When skimming through my pending Mac OS X upgrades this morning I noticed one saying:

This update eliminates the noise made by the optical disk drive during system startup and wake from sleep on MacBook computers.

Wow. As long as I've been using a Mac, the sweep-sweep noise has been characteristical for a Mac startup sound, reminiscent of the floppy drive seek sound computers made when they still came with floppy drives (yes, dear children, I am that old).

I wonder what this was for in the first place. Maybe to find out reliably if there is a disc in the drive already? <crystal ball>Possibly, the operating system did not check again and just relied on the hardware status flag being set correctly on startup, and if it was wrong, evil things could happen?</crystal ball> And now, almost suddenly, the Mac engineers found out that it is unnecessary altogether? The wonders of Snow Leopard.

What comes next? Removing the gong on boot to avoid Mac-obsessed college kids from making fools of themselves during lectures? ;)

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Zombies Invade San Francisco!For the longest time, I was sending my laptop to "hibernation" mode every night. Why? Not because I particularly mind the minute power consumption it might have while sleeping, but because it would randomly wake up during the course of the night. My "zombie laptop" would particularly annoy me because it'd log back into my messaging service in my absence (thus prompting people to think I am awake at 3 a.m.), get unnecessarily warm (due to its being closed), and when I opened it back up, it'd not switch its monitor back on (due to a feature that OS X calls "clamshell mode").

Today, I had enough, and after a little more googling, I stumbled across a comment in a macosxhints article mentioning Bluetooth settings: Apparently, there's a setting for letting bluetooth devices power your Mac up from sleep. As I have a bluetooth-based wireless Mac keyboard, I tried out switching that setting off -- and long story short, it seems to have worked.

If you have the same problem, uncheck the following box in System Settings / Bluetooth / Advanced Settings to give it a shot:

Bluetooth Wake

Happy zombie-Mac killing!

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Just recently, my colleague oremj published a bookmarklet making "assign this bug to me" a one-click operation in bugzilla.

Obviously, bookmarklets are fun and games, but Jetpacks are even more awesome, so I went ahead and wrote one that adds an "assign to me" button next to the assignee field:

Assign-to-me button jetpack

You can find and install the jetpack through my jetpacks page on github.

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This photo is not photoshopped:

Colosseo

The Mozilla Italia team projected a Firefox wordmark onto Rome's most famous landmark -- and on many other places all over the city. Make sure to check out the picture in its full glory over on flickr.

Picture CC by-sa licensed by nois3lab on flickr.

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The source code for the Mozilla Add-ons project tries to follow the PEAR Coding Standards. One of these standards is to use 4 spaces per level of indentation, and no tabs.

Over time, unfortunately, some files start to contain a significant amount of mixed-up indentation (both from badly set-up IDEs and third-party contributions that came with tab indentation but went un-noticed). That's both tedious and error-prone to fix by hand.

A similar problem poses trailing whitespace. While it's just annoying in general, especially in HTML template files, it also increases page size unnecessarily by leading to more bytes transmitted on the wire, with no benefit to neither the users nor the developers.

Luckily, there are two quick fixes for these problems in both the editor vim and my IDE of choice, Komodo:

To remove tabs and replace them with spaces...

  • in Komodo, select a code block, then click Code -> Untabify Region.
  • in vim, type :%s/\t/    /g (those are four spaces) -- or, as oremj points out in the comments, you could just to :retab .

And to wipe out trailing whitespace...

  • in Komodo, in Preferences -> Editor / Save Options, activate the option "Clean trailing whitespace and EOL markers". Then open your document of choice and just save it again. However, when writing patches, you might want to refrain from keeping this option on at all times: It might result in confusion if a lot of lines are touched that do not have anything to do with the current patch. I wish there was a one-time way to run this, instead of a config option.
  • in vim, type :%s/\s+$//g which the regex-savvy among you have quickly decyphered as: "in the entire document, replace all one or more whitespace characters that are followed by a line ending with the empty string".

Happy cleaning!

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For work, I have a virtual machine serving one little purpose: To run Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, for the rare instances when I have to test a website with it. To make that a little more convenient and a little less painful, I just created a "desktop shortcut" for it, and look what it showed up as:

Shortcut to Internet

Haha, "Shortcut to Internet" -- this is classic.

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Just a reminder, because I always forget it: When you use git-svn on an svn repository and your code base contains empty directories (say, for temporary files, or log files), they will be ignored by git unless they contain at least one file.

Paradox? Maybe. There's a good reason however: git ignores empty directories because it tracks (file) content, not a bunch of directories some of which happen to contain a file (the concept of tracking files might be the only thing git has remotely in common with good ol' CVS -- though git also does not deeply care about file names, only content).

The "common" way to handle this is by adding a .gitignore file to the repository. This won't harm svn-only clients, but it'll make git-svn clients pick up the (almost) empty directory properly.

This is what you need to do.

mkdir empty_dir echo '*' > empty_dir/.gitignore echo '!.gitignore' >> empty_dir/.gitignore git add empty_dir git commit -m 'adding empty directory' empty_dir

The .gitignore file tells git what file names not to track inside the directory in question. The asterisk means, ignore all files, but the second line makes sure the .gitignore file itself is recognized and added to the repository.

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Mozilla pins (wallpaper)
Creative Commons License photo credit: flod
In a very well written article that was published in Sunday's New York Times, Miguel Helft explains the post-"browser wars" web, and how Mozilla's mission fits into this increasingly complex setup.

As indicated by the title -- "For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs are Getting Tricky", the author puts some emphasis onto the Google/Mozilla relationship, which among the community tends to be a big point of interest. Quote:

"In many ways, Google and Mozilla are fighting the same battle, albeit not with the same objectives. They both contend that the Web should be open and based on common standards — Mozilla because it is its mission, Google because it is good for its business."

Highly recommended reading, even for non-geeks, who are interested in Mozilla and the Web as a whole.

Link

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Firefox 3.5 has officially been released:

Firefox 3.5

What are you waiting for? Go download it! :)

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This is another cross-post of an article I wrote for the hacks.mozilla.org blog. It shows off some of the fun stuff web developers can do with the -moz-box-shadow feature that will be released as part of Firefox 3.5.

Another fun CSS3 feature that's been implemented in Firefox 3.5 is box shadows. This feature allows the casting of a drop "shadow" from the frame of almost any arbitrary element.

As the CSS3 box shadow property is still a work in progress, however, it's been implemented as -moz-box-shadow in Firefox. This is how Mozilla tests experimental properties in CSS, with property names prefaced with "-moz-". When the specification is finalized, the property will be named "box-shadow."

How it works

Applying a box shadow to an element is straightforward. The CSS3 standard allows as its value:

none | <shadow> [ <shadow> ]*

where <shadow> is:

<shadow> = inset? && [ <length>{2,4} && <color>? ]

The first two lengths are the horizontal and vertical offset of the shadow, respectively. The third length is the blur radius (compare that to the blur radius in in the text-shadow property). Finally the fourth length is the spread radius, allowing the shadow to grow (positive values) or shrink (negative values) compared to the size of the parent element.

The inset keyword is pretty well explained by the standard itself:

if present, [it] changes the drop shadow from an outer shadow (one that shadows the box onto the canvas, as if it were lifted above the canvas) to an inner shadow (one that shadows the canvas onto the box, as if the box were cut out of the canvas and shifted behind it).

But talk is cheap, let's look at some examples.

To draw a simple shadow, just define an offset and a color, and off you go:

 -moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 10px #00f;

 

simple box shadow

(Each of the examples in this article are live examples first, followed by a screen shot from Firefox 3.5 on OSX).

Similarly, you can draw an in-set shadow with the aforementioned keyword.

-moz-box-shadow: inset 1px 1px 10px #888;

 

inset box shadow

With the help of a spread radius, you can define smaller (or bigger) shadows than the element it is applied to:

-moz-box-shadow: 0px 20px 10px -10px #888;

 

box shadow with spread radius

If you want, you can also define multiple shadows by defining several shadows, separated by commas (courtesy of Markus Stange):

-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 20px black, 20px 15px 30px yellow, -20px 15px 30px lime, -20px -15px 30px blue, 20px -15px 30px red;

 

multiple box shadows

The different shadows blend into each other very smoothly, and as you may have noticed, the order in which they are defined does make a difference. As box-shadow is a CSS3 feature, Firefox 3.5 adheres to the CSS3 painting order. That means, the first specified shadow shows up on top, so keep that in mind when designing multiple shadows.

As a final example, I want to show you the combination of -moz-box-shadow with an RGBA color definition. RGBA is the same as RGB, but it adds an alpha-channel transparency to change the opacity of the color. Let's make a black, un-blurred box shadow with an opacity of 50 percent, on a yellow background:

-moz-box-shadow: inset 5px 5px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, .5);

 

box shadow with RGBA

As you can see, the yellow background is visible though the half-transparent shadow without further ado. This feature becomes particularly interesting when background images are involved, as you'll be able to see them shining through the box shadow.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

As a newer, work-in-progress CSS3 property, box-shadow has not yet been widely adopted by browser makers.

  • Firefox 3.5 supports the feature as -moz-box-shadow, as well as multiple shadows, the inset keyword and a spread radius.
  • Safari/WebKit has gone down a similar route as Firefox by implementing the feature as -webkit-box-shadow. Multiple shadows are supported since version 4.0, while neither inset shadows nor the spread radius feature are supported yet in WebKit.
  • Finally, Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer have not yet implemented the box shadow property, though in MSIE you may want to check out their proprietary DropShadow filter.

To achieve the biggest possible coverage, it is advisable to define all three, the -moz, -webkit, and standard CSS3 syntax in parallel. Applicable browsers will then pick and adhere to the ones they support. For example:

 -moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 10px #00f;
 -webkit-box-shadow: 1px 1px 10px #00f;
 box-shadow: 1px 1px 10px #00f;

The good news is that the box-shadow property degrades gracefully on unsupported browsers. For example, all the examples above will look like plain and boring boxes with no shadow in MSIE.

Conclusions

The CSS3 box-shadow property is not yet as widely available in browsers (and therefore, to users) as, for example, the text-shadow property, but with the limited box shadow support of WebKit as well as the full support provided by Firefox 3.5 (as far as the current status of the feature draft is concerned), more and more users will be able to see some level of CSS box shadows.

As a web developer, you can therefore use the feature, confident that you are giving users with modern browsers an improved experience while not turning away users with older browsers.

Further resources Documentation

Examples

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