Archive for September, 2006
If you dislike the new iTunes 7 icon set, you can replace the icons with the iTunes 6 versions. Download the set, unarchive, and copy and replace to /Applications/iTunes.app/Content/Resources/.
These icons are copyrighted by Apple Computer. Enjoy!
About a month ago I gave a presentation at Web Monday about Plazes. If you’re unfamiliar with Plazes, it’s a web service which uses a small application on your computer to register the network you are connected to. Information about this network can be stored, this forms a Plaze. For example, right now I’m at the University of Twente Campus Network, which is a huge plaze for every computer directly connected to the university’s network. Effectively, everyone who uses plazes and is connected to the university network will be at this plaze.
Since I gave the presentation, Plazes launched a mobile client. It works by finding the ID of the cell tower your phone is connected to, asks for an address if needed, and gives you a list of plazes in the neighbourhood. Up to you to pick the plaze you are actually at. Even though the promise of connecting to Plazes without using a computer is pretty neat, picking a plaze kinda sucks. And thus, my proposal at Web Monday:
There should be a Plazes client which uses RFID tags to identify the Plaze, and connect automatically.
The way this would work is that you would walk into a house or office, and there would be a sticker on the wall with the Plazes logo. Touch it with your RFID-enabled phone (inspired by the address book desk by Timo Arnall) and you’re good to go. This would also lead to the creation of more plazes, on locations where there might not even have been a computer network in the first place. However, as was quickly pointed out, I believe by Gernot, RFID is still far from ubiquitous, and a better solution would be to identify the plaze by a barcode. The hardware (a camera) and software for this is available today. The Plazes APIs support it as well (although not directly).
All there’s left to do is actually implement it.
I was looking at a bug report for sIFR today. It discussed how sIFR 3 crashed Firefox 1.0.0 on Windows. After the better part of the evening, here’s what I found: if you create a non-anonymous method, declare a variable inside it and set a property on the function object with the same name as the variable (and whatever value, I used null), Firefox 1.0.0 will crash after about ten seconds after loading the page. If it doesn’t, close the window and it should crash right away. It seems to be an issue in the JavaScript parser.
Here’s the code, adjusted for readability, but you bet this fits in one line!
(function nonAnonymousMethod() {
var aProperty;
}).aProperty = null;
In the case of sIFR, the parseSelector code contained a similar construct. Fixed now in r130.
Full testing details: Firefox 1.0.0 and Firefox 1.0.1 on Windows XP SP2 with the latest updates as of Sept 8, 2006. Firefox 1.0.0 crashes, Firefox 1.0.1 doesn’t. I therefore assume the problem will not occur in any versions later than 1.0.0. Download old Firefox versions.
I’m back in the Netherlands. Thank you Jot for this amazing summer!