07.08.10
Posted in Camino, Life
at 1:26 am
by Smokey
To borrow a line from the illustrious Jon Hicks, “I never thought this would really happen, but…” I finally got my Camino 1.0 shirt.
Back in December of 2005, Samuel Sidler emailed those of us who had worked on Camino during the post-0.8 era, announcing that there were going to be Camino 1.0 polo shirts in celebration of our forthcoming 1.0 release. Of course Sam was out West and most of the rest of us were not, so there was always the question of how we were going to get these celebratory garments; for most, the solution turned out to be the 2007 Meet-Up. I was one of the Camino team members who couldn’t make that meet-up (or the 2008 version), so, as time went on and my shirt alternately was riding around in Sam’s car or sitting in his apartment awaiting a trip to the post office, I slowly gave up hope of ever seeing it.
Then, in late May of this year, the 2010 Samuel Sidler World Tour™ rolled into town and Sam and I met for dinner—and he had stopped by wherever lost Camino 1.0 shirts were kept and picked up mine before arriving. I never thought the day would actually come…. After such a long saga, it was a surprisingly low-key ending, yet well-worth the wait.
And, because no good story is complete without pictures, here’s Sam in his Songbird kit and me in the long-awaited Camino 1.0 polo, befuddling other patrons outside the restaurant after dinner:
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06.12.10
Posted in Links, Travel
at 1:35 am
by Smokey
I’m in a bit of a posting malaise right now, with lots I want to write about but little energy to make it happen when I have the time.
As a step in the right direction, though, I offer these links to some nifty graphics to keep your mind sharp for the weekend:
- Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench from Our Amazing Planet
- I never realized the Statue of Liberty was so short!
- Locals and Tourists from Eric Fischer
- Having been a tourist in nearly a dozen of these places, a former resident of one,1 and a general geography buff, it’s fascinating to see the places we find interesting, and the differences around the world (Greater Cairo, for instance, has a relatively low density of photographs, and an even-lower density of definable locals—but it is fun to see the tourists on felucca rides in the Nile!).
1 Or two, by the definition used in the compilation—had I uploaded any photos to Flickr, of course. ↩
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05.31.10
Posted in History, Life
at 8:36 pm
by Smokey
In the 1940s, all four of the children of John and Mary Ardisson of Export, Pennsylvania, answered the call of their country and served overseas in branches of the United States Army. All four were lucky enough to return home safely. Since the last Memorial Day, two of them have left us.
Dorothy Anna Ardisson, 1917-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Nurse Corps, World War II (March 1942-October 1945); service at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, and Oran, Algeria
Gerald John Ardisson, 1921-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Air Forces, World War II (March 1943-October 1945); service in the skies over France and Germany from Nottingham, England
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04.03.10
Posted in Life
at 1:28 am
by Smokey
Things I learned today:
- I have less hair on my head than I thought.
- It can take longer to check out with three pies and two gallons of milk in the express line than it takes to get a haircut.
- No matter how hard one tries to move pieces of tree trunks without hurting one’s back, one can still hurt said back.
- Whatever that thing is that periodically happens to my foot (and which happened this morning while walking the dogs), it doesn’t go away as quickly as usual when one spends the afternoon walking around running errands and doing yardwork.
- I am not as young as I used to be.
- Sometimes when one dreams a solution to a problem, it is actually a solution to the problem.
- Writing short posts can sometimes be as hard as writing long ones, particularly when you can’t remember everything you intended to write once you sit down to write (see also: item five).
- After a several-year outage, beccary.com is back, with a new version of Ocadia. New item on the to-do list: merge local changes. FileMerge, here I come?
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12.31.09
Posted in Camino, Life
at 8:05 pm
by Smokey
Sitting at this end of the calendar, 2009 seems like quite a long year; I’m exhausted, and I hope 2010 will be less of a marathon. 2009 was, however, still a good year for Camino, and that is what my annual look back is all about.
- First and foremost, we released Camino 2, a significant new release with lots of great new features like Tab Overview, phishing and malware protection, drag-and-drop rearranging of tabs, Growl support, and new AppleScript features. As with all community projects, it took longer than anticipated, but based on the very positive reaction, it was well worth the wait.
- Stuart Morgan fixed the most bugs, while Sean Murphy wrote three major new features; Jeff Dlouhy, Christopher Henderson, and Ilya Sherman also contributed major features to Camino 2.
- Our localization teams stayed busy, so the Multilingual edition of Camino 2.0.x currently ships with 15 languages.
- In conjunction with the Camino 2 release, we rolled out a redesign of caminobrowser.org. Thanks to our friends at Clearleft for the design work, Samuel Sidler for implementing the redesign, and Philippe Wittenbergh for helping to polish the rough edges afterwards.
- While our focus was on Camino 2, we continued to release security and stability updates for Camino 1.6 throughout the year, and beginning in the summer we started landing code for what will become Camino 2.1.
- Dan Weber was our Google Summer of Code student in 2009, working on enhancing the location bar. Over the course of the summer, Dan implemented a new look for the autocomplete window as well as extending autocompletion to include URLs and titles of both bookmarks and history items (fixing a couple of the oldest remaining Camino bugs in the process). Check out a nightly build to see his work in action.
- Our hard-working localization teams added two new languages this year, Slovenian and Turkish, and revived two translations, Chinese (Simplified) and Danish that have been missing for several major releases. Sadly, a few languages didn’t make the jump to Camino 2, so if Camino is not currently available in your language, drop by the caminol10n project website, join the mailing list, and learn how you can help!
I think that about wraps up the high points of the year, in a little briefer fashion than years past. 
Thanks to everyone who was a part of the Camino community in 2009—developers, testers, localizers, and users—for a great year! We’re always looking for new contributors, so if you’d like to help make Camino even better, there are many ways you can help out in the coming year. In the meantime, enjoy Camino 2, Happy New Year, and welcome to 2010!
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10.27.09
Posted in Camino, Life
at 3:34 am
by Smokey
Just a very brief post here tonight, to come up for air and to mark an occasion; I have a large backlog of things to write about in the near future, and also a lot more work to do.
I realized tonight that in the year that I have been handling the “build” side of Camino’s build and release process (at first sharing duties with the illustrious Mark Mentovai, and then on my own), I’ve produced builds for a bunch of releases: five Camino 2 milestones and five Camino 1.6.x security and stability releases (with at least one respin in the mix). However, I had never been responsible for the build process for a major release, for the new version that’s all shiny, the culmination of the entire team’s hard work, and the build that’s tested and reviewed by the world. Since 2006 (and Camino 1.0), Mark had always handled that. Tonight, though, I felt the weight of tagging on my shoulders.
Which is a long, rambling, nostalgic way of saying that we now have a Camino 2 release candidate (note to the press and other interested parties: release candidate; Camino 2 is not out yet) for our community to hammer on, with special thanks to Stuart Morgan for fixing a dozen or so of our blockers and wanted/pseudo-blockers in the past two weeks and to Mark for the ninetieth-minute superreview on the very last patch.
I’ll have more to say about Camino 2 in the coming days, and the release will be here before you know it, but for now I’m just going to mark this milestone, point everyone to the usual places, take off my build engineer’s cap, and go to sleep.
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09.17.09
Posted in History, Life
at 11:18 pm
by Smokey
Mary Travers
1936-2009
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08.23.09
Posted in Life
at 1:14 am
by Smokey
Dorothy Anna Ardisson
August 20, 1917–August 15, 2009
Twin Valley Cemetery, Delmont, PA, August 19, 2009
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07.05.09
Posted in Life, Travel
at 10:26 pm
by Smokey
Ingrid & Martin, banquet hall at Ekebergrestauranten, Oslo, July 5, 2008
One of the longest and most enjoyable days of my life, from the Oslo heat wave to the rumbles of Thor to the Norwegian speeches and the cake and dancing long into the night. Congratulations again, Martin and Ingrid; I’m thinking of you fondly again on this day.
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03.11.09
Posted in Camino, Life
at 2:31 am
by Smokey
(Trying to make this a quick little post before bed, because active bugs+meeting agenda took too long…)
In the process of investigating another bug, Chris Lawson and I found, filed, figured out, fixed, and checked in the fix for a bug today:
[11:54pm] cl|zzz: i like these bugs we file and fix in one day.
This was a pretty simple fix, which is why I was able to do it, and after chasing some really bizarre bugs over the past few days, figuring out the cause and writing the patch certainly made me happy.
It’s relatively rare that I fix a Camino bug that involves actual code, given that I can mostly AppleScript my way out of paper bag. When I am able to fix such a bug, like today, it reminds me that over the last four or so years, I have actually learned something useful about our codebase. I could guess the cause was related to isTextBasedContent and menu item validation, head over to MXR and find the isTextBasedContent function, and then stick in a fix.
It’s the little things, really. Every little bug-fix counts, and even though I spend most of my Camino time doing lots of other little things that also matter, it’s good to be able to knock out a code bug every now and again, too. 
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