I ported Bloctoquote, originally a Firefox add-on, to a Google Chrome extension. Get it from the Chrome Web Store. Source code is available on Github.

Still to do: create a logo/icon for the tool, and port it to Safari.

I like audio. I like C++. So when I looked around for an open-source project to contribute to, I came upon the Apple Lossless Audio Codec project on MacOS Forge and jumped right in.

I figured that a good start would be to view the tickets that had been posted, and fix an issue prioritized as minor; this would acquaint me with the codebase and, at the same time, let me see what the community is like. Four weeks later, I’m still waiting to find out.

I think that this is emblematic of a lot of the smaller open-source projects out there. Developers will open-source their code and, for whatever reason, these projects tend to fall by the wayside. When there’s no real means of communicating with the developer, either via mailing list or e-mail, there’s no way for other developers to pick up the torch. This seems to be the case with ALAC; the wiki was last updated over a year ago, and the last ticket filed was in July of last year. A few people seem to have either mirrored the repository or ported it to another language, but there’s a dearth of activity in those projects as well.

On the surface, it’s troublesome that even a relatively well-publicized (by Ars Technica, MacRumors, &cet.) open-source project by a major company (Apple) can fail to gain traction. But really, it’s not that surprising. A smaller project won’t have the priority level that keeps the attention of an otherwise-busy developer. And something like ALAC doesn’t have the appeal of, say, Webkit, nor does it have well-known developers of projects like ThinkUp, who bring along both their talent and their audiences.

Another possibility is that the project has been obsoleted by something newer and better, and thus there’s little point in maintaining it. This makes good sense, even if it bothers my personal need for closure. I can’t find anything to support this, but it certainly looks like ALAC is abandonware.

Oh well. Onwards and upwards.

Over the weekend, I participated in my 3rd annual MS Bike Tour. This year’s 1200-rider provincial event, in Trois-Rivières, managed to raise over $910,000; combined with the amounts raised in the Québec regional event, we managed to raise $1.24 million.

We had some lovely—if a little hot—weather, and while I won’t go so far as to say the ride was leisurely, it was definitely one of the more pleasant I’ve been a part of. I’m thrilled to have been a part of Team Assante, which in total raised just short of $24,000 this year—160% of our $15,000 goal.

While I screwed up running Cyclemeter on the first 80-km day (turns out Airplane mode turns off iPhone’s GPS too, for some reason), I managed to get some of my (lousy) stats for day two:

• Ride time: 4:38:57
• Distance: 64.81 km
• Fastest Speed: 41.94 km/h (whee!)
• Average Speed: 13.94 km/h (not sure if this includes stopped times or not.)
• Elevation: 74 m
• Ascent: 247 m
• Descent: 242 m
• Calories: 2351

Here’s a map link including my average times per 5-km leg. As soon as the photos are up, I’ll put up some links.

Once again, a great event put on for a great cause. I’m looking forward to next year.

If you’re like me and use ellipses ( … ) a lot in your messages and e-mails, then here’s a quick tip for using iOS 5’s built-in keyboard shortcuts.

Go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Add New Shortcut… and enter the following:

Note that to enter an ellipsis in the Phrase field, hold down the period key ( . ) to show the alternate character bound there. Then, when you’re typing something, just hit the period key three times in a row and it’ll auto-replace it with a proper ellipsis:

Why bother?

1. iOS won’t auto-capitalize a word that comes after an ellipsis, but it will auto-capitalize a word that comes after a period. Obviously, you don’t want a capitalized word following an ellipsis.
2. The ellipsis counts as one character, rather than three, which is handy for limited-length things like SMS and Tweets.

Hope this is useful to someone out there.

I’m seeing a weird bug where installed updates are still showing up (kinda) as available in the Mac App Store on OS X Mountain Lion. I filed a radar – anyone else seeing this?

If you do web development and just upgraded your Mac to Mountain Lion, you may have noticed that Web Sharing has now disappeared from the Sharing pane in System Preferences:

The Apache web server is still installed, but must be enabled (PHP too). I followed these instructions at Coolest Guy On The Planet and got everything up and running again in a couple of minutes.

Leo Laporte on the tone of Dr Paul Vixie’s writings regarding DNS Changer:

And [there’s] a little bit of blaming the user. It’s their fault. And I think really he should take more blame for setting up a system that doesn’t work and should be putting more effort into fixing it than blaming the user, to be honest.

This got me thinking. It’s important for engineers to understand that to everyone else, we’re the weird ones. That’s why good UI/UX people are worth their weight in gold.

All tests passed successfully.

If you’re on the Aurora dev version of Firefox, Mozilla recently tested and validated Bloctoquote for v14.0 – I will probably be revving it to one-point-oh status this weekend to make it official.

I’m running into an issue writing specific code in a virtualized Windows 7 environment under VMWare Fusion. Specifically, I’m trying to determine the execution of a C++ function using the clock() function of the ctime library.

The OMD is the best body IQ wise so it’s the winner for me. It’s replaced my 5Dii/5Diii as my family camera and I don’t see that changing for quite a while (unless the Pen4 is something I might change to). The IQ is there, the focus is spot on w/o having my face smashed into the back of a camera, it’s tiny, it’s just a nice smart small package.

This man changes cameras more often than I change pants. I love my Olympus E-P3, and the OM-D sounds like a perfect upgrade path for those looking to go a little more pro with their M43 setup.