Author: Peter

Bad Apples

Nine days ago I became the proud owner of a PowerMac G4, which nicely matched my new(ish) 15GB iPod. This evening I became the not-so-proud owner of a 13kg silver paperweight and a credit-card-sized white doorstop.

Somehow, between turning off the machine on Friday night and attempting to turn it on tonight, it flaked out. Symptoms seem to indicate the power supply is fried, and to replace it myself will cost upwards of 1/3 of the price of the entire computer. The other option is to have Apple fix it, which will cost just a few dollars less than the computer itself did. Neither option takes into account replacing the now-dead iPod I had connected to it.

So ends my first–and last–experience with Apple hardware.

Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles… the iPod, she lives. Apparently there is a problem with the iPod where the battery would drain if connected to a Mac that was off or sleeping. Nice going, Apple.

Saddle up, the Mac lives again too! Thanks to Andy Skuse at Mostly Digital, I discovered that I needed to perform a PMU reset. Even better, he diagnosed the problem via e-mail, and at no cost. Needless to say, Mostly Digital is my new favourite Mac store.

Wincent Colaiuta shared a similar story about a year ago.

NavButtons for Firefox

I’ve liked Mozilla’s Site Navigation Bar since it was introduced, and a while ago found Chris “cdn” Neale’s NavButtons extension. Since upgrading to Firefox 0.9, though, it hasn’t worked due to the new extension packaging format introduced by Ben Goodger. A version of NavButtons for Firefox 0.9 seemed unlikely, since Neale prefers his Link Toolbar (which, contrary to its name, sits in the status bar), so I decided to repackage it myself… and here’s the result. I decided to continue on from the original version numbering, so this is version 0.4; there’s really nothing different, though, other than the internal layout of the files. (NB: I’ve e-mailed Chris to ask if he’ll accept the revised code, but for now it’s all my doing and should be considered unsupported by him.)

Because I’ve had feedback from two people who have installed the extension and then not known what to do with it, here’s a slightly less short description. NavButtons adds several buttons into the Customize Toolbar palette that can be used to navigate to the previous, next, first, last and top entries, as well as up a level, in a collection of web pages linked together using (X)HTML’s link element. For example, from this page you can quickly navigate to Going all the way using the Previous button (the left arrow), Bad Apples using the Next button (the right arrow), and the main blog page using the Top button (the up arrow with a bar). (If I thought there were enough people coming by who would actually use it, I’d probably add an up link to the monthly entry index. But not tonight.)

Going all the way

For over two years I’ve been blogging in XHTML. Almost a year and a half ago I updated my server config to correctly send XHTML pages as application/xhtml+xml to UAs that support it and fall back to text/html for those that don’t. It’s time for step 3: no more fallbacks. As of August 9, my two-year anniversary of starting to blog in earnest, Petroglyphs will be a text/html-free zone.

I’m doing this partly in protest, but mostly because it’s the Right Thing to do (since I’m creating XHTML anyway). It will, probably, reduce the already-small number of people who come by, although regulars can make changes if they don’t want to switch browsers. (Really, though, why wouldn’t you?)

(Hey, this is cool: Simon Willison has been serving only application/xhtml+xml for more than a year.)

Unsafe at any speed

People who browsed [seemingly safe Web sites] on Windows computers got infected with malicious code without downloading anything…. [Internet Explorer] is simply too dangerous for routine use.

In the few days that the sites provided the Trojan horses, hundreds of thousands or millions of users could have had their credit-card, stock-brokerage and bank-account numbers and passwords stolen.

Let me repeat myself: Millions of you may have every bit of your browser-driven online financial security information stolen….

Go ahead, stick with Internet Explorer for everyday use. It’s your funeral.

Disruptive work on a stable branch

I sat down to write a screed on the wonky Aviary branch happening at mozilla.org, but I’m a little under the weather and thoughts aren’t flowing as clearly as I’d like. I might come back to this later, but thought I’d post what I have just so it’s out there.

In Real Life I do quality assurance, including being the de facto source control guru. As part of this I help to manage change in our source tree; in large part I try to stick to the best practices put forth by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald at Perforce Software, because for the most part they’re simply formalizing common sense.

The Aviary branch of the Mozilla browser and mail programs was created to be used for stable branch builds of these apps from now until the 1.0 releases of these apps. The Mozillazine FAQ says that the trunk is for Continued Mozilla backend development. Unfortunately, the brunk policy (if there is one) is that development can take place willy-nilly without being propagated back to the main codebase. Logic, and the rationale behind the branch in the first place, would suggest that disruptive changes–new features, modifications affecting interoperability, and other substantial alterations–be created off to the side and then merged into the so-called stable branch when they are–wait for it–stable. Stable changes in the branch should be merged back to the trunk sooner rather than later [because] postponed and batched change propagations can result in stunningly complex file merges.

Election hopes

If there’s one thing that makes me feel even a little bit hopeful about tomorrow’s election, it’s that I haven’t been able to see Fahrenheit 9/11 this weekend: every show I’ve tried to get to has been sold out for more than half an hour before I’ve even reached the theatre.