Symphonious

Recently Apple made WebKit development much more open which is great for people who develop products using WebKit as they get more control - it's great for the KHTML developers as it's easier for them to integrate Safari changes and for a bunch of people to test against.

The downside however is that people who have no business playing with development builds of WebKit just can't help being cool and running it anyway.  What's worse is that people encourage this stupidity by making prepackaged builds available.  If you can't follow the very simple instructions to build your own version of WebKit from CVS, you really, really, really shouldn't be working with a development build - you almost certainly don't have the skills required to provide a worthwhile bug report anyway.  The build instructions for WebKit are probably the most brain-dead simple instructions I've ever seen for any open source project (you thought ./configure; make; make install was difficult - try just build-webkit; run-safari).  There's even a simple script to pull the latest updates from CVS without having to know anything about CVS commands.

Why is it so bad that people run these development builds you ask? Because when you're not a developer (and often even when you are) you don't know what's a bug caused by the WebKit development build and what's a bug caused by the software you're using - you can often get very weird knock on effects.  For instance, Swing applet's can't use command-V to paste in Safari because Safari eats the keystroke and the applet never sees it yet to a user the applet has a bug.  What really hurts is when these users wind up turning to the 3rd party developer for support and you have to waste time trying to reproduce the problem only to finally discover it was a bug that existed in WebKit for a matter of hours and it just so happens this user build WebKit from CVS in that timeframe.

Here's a tip, there are no improvements in the latest CVS WebKit that are so compelling that you would want to run it instead of the tested, stable released version and deal with the inherent instability of a bleeding-edge browser.  Just don't do it.

My saturday mornings are being consumed by catching up on reading that I put off during the week and it's
starting to get out of hand.  I had the future in-laws, my mother and my little sister over for dinner last
night so completely ignored the incoming feeds - this morning there were over 200 new items to flick through and
another 20-30 had arrived before I got through them all.  The list of open tabs in NetNewsWire has overflown
into a drop down menu all week and after 3 hours of reading this morning I've only just gotten it to fit
again.  Plus I have a stack of downloads to play with and evaluate.

I think RSS is taking over my life….

Oh yeah, I forgot about the bunch of podcasts waiting for me to listen too as well.

Hand warmer for geeks - a USB powered device that blows warm air across your keyboard.

The rest of me is quite warm, but I can't wear gloves and type at the same time.  If you know of one
that exists, my birthday is in a couple of weeks so you could just send one now….