize.
Congratulations to everyone who picked Yahoo! in the pool. Congratulations also to everyone who picked Philippe Wittenbergh as the reporter of the bug determining the winning website/company.
For the record, here are the past winners:
Do you think Yahoo! will make it three in a row in 2010, or do you think the switch from “09” to “10” will trip up someone else?
1 Honorable mention for 2007 goes to VersionTracker, who had a November 1 bug rather than a January 1 bug. ↩
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