While everyone else in the city is making their way to the fireworks on the river tonight, I’m getting myself geared up to pack. I hate packing. So blogging is a good way to put it off a little longer.
June 2005
Monthly Archive
Just a quick note in case it’s not too late. Mozilla is doing some quality tests for Firefox 1.1. It sounds like a simultaneous thing they’re going to do, co-ordinated over IRC. It’s only a couple hours from now by my watch. Have a look at the Mozilla QA blog for details.
I’ve always thought the way Windows uses ellipses in the middle of a long string was quaint. It’s great except for the fact that sometimes it trims out the important bits. Here’s a little php function that I wrote to trim out the middle part of a string. I suppose you could use it to trim out important bits, too.
Read the rest of “Squeezing strings in PHP”…
SSD is a term coined a long time ago for a device that acts like a hard drive but with no moving parts. According to Wikipedia, they’ve been in use since about 1970. I don’t know how the term “Solid State” came to refer to this, but I remember televisions and electronics when I was very young that had the term emblazoned on them like a badge of excellence. I’d look at it and imagine perhaps liquid or gaseous TV sets. SSDs are being proposed again as a main storage device for computers with a couple recent news articles. BetaNews published a story last month about a product announcement from Samsung. Now Slashdot points to an article speculating the Samsung SSD might show up in Apple products.
Read on for my observations Read the rest of “Yay for Samsung and Solid State Drives”…
I picked up Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Read the rest of “Jak II and GTA Vice City Reviews and Ruminations”…
Jeff has his results up from testing the Opera native SVG Tiny rendering on Windows XP. He also points to similar testing with different results from Antoine Quint over at SVG.org. I’d guess that maybe they’re using different operating systems, otherwise I’ll have to finally go get Opera and cast a tie-breaker vote 
.
It’s good to see the different agents being put through the paces. Hopefully now that there are more ways to render SVG the pace of test cases will speed up. Or we could just end up testing in live pages and get the same mess of quirks that we have in HTML. Squared.
I’d planned to put together a big table of all my test results from Firefox, and I have that. Just it’s in a spreadsheet, not a web page. If anyone really wants to see that, just ask and I’ll send it along. I’ve decided that I’d rather summarize my findings here. I think that’s a lot more useful than just another table of red and green - especially since that would imply something far more official than I intend to. So today I’ll talk a little about my subjective results of looking at all the tests in the SVG test suite with Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1.1. I looked at features that should be supported according to the Mozilla SVG status page and features that are clearly documented as not supported.
Why bother looking at unsupported features? Failure mode analysis. It’s one thing to say that a feature is not supported and it’s another to know what will happen when that feature is requested anyways. I know this is bound to change before the final release of 1.1, but alpha builds are for testing, right?
Anyhow, the test suite prefixes and the modules described in the Mozilla SVG implementation status page don’t clearly line up all the time, so I just made my best guess at where each test fits in terms of the primary features being tested and what Mozilla supports. The ones that should be supported are the ones I’ll talk about first (and file bugs if it makes sense), the ones that shouldn’t be supported I’ll give some attention to another day if it’s warranted.
Read the rest of “Deer Park Alpha Test Suite Results”…