so i started working on camino again. I submitted my first-in-a-while patch a week ago. just a little fix - getting .webloc files to correctly drag&drop on the toolbar.

it's still languishing.

so, of course, safari beta 2 came out today. It's got tabs. I decided to test out some tab features.

I opened my grouping of 8 blogs I frequent in Camino (downloaded 2 days ago) and Safari. Both load all the blogs in roughly the same amount of time.

BUT - in Camino, I've got spinning beachball until every tab is loaded. In Safari, I can browse & scroll the frontmost tab as soon as it appears - even while the other tabs are loading. Plus - it seems as if the front tab gets priority on rendering. Better use of threading? Maybe. I think it'd be a big thing to fix in Camino. In fact, a bug on it has attracted occasional interest (and some investigation time) since my heyday of working on it. It's not going to get fixed anytime soon.

Also - I played around with entering text in a text field looking at quartz debug. In Camino, because the rendering area is one giant view, repaint commands get rectangularized - so typing in a text field in the middle of the page when there are some animated gifs sitting in the bottom corner results in a large fraction of the view getting redrawn. Not to mention lack of spelling checks, etc. In Safari, this ain't a problem - each item (I imagine) on screen is placed in its own view, so repaints are tiny events. Again - this is something that isn't going to be fixable in Camino without tons and tons of redesign.

So I'm thinking about contributing to Open Office for OS X instead. It's likely to be a project that's not going to be demolished by an Apple-branded replacement in the next few months. And it's still early in the project, so I might be able to make some big improvements easily.

Although I'd still like to do the bookmark stuff in Camino (and I've done some work so far on my own on this), and I'd like to build in bookmarks which can check for updates & whatnot, I'm afraid that's a feature which will appear in Phoenix for OS X (so not as interesting in Camino) and I'd like to do it Cocoa-y, which means trashing the current ns-as-in-netscape not NS-as-in-Nextstep based code. Heck, even just write the bookmarks out as a .plist using Apple's built-in xml parser rather than the (I believe) hand-rolled moz parser it currently uses. And I like the fact that with camino, if something really bugs me, I can fix it (which is not an option with Safari, with the exception of the HTML renderer, whereas I'm more likely to be bugged with UI problems.)

walking into the union to get coffee, i saw a bunch of people sitting in front of a tv. cnn was on. the correspondant was in baghdad talking about the bombs falling in the city.

it made me upset. people's homes are being demolished. they're undoubtedly terrified. some are dying, or watching their family or friends die. and here in the US people sit, in nice comfy chairs, nibbling on a sandwich or some ice cream, listening to a reporter say "wow, there was just a big one a mile or so away" like it's some kind of 4th of july fireworks display.

war should not be a form of entertainment.

I don't know if i'm angry at the people watching, or the news channels for treating it like the next hot reality tv series. or at myself for wanting to sit down and watch, too.

somehow, the tibook arrived in eagen, MN, and then left stevens point, WI. i guess there must be a wormhole between the two states. that would explain a lot.

now to get some hot chocolate.

last sighted in spokane, washington - leaving the distribution center at 6 AM yesterday morning. wa-hoo!

i never knew how much fun package tracking could be.

wowzers. my first story accepted to slashdot, after lo these many years. and one other attempt.

ebay guy sent me a ups tracking number. unfortunately, it just says the billing information has been submitted, not that a tibook with my name on it is cruising east on 90 through montana right now. but it delays the credit card fraud call another day.

what an idiot i am.

i ponied up the bucks to buy a TiBook on e-bay. The price was reasonable - in line with what lowendmac suggested. The buyer had a good reputation. His paypal account was verified.

I paid on Thursday. He said UPS would pick it up Friday. They didn't. On Monday, he said UPS was coming by that afternoon, and he'd have a shipping number for me. Since then, nothing.

I'm giving him until 5 pm my time, then I call the credit card company and scream fraud. But it's going to be a big hassle. I knew I should have gotten escrow.

I've decided people are cruel.

Not excluding myself.

That sucks.

My application to the peace corps was submitted today. I am not certain that I'm right for the peace corps - but I also have no idea what I'll do if they don't accept me.

Of course, if the do accept me, it's just delaying a "what to do" crisis for 2 years or so. And Darrell said what I suspected - it's going to be tough to get a sciency-job if you take 2 years off. Not that I wanted one, mind you . . . but it's what I've been trained to do.

I've also started coding again. I'm determined that, before I graduate, I'm going to write a revamped bookmark system for Chimera (or whatever it's going to be called) - without any NSPR/mozilla dependencies. I see 2 good reasons for this - first, undo/redo of bookmark deletions becomes simple; and second - if somebody else comes along and wants to base an open-source browser off of webcore, they'll have useable bookmark code.

Of course, i think decent undo/redo of deletions is present in the main-branch moz tree, but so what :)

here's what the new bookmark code has to do:
1) unlimited undo/redo of moves,deletions, additions
2) scheduable status check (ie, updated, broken, etc)
3) favicon support and "smart" transparency (ie, make white backgrounds transparent)
4) fully apple scriptable
5) no dependencies on non-system frameworks (with the possible exception of libcurl)

yep. well, i can dream. let's see what actually gets implemented.

this means, of course, i've got to bite the bullet and get a computer. might as well be a laptop. which is what i'll use dad's check for.

Mosco lent me season 1. Wow - it lived up to the buzz.

I can't decide what made me laugh more - the box of sand for Cusamano, or Paulie admitting he had been in therapy the year before.

today i begin the "6 months till graduation" push that everyone talks about.

i don't want to be here anymore.

please let me finish.

It is VERY COLD outside. brrrrrr.

I have to check on a machine here in the lab in 2 hours.

I have no clean clothes left.

Thus, 2 extra chances to turn into a bike-riding popsicle. Oh joy!

I don't think I can cut it as a blogger. I've got too short an attention span to keep this sort of stuff up. Oh well.

I'm at peace with my research. It's a wonderful feeling. Or maybe it's just relief that my advisor didn't kill me when I told her I didn't want to do industrial R&D when I left, and that getting a degree no longer was a big concern of mine. Oddly enough, after having "the conversation", I'm sort of excited about doing work again. I'm sure this has happened to me before.

War is coming. Calling my little congresswoman & senators and telling them I think it's a bad idea doesn't really seem to be enough. Please, let the Dems take/keep control of one of the houses to stall W until Nov. 2004.

Being a T.A. is fun. It makes me feel important. Or maybe I just recognize it as useful work, which I don't do enough of.

My Chimera location bar patch is rotting. I just sort of died when 10.2 came out, thinking I'd get a new mac & keep developing on it. But I've been blowing my new mac money on travel and moving and rugs. Oh well.

Dad's started to fall. He's going to need to get a cane at least soon. He doesn't want to yet. I hope he doesn't break a bone before coming to grips with needing "assistance".

In 72 hours, I will be digesting a meal prepared by the Iron Chef (or more likely one of his minions, which is OK by me). That will be good.

Ugh . . . so sleepy.

I got a bookmark bug fixed (which I probably caused), and so just for grins implemented Undo & Redo. So clever is me.

I really would like to make it to the Farmer's Market tomorrow, but I'm not excited about getting up so early. Ugh.

I spent hours trying to find a complicated solution to a problem, then realized Cocoa would solve it for me with exactly 0 lines of code. I just had to use IB. Man oh man, Cocoa rocks.

Note to self: if it's too complicated, you've probably missed something.

And now Chimera can undo & redo like the best of them. At least when we're talking URL bars.