chealion.ca

When looking at one of the trailers (Tetro: Original Trailer) that has been transcoded into WebM. I wanted to compare YouTube’s x264 settings versus their WebM settings. I’ve also uploaded some 1080p footage for more recent footage (in case the H.264 settings had changed between Dec. 2009 and now - which AFAIK they haven’t) to compare. It’s also important to note that the HTML5 access to YouTube videos is only available on non-monetized content.

During my testing I noticed that in the HTML5 Beta on older versions of Chrome and Safari (aka H.264 using browsers) when you select 360p for your video size, YouTube does NOT give you a 360p file - it is actually smaller in terms of resolution (480x270) and has to be upscaled. This is most likely a reason why my initial thoughts on Twitter didn’t match with what I had on paper.

Disclaimer: Subjective paragraph to follow - I’m not an expert and I’m judging just by general visual quality to my eye.

A quick visual inspection shows the WebM version in 360p seem noticeably sharper in terms of details than the 480x270 H.264 which had to be upscaled. The 720p WebM version was close enough to it’s H.264 counterpart. However I did definitely notice with the 360p version, a “quality bump” every once in a while as described in the ratecontrol section of a blog post by one of the x264 developers when criticizing the VP8 specification.

Using MediaInfo Mac the following settings can be found:

Tetro Trailer (Originally encoded 12/26/09)

12 Second Test Clip Uploaded Today

Even though H.264 is definitely better on paper, I think VP8 will do just fine as a replacement for Theora and a competitor to H.264 for use on the web. For the near future (next 3 months IMO) you won’t see a lot of WebM footage available as the playback availability is extremely limited.

While doing some research I discovered (first with the 27" iMacs) and now with the new MacBook Pro line that runs the i5 or the i7 processors; Apple has slotted in an ethernet controller that does NOT support Jumbo Frames.

See page four of the PDF of the Broadcom 5764 Chipset

I’ve been using Chromium (the developer version of Chrome) since May side by side the WebKit nightlies. They’re very fast and I like Chrome quite a bit however I won’t be moving to Chrome/Chromium as my main browser. Yet. After all it’s still a beta and under very active development.

And like any craptastic method of making sure one has an easy time of making an article/blog post/etc. a set of pros and cons as to what I like and dislike about Chrome/Chromium)

Pros:

• Super fast, uses a newer version of WebKit than Safari. (If you like Safari but want the new versions of WebKit - use nightly.webkit.org - will never use Vanilla Safari again)
• Automatically updates itself silently (Chrome only, Chromium must be manually updated
• Updates often so new features and bug fixes in WebKit show up quite quickly.
• Bookmark Sync (this came online last week). Awesome.
• If one tab crashes the entire program doesn’t crash. Huge. Not as huge since Safari started sandboxing Flash but huge none the less.

Cons:

• Silently installs an auto updater that is hard to remove and impossible to control in a managed environment.
• Extension support not easily accessible
• Bookmark Management is near non-existent. It’s a completely broken feature at this time.
• No Click To Flash yet. Flash Blocker is a poor substitute.
• Tabs just become a set of mountains when too many are open.
• Top Sites look alike feature isn’t as customizable. Oddly I use Chrome’s Top Site feature but not Safari’s.

I like it a lot but I believe calling it a beta is disingenuous. A beta usually refers to something feature complete and in bug testing. My usage however says that it’s very solid but that new features are being added all the time. The reality is that Google Chrome is being treated like a web application - iterated fast and often and there is no real distinction between alpha, beta or a final “1.0” version number. Just a stable and unstable branch and the version number to correspond to where development is at.

It’s a bit more chaotic but represents a change in how developers can approach development, after all there are no instances of a user using a version 3 or 4 versions old when you make sure everyone is using the latest version all the time.

In order to profile some in house web application development and find out a couple bottlenecks that were appearing I went looking for a decent PHP profiler and found Xdebug. Because I am using the built in version of PHP on the Leopard Server, and a MacPorts version on Snow Leopard (we also have an application that fails miserably on PHP 5.3) it lead to some fun installing Xdebug on the Leopard machine since I didn’t want to reconfigure apache2 to use PHP 5.3 from MacPorts.

The crux of it is to grab the source of Xdebug, and then when configuring prefix your standard ./configure --enable-xdebug with the statement CFLAGS='-arch ppc64' or CFLAGS='-arch x86_64' as necessary. Compile xdebug as a 64-bit extension and it will actually work with a 64-bit version of Apache. With MacPorts it was as simple as enabling the xdebug variant and letting it recompile PHP.

I highly recommend using webgrind. It gave me more useful results than MacCallGrind, and didn’t require an hour hoping MacPorts could compile all the dependencies for kcachegrind (which would require graphviz as an additional install). Now I have some numbers to tell me where to look for proof old me is a moron.

As many of you are aware, Apple released a new horribly named mouse, the Magic Mouse. On Saturday I had the opportunity (since I was in the mall anyway) to drop by the Market Mall Apple Store and give the mouse a whirl - it was comfortable, did not have the gum-up-every-5-seconds trackball, and was exceptionally responsive. On a whim I ended up purchasing one later that day.

The Good

The mouse is accurate, responsive and the multitouch feels intuitive and that with software updates it could become even more. Additionally the weight has just enough heft to feel solid but much lighter than most other wireless mice Definitely the best Bluetooth mouse I’ve ever used.

Scrolling without a wheel (and momentum on Snow Leopard) brings the best of scrolling on an iPhone/iPod touch to the desktop and for the reason alone is worth it. Instead of a tiny wheel that just spins the entire surface of the mouse is now you touchpad for scrolling, perfect for reading long PDFs and being able to lean back and just use one finger without having to clutch a mouse.

Of note the two finger swipe to go back in Safari hasn’t been an issue and actually useful on occassion.

The Bad

The mouse is smallish and does not offer the ability for a “middle click” (3rd button). If you are used to the Mighty Mouse the muscle memory of squeezing may take a little while to get used to not being able to do. The loss of being able to trigger Exposé in any form is definitely a large loss and the primary reason I normally prefer 5 or 6 buttons on my mice. Being forced to use a less than optimum layout for Exposé on the Aluminum keyboard makes using Exposé more and more of an afterthought without resorting to Dock Exposé in Snow Leopard. Apple’s hardware definitely is not very Exposé friendly at times.

The Ugly

The new mouse is quite cramped and not all that comfortable compared to full size mice like Logitech’s MX Revolution, 1000 or the Performance. This is a huge misnomer because the Magic mouse is surprisingly comfortable even for long periods of time - it’s that the MX line fits my hand more completely and feels nicer to hold at odd angles. That said, I always have a hand on the keyboard and avoid mousing unncessarily as keyboard shortcuts are nearly always faster then hunting for them in the menus.

Conclusion

Suffice to say, it’s an excellent Bluetooth mouse, it’s minimalistic and has all the features I want. For users who don’t require a middle button, those who want a solid mouse it’s perfect. I’ll definitely be keeping it - at least until the wife steals it and I upgrade to an MX Performance.

I highly recommmend the mouse so long as you’re not looking for a large or gaming mouse.

My initial impressions are that Snow Leopard is very much worth the upgrade if you can afford the time to do an operating system upgrade (in this case for me it was ~1.5 hours: 45 minute install, 45 minutes testing apps and seeing they still worked without any modification)

Pros:

• Speed
  Awesome!
• New Services Feature
  My favourite feature
• OpenCL
  If you haven’t seen MacResearch’s Introduction to OpenCL check out 33:30 to 34:50 or so. (Rough timecodes
• iCal Event Editing Gets a Window Again
• Spotlight Default Search Location Fix and Sortable Results I can finally search within a folder without holding a needle to my eye first!
• Enhanced Icon View Neat if I used icon view.
• Faster wakeup to password screen Hawt.
• Faster Time Machine Backup Hawt.
• Airport Menu Changes Neat animation, but more info when holding the option key as well.
• Gamma 2.2 Default No longer do I have to set this up each time.
• New Fonts Menlo is cool, but Chalkduster; Heiti SC and TC; and Hiragino Sans GB are all fonts I’ll never use.
• Safari Plug-ins are sandboxed Awesome - Flash won’t hurt as much even after ClickToFlash
• QuickTime Player New UI is great for viewing.
• Preview Faster and better scaling.
• Mail Much faster. :-)
• Set a time before the screen saver asks for a password. THANK YOU.
• Smaller footprint I liked the good thwack of disk space I got back (~6GB)
• Grand Dispatch Can’t wait to see the results on the Mac Pros at work.
• Screen Recording Neat, but I’ll stick with ScreenFlow.
• Revised Keyboard Shortcut / Services Preference Pane Much nicer to work with.
• Wake on Demand No more having to worry about whether the computer is asleep or not? Over wireless? Sweet (Airport Extreme only though)

Cons:

• Base 10 Counting
  WTF. DO NOT LIKE. “Mac OS X can not count” Would prefer a preference to turn this off and/or proper suffixes (eg. MiB instead of MB)
• QuickTime Player Absolutely neutered into being useless beyond viewing and “Sharing” your movie to MobileMe.

In summary, there is no one real feature in Snow Leopard worth upgrading for - no major consumer focused feature. It’s the sum of all the parts that make it worth much more than the $29 they are charging. Once installed you never want to go back.

At my workplace we use iCal Server running on Mac OS X 10.5 Server to share several calendars all under our one staff group. With iCal, so long as the group is delegated to be shown on the user’s accounts you can see all the calendars but with Sunbird you only get to see the first calendar.

Before going further it’s worth noting how to delegate a group calendar so a user can view it without manually adding the group calendar as it’s own calendar (if using Delegates instead of multiple calendar “accounts” (same credentials, different calendars) is your aim). To do so you have to add the group calendar as a normal account in order to set it up, and then set up delegation as you would for a normal account. The important URL to know for using a group calendar is http://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8008/principals/groups/groupname (as always replace http with https and 8008 with 8443 if you are using SSL).

Sunbird uses slightly different URLs than what you use in iCal to start with, where in iCal an example URL might be http://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8008/principals/users/USERNAME or http://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8008/principals/groups/GROUPNAME. The corresponding URL to use in Sunbird is http://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8008/calendars/users/USERNAME/calendar or http://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8008/calendars/groups/GROUPNAME/calendar

That’s great for adding a single calendar but what if a user or a group has multiple calendars under their one account? iCal will automatically show them as a group whereas Sunbird requires you to add each and everyone that you wish to have show up.

You can specify a “sub-calendar” to subscribe to in Mozilla Sunbird by specifying the unique ID of that calendar instead in the form of the url http://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8008/calendars/__uids__/UID_OF_GROUP_OR_USER/UID_OF_SUB_CALENDAR (Newer versions of Lightning will take http://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8008/users/USERNAME/UID_OF_SUB_CALENDAR). Note the lack of calendar at the end of the URL. To determine the UIDs in question it’s easiest using iCal, if you click on a calendar and press Command-I (File -> Get Info) you can see part of the CalDAV URL at the bottom of the sheet that appears.

You will see calendars/__uids__/UNIQUE_ID/ONLY_PART_OF_THE_UNIQUE_ID because the label the text is placed into is not big enough to fit the URL. Because you can’t get the full URL from there it’s easiest to go to the iCal Server itself and navigate to /Library/CalendarServer/Documents/calendars/__uids__/ (you’ll need administrator privileges to view this). From there find the folder named the same as the UNIQUE_ID portion of the URL and open it to find a folder with the UNIQUE_ID of the “sub-calendar”. You can now put the URL together and use that in Sunbird to view that additional calendar.

Example URL of a sub-calendar in the group:
https://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8443/calendars/__uids__/FA26C8C6-5B78-4AB0-AE73-0E9576574EBB/F74174B7-380C-4630-9192-9025F4C691A2

EDIT:

Sub-calendars also work at https://FQDN.OF.SERVER:8443/calendars/users/USERNAME/UID_OF_SUBCALENDAR

Sources Used:

• MacOSXHints.com - Add group calendars to iCal Server
• Apple Support Discussions - Correct URLs for Sunbird
• Apple Support Discussions - iCal + Sunbird

When I read on MacRumors that the Chromium builds for the Mac were available and were actually launching the “stupid” geek in me jumped at the opportunity to try the unfinished, unpolished software. By “stupid” I refer to the side of near any geek who sees the OOO SHINY and is fully prepared to deal with the instability and issues that will crop up with using pre-alpha/alpha software. Naturally when I saw how fast and furious the updates were happening alongside the fact there was no automatic update mechanism apparent in Chromium (I don’t have the Google Updater installed and don’t want to) I sought to find out how to automate the updates to make the pain of manual downloads, copies and such go away.

Using my previous WebKit script, 5 minutes looking at the Chromium application layout and how the builds are stored on the server I changed the script. I fully expect it to break horribly in the future as Google changes folder layouts and/or adds Chromium support to their own “silent” updating mechanism.

Realistically you should be looking for the latest source at the link below:

As always this script can be found in my git repository on GitHub.

On ServerFault someone was asked a question why .csv files were unable to be viewed in Quick Look. For some reason .csv files are not defined as plain text by the operating system which leads to odd conflicts between applications that can deal with .csv files that causes QuickLook to report that it can’t find a generator for the file and just show the icon.

The one way to force it to work is to roll your own, with a bit of help after reading the QuickLook Programming Reference it was rather simple to roll together a proof of concept QuickLook generator for .csv files.

It’s not pretty, it may break at any time (if only because it’s using a dynamic UTI since one is not defined anywhere, however .csv files have been using the UTI “dyn.age80g650” for quite a while - as far back as prior to 10.0) but it works and forces the .csv to display properly.

The code and a download of CSVQL is available on GitHub:

Source: http://github.com/Chealion/chealion/tree/master

Download: http://cloud.github.com/downloads/Chealion/chealion/CSVQL.zip

Check out Pascal’s comment for a much nicer looking version - actually puts the data into tables.

I’m unsure as to exactly why this annoyed me so much but on receiving junk mail to my home address from a company called “Domain Registry of Canada” (spammer’s website) I felt compelled to write an email (if only to get myself off their mailing list).

Hi,

I’d like to inquire why environmental resources, postage, and my time was wasted by sending a letter to my home address “as a courtesy” to “renew” or should I say SWITCH for 4 times ($40.00 CDN) the price I currently pay to register my domains.

Please remove me from your database and in my obtuse opinion grow a pair of non shifty business practices. (“Domain Registry of Canada”? It may be legal but it’s certainly douchy).

Pissed off over junk mail and shady business practices,

Micheal

I’m fully aware it will do nothing, they won’t (and most likely should not) care about my opinion of their practices but making it known that Domain Registry of Canada is soliciting me to switch (under the guise of renewing) is douchy. The domain is even transfer locked (meaning I can’t switch registrar’s with their fancy paper form). It does stand to point that the moment you start reading further it’s quite obvious it’s a solicitation - it’s not hidden but the fact that I am being solicited for this annoys me even if it “standard practice” by those who have business practices I despise.