Technocrank

Google Gears (0.5.29) has just been released and now works with Firefox 3.5.  I’ve only tested it so far with WordPress.

This “article” on the BBC Magazine site wrings its hands and cries:

Sat-nav clearly suits an era which has given up on understanding the roads as a coherent, logical system – an era in which map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.

I honestly wish I knew more about how the editorial process in the mainstream media works.  I can’t fathom the genesis of this story and I can’t understand the fear-mongering behind it or why its acceptable to crank out a fluff-piece that does nothing but weep about the loss of our humanity (which isn’t happening, in case you were wondering).  And yes, I am aware that this is quite a common pattern, particularly on slow news days.

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Given that Fluid is having this disagreement with Gears, I thought I’d try creating a Mozilla Prism-based SSB instance for Google Reader.  There’s a nifty theme for Reader called Helvetireader that I was using with Fluid.  It also works with Prism but the instructions on this page didn’t work for me.

I had to take the webapp.css file from the helvetireader.webapp (which is just a zip archive) and drop it into the Prism instance (at /Applications/Helvetireader/Contents/Resources/webapp/).  You could also just directly create this file – it’s contents are just a CSS import as described in that last link.

Unlike the Fluid-based SSB, Prism instances seem to require extensions, plugins and themes separately, i.e. per-instance.  I guess this is a good thing and avoids the kind of snarl that Gears and Fluid are having.

I found this a few months ago but forgot to post it:  Fluid, the OSX WebKit-based single-site browser application, floods your /var/log/system.log with errors regarding CGWindowContextCreate failing:

FluidInstance[3592]: Failed to create window context device
CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create context delegate.
_initWithWindowNumber: error creating graphics ctxt object for ctxt:0x18343, window:0xffffffff

The bug was being discussed here (in which commenters pointed their fingers at several plugins) but the discussion seems to have ceased.  The last suspected culprit is the Google Gears plugin (located in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins).  Indeed, when I removed every plugin and added them back, the Gears plugin was the one that caused the flooding.

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Yet another incarnation of the impending Firefox 3.5 release, although it doesn’t seem to be up at the normal beta version download site which still has 3.5b4.  Apparently, if you download 3.5b4 and then do an in-browser Check For Updates you’ll be fixed up proper.