July 2007 Archives

This just proves that Gran Paradiso, the thing that will eventually transform into Firefox 3, now has a new crash reporter that also works on Intel Macs. It's based on Google Breakpad and is much nicer than the old Talkback program that Firefox used to ship with. And it's open source, so the stricter Linux distributions can include it too, which should lead to improved stability for Linux users.

I'm now running Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 as my primary browser on my MacBook, and 98% of the time this is not a problem, however there's an occasional annoying bug where none of the text fields in a particular window will accept input, including the address bar, and all you can do is close the window and open it again. But it's a compromise with the hugely improved performance over Firefox 2 that I'm willing to accept.

Oh, and the cause of the crash? Some plugin, I think.

BAA, the operator of Heathrow Airport (and a number of other big UK airports) wants to get a court injunction against members of 15 organisations who are running Camp for Climate Change in August. The injunction would mean that members of the 15 organisations involved in the camp cannot go into the airport, use the Heathrow Express or its platforms at Paddington station, use parts of the Piccadilly Line on London Underground, or use any of the airport access roads, including parts of the M25 and M4. There's more from Greenpeace here, link via BoingBoing.

The thing is, these 15 organisations aren't all loony liberal hippy organisations. Yes, the likes of Greenpeace are there, along with single-issue groups opposed to airport expansion. But you've also get well established organisations like The National Trust, RSPB, The Woodland Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The combined membership of these organisations is around 5 million people, and if the injunction is worded how Greenpeace say it is, then all 5 million of them will be banned from the airport. And as I'm a proud paid-up member of The National Trust, that includes me, and my parents.

Amusingly, it also includes The Queen, patron of the RSPB and CPRE, and Prince Charles, patron of the National Trust. And whole load of BAA's own staff.

As it happens I have no real intention of being anywhere near Heathrow at that time, either as a protester or a passenger (although I know of a few friends wanting to do the former). But this injunction is so broad that's almost amusing in a real head-against-wall way, if that makes any sense.

So now that I've got Movable Type 4 running on here and the basics are working, I now need to get the bells and whistles that I had previously back up and running.

• Smilies are now working in entries and comments :) .
• I've fixed the issues with OpenID/TypeKey comments that appear when you preview your comment by updating the JavaScript used to MT4's version (and not a cannibalised version of the MT3 defaults like before)
• At my end, I'm not receiving email confirmation of comments when they're posted, even though I should be and did before the upgrade. Not quite sure what's up there. Update: Just received one, so either it's a fluke or they're magically working again.
• You may not be able to comment anonymously on some recent entries because the comment challenge box isn't there - that's because I forgot about it until late last night and didn't rebuild everything. Yes, I still use static pages for entries.
• The purpose of the sign-in link isn't very obvious - it doesn't make it clear from the outset that you can sign-in with OpenID or whatever. I'll fix this with some images.

I would have kept a shorter version of this as an addition to the previous entry, but Google Reader doesn't show updates to posts and so quite a number of you wouldn't see it. To be fair you're probably not interested anyway but nevermind.

I'm now running Movable Type 4.0 RC1, and in doing so blatantly ignoring the advice about not installing over a production environment. That said, I have backed up all 20 megabytes of the database, just in case.

MT4 is big - around 13.5 MB when unzipped - and on my 2 megabit connection took around half an hour to upload. Thankfully it's pretty easy after that as the upgrade is very simple, although as this is an early release quite a few plugins haven't been updated yet and so I've had to disable quite a few of them; though none of them are particularly big or important.

So, if you can read this then the upgrade was a success and most things are working. The interface is very different but I'm liking it so far.

Update: It's taken me a little while to get things working properly, mainly because of a MT template tag used in the wrong context on one of my custom templates (<$MTArchiveDate$> in the Entry template) which MT 3.x had no problems with but MT 4 seems to throw it's toys out of the pram over. To be honest it's not really MT's fault as the tag was in the wrong context, but it would be nice if this was told to me when the entry was saved. As it happens, it just said everything was okay and then didn't rebuild me pages for me, though thankfully I found out when doing a manual rebuild what the problem was.

Of the plugins I've had to disable, Fast Search is the one I'm going to miss the most - until it's updated for MT 4.x we're back to MT's default CGI-based search which is much slower. I've also had to disable the plugin which crossposts entries to LiveJournal for the time being - sorry LiveJournal people.

Other plugins which I've previously used have been folded into MT's core. OpenID Comments is now built-in, and so when you sign-in you'll have the option of using OpenID, TypeKey, LiveJournal or Vox to authenticate your comment. There's also the ability to add user accounts and so you'll be able to have your own account with this site in future if I enable the option, but as I've previously mentioned I'm sticking with allowing anonymous comments for the time being. Markdown and Smartypants are now built-in, as is SCode for providing image CAPTCHAs, although I'll still be using Comment Challenge which still seems to work okay in 4.0. Some plugins that are still enabled may or may not work, such as MT-Notifier which sends out the email notifications of new comments.

Rich text editing is now included, so you can format posts without having to use HTML, and it seems to work pretty well too - I'm using it for this post. In particular, adding images to entries is far easier than it used to be. There's also the ability to preview your entries as they would appear when posted (i.e. with your blog's design) and not just how the text will look.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, mainly because I've spent most of the evening retro-fitting my templates into the new software, but so far I'm really impressed.

Anyone who was a child in Britain during the early 1990s will surely remember this advert being on TV:

Honestly, what was life like before YouTube?

The latest 'in-thing' for Bloggers seems to be disabling comments on their blogs. Joe Spolsky, of Joel on Software, first aired the idea and various other bloggers have jumped on the bandwagon. The argument is that having comments open allows people to make silly anonymous comments, whereas really they should be held accountable by posting on their own blogs.

I'm not about to go down this route. I don't get many comments nowadays, mainly because I don't blog much - I managed a mere 11 posts last month down from a high of 93 for the same peiod 4 years ago. But many of those that I do get are by people who do not have blogs of their own, and probably wouldn't go through the trouble of creating one just to post the occasional comment. I know that I for one would not want to make a new blog entry everytime I wanted to post a reply to someone else's entry, and I imagine it would become tedious for any regular readers who would just get a series of replies to other people's posts. Though I may not have much new content on here, I'm proud to say that much of it is relatively original, and not lots of 'me too' entries.

There's also the issue of tracking the conversation, and I don't believe the tools we have for this are anywhere near perfect. I disabled trackback on here because 99.8% of all trackbacks received were spam, and most of the rest were people mentioning my entries without really adding to the conversation (such as link blogs) so I really didn't see the value in keeping it. Apparently Pingback is more resiliant to spam but Movable Type doesn't support it so I can't enable it on here, and I'm not about to switch to Wordpress over what I would call a trivial feature. Technorati and the like are all well and good but integrating it with this site, to allow people to track the conversation, is easier said than done. I've tried it before and given up.

If anything, making commenters accountable to what they say is precisely why we need OpenID. OpenID makes it hard (though not impossible) to be anonymous when posting comments, and it raises the bar so that not anyone off the street can comment. As time goes on more people will have access to OpenID and so this could be one good way of allowing comments while keeping out those anonymous cowards who only wish to flame and bait.

Ironically, this is a reply to Dave Metzener, who has just disabled comments on his blog. As it happens, I would have probably posted a briefer and more specific version of this over there, but he's disabled comments so I couldn't. He'll have to do with a trackback.

Please feel free to comment on this entry, either here or on your own blog - I really don't mind.

Update: Dave responded to this post. Ultimately I suppose the decision to close comments on your blog should be up to you as each blog is different.

Jeremy Zawodny has a quick guide to set expiry dates for images under Apache. It means that most browsers will know not to refresh any images on your site for a set amount of time (a month in Jeremy's example). It should therefore help improve performance and reduce bandwidth usage on sites, especially those with big images which do not change frequently.

And yes, I have just added this to this site at one o'clock in the morning, while under the influence of alcohol, so if you see anything bizarre happening on the site this may be why. However, everything seems to be working fine.

And for the record, where I'm living in Bradford, we're not flooded and have full electric and water supplies, though my thoughts are with those less fortunate right now.

Way back in November 2005, I wrote a guide to adding Growl notifications to Thunderbird, so that Thunderbird would issue a Growl notification when you received a new message. Though the method worked, it was very convoluted and not really for the faint of heart.

Thankfully, there's now an official Growl extension for Firefox and Thunderbird. In Firefox, it'll notify when a download completes, although Firefox 3 will have this feature built-in and so it won't be necessary when that launches later this year. And in Thunderbird, it'll notify when a new email message arrives. Setting up notifications in Thunderbird is now as simple as downloading this extension, installing it and restarting the program - no need to install any helper programs like growlNotify.

I'll keep the old guide up for reference, but really everyone should use the official extension now as it's much simpler.

Normally, when maintenance releases of Firefox and Thunderbird come out, the only changes improve compatibility or fix bugs - it's rare that a new feature slips in there. However, Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 changes the behaviour of the 'Date' sorting field to reflect the date the email was received, not sent, which was bug 166254 in Bugzilla (and is almost 5 years old).

Normally, if you sort your emails by date (like I do), the date used is the date that the email was sent. This is fine in most cases, but falls down when the sending computer has the wrong date, the email somehow gets delayed or the date is left off the email together; the latter case means that the email gets tagged as being from 1st January 1970. Apple do this with the Developer Connection emails - most of your new mail will be at the top, except theirs which get pushed to the very bottom, which is annoying.

Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 fixes this, so email uses the date it was received. This means that, when sorted by date order, your emails will all be sorted by the date you received them, no matter what time they claim to have been sent.

I suppose you could say it fixes a bug, but as I understand it, it's also possible to turn off the new behaviour, so that makes it a feature in my mind. And it's one that I've been looking forward to.

Back in April, I wrote a list of 8 films I was intending to see this year. Of those, I haven't seen Hot Fuzz or 28 Weeks Later, though I should be getting the former to rent sometime soon, and I haven't seen The Simpsons Movie because it isn't out yet.

Yesterday Hari and I killed 2 birds with one stone and saw both Shrek the Third and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the same day (taking a break in between to go for dinner). Shrek 3 isn't quite as good as 1 and 2 but it's still a very good film, and Harry Potter 5 is as least as good as the first 4 films. The fact that this is the fifth film in a series and it doesn't totally suck is a testament to J K Rowling's writing and the directors/screenplay writers - pity the same can't be said for films like Police Academy V...

Hari and I also went to see Wedding Daze (also known as The Pleasure of Your Company) a few weeks ago, mainly because we wanted to go on a date and that was all that was on at the cinema at the time that interested us, but actually it was quite enjoyable, if rather random.

There are, of course, other films that we're considering going to see this year:

• Transformers - I've heard some very mixed reviews of this film and so we may be renting it rather than going to see it in the cinema.
• Ratatouille - Pixar make good films and the reviews suggest this is no exception, but alas us Brits have to wait until mid-October before this film is out here.
• Stardust - saw the trailer for this before Shrek 3 yesterday and it looks pretty good, and it's based on a Neil Gaiman novel.
• Evan Almighty - I enjoyed Bruce Almighty so with a bit of luck this won't disappoint. Again, the US gets this first, it's not out here until August.
• The Golden Compass - the film based on Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. Not out until December.

Today Apple released QuickTime 7.2, which finally, finally, finally supports video playback in full screen mode, without the need to buy QuickTime Pro. In other words, it does something that Windows users have had for years in Windows Media Player without additional expense.

Admittedly programs like VLC have brought this feature for free but it's nice to see it finally available 'out of the box', as it were.

Oh yeah, and it fixes some critical security issues so you'll probably want to update it anyway.

(This post brought to you in association with half a bottle of £2.89 Rose d'Anjou from Lidl)

Scratch that, it didn't embed properly - click here to view it instead.

I'm testing out Skitch, a new program from Plasq, makers of Comic Life, thanks to invite from Dave. One of the nice touches is that you can save images not only in JPEG and PNG, but PDF, and also SVG which is what I've shown here. You'll need a recent copy of Firefox or Opera to view it, or the beta of Safari, and it probably won't yet work in most feed readers, but all of that is a big lump of XML code.

I may post more about it when I've had more time to play with it, but it looks like a fantastically useful little program.

It looks like some of the spam bots out there are now taking the Comment Challenge plugin into account, as I've had some automated spam where the extra question has been answered correctly. Though I've always had some spam get through, until now it looks as if it had all been typed in manually by a human, and not the work of a spam bot. Comment Challenge, by the way, is the thing that makes you type 'elephant' when you post a comment here.

Considering it's been over 10 months since I installed the plugin I'm impressed that it has taken until now for the automated bots to work around it - I thought that something so simple would be trivial to work around. Obviously it wasn't.

As it happens, only 4 spam comments got through, and they were all junked by other anti-spam plugins (namely Akismet and SpamLookup) so they never appeared on the site. But it's a slightly concerning new development.