Adding Default Descriptions to Trac Tickets

May 2nd, 2008

I’ve been using Trac for the new projects I’m working on, and am liking it so far. I have, however, done a bit of customization to make it fit my needs a bit better. One thing that took awhile was figuring out how to change the default ticket description.

I like having some structure to my bug descriptions, including steps to reproduce, regression information, etc. Thankfully, Trac’s template system allows you to replace output with an override template (typically found in templates/site.html) that is applied before content is sent across the wire. It was a bit time-consuming to figure out how to do what I wanted to do, but I eventually ended up with a templates/site.html file that looks something like this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/" py:strip=""> <!-- Custom match templates go here --> <span py:if="req.environ['PATH_INFO']=='/newticket' and not req.args.has_key('preview')"> <textarea py:match="textarea[@id='field-description' and @class='wikitext']" py:attrs="select('@*')"> Your custom description goes here. </textarea> </span> </html>

I hope this is useful for someone. :)

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

On Regret Minimization, Leaving Apple, and Playing Pinball

April 30th, 2008

It’s been a month now since I left Apple to start a company. I’d been working on Time Machine (an interesting and challenging project) as a software engineer, with a fantastic group of people, and was in a situation that was really pretty great. So, why did I decide to leave and go do my own thing? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General, Startup | 5 Comments »

Happy Leopard Day!

October 26th, 2007

In January, I started working as a software engineer on Leopard. I was lucky enough to get to work on two of the top ten features for this release of OS X:

Time Machine Parental Controls

For the past few months I worked seven days a week pretty much non-stop on making the back end of Time Machine faster and more reliable. It was a lot of work, but overall a very rewarding experience, and I’m happy that I got to work on such a kick-ass release of OS X. Enjoy!

Now, I’m off to a beer bash for some much needed relaxation. :-)

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

UI Patterns: Wet Lazy Susan

June 3rd, 2007

I ran across a couple of variations on the “wet floor” effect today which both introduce a rotating set of images that can be moused over for more information. For lack of a better term, I’ll call this the “Wet Lazy Susan” effect. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General, Programming | No Comments »

Microsoft Web

March 31st, 2007

Here’s a snippet from Microsoft’s current corporate home page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html lang="en" dir="ltr"> <head> <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-16"> <title>Microsoft Corporation</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="SearchTitle" content="Microsoft.com"> <meta name="SearchDescription" content="Microsoft.com Homepage"> Download this code: /code/microsoft.txt

Can you spot the problem?

Update: James Booker is the first in with an answer: there are two Content-Type meta tags above, both of which specify different character sets.

Specifying the content-type in meta tags is a bit of a hack, as the browser has to seek through the first section of the document looking for a content-type declaration, then try reinterpreting the page with the character set the page specifies. Specifying a character set of “utf-16″ doesn’t make any sense in this scenario, as the browser is going to try the sniffing by interpreting the HTML as ASCII. If the page were actually UTF-16, this wouldn’t work, as the representation for the string “Content-type” in UTF-16 isn’t identical to its representation in UTF-8, as we can see in a Python shell:
>>> "Content-type".encode("utf-16") '\xfe\xff\x00C\x00o\x00n\x00t\x00e\x00n\x00t\x00-\x00t\x00y\x00p\x00e' >>> "Content-type".encode("utf-8") 'Content-type'

Thankfully, the HTML spec foresaw this problem:

The META declaration must only be used when the character encoding is organized such that ASCII-valued bytes stand for ASCII characters (at least until the META element is parsed). META declarations should appear as early as possible in the HEAD element.

So, there are actually three problems with the above HTML. There are two content-type declarations in meta tags, one of them is bogus, and the correct one isn’t as early as is possible in the head element. These problems, thankfully, are mitigated by the presence of an HTTP header that specifies the correct character set, and by the incredible amount of effort browser vendors have put into making their code accepting of mistakes such as these.

Posted in General, Programming | 1 Comment »

robots.txt Adventure

March 12th, 2007

Introduction.txt

Last October I got bored and set my spider loose on the robots.txt files of the world. Having had a good deal of positive feedback on my HTTP Headers survey, I had decided to poke around in robots.txt files and see what sorts of interesting things I could find.

Since then, I’ve taken 6 weeks of vacation and gotten to be very busy at work, so I’m just now getting around to analyzing all the data I gathered. These are some of the results of that analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General, Programming | 18 Comments »

New Zealand Trip 2006

February 9th, 2007

Introduction

In mid-2006, I decided that I wanted to use up some of my long-accrued vacation, and started planning a 5 week trip to New Zealand. I’d wanted to go to New Zealand for a couple of years, after having seen photos of the country from my friend Josh’s ’round the world trip.

Typically, for me, planning a trip involves booking transportation, getting a rough idea of what I want to do, and figuring things out when I get there, a tendency which annoys some of those close to me to no end. I didn’t want New Zealand to be any different, so I booked airfare and investigated my in-country transportation options pretty carefully. I finally settled on renting a campervan, so that I’d be able to set my own pace for exploring the country. That settled, I booked the only activity I really had to book in advance, a hut ticket for the Milford Track, which is reputed to be the “finest walk in the world.” That settled, I geared up for the trip, buying lots of photography and hiking gear, and prepared myself for my first vacation outside of North America. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General, Travel | 7 Comments »

A Peek Inside

January 27th, 2007

The Shomstoppers present: Jolly Boots of Doom.

Posted in General | No Comments »

Undergraduate Computer Science Reading List

December 28th, 2006

My friend and coworker Buzz Andersen posited awhile ago that there exists a programming canon, a body of literature with which software developers and computer scientists are expected to be familiar.

Having interviewed a lot of people (and I mean a lot) and been interviewed myself a few times, Buzz’s point resonated with me. I’ve noticed that many recent university graduates have not been exposed to material that is considered fundamental to computer science and programming by many in the industry. A lot of schools have sacrificed the teaching of this material in favor of more IT development oriented courses, and really done their students a disservice in the process.

Since I’d rather see more kick-ass programmers and computer scientists than fewer, here’s my list of books that I think should be on the bookshelves of all computer science undergraduates. These books are, of course, my own favorites, and they exclude a lot of the books I’d include in a list of graduate-level books. Feel free to chime in in the comments if you think I’ve missed something important. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General, Programming | 2 Comments »

Rolling Garfield Ninja Turtles

October 26th, 2006

So, a friend pointed out today that when you search for “Rolling Stones” on Google, you may not get the results you were expecting:

Search for Rolling Stones on Google

Apparently, to Google, Garfield.com is the canonical source for information on the Rolling Stones. Also, Garfield.com and NinjaTurtles.com are apparently the same site:

TMNT and Garfield, they both like fake Italian food.

Hmm, I wonder what the top result is for “Ninja Turtles“. Let’s see:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Garfield

Yup, that Garfield cat sure is popular. For completeness’ sake, I’ll point out now that searches for both “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and even “Ninja Stones” also show Garfield.com as the top hit. If you find more, let me know. In the mean time, I’m really curious as to why this is happening, so let’s try to figure that out.

So, why does Google think Garfield.com and NinjaTurtles.com are the same site? Well, might they be hosted on the same machine?

$ host www.ninjaturtles.com
www.ninjaturtles.com has address 216.204.128.19
$ host www.garfield.com
www.garfield.com is an alias for ucomics.com.
ucomics.com has address 198.247.208.81
ucomics.com has address 198.247.208.121
ucomics.com has address 198.247.208.122
ucomics.com has address 198.247.208.123
ucomics.com has address 63.208.55.161
ucomics.com has address 63.208.55.201
ucomics.com has address 63.208.55.202
ucomics.com has address 63.208.55.203

Nope. Neither is anything about the Rolling Stones. Okay, just for fun, let’s look at the robots.txt file on Garfield.com:

# robots.txt for http://garftest.uclick.com/

User-agent: *
Dissallow: /

That’s weird. First of all, they misspelled disallow as “dissallow”. A quick check of other sites with disallow misspelled in their robots.txt files shows that Google ignores the misspelled disallow directive. So, the file should have no affect on indexing.

Maybe Google’s is using a hash of the domain name to identify identical sites? Trying 16 common hashing algorithms (MD5, RIPEMD-160, Tiger, SHA-1, SHA-256, Adler32, CRC32, etc.) of various permutations of the domain names with and without punctuation, I didn’t find any collisions. That doesn’t rule out hash collisions using different (say, homegrown) hashing algorithms, but I’ll move on for now.

Next, scanning the results returned for Garfield on various search engines, I don’t see any evidence of Googlebombing the terms “Garfield”, “Rolling Stones”, or “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”.

So, I give up. Maybe Garfield’s prominence in Google results is an homage to Eugene Garfield, a citation analysis pioneer cited in Larry and Sergey’s PageRank paper from 1998.

Okay, that’s a stretch, but I’m stumped. Anyone else have any ideas?

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

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