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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03.02.09
Posted in Life at 2:42 am by Smokey
One of the things about being a boy growing up in the South is that snow becomes one of those mythical things you hear about, read about, but rarely ever see (experience). When we’ve been so lucky as to have a fabled White Christmas (once, I think), it meant that we had some light flurries on Christmas morning and then the sun was going strong, no sign of winter remaining, by noon.
I have a couple of rather nebulous and two distinct memories of real Georgia snows from my youth. When I was very little, one year we had what seemed to me a big snowstorm; I remember baggies on my shoes (most people and children did not have snow boots in the South), coming back inside frequently to warm up to a fire and hot chocolate, and my first sled. See, we lived up at the top of a great big hill, and either the street (a bit dangerous, and too fast) or the backyards made for incredible sledding. To take advantage of our great location and these wondrous conditions, my dad built me a sled out of spare boards and tacked sheet metal on the bottom of boards that made up the “runners,” ensuring the sled would go flying! Compared to the garbage can lids the other children used, I was sledding in style. For some reason after that snowstorm I managed to convince my parents to buy me a real sled (apparently, despite my fond memories, the handmade sled was not good enough for me), and, amazingly, we had another big snowstorm the following year, so I got to use the new sled, too. At some point not long thereafter, everyone started fencing in the backyards (a tragedy of the commons of another sort), and our days of amazing sledding were done.
Once we moved to Lawrenceville, there must have been a couple of years with a good snow, or at least some decent ice on the roads. Backyards were all fenced in, and the street was neither as steep nor as long, so my salient memory of that era is that one of our neighbors owned ice skates, and she went ice skating on the street; we had to avoid hitting her as we attempted to sled.
After that, my memory becomes stronger, but the snow events seemed less memorable. In the blizzard of March 1993, I remember going out with my dad to check on the situation at his office and then trying to go to the library so I could continue doing research for a major English paper due the next week. We saw no other cars out on Lawrenceville Highway, and needless to say, the library was not open. People still talk about that blizzard, but for me there was nothing particularly exciting to remember about it beyond Lawrenceville Highway as a snowy ghost of a route.
In 1996 we had another big snowstorm; it hit the weekend I was supposed to go back to college after a break. We were sitting in the family van at a traffic light waiting for it to turn green when we were rear-ended by someone who was driving too fast, couldn’t stop, and probably shouldn’t have been driving in the weather at all (in the South, that means pretty much anyone who hasn’t moved here from the North). Luckily there was only minor vehicular damage, but I was a day late getting back to school as we waited until things had melted enough that we could take the car to get me back to Rome.
Most of my memories of the ridiculous relationship between Southerners and snow come from my years in Washington, DC, which for all its hustle and self-importance is, in so many ways, just another Southern city—except that it gets a decent snowstorm once a year. Despite the regular nature of snowy inclement weather, Washington and its residents aren’t prepared to handle the white stuff. Just like in Georgia, mere mention of the four-letter word is enough to clear the supermarket shelves of milk and break (I first saw the phenomenon for myself in Washington), and while the District has snow plows and salt trucks, you’re lucky if the main thoroughfares are ploughed well. Further, many schools, companies, and so forth key their closings off of the Federal Government, and say what you might about that bureaucracy, but it is very reluctant to close. As a result, snow means something short of mass chaos but bordering on mass insanity.
My first winter in Washington, we had one of the bigger snowstorms I experienced there, and of course everything remained “open.” I dutifully hiked the 30 minutes or so down the hill to campus, mostly over unshoveled sidewalks (owners or residents are required by law to have the sidewalks in front of their homes/buildings shoveled within a few hours after the end of a snowstorm; most years I was lucky if half of the sidewalk on my way had been cleared by a few days after the storm), only to find out that I may or may not have class. That’s right, the professors had just as difficult a time getting to campus. After a while one of the women who worked in our department finally arrived, explaining she had walked the last few miles to work, since traffic was not moving enough for Metrobuses or taxis to be useful means of transportation. Out on Healy Lawn, undergraduates were making the most of the class-or-no-class? day by building giant snowmen and having snowball fights and other kinds of winter fun.
In spite of all this insanity, I loved snow in DC. In part it was because it was snow, but in part because snow was one of the only things that slowed life down. I used to look out my window and wander up to the lobby to look out on Wisconsin Avenue becoming covered with snow as the storms arrived late at night, watching the bustling street become a peaceful, pure, sparkling white otherworld. It was as if someone had placed a soft blanket on a screaming baby and he had fallen into a deep, peaceful sleep. I marveled at it time and again…and then fell off to sleep, dreading the morning to come.
For the first time in several years, we’ve had a decent snowstorm here in Georgia, again in March as they so often are. The yard soon became white, the birds all atwitter as they fed at the feeders all day, and the neighbor children tossed snowballs in their backyard. As semi-melted snow began to accumulate on the street, the unseen exit of a car across the street left two snow-hearts on the street in front of our driveway. 
And that amazing feeling, of peace and of wonder, descended again upon me…snow—yes, it really does exist!
Now, as in Washington, I’m off to sleep, trying not to think of the chaos that Monday morning will bring, turning the magical into the vexing.
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02.10.09
Posted in Life at 1:34 am by Smokey
It is interesting to see where people have gone. I don’t write much anymore, but I read what I see out there, and it makes me happy.
It is interesting to see where people have gone.
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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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