With the switch from CVS to Mercurial the ongoing work for the next major release of Firefox 3.1 is happening in mozilla-central now. That’s why using Bonsai to query for fixes within a given time span will not work. So what’s the replacement? How can you search for checkins which caused a regression?

It’s as simple as that. Since yesterday the web frontend (pushlog) supports querying by date. You can use the same date format like it was used for Bonsai or just enter “yesterday”, or “today” which will also work. Sweet! Thanks goes to Ted Mielczarek who implemented this enhancement in bug 437445. Now it only has to replace the changelog/shortlog pages and should be shown by default. Hopefully this will happen soon. Until then just bookmark the above URL.

Some hours ago Mozilla has advertised the release date for Firefox 3! So this wonderful piece of software will be official available on June 17th, 2008. Amazing work was done during the last three years which result in a huge list (approx. 15.000 of them) of new features and improvements. Deb Richardson has written a field guide for Firefox 3 which describes the most impressive ones in detail.

Anyone who is interested in Firefox 3 should also pledge to download Firefox 3 by June 18th. It will help Mozilla in trying to set a world record for the most software downloads within 24 hours. Read more about the Download Day 2008.

Don’t forget: Spread the word around and inform your family, friends, and colleagues!

In February last year I bought my first MacBook with OS X 10.4 alias Tiger installed and I was happy to say “Hello” to the Apple folks. Ever since it was a bit of work and I had to learn a lot until everything worked like expected. But there is still one thing which bugs me when running Firefox or Thunderbird on a fresh OS X installation. Both applications don’t use a reasonable temporary folder. Instead files which are opened by helper applications are stored under ~/Desktop or ~/Download and will not be removed sometimes after Firefox or Thunderbird are closed. This results in a really cluttered desktop or download folder. All the following steps have to be done because there is no way to specify the temporary folder from within Firefox and Thunderbird. Both lack an UI or a hidden preference to change this folder. I cannot say when this will be changed, but there is a reported bug about this issue. But lets go on… (more…)

Some days ago I found this really interesting site. Until today it wasn’t possible to compose music by using wav files. Instead you have to use the midi format which emulates (todays nearly perfect) the real sound of the given instrument. But now that’s history! Grab a wav file, select the appropriate instrument, voice, or sound track and move its notes up or down. Damn, is that easy going. I’m fascinated about how that is working. Take a look at the video to also get banned.

The release of the Celemony plugin v2 is set to autumn 2008. So let’s have a great summer and wait for this wonderful piece of software.

What an amazing weekend! Reminisce about the last two years this one was definitely the greatest one at FOSDEM. The main reason why I joined again was Mozilla. And due to there aren’t so many choices to get the opportunity to meet Mozillians, I cannot cancel such an appointment. I met a lot of interesting and crazy people, listened to mostly all talks inside the Mozilla devroom (also known as sauna) and had pulsating and valuable conversations. Mostly I enjoyed to finally met Seth Bindernagel and David Tenser. Both guys working for the Mozilla Corporation and doing (like many others) a really great job. And that’s the reason why Mozilla gets so popular and can celebrate its 10th anniversary this year. Thanks to the organization team of Mozilla-Europe we had an incredible evening in the bowling centre. Sadly I didn’t made any pictures this year. But that’s not as bad because there are still hundreds of them available.

To be a bit more concrete about the topics I had at FOSDEM and work that I’ve taken with me, I will give a short overview:

1. Some weeks ago during a QA session on IRC, Marcia Knous asked me if I would be pleased when Mozilla would support my work. I was happy to hear that because I don’t have the perfect equipment to build my own debug builds under each operating system. This is bad when triaging crasher bugs which only happen under a special OS. Now everything goes really fast. Three days later I got a message from Seth Bindernagel who leads the community-giving program. After some conversations there was made the decision that I will get a new Mac Mini and the appropriate OS licenses. Finally we met each other at FOSDEM and discussed if I would fit into the Community Loan Program. But due to I don’t have a real plan of things I want to do - QA work is really widespread - we dismissed that option. Meanwhile I got the Mac Mini from my local Apple salesman and I will start to set it up within the next days. Hopefully I’ll get some help.
2. Over the last month I heard about SUMO several times. But I hadn’t the change to gain insight into this project. So I was totally uninformed on Friday evening when I was introduced to David Tenser, the smart and blond Swedish guy behind this project. To make matters worse his first question was about the German translation. I had to acknowledge my ignorance. But during his talk on Saturday I get more and more informed about the background. In co-operation with Abdulkadir Topal we will try to find some reliable localizers who are engaged to help translating the Firefox 3 help into German. We plan to do some posts to our German newsgroups and forums. Lets see if we are successful.
3. On Friday I also had the chance to talk with Chris Hofmann about the translation of the Firefox privacy policy into German. Due to the legal text no-one wanted to do that in the past. Now we will give it a try and do our best to create a good first translation. But the final review will be done by a lawyer so we don’t have to know everything in detail. That’s really helpful! Thanks Chris.
4. Stanisław Małolepszy and Seth Bindernagel did a great job in analyzing the latest community surveys. Hopefully we can get some data to be able to have a detail view onto the community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It looked like we are really a bit behind and not so enthusiastic like the Spanish folks…

Finally I have a lot of things to do right now and will give several status updates over the next weeks.

Hey, what’s up with my Tiger? I didn’t realized it all the last weeks but why there is no keyboard shortcut anymore to cancel a dialog? It was a fine thing to only have to hit the space key. I mainly used it within Lightroom to delete an image from the database. But as I see now, the button hasn’t a small blue border anymore. It’s cumbersome to grab the mouse and navigate to the cancel button.

Does anyone of you also have this problem? I could imagine that this regression was caused by the latest Apple update 2007-009 which also half-killed my OS X installation.

Update: The button I talked about isn’t cancel itself, sorry. What I mean is the optional button e.g. “Delete from Disk” within the following image:

Update 2: See comment 4 for the solution.

Today I got a notification from the Apple update tool that a new update is available. I hit ok, to install the Update 2007-009. After rebooting my system OS X presents a black screen. I like the console on Linux but I’m totally stranded at the moment.

I used dmesg to get closer which module or application is responsible for the behavior but didn’t really find anything for the moment. But probable VMware Fusion could be the reason. After trying to restart from the installation DVD it doesn’t even recognize my keyboard. Holding down the c key doesn’t start the installation procedure. I had to do several reboots to be able to get it running. But no errors were found. It’s enough for today.

If anyone can help me I would be very happy.

Update (20.12.2007): It’s time to respire. After several hours and with the help of some friends I got the problem solved. Now my MacBook is running fine again. But what’s happen? Lets try to explain…

As I have written in the last post I got some trouble with Keychain. All my stored passwords were invisible until I restarted my system. No idea what happened at this point but meanwhile I think its causing all the trouble from yesterday.

I had to start my MacBook in Single User Mode - just holding Cmd+S immediately when booting. I opened the system.log again and found the information that the “Setup Assistant” has crashed. Why the Setup Assistant? I don’t want to setup a new profile! But it looks like that it forwards you to the login screen if a profile already exists. Anyway, if an application crashed the CrashReporter puts a file with log information in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter. For the “Setup Assistant” it’s called “Setup Assistant.crash.log” and looked that way:

Host Name: hostname
Date/Time: 2007-12-20 20:30:04.095 +0100
OS Version: 10.4.11 (Build 8S2167)
Report Version: 4
Command: Setup Assistant
Path: ./Setup Assistant
Parent: sh [2]
Version: ??? (???)
PID: 283
Thread: Unknown
Link (dyld) error:
Library not loaded: /System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface
Referenced from: /System/Library/Frameworks/PreferencePanes.framework/Versions/A/PreferencePanes
Reason: no suitable image found. Did find:
/System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface: unknown file type, first eight bytes:
0xD9 0xD5 0×05 0xF9 0×20 0xA1 0×63 0xD7
/System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface: unknown file type, first eight bytes:
0xD9 0xD5 0×05 0xF9 0×20 0xA1 0×63 0xD7
/System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/SecurityInterface: unknown file type, first eight bytes:
0xD9 0xD5 0×05 0xF9 0×20 0xA1 0×63 0xD7

Here you can see that there is a problem with the SecurityInterface library. Due to some strange bytes at the beginning of the file it’s not recognized as library. It has to be replaced with a working one. But where can I get it? Running the Darwin console doesn’t give me a chance (or I didn’t found it yet) to mount the dmg of the update. I asked several people if they could send me their file. Here you have to take care about your system. You need a version which fits to your OS X version! If you have a MacBook it has to be compiled for an Intel processor. Otherwise the PPC version is the correct one.

I downloaded the file with my other box and was able to retrieve it via scp from its file system. Now I replaced it locally:

$ CD /System/Library/Frameworks/SecurityInterface.framework/Versions/A/
$ mv SecurityInterface SecurityInterface.bad
$ mv /var/root/SecurityInterface .

That’s all. Now you should reboot your system and login as usual.

To avoid such problems in the future I will make a complete backup of my system files and also store the updates dmg file locally!

I’m really impressed. After nearly one year in using my Macbook I could learn about hidden features of Apple software each day. All of them will give your live more power and also simplifies your work-flow. Today I will tell you some nice features of the OS X address book.

The trigger to have a deeper look at possible address book features was an email I received on Monday. Someone answered the message I sent him a while back and annotates that I used the wrong address. So my first thought was: “Don’t have I set his primary address correctly?” I decided to have a look for. But where can I see what’s the primary address? I cannot find it anywhere. I searched Google and had to read that it’s not possible by default. The address book automatically uses the first entered address as the primary one. Only when you are using distribution lists you can select the primary address of a contact within the edit mode. But that’s not the same. I want to have it set globally. Thanks Apple! (more…)

Yesterday I was really shocked. After reactivating my MacBook from stand-by mode I wanted to burn a DVD with exported pictures. I copied all files into the burning folder and started the process. From now on the whole system was curiously pretty slow. I never had this before. No idea if the burning process was responsible for that. But anyway, let us talk about the real problem…

I opened Adium to check if a friend is online. But instead of getting my contact list a password dialog was shown. Damn, what’s that? Most of my passwords are stored within Keychain. Why I have to enter a password now? Afraid of the thing happened I started the Keychain application and I was taken my breath away. No password, certificate or notes were visible. All entries were completely gone! The only thing I saw was a bright and white background. But that’s not what I wanted to see!

I was ebbed between waiting to finish the burning process or executing a restart immediately. Finally I decided to wait because there is no reason why it should getting worse. While the burning process wasn’t finished I restarted Keychain but without luck. It seems that all my stored sensitive data was lost. But stop! Let’s run a restart first… After taken the DVD out of my drive I did a restart. All the while I hold my fingers crossed. Please, please, please give me back my data… In such situations a restart takes a really long time! I entered my password and opened Keychain after my profile was loaded…

The applications window was shown and what I saw made me really really happy! All the entries were visible again and saved me from hacking them in again. I still have no idea what’s happened here and why they are back again. But I’m glad to have them back and I’m still interested for an explanation.

Anyone of you who had a similar experience? What was your result? Did you get back your stored passwords?

Last Friday Adobe released the third update of its Lightroom software. It’s free again for all registered users. Downloads are available for Mac OS X and Windows.

With Lightroom 1.3 a bunch of known bugs were fixed. Photoshopservices gives a good overview about most of them. There is also a brand new Export dialog available. Under the hood it will offer a fantastic new feature. From now on developers can create export plug-ins which could export images directly to Flickr, Picasa, FTP hosts, or whatever you want. There is a first Export SDK release on Adobe Labs available. Let’s see what developers will spread around.

For myself the auto-write XMP performance speed-up fix comes a bit too late now. I enabled that preference already last week and did a sync for all of my pictures taken since 2003. While it was working I wasn’t able to do anything on my macbook for around two hours due to the high cpu load. And that’s on a dual core!

With the latest fixes to have a better support for Leopard I’m ready to run an upgrade in the next time. I’m really anxious!

Anyone who is interested to buy Lightroom can have a look at Amazon. There it’s available for Mac and Windows and costs 279,99EUR.