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.
ClickToFlash is a nice little Flashblock-type plugin for Safari with one big problem. Two, actually.
- you can’t leave feedback for the developer without creating a (free) account on the project website. Dude, I just wanted to tell you about #2…
- the only way I could find to get into the whitelist and preferences for the plugin is via a page with Flash that isn’t already blocked (there’s a little control on the blocker that gets you in). However, if you’ve already whitelisted the page there’s no way to get back in and un-whitelist it without going to another site with Flash. Worse, if you’ve whitelisted it in Fluid (a single-site browser application instance of Safari) there’s no hope at all of making any changes. You are stuck.
You need to get a preference pane in the main application fast.
One thing about ClickToFlash compared to Flashblock: as I’ve cranked about a few months ago, the Flash media player on MySpace doesn’t load properly in Firefox when you tell Flashblock to unblock. However, with ClickToFlash in Safari there’s no such problem. You click, it appears. Flashblock developers say this is a known bug in the Mozilla code which I should point out nobody seems to be working on. The Flashblock bug was logged October 2008, the Mozilla bug March 2009 and the feedback comments run in circles. It’s also suggested that the problem is with the Flash player but ClickToFlash on Safari doesn’t have the same issue.
Score one more for Safari.
