Have you ever seen, while dealing in a support channel with a novice that just got in touch with the power of UNIX a conversation that goes like this?: How can I process the output of a command, so that any number of spaces gets turned into a newline? What are you trying to do? I want to list the contents of a directory, but I want one per line.

No começo dessa semana, o programa CQC (de quem eu ainda espero alguma piadinha pela mancada do Bóris, btw, porque isso é uma vergonha ;D) nos prestou um serviço importantíssimo: colocou nua e cruamente na TV um flagrante de funcionários públicos se apropriando de uma doação de TV de plasma feita pelo programa com um GPS dentro para que se soubesse onde foi parar. Mas não sem antes ter a exibição censurada por uma juíza sem noção que acatou um pedido de liminar do prefeito da cidade de Barueri, Rubens Furlan (PMDB – ugh).

We’re coming close to GNOME 2.30 release date, and we are getting ready to branch a stable release off of WebKit’s svn trunk in preparation for that. The idea of the stable branch is to try to maintain, and improve stability, with no additional features going in. Speaking of features, though, if you’ve been paying attention you will have noticed WebKitGTK+ has come a long way, now. We came from not having basic features such as download support or openning links in new tabs, a more-or-less working HTML5 media implementation, and very few or missing in action developers to a thriving project, that gets more, and more attention, and contributors every day, with advanced features available, and rocking HTML5 media support that leaves little to be desired.

Most times when I blog about WebKitGTK+ it’s to talk about new features, and their usage in Epiphany. This time I’d like to tell those who care more about our test infrastructure. Like I said in my previous post, testing is something we take very seriously in WebKit land. It would be hard to get such a complex project, with such diversity of platforms moving forward without automated testing. Apple hosts a buildbot master that controls a whole lot of build slaves, for many platforms.

So, one of the things I get to do during work hours for Collabora is to contribute code, and do maintenance tasks for WebKitGTK+, and have been doing so since early last year, working on all kinds of things, from improving the network backend to handle the real-world web, to fixing scrolling problems, while reviewing patches from the many awesome developers who have been joining us (more on that later =D).

Isso era pra ser comentário de um post no blog do Eriberto, mas como ele exige login para fazer comentários e reiniciar a senha que eu obviamente esqueci demorou muito, vai um post mesmo. O post dele trata da ida embora da combinação Control-Alt-Backspace, que matava o X. Essa combinação ir embora é uma coisa boa, na minha opinião por vários motivos, o principal deles sendo que eu já derrubei meu X várias vezes sem querer fazendo um comando no Emacs ou no Bash ;D.

Did I mention I hate flash? I do. It crashes a lot, and is overall a bad thing for the web, in my opinion. But I do enjoy watching videos on the web, and unfortunately, up to this day, flash is what most sites use to show videos. Months ago I read a couple of blog posts with nice hacks to make Firefox able to play youtube videos without using the flash player.

One thing everyone forgot to talk about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest was that master Dan Winship added basic Content-Encoding support to libsoup, and patched WebKitGTK+ to use it. If you are using a recent enough version of those you will finally be able to visit web sites that send gzipped content despite the browser saying it could not handle it, like the Internet Archive. This was one of those cases in which the web shows all of its potential to behave weirdly.