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.

Together with Abdulkadir Topal, who co-ordinates the German translation of Firefox and helped me a lot with the website translation, we will reach Vancouver this Thursday evening. So we have 3 days to explore Vancouver and the area around. There is still a plan of things to do but its not final. So if anyone is interested to join us, you are welcome. Just ping me in IRC or add a comment here. Otherwise see you on Monday!

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!

As a circumvention it was possible to use Safari and change its download folder to the specified location. From now on Firefox and Thunderbird are using this folder to store the temporary files. It’s not the best solution but I’m fine with that because I do not use Safari and I’m not interested in its download folder. But with the release of Safari 3 this isn’t possible anymore. The newer versions are using an other way to store its download folder settings and don’t touch ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconfig.plist anymore. So how it can be easily changed without using a plist or hex editor?

It’s just easy. Download one of the former versions of Safari and use it to change the download folder. There is a project called Multi-Safari which gives you the possibility to run different versions of Safari in parallel. So grab the latest Safari 2 release, open the preferences, and select another download folder location. It looks like that the best solution is to use ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems (NS_OS_TEMP_DIR) where all contained files will be deleted on restart. If you want to have the files deleted on exit of Firefox or Thunderbird you can also add the preference browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileonExit and set its value to true. That’s all.

Please remember that this is just a workaround. It would be nice to see bug 311292 fixed in a timely manner.

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.

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.

$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera - Lose The Tripod - The most popular videos are a click away

A more advanced version can be found on concept-club.de. But there are still some things which could be enhanced, e.g. a variable cord length so you also take a photo while crouching. I believe that I’ll have something to think about in the near future…

Seen today on kwerfeldein.de.

For myself a long term wish comes true and I’m really happy to own a racing bike from Cannondale now even when it’s second hand. It’s a R800 Sport and was produced in 2003. The frame is made of Aluminum and it is damn lightweight against my other bike (F600 SL). You can really feel the ease while riding and reaching 40 km/h isn’t a problem. The only trouble I had is holding this speed.

I think it’s time to start this year’s training. Woohoo, it’s so cool…

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.

With the first post in 2008 I want to start a small survey because I don’t know anything about my readers and what they really expect in reading my blog. I would be glad if you could take some seconds and answer the following questions:

1. I switched the language of my blog to English a while ago. Are you happy with that change?
2. Did my posts reach your interest? What should I improve and should I blog more often?
3. Are you happy with the design/navigation?
4. A while ago I added a photoblog. Do you have some ideas for improvements?
5. Any other comments?

Thanks!

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!

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!

But to my surprise I found a fascinating website. For the first time I got the information that the address book can be enhanced by plug-ins. There are also mentioned some basic information. Take the time and read it!

To solve my own issue I downloaded and installed the plug-in ‘Set primary Addresses‘. After a restart of the address book you have an additionally context menu entry when hovering over an email or home address to set it as the primary one. As I was able to see the wrong address was set. So I corrected the entry and tried it again from within Thunderbird. And yes, Thunderbird takes the correct address now.

After that is working now, I also wanted to give the Google Maps Plugin a shot. I tried the one which was mentioned at the site above but wasn’t able to get it to run. I did a search and after trying several plug-ins I found a solution which is working for me. Just installed I’m able to see where contacts are living in high quality. Even directions are possible and you can immediately print the route if you plan to visit a friend. Cool!

That’s just the beginning. Be surprised while exploring the hidden address book features.

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?

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.

I asked several people who are still working on OS X for a longer period of time. But no one was able to give me a hint. So I started searching the web. I got this nice shortcut overview but no system wide shortcut is given. Now, while writing this post, I found this HIG document from Apple. It’s quiet interesting but once again a keyboard shortcut isn’t mentioned.

I’ll stop searching right now and hope that someone, who reads my post, could help me. I would be deeply grateful. Thanks!