Record and Reverie

Yes, sourceforge.net has resorted to spamming its users. I have received a number of emails from this “Sourceforge.net Marketplace”. In the past, I just let the spam catcher correctly junk them, but today I got annoyed with it. I looked at the bottom of the email, and I see

This email was sent to: xxxx@users.sourceforge.net if you would prefer not to receive information about SourceForge.net Marketplace, please update your communication preferences by visiting the Profile Center.

(my username crossed out because I get enough spam there already)

So, I visit sourceforge, log in, and go to my profile. Nothing is listed for the marketplace mailings. I got visit the marketplace, and there is no profile there. So, what next? I spend several minutes trying to find the old ticket system for the sourceforge site. It used to be rather prominent, but now it more hidden. I file ticket 1884414. It seems that they went through great trouble to hide the fact that “Profile Center” is actually a link. I mean they used inline css to hide all attributes that give you any hint that it is a link; I guess in the hopes that you will not actually click on it. The link tag looks like this

<a style=”font-family:arial;font-size:11px;color:#999999;text-decoration:none;” …

So, I used to use sourceforge back in the day for open source projects. I moved my projects off of them because their servers were too unreliable and they took so long to adopt svn. Now, I host my own projects, one of which is bigger than any I worked on under sourceforge, and the stability is much greater. I guess sourceforge has noticed their pending obsolescence, so they started using their large user base to spam people. Perhaps it is time for me to delete my account there as I have no use for it anymore.

Well, it started before 1.0 was even released. We started looking at methods to optimize the routines within Perian to run even faster. The road has been a bit of a long one. Now, we are in a private beta. The beta has been opened to those who have donated to the project as well as personal friends of developers. We often get the question as to why we limited the beta to donators. I find more often than not that such people are the kind who think they deserve something to which they have no right to have (see Open Source Attitudes). The reason we did this is simple. We didn’t want the beta to be fully public, but we wanted more testers. Those who have donated have already shown they use and care about the project, so they are a natural choice.

Along they way, Apple decided to break things with Quicktime 7.3. I have filed these with Apple, and one of which is still open without any resolution. This one, bug ID 5594478, is particularly annoying.Open anything with an AC-3 track in it, that has more than 2 channels, and it will come through in stereo only. Change the id of the codec to something other than ‘ac-3′ and everything works flawlessly. I filled this bug report over 2 months ago, and about 2 weeks later I get a response stating that QT has never been able to decode multi-channel AC3 audio. Guess Apple is suffering from the NIH (not invented here) syndrome where nothing exists outside of what Apple makes. Then QT 7.4 comes out, and fixes nothing. Apple, this is your fault, you are in violation of your own design principles, you need to fix it. So, in the mean time, I ask everyone to file bug reports with apple, use the above id number as a reference, and get on their case to do their jobs.

Anyway, the beta is proceeding well. There are a few issues we have yet to resolve, but they are minor, and all seem to be Apple’s fault.

Tags: Perian

So, as I said earlier, I have started using Google Analytics. Google now suggests some new code to use in running the analytics. The problem: it’s broken! Here’s their code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? ” https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(”\<script src=’” + gaJsHost + ” google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’>\<\/script>” );

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-xxxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Now for what is broken:

1. There is a space between the ” and google-analytics.com. This causes browsers to load the wrong (and invalid) address
2. Code that is dependent on code in the ga.js is executed immediately after the html is written to load the external javascript. There is no explicit indication as to the order this should be done. Race condition!

So, here is the fixed code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? ” https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);

document.write(”\<script src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’>\<\/script>” );
document.write(”\<script type=’text/javascript’>var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(\”UA-2245403-1\”);” + “pageTracker._initData();” + “pageTracker._trackPageview();” + “\<\/script>”);
</script>

The space is removed, and the executed code is now explicitly after the loading of the external script. Nice and sloppy code you’ve got there Google.

A while ago, I switched to Firefox since it supported several features I liked, the most notable being an ad blocker.  I knew that there were ad blockers for Safari, but none of them were very good.  All required manually managing the block list, which is just painful.Yesterday, I found out about Safari Adblock, which has support for the ad block lists, like Adblock Plus in Firefox.  So, I decided to install it, and finally opened Safari to try it out.  No adblock; nothing.  It didn’t do anything.  I then tried another account on my computer and it worked there, so it was something specific to my account.  I finally noticed that the adblocker was an Input Manager, so I researched reasons why one wouldn’t load.  I finally ran across this post, which described some of the problems.  Mine was simply that my user belonged to the wheel group.The solution seemed to be simply remove my user from the wheel group.  It wasn’t so easy in practice.  Since leopard, NetInfo is gone, and so it the nice tool used to edit the group associations.  I had to find out how to use the new tool on the command line, and then remove the group that way.  Then, it turns out you have to reboot for it to fully take effect (which is ridiculous).  Finally, I was able to test out Safari, at the cost of no longer being able to su to root (my account is not an administrator account for good reason).The Good:

• Safari is faster than Firefox, both in loading pages and launching.  Can’t judge the stability yet, but so far so good.  I have also gained the ability to view inline PDFs again (something that even the new Firefox beta still can’t do!).  For someone doing research and reading a lot of papers, inline PDF reading is a lot more than a convenience.  Having to read PDFs in other means is nothing short of a nuisance.  
• I now have Mac OS X’s spell checker back.  The spell checker in Firefox can catch misspellings, but is horrid at correcting them.  I have found several cases where it fails to provide a suggestion, even when only a single letter is missing.
• Safari’s DOM inspector is wonderful.  It is a much better way to view the webpage source than seeing just raw HTML.
• Keychain support.  Firefox cannot use the keychain (again, true of the new beta as well).  At least 1Passwd can get around this severe deficiency.

The Bad:

•  I miss being able to switch to a particular tab via the command key.  In Firefox, command-1 goes to the first tab, 2 goes to the second, etc…  In Safari, those go to bookmarks, which I find worse than useless.
• No Mouse Gestures.  I use mouse gestures to direct the browser.  Hold the right mouse button, and drag to issue a command.  In particular, dragging to the left goes back; right, forward; down then right, close the window.  Those are the ones I miss the most.
• The adblocker is using a now unsupported method.  This means Apple can, and most likely will, break it very soon.  I also doubt that they will even think twice about adding support for this functionality back in once they kill it.

So, for now, the experiment continues.  Thankfully I used 1Passwd to store all my passwords in the keychain so the transition between the browsers is seamless.

So, people often ask me, why do I not use Windows. The reason is simple, nothing works right. Granted, many thing work, but none of them correctly. There are little tiny bugs in everything that, if the programmers had any competence in design, shouldn’t exist. Now Apple has fallen to the same regime.

I have been running Leopard for some time now. I don’t think a single day has gone by without running into a notable bug. To make matters worse, none of them were fixed with the recent update. That means I get frustrated every day with things that don’t work correctly, which is reminiscent of my experience on windows.

I am seriously considering “upgrading” to Tiger simply because it actually works correctly, which is something that cannot be said for Leopard.

P.S. I have been using macs for over a decade. Leopard is the most bug ridden OS I have used yet.