Bluish Coder

Dave Winer Visits Mozilla

Dave Winer visited Mozilla yesterday to give a talk about RSS during the all hands meetings. I've been a reader of Dave's blog for awhile and was previously a Radio Userland user for a couple of years so it was good to meet him in person.

He outlined his views on the 'river of news' format of aggregating feeds that Radio Userland uses. This seems to be Dave's preferred way of dealing with RSS. The advantage of this approach is that the new news items appear at the top of the list so you can quickly scan the new information and discard the old if you don't have time. I don't think he was too impressed with the way Firefox handles RSS feeds with the 'live bookmarks' and the way things are handed off to external readers.

I briefly talked to Dave afterwards about the new Video and Audio elements that are being specified, and about the Video implementation in Firefox. This came up in the context of if it was possible to build a podcast player in a web browser. With the video/audio elements I think this is more than possible and could make for a great user experience - all in standards (or at least, draft standard) based HTML.

On his blog he wrote about following up on his ideas on integrating RSS and podcasting into the web browser. I'm interested in seeing what he has to say on this and how the new functionality we are implementing could help with this.

Firefox Video Element Patch Version 4

Version 4 of the Firefox Video Element Patch is up. It has a number of bug fixes and contains changes suggested by the reviewers.

Before applying the patch to the Mozilla Firefox CVS trunk, you should first apply the third party modules patch. Another option is to just use the git repository I've been maintaining.

One major change is I'm no longer using PortAudio. Instead I'm using the Sydney Audio library included with liboggplay. This works well and now sound works across Windows, Linux and Mac OS X for both debug and optimized builds. I abstracted out the sound library implementation behind an interface. If it is decided to go to another library it's fairly simple to implement that interface.

I've done binary builds for Windows, Linux (x86) and Mac OS X (Intel). They are available at the test page. I put together. Remember this is alpha code from the CVS trunk with the patch applied - it may crash or do nasty things so run it in a Firefox profile specific for testing this (using the -P or -ProfileManager command line option for example).

If you try it out, let me know of any bugs you come across, or if the Git repository doesn't build on your platform. I'm off to the Mozilla All Hands meeting in Mountain View next week, so if you're in the area and want to meet up, let me know.

Using the Factory Window Manager on Mac OS X

Factory is an X11 window manager written in Factor by Eduardo Cavazos. Although best used in Linux, it can also be run using the X11.app in Mac OS X.

First you need to build Factor using the X11 backend rather than the standard Mac OS X backend. This can be done with the latest darcs code using these steps:

cd Factor
make macosx-x86 X11=1
./Factor.app/Contents/MacOS/factor -i=boot.x86.32.image -ui-backend=x11

The X11.app program usually runs a Quartz based window manager. You can run any window manager by providing a .xinitrc file in your home directory. Copy /private/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc:

cp /private/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc

Edit it so the last line which runs the window manager is removed, and remove the '&' from the end of the line that invokes 'xterm':

# Change this
xterm &

# to just
xterm

#Delete this line
exec quartz-wm

Now when you run X11.app you'll find an ugly looking xterm window starting with no window manager decorations. From within this xterm, run the X11 Factor you built, and start Factory:

cd ~/x11-factor/Factor
open Factor.app
USE: factory
":0" start-factory

This starts a UI instance of Factor, loads the Factory code, and starts the window manager on the given display. You can also run it as a terminal application rather than the UI:

cd ~/x11-factor/Factor
./Factor.app/Contents/MacOS/factor -run=listener
USE: factory
":0" start-factory

Either way you run it, you'll see the X11 windows instantly get the Factory decorations. The key bound to bring up the Factory menu is F12 which by default on my Macbook does something else. This can be configured, along with the menu, by copying two files and editing them to do what you want:

cp ~/x11-factor/Factor/extra/factory/factory-rc ~/.factory-rc
cp ~/x11-factor/Factory/extra/factory/factory-menus ~/.factory-menus

In ~/.factory-rc, change references to the F12 key to F8. Now when you start Factory, F8 will bring the menu up for running applications.

With Factory loaded this way you can modify the window manager code on the fly and the effects occur immediately.

Mozilla based browser for the N800

The N800 is a small tablet type device produced by Nokia.

It has a 320Mhz ARM CPU, 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash storage. While the latter sounds small it also has two card slots allowing plugging in lots of extra storage. The display is a nice 800x480 and about 4 inches. It has both 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.0. A built in camera is also included.

Recently a Skype client became available for it and now it seems a browser based on Gecko, the engine behind Firefox.

The new browser seems to be well received based on posts to this thread and there's a nifty web site that explains a bit about it.

The browser is open source. Links to the source and other stuff here.

I don't have one, but being a gadget person I have to say I'm now quite tempted! Time to stop reading about it...

Firefox Video Element Patch Version 2

I've attached a new version of the Firefox Video Element Patch to bugzilla. As outlined in the bugzilla entry, this patch fixes/updates:

• Ogg codec support can be enabled/disabled with configure flag --disable-ogg. Currently if the Ogg codec is disabled then the video element is disabled too. In the future if/when other codecs are supported this can change.
• Fix build problems when doing libxul enabled builds
• Fix link error on windows when doing a --disable-libxul build
• Fix colour playback issues on Linux and Windows
• Handle no audio device being present
• Adjust element size when video size information is read from the Ogg file
• No longer use channel across threads
• Various refactorings based on email feedback

A couple of issues still to track down:

1. Sound not working on Linux
2. Sound not working on Mac OS X optimized builds

I've also updated the third party modules patch which you need to apply first: third_party_modules.patch.gz

I've been regularly updating the Git repository and it contains all these changes as well.