Rich Text (HTML) signatures in Mail.app
I was recently asked to help with setting up an HTML signature in Mail.app. "No problem", I thought. Unfortunately after a few quick attempts I quickly discovered that Mail.app's signature system is atrocious. Typing in plain text signatures (all I've ever done prior to this) is easy. Entering an Rich Text1 signature is not.
The problem is mainly that the editor window is difficult to use. For one thing it relies on the available-to-all-Cocoa-apps Fonts and Colors floating selection windows - which are elegant but seem to be constantly getting in the way just when you least expect it. Also using images in your signature is a pain because the signature window inexplicably doesn't display images you drop into it.
The line spacing in the signature window is also buggy. On several occasions while switching from one signature to another I saw random increases in line spacing as well as inserted line breaks in the middle of sentences. These random increases were cumulative, so after several switches the gap between two lines of text was several centimetres. I encountered similar problems with the "Always match my default message font" checkbox. Selecting and unselecting the checkbox repeatedly again caused the line height to increase to gigantic proportions.
The bug is difficult to reproduce but you can see a hint of it here:
After taking the first screenshot I selected and unselected the "Always match ..." checkbox. As you can see in the first image the image is at the end of line 1, but in the second image there are two line breaks between line 1 and the image.
In my search for a solution I found this hint at MacOSXHints. The 6-step method is a bit of a pain, but it works - albeit with a little tweaking:
- In step 3 the HTML page you create must use FONT tags to control the text colour and size. Using CSS won't work. Nor will using a BODY TEXT tag.
- In step 6 the easiest way to determine which signature file you need to replace is to modify the signature file you wish to replace and quit Mail.app. Now when you open the
~/Library/Mail/Signaturesfolder you can replace the most recently modified signature file. - And when you eventually send your signed emails, the body of the email must be in Rich Text format, otherwise your finely crafted signature will be displayed as plain text (and also without images).
1 Mail.app's Rich Text format is actually HTML.
From iMovie to YouTube, a.s.a.p.
Imagine this, if you will. You've put together your iMovie masterpiece and want to share it with friends and family. No problem, fire it through to iDVD and send them a DVD - right? But suppose it's a very short clip, or the friends and relatives in question are more of the 'casual acquaintance' variety? Is it still appropriate to physically send a DVD? This was the quandary I was in (short clips, not casual relatives) - so I decided to make use of YouTube.
Now, we know that YouTube wants the video to be in certain formats so they can convert it to the Flash movie that YouTube viewers see. On top of that YouTube specifically recommends divx or xvid video with MP3 audio to achieve the "best results". If the video or audio is in the wrong format you end up with a movie missing the video or audio (as I discovered on several occasions during this process
).The problem is finding a video and audio format which - in order of importance - (a) is compatible with YouTube, (b) is as small as possible to reduce upload time, and (c) encodes reasonably quickly and directly from iMovie without any intermediate apps such as ffmpegX.
After a lot experimentation I have found that H.264 video with AAC audio offers the best combination of encoding speed, file size (and hence upload time), and being available from within iMovie itself. The fact that YouTube accepted H.264 was a surprise to me but given the format's excellent video quality it was definitely a most pleasant one!
Here's what I did and the settings I used:
1. Start with your video clip in iMovie. Highlight the video in the Clips panel so that it is displayed in the large preview window. Click File:Export.
2. You should now see something similar to the image below. Choose 'Expert settings'. Click 'Share'.
3. You are now given a save dialog box similar to the one below. Click on the 'Export' drop-down menu and choose 'Movie to QuickTime Movie'. Click Options.
4. You should now see the Movie Settings panel as shown below. In the video section click 'Settings'.
5. Now we get to choose our video format. Set the 'Compression Type' to H.264 with a frame rate of 15 fps with automatic key frames. I have found that a 'Low' quality setting with 'Best Quality' multi-pass encoding produced video that is perfectly sufficient for YouTube. Click OK. (See that preview? That's why this blog has been kinda quiet recently
)
6. Back at the Movie Settings panel you already saw in step 4, click the audio 'Settings' button.
7. Now we choose an audio format. Unless your home video has some kind of superb stereo sound (unlikely), we can save some space here by choosing a mono format and reducing the bitrate. Set the format to AAC, choose Mono from the channels drop-down menu, change the 'Rate' (frequency) to 22.050 kHz, and choose a target bit rate of 24 kbps. Click OK.
8. Back at the Movie Settings panel again. Make sure 'Prepare for internet streaming' is deselected.
9. Still at the Movie Settings panel. In the video section click 'Size'. You'll probably need a calculator here. My source video was from a European digital camera, so it is PAL video with frame sizes of 784 x 576 (essentially a 4:3 aspect ratio). YouTube's default video size is 425 pixels wide so we'll aim for that width, which means to preserve our aspect ratio our video should be 312 pixels tall (784/425 = 576/312). Choose 'Custom' dimensions and plug in the frame size you just calculated. I also, hopefully unnecessarily, check the 'Preserve aspect ratio' box using 'Letterbox'. Raincoat and an umbrella, you know?
Check the 'Deinterlace Source Video' box. Click OK.
10. Back at the Movie Settings panel from step 4 ... hopefully for the last time. Click OK.
11. You should now be back at the save dialog box from step 3. Give your exported movie a name, and click 'save'. iMovie will now show you a progress bar for your export.
On my 2.16GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro a 3 minute iMovie clip takes about 10 minutes to export using this method, and ends up being about 3 megabytes in size. This in turn takes me about 3 minutes to upload to YouTube on my bog-standard 2 megabit ADSL broadband with it's pitiful 256k upload speed. For me that is a quick-enough process to make using YouTube as painless as possible. And it keeps the rellies happy!
This post isn't about Twitter
Okay, I lie, it is ... kind of. Mike over at industry watcher TechDirt has an interesting article on the demise of Tello and corresponding rise of Twitter. As is the norm for TechDirt, the article is a densely-packed single head-expanding paragraph with very little 'fluff'.
Microsoft Zune search results
Zooomr pro accounts for bloggers
Get a free pro account with Zooomr by blogging a photo you've uploaded. More info on the Zooomr blog. Here's my pic:
Giant iPod found on Google Maps
We've seen Jesus, now we have giant MP3 players. Is there no end to the things people find with Google Maps err Google Local?
Built for Adsense? Try Built for Google Buyout instead
Have you ever heard the term "built for Adsense"? Have a look at this AJAX word processor site, and then come back here and place your bets on how long it takes for Google to buy the company behind it. Edit: Yes, Google already bought Writely, but this version is available for you to try out right now. Via Fosfor Gadgets.
This week's sign that the US patent office has lost their minds
One unknown California web-design firm has been granted a patent which covers, among other things, Flash, AJAX and Java. Talk about completely fucking insane.
Interesting video interview with Derek Franklin
If you have half an hour to spare (as well as decent broadband, 1 megabit minimum), I would urge you to watch this video interview with Derek Franklin. Franklin is a longtime Flash author as well as the creator of Search Automator and WhoNu.com. Not only is the interview interesting (Franklin comes across as a very engaging fellow), but the quality of the h264 video is simply stunning and well worth a look if you are interested in this sort of thing. Quicktime 7 required.
FolderBlog on IIS
I've been using the great little image CMS known as FolderBlog for the last few months and have been thoroughly enjoying it. The program is easily adapted to any design and is incredibly simple to use, allowing even the most computer-illiterate client to easily upload images and edit captions. The official program doesn't have an easy non-FTP way to delete images, but that is taken care of by a nifty little modification by Björn-Frederic Limmer known as FolderBlog Ikue Reloaded (FIR). FIR also adds other features - including adding .gif compatibility and sorting by EXIF data - but it is the delete function that tops my list.
However, my entire experience of using FolderBlog and FIR has been on Apache servers. Today I tried to use it on an IIS server and ran into many problems. Searching for information to solve this problem was difficult, largely due to the lack of a search function at the official FolderBlog forums. The incomplete documentation for the current version 3 of the program also doesn't help! As a result I've decided to post my solution here:
Step 1
Edit fb_settings.php and replace:
With:
Note: To post new images and captions after changing this setting you need to browse to fb.php?p=post instead of fb.php/post/
Step 2
IIS does not have the REQUEST_URI function. We need to use PHP_SELF instead. Open up fb.php and replace all instances (there should be 5) of:
With:
Step 3
Some IIS servers which are running PHP as CGI may not have EXIF enabled. This was the case with my IIS server. In order to fix the exif_imagedata errors that result from this I had to find this section in the FIR version of fb.php:
global $photo_directory, $thumb_directory, $thumb_maxsize, $square_thumbs, $file_extension;
// MODIFIED BY IKUE
// check if it is a supported filetype, better error handling included
$original = @imagecreatefromjpeg($filename);
// could it be loaded? if not, try another
if (!$original) { $original = @imagecreatefrompng($filename); }
// could it be loaded? if not, try another
if (!$original) { $original = @imagecreatefromgif($filename); }
// still not loaded? dear... give an error message
if (!$original) { showerror("You attempted to load an unsupported filetype. Check your file extensions in the settings.<br>File: $filename"); }
$x = imagesx($original);
$y = imagesy($original);
if ($square_thumbs==0) {
$scale = $thumb_maxsize/max($x, $y);
$newx = $x*$scale;
$newy = $y*$scale;
$thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($newx, $newy);
imagecopyresampled($thumb, $original, 0, 0, 0, 0, $newx, $newy, $x, $y);
} elseif ($square_thumbs==1) {
$scale = $thumb_maxsize/min($x, $y);
$newx = $x*$scale;
$newy = $y*$scale;
$thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($thumb_maxsize, $thumb_maxsize);
imagecopyresampled($thumb, $original, ($newx-$thumb_maxsize)/-2, ($newy-$thumb_maxsize)/-2, 0, 0, $newx, $newy, $x, $y);
}
if (exif_imagetype($filename)==IMAGETYPE_JPEG) {
imagejpeg($thumb, $thumb_directory . basename($filename), 95);
if ($altname) {
imagejpeg($thumb, $thumb_directory . $altname, 95);
}
} else
if (exif_imagetype($filename)==IMAGETYPE_GIF) {
imagegif($thumb, $thumb_directory . basename($filename));
if ($altname) {
imagegif($thumb, $thumb_directory . $altname);
}
} else
if (exif_imagetype($filename)==IMAGETYPE_PNG) {
imagepng($thumb, $thumb_directory . basename($filename));
if ($altname) {
imagepng($thumb, $thumb_directory . $altname);
}
} else { showerror("You attempted to load an unsupported filetype. Check your file extensions in the settings.<br>File: $filename"); }
return array($newx, $newy);
}
And replace it with the same function from the original unmodified (not FIR) version of fb.php (this will remove EXIF functionality from FIR, but I don't need it anyway):
global $photo_directory, $thumb_directory, $thumb_maxsize, $square_thumbs, $file_extension;
$original = imagecreatefromjpeg($filename);
$x = imagesx($original);
$y = imagesy($original);
if ($square_thumbs==0) {
$scale = $thumb_maxsize/max($x, $y);
$newx = $x*$scale;
$newy = $y*$scale;
$thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($newx, $newy);
imagecopyresampled($thumb, $original, 0, 0, 0, 0, $newx, $newy, $x, $y);
} elseif ($square_thumbs==1) {
$scale = $thumb_maxsize/min($x, $y);
$newx = $x*$scale;
$newy = $y*$scale;
$thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($thumb_maxsize, $thumb_maxsize);
imagecopyresampled($thumb, $original, ($newx-$thumb_maxsize)/-2, ($newy-$thumb_maxsize)/-2, 0, 0, $newx, $newy, $x, $y);
}
imagejpeg($thumb, $thumb_directory . basename($filename), 95);
if ($altname) {
imagejpeg($thumb, $thumb_directory . $altname, 95);
}
return array($newx, $newy);
}
Step 4
Almost there! The FIR gallery now displays in my web browser, but although the thumbnails are visible none of links work. It turns out that all of the links were missing the ?q= characters. Thanks to this thread all you need to do to fix this is edit fb.php and replace this line:
With this line:
Step 5
There is no step 5. You should now have a working FolderBlog installation on a Windows IIS server.
JenSense strangely beats ProBlogger ... how?
I noticed today that JenSense has won SearchEngineJournal's 2005 "Search Engine Blogs Awards", beating out several high profile blogs, including ProBlogger. Now don't get me wrong, I read and enjoy both ProBlogger and JenSense, but I simply cannot understand how people voted. Without being rude about it, I simply cannot think of a single area where JenSense is better than ProBlogger. Both authors are clearly knowledgeable, but ProBlogger is far and away the more interesting read. JenSense simply seems (sorry Jen!) boring by comparison.
I think part of it is a personal bias towards design. Jen's blog is so ... plain. I know, I know, whitespace is the new black and there isn't enough of it around, but c'mon, there's got to be more to a website than the words. Why not just use default fonts and no CSS at all? Perhaps this simplicity is good for attracting the business-types, I don't know. I also think the main body column in JenSense is too wide and find reading it quite tiresome. That could however simply be my uselessness rearing its ugly head.
My final gripe is that JenSense is much more 'news' oriented. A simple glance at the last 15 entries on each blog clearly demonstrates this. (I started to type out the 15 recent entries of each blog but quickly got fed up. So I took some screenshots instead.)
Here are JenSense's last 15 entries:
And here are ProBlogger's last 15 entries:
I think these two shots are pretty illuminating, but if you don't agree a quick read through those entries may change your mind. On re-reading this post it may appear that I am being overly critical of JenSense. This isn't my intention. My goal was simply to understand how ProBlogger could rank so many places behind JenSense. (I am more careful about these things since facing the wrath of a couple of righteous commenters a few days ago!)
Update: On further reflection (which I should have done before posting
) I think the fact that JenSense is more focussed on Adsense while ProBlogger has a wider coverage makes JenSense less interesting to me. The narrower focus means that Jen covers more of the minutiae which by definition is less engrossing to the casual reader such as yours truly.
CNN poll on Top 10 web moments
Matt Cutts, a Google employee who is also a prominent blogger, discusses a CNN poll which asked users to name the 10 most significant events in the history of the World Wide Web. The poll is to celebrate 15 years of the WWW and offers these choices:
Matt doesn't think much of the poll, saying that it is difficult to trust when webcams are included but RSS, XML and AJAX are not. I can't say I agree with Matt there, even today your average websurfer wouldn't have a clue what RSS, XML and AJAX were. Commenters on Matt's post offer a variety of other opinions, some of which I disagree with, and a couple of which simply made me laugh (modems? HTML? How can these be 'Top 10 Web moments'?)10. WiFi hotspots -- wireless Internet connectivity appears in airports, hotels and even McDonald's.
9. Webcams and photo sharing -- communication becomes visual, and inboxes fill with baby photos. 8. Skype -- telephony turns upside down with free long-distance calls, Ebay snaps it up in September 2005 for $2.6 billion.
7. Live 8 on AOL -- five million people watch poverty awareness concerts online in July 2005, setting a new Net record.
6. Napster goes offline -- Regulators close the pioneering music swap site in July 2001 and file-sharing goes offshore.
5. Lewinsky scandal -- Matt Drudge breaks the Clinton/Lewinsky sex scandal in 1998. The blog is born.
4. Tsunami and 9/11 -- two tragic events set the Web alight with opinion and amateur video.
3. Boom and bust -- trillions of dollars were made and lost as the dotcom bubble ballooned and burst between 1995 and 2001.
2. Hotmail -- went from having zero users in 1995 to 30 million subscribers 30 months later. It now has 215 million users.
1. Google -- redefined search. Invented a new advertising model and commands a vast business empire.
My own nominations would include most of the CNN list, barring the Live8 coverage and Skype. I would also rephrase number 6 so that it recognises the creation of Napster rather than its demise. However I think there are some glaring omissions. My other nominations would be:
I'm sure I've forgotten some, but I think these deserve a place on that list. Has anyone else got any suggestions?Netscape - the first popular graphical web browser, sparks the 'browser wars'
WYSIWYG HTML editors - it's 1995, PageMill is released, and suddenly anyone can build a webpage
Javascript - webpages become interactive, later develops into AJAX
Amazon - dramatically shook up e-commerce with great prices and fast worldwide delivery
ICQ - instant messaging enters the public consciousness via a tiny Israeli company
eBay - wasting time on the web while at work explodes in popularity and propels thousands into earning a living in their pajamas
Juvenile behaviour on World of Warcraft? No shit, sherlock.
Boing Boing are reporting on a San Antonio university course where students are required to observe interactions in the online role playing game World of Warcraft. One bright spark boldly embarked on an investigation into sexism, and was inexplicably surprised when she got plenty of juvenile responses ("show us yer t*ts!!!") on the WoW discussion forums. Hello? It's a GAME - with a commensurate number of children playing. Juvenile behaviour is the norm.
Mail.app nightmare over
Back in April, I posted a rant about Mail.app's handling of inline images. The gist of my tirade was that Mail.app insisted (nothing's changed - it still does) on displaying images inline, rather than as attachments. The problem here is that messages with inline images or PDF documents take an age to open. This glacial response time is infinitely more aggravating when there are several such emails to open in succession (for instance when searching for one particular image out of dozens emailed to you). Mail.app does offer you the ability to right-click an image and choose 'display as icon', but close and re-open the email and you'll find that Mail.app will blithely continue to display the image as if you'd never told it otherwise. Even worse, there is no global preference to alter this behaviour.This glaring tidbit of user-interface idiocy is particularly frustrating for me since I was a long-time Eudora user prior to the arrival of Mail.app and Eudora has always, for at least a decade, clearly distinguished between inline images and attachment images. Those of you who have never used any email client other than Mail.app may wonder what I am blithering on about. The basic explanation is that 'inline' should mean that the image is displayed along with the text of your email, whereas an 'attachment' should properly be an image (or other file) that is sent with the email as a file attachment but is not displayed with the text of your email.
The 'official' description of the difference between 'inline' and 'attachment' can be found in this RFC document, the relevant part of which is:
Thus concludes Mac History 101.2.9 Content-Disposition and Multipart
If a Content-Disposition header is used on a multipart body part, it applies to the multipart as a whole, not the individual subparts. The disposition types of the subparts do not need to be consulted until the multipart itself is presented. When the multipart is displayed, then the dispositions of the subparts should be respected.
If the `inline' disposition is used, the multipart should be displayed as normal; however, an `attachment' subpart should require action from the user to display.
If the `attachment' disposition is used, presentation of the multipart should not proceed without explicit user action. Once the user has chosen to display the multipart, the individual subpart dispositions should be consulted to determine how to present the subparts.
"So", I hear you ask, "why are you moaning about this again?". Despair not dear reader - there is a solution! I have recently discovered that I am not alone in my Mail.app nightmare. Adam Nohejl of Czech outfit Loki Software must have been a fellow resident of inline-hell, but unlike yours truly he actually did something about it, writing a wonderful piece of $6 shareware named Mail Attachment Iconizer. This program does one thing only, and by God does it well. Simply fire up the installer and Mail Attachment Iconizer will modify your copy of Mail.app and forever turn those inline images into image icons. Double click 'em and they expand into images or PDFs; double-click a second time and they revert to icons. Apple - are you watching? This is the way it should have been done from the start.
For those of you wondering why I switched from Eudora in the first place if it was so damned wonderful, the answer is that Eudora at the time did not make the transition to OS X very well and wasn't updated for at least two years. It also didn't have Mail.app's tight integration with Address Book and the iLife apps. Not to mention the fact that Mail.app is free, whereas Eudora requires an annual (annual!) payment for the ad-free version.
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Google Maps for your phone
I somehow missed it at the time but I've just discovered that back in April Google launched a Google Maps service on certain mobile phones. The service is a downloadable application which lets you view Google Maps (maps and satellite imagery tied together with driving directions and telephone directory information) on your mobile phone. Just like the computer version of Google Maps, you can drag the map around the screen. The mobile phone service also introduces a new feature named 'click to call' where you can phone up a local business simply by locating them on the map.The service, named Google Local for mobile, is currently only available in the US and is officially limited to just over a dozen phones from a few manufacturers. Google say that 'most' Java-enabled (J2ME) phones released in the last year should be compatible, although phones from Sony-Ericsson are conspicuously absent from the compatibility list. There have been reports on the Google Local for mobile group that some unsupported phones are also compatible - notably the Treo, the SE W800i walkman phone, the SE P800/P900/P910, the SE K750i ... but not the Blackberry.
There are no charges other than data transfer charges for your phone's internet connection. The service is only currently available on certain networks, including Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint.
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Mobile MMORPG
Here's one for all of you with unlimited data connections on your mobile phone plans: German developer CipSoft have finally introduced a worldwide version of their Tibia MMORPG for Symbian Series 60 phones. For those of you paying per kilobyte, one hour of gameplay averages around 400kb of data transfer. Could this be a threat to the dominance of World of Warcraft? No longer will people need to closet themselves at home to get their online gaming fix!
MT SpamLookup report card
Since installing SpamLookup 104 days ago this site has been completely free of trackback spam. In that time SpamLookup has blocked 297 trackback spams. Of those there was 1 false positive (apologies to inaniloquent.com, but your ping IP didn't match your site IP). There was also one angry young man. Pretty damn good if you ask me.
Airport Express 6.2.0 firmware update = no more internet
While adjusting some settings in Airport Admin Utility today I was prompted to update my Airport Express firmware to version 6.2.0. I knew that this firmware update was included with the OS X Airport 4.2 update from back in July 2005, but although I had updated my Mac's Airport software at the time I had never got around to applying the included update to the Airport Express's firmware. "What the hell", I thought, "perhaps it'll solve the occasional freezes I get" (every few weeks my connection seems to lock up, and resetting my D-Link modem fixes it).
Updating the Airport Express firmware was, as it turned out, a god-awful idea. After the update my internet connection immediately stopped working. I could see the Airport network and connect to it but nothing else worked. Internet Connect reported that I was connected to the internet. Network Diagnostics reported that my connection made it as far as my ISP but not to the internet itself. Several resets of the modem and Airport Express did nothing. Nor did a reboot of my Mac.
Eventually I fired up my trusty old dial-up modem and connected to the net to begin searching for clues. In the UK NASCR are a convenient source of dial-up services - no monthly charges and you just pay local-call rates on your phone bill. Having an account with them has saved me more than once!
After some slow-as-hell web browsing, I eventually found the solution. This comment on Versiontracker led me to discover many useful threads on the Apple discussion forums. Several people suggested that the Airport Express 6.2.0 firmware update breaks PPPoE on DSL connections, and reverting to 6.1.1 would fix it. I don't actually use PPPoE to connect, but I still thought that reverting was worth a try. Sure enough, after downloading and installing the Airport Express 6.1.1 updater, my Mac miraculously had an internet connection again!
Comment
This is ridiculous. This firmware update was released over 2 months ago, but I found several recent references to this connection problem in just 5 minutes of browsing of Apple's forums (at a snail's pace, mind you!). If this is such a common problem why hasn't there been a fix? It's hardly as if DSL connections are uncommon.
As an aside, surfing the net via dial-up modem was an edifying experience. For one thing I discovered that my very own website loads extremely slowly on dial-up!
I used to pride myself on small fast webpages suitable for dial-up connections - evidently a few years of broadband has desensitized me to the needs of my dial-up brethren! I shall rectify that, but the whole episode also makes me appreciate my 2 megabit connection more than ever!
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Plague (honestly!) on World of Warcraft
A report on Ars Technica today discusses a virtual plague spreading across World of Warcraft servers. Essentially a new high-level area was introduced in which a new in-game magic spell can infect players with a 'disease'. This disease can spread from infected players to nearby players. However when infected players returned to the population centers the disease started spreading like wildfire. Unfortunately since the disease was meant to do moderate damage to high-level players it started indiscriminately wiping out low-level players. Even computer-controlled characters in the cities have caught it - but they regenerate fast enough to not die from it, thereby perpetuating the disease.
Ars cite a discussion on ShackNews as the source:
Funnily enough most World of Warcraft players are fairly blasé about the whole epidemic, regarding it as not merely a programming foul up, but as a hazard of virtual life and something to celebrate! Rightly so, in my opinion! This is fantastic stuff, how can anyone not love it?Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul'Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).
Update: Someone made a video.
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Free Opera (or how to abandon desktops while taking over the world)
The relatively unknown (to the general public) web browser known as Opera is now free! From humble beginnings in 1996 with a public debut as a small Norwegian browser to 2005 and membership of a very exclusive club - browsers that cost money - Opera has had a good innings. Who cares?
Opera is mostly known for the oft-repeated claim of being "the fastest browser on earth" (which incidentally is probably true). However despite impressive performance Opera never really caught on (cost probably had something to do with that), and it now seems likely that the advent of Firefox has sounded Opera's death knell as a worth-paying-for alternative to the mighty Internet Explorer. Opera users today are a shrinking mixture of diehard loyalists from the glory days, web designers testing for compatibility, and power surfers willing to pay for Opera's much touted speed and impressive, if sometimes exotic, features.
So how is Opera Software going to survive?
Their website doesn't suggest many possibilities, but presumably Opera Software will make a few bucks from paid support for the now-free browser, however it doesn't take a genius to see that, even charging for it, they cannot continue supporting a declining browser forever. Despite that it's not all doom and gloom - surely Opera for Mobiles (smartphones and PDAs) must form a major part of Opera Software's future. After all, Opera for Mobiles has no serious competition and the mobile market can't do anything but grow. Opera Mini, released for non-smartphones (stupidphones?) in 2004, is still in its infancy but is another clear sign of Opera's dominance of the entire mobile browser market.
What will happen to the desktop browser now?
Given that paid support is likely to have a limited lifespan, one possible option which would generate some public interest, not to mention great PR, would be to open-source the browser. This must seem tempting to Opera bigwigs given the lightning pace of development shown by the unpaid volunteers working on the Firefox project. On the other hand Opera Software may be taking a page out of Google's book and offering free-yet-proprietary software to the world, all the while betting that the software's performance and features will boost the company's reputation in the public eye.
Comment
Hmm ... giving away quality software for desktop PCs ... proven technological innovation ... demonstrable longevity amidst fierce competition ... complete domination of a massively growing market. Sounds a bit like the history of a certain fruit company. Opera Software went public on the Norwegian stock market last year - could it be time to buy some shares?
Failures on Google
This has been getting some attention recently - do a search for 'failure' in Google. The results are surprising (or not, depending on your point of view):
Google Maps vs. Virtual Earth
Whilst reading today's Ars Technica article on censorship of security-sensitive areas in Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth, I rediscovered something I had vaguely noticed on the day of Virtual Earth's launch, but had not investigated due to the sluggishness of the Virtual Earth servers (the speed issues have since been addressed). You can see what I mean in these side-by-side pictures of Washington DC's Capitol Hill Reflecting Pool - both images are at maximum magnification:
(Google Maps is on the left, Virtual Earth on the right. Click to enlarge.)
As you can clearly see, maximum magnification on Virtual Earth is significantly 'closer' to the ground. Even though the two images are clearly from the same satellite photo (note the positions and colours of the cars on 3rd Street, just to the west of the pool) the Virtual Earth image is of considerably better quality. Now all we need is for Virtual Earth to expand outside the US, but apparently that won't be long now.
Password assistant
I've used Keychain Access for quite a while now, both to store logins and passwords for websites and for personal information such as banking and identification details. So it was a bit of a surprise when I finally clicked that key-shaped button next to the password field:
Pretty nifty, especially in this day and age when ordinary people have to come up with more and more non-trivial passwords.
One angry young man
Had an interesting comment on this site today, from someone identifying himself as 'El Mexicano' with the email address of chico@chipala.com. This fellow posted this comment from the 207.248.240.119 IP address, which resolves to a Mexican IP address governed by LACNIC, the Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry. The address is dynamic, but I have noted the IP address, the date and time in case I need to report him.
"Why report him?", I hear you say. Well, that's a long story. It began about ten hours earlier when this character started an automated script to flood this site with trackbacks advertising online poker. The first hit was at six o'clock this morning :
He then returns to the automated script attack (does he not get the hint?):
Here is the moment when he finally gives up, and posts his comment manually:
Do you think he's a little annoyed?
The poor fella took the time to post 77,148 (yes, seventy seven thousand) smilies!Interestingly enough, this evening I received 7 unsolicited emails asking me to confirm my subscription to random mailing lists. Obviously I deleted them rather than confirm anything, but I'd bet my last dollar that this is the work of the same angry young man. He really must be peeved off about his inability to spam this site to go to all this effort! Bless his cotton socks.
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More WebKit and SVG news
Some news about the future of SVG in Safari. I made a few notes about this a few days ago.
Intel hedging bets
Intel appear to be hedging their bets by investing an unspecified amount of money into ClickStar, a 'new' startup planning to distribute movies over the internet before they come out on DVD. The company was founded in 1996, but appears to have done little since then, and clickstar.com is nothing more than a link farm. Strangely enough, Morgan Freeman is one of ClickStar's founders.
No word on how ClickStar plans on getting cooperation from the movie studios so it looks like an effort by Intel to cover their bases. Any chance Apple's unexpected success with the iTunes Music Store is the prime motivation here? It seems likely.
Tiger Notes, vol. 4
Finally, Mail.appetizer has been updated to work with Tiger! There is a new compatible beta available for download! Cue angels bursting into song...
The last major (for me) item is still DoubleCommand.
Google toolbar for Mac Firefox
Although this unofficial hack already exists, this unconfirmed mailing list post states that Google are about to release an official Google Toolbar for Firefox.
Scalable Vector Graphics on a Mac
I was browsing around today (using Safari 2.0 on Tiger) when I came across this entry on Jacques Distler's Musings blog which produced a 'missing plugin' message:
A quick google told me that "image/svg+xml" was the MIME type for Scalable Vector Graphics, developed by Adobe and Macromedia back when they were separate entities (Adobe offers standalone SVG viewers an SVG plugin for download here). Further searches revealed that WebKit does not support SVG, so getting it to work in Safari wasn't likely.
I then fired up a few more browsers to see which, if any, of them worked. The WebKit-based Shiira 1.0 unsurprisingly did not show anything. However both Opera 8.0.1 and Firefox 1.0 do support SVG and displayed the image. Control-clicking the SVG brings up the zoom menu.
The image at normal size
The image zoomed in
Update: thanks to Jacques's comment below, I have now installed the Adobe plugin mentioned above. This is what the image looks like now:
Google Maps UK updated!
The internet colossus known as Google has finally got full resolution satellite imagery of the United Kingdom! Check it out. Truly amazing stuff.
Unusual MP3 download site
TUAW mentioned this legal MP3 download site today. With top hits like Ice Cream Truck how can you go wrong?
Smart mailbox tip
There's a great tip on MacOSXHints today describing how to implement IsNot checks so you can, for example, redirect all mail that isn't already in another mailbox.
BitTorrent's successor? From Microsoft...
El Reg has an interesting article today on a new P2P system ... from Microsoft of all people. The logic behind it sounds plausible, although part of their explanation is somewhat vague:
Comment
Exactly why this is better than BitTorrent isn't exactly clear. It seems to me that a very large swarm would be needed to make this useful. But then again, if the swarm is that large surely the original BT protocol would be just as efficient?A secondary concern is the CPU power 're-encoding' will take. Users of BitTorrent on the PC will already know what a resource hog it can be once you get up to a few hundred connections, causing your PC to become extremely sluggish when performing routine UI tasks such as dragging a window. The situation is better on a Mac where the UI doesn't suffer any slowdowns, but the CPU drain is still significant.
Headline of the week
For me, and I suspect a significant proportion of other RSS users, the language of the headline plays a major part in whether or not I read the article. I have tried to reflect that in the headlines I choose for this site. However every once in a while you see a headline that just has to be shared (the granddaddy of them all surely must be 'Keegan fills Schmeichel's gap with Seaman'). So, without further ado, here is this week's Headline of the Week:
SCode reinstalled, GD issue solved
During the relocation of this site to Register1's hosting service an issue cropped up with James Seng's MT-Scode. The scodetest.cgi script was failing due to a missing GD.pm. Register1 were very helpful and had GD.pm installed within a couple of hours of my first email. However GD still refused to function - the SCode numbers weren't being drawn. From the http error log:
[Fri May 13 18:46:04 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] Premature end of script headers: mt-scode.cgiAfter a dead end or two, Aaron & Isaac Goldberg provided the vital clue - it appeared to be a problem with the server's GD installation.
[Fri May 13 18:46:04 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] /usr/bin/perl: relocation error: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/GD/GD.so: undefined symbol: gdFontGetGiant
[Fri May 13 18:54:38 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] gd-png: fatal libpng error: Invalid number of colors in palette
[Fri May 13 18:54:38 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] gd-png error: setjmp returns error condition
Despite just having spent a fair amount of time on my GD.pm problem, Register1 enthusiastically started investigating the new problem. They weren't running CPanel so the Goldbergs' cleangd advice didn't apply. Nevertheless Register1 solved the problem two days later without any further prompting, and the previously-broken SCode installation suddenly started working. They explained how they fixed it:
We had to downgrade the version of GD from 2.23 to 2.11 and use a pre-compiled Perl-GD rpm available from Redhat as opposed to a self-compiled version.
SCode was the one stumbling block to a complete migration to Register1's servers. With that solved, this site's old address is now officially defunct, and all traffic is being redirected to thoughton.co.uk/digitallife/
Comment
Register1's support has been nothing short of outstanding throughout this episode. Email replies were very quick - often within an hour. On one occasion, having just sent off a half-past-midnight email inquiry, a reply arrived at 1am! A great personal service - I've only been with them for a week but they are looking like the perfect hosts. Highly recommended, and very reasonably priced as well. They are also currently offering a "3 years for the price of 2" deal.
Server move
This site is now hosted by Register1, a UK-based hosting service. I chose them after reading many recommendations at the overclockers.co.uk forums. Migrating has not been totally hiccup-free, but Register1's support has been nothing short of outstanding.
1 gigabit internet, but I no longer live there
Wouldn't you know it. Just when I'm feeling quite pleased about upgrading to a 2 megabit connection, a company in my home town named Hong Kong Broadband Network has announced a 1 gigabit connection. Essentially they are installing gigabit ethernet in apartment blocks, so it's currently only about a third of the total households in Hong Kong. Discussion on Slashdot here, and although some of it is pure ignorance Slashdot reader xstein astutely noted that the 1 gigabit speed only applies to local traffic within Hong Kong, overseas bandwidth is capped at 20 megabit (warning: Chinese language page, plus humongous flash advert).
MySQL broken by 10.3.9?
I noticed today that my MySQL install seemed to have broken. I was getting an error when I tried to post a new entry via Ecto, and after poking around a bit I discovered that any query involving the mysql database (such as a site search) produced the same error:
Further investigation seemed to indicate this was a permissions problem. The only thing I've installed recently has been the OS X 10.3.9 update, so I'm guessing it happened then. After much googling I found the fix.
Change directory to your mysql directory:
And enter this change ownership command:
And voila! Everything works again.
That's Not a Picture, it's a work of art!
Utterly useless, but great fun! Even the webpage is amusing!
Reading the comments on VersionTracker and MacUpdate is also entertaining.