So I’ve got a big update ready to go for iTransmogrify!. Except there’s a problem with Google Code.

Google Code doesn’t allow downloads to be renamed or deleted after they’re 2 days old or have 50+ downloads. That nugget of critical information is buried deep in their FAQ.

I posted this in Google Code Support, Rename or replace download and commented on issue 417, Need a stable link to the latest version of a download. A ‘latest version’ link on Google Code would solve this completely, but it’s been almost four months since they tagged the issue, so who knows when or if that feature will ever exist.

I’m not expecting any help from Google, so I’m considering the following two options:

1. Link files directly from svn trunk.
2. Set up externally-hosted http redirect.

Neither is ideal and both would require users to update their bookmarks or miss out on updates. Additionally the main script file would be outside of stats collection, so no one would know how many times iTransmogrify has been used, when I hit publish on this post, that number was just under 279,000 times.

My solution

After a day of thinking about it and discussing things with a few people, I’ve decided to go with a locally-hosted redirect for the main JavaScript file. Going forward I’ll just manually update the redirect to point to the latest version. This is an acceptable outcome for an imperfect situation.

The update will unfortunately require action on the users’ part, something I had intended never to happen: Users will need to update the bookmarklet. From here forward, all updates will just happen, as I’d planned from the beginning.

Once this update is known to be working, I will modify the graphics seen by the old script file to announce the changes. Hopefully that last step will get most everyone moved to the newer bookmarklet.

iTransmogrify! is a bookmarklet for iPhone which transforms embedded Flash content into direct links to natively supported formats. That means YouTube videos and MP3s can now be played from the iPhone’s Safari web browser with just a few clicks.

Seeing it work is the best explanation:

On an iPhone? Try it now: iTransmogrify! (works in Safari and Firefox too)

Sorry, it took YouTube a long time to re-encode that for iPhone, here’s a baby panda:

Installation

To install the bookmarklet, just drag the link to your Safari or Firefox Bookmarks, IE users should right click and choose “Add To Favorites…” After adding the link, sync your iPhone.

Grab it now: iTransmogrify!

You can also add iTransmogrify from your iPhone!

More information, source code and bug-tracking is available on the iTransmogrify Google Code page.

Currently supported content:
• Default YouTube Object-Embed code
• YouTube bare Embed
• YouTube bare Object
• A variety of Flash-based MP3 players including Digg Podcasts

Lots more added: iTransmogrify update

Support for other embedded media sites will be added as I figure them out. Please report broken sites or suggest additional sources using Google Code issue tracker.

Acknowledgements

The first robust, script insertion bookmarklets I ever saw was Sumaato’s original Flickr GeoCoding bookmarklet.

Other sites also deserving links:

• Jan Wolter’s Dynamic Script Loading
• Andrew Sumin’s Modularity in JavaScript
• Mike West’s Scope in JavaScript was the refresher I needed to resolve one especially annoying object-scope bug.

iPhone graphic reference:

• iPhone Graphics locations
• Huge iPhone icons

Also, John Resig’s amazing jQuery JavaScript library. This project was the excuse I’d been looking for to finally dig in and learn it.

The name came from a late-night brainstorming chat with Bruce and was far more fun and interesting than the utilitarian ones I was thinking of. So thank you Bruce, and of course, Bill Watterson.

This is sort of a follow up on the old mod_rendezvous article I wrote for O’Reilly. While cleaning up my virtual hosts I discovered a bug in 10.5’s handling of multiple RegisterResource directives in mod_bonjour. This is expanded from a bug report I submitted to Apple (rdar://problem/5628484).

I keep functional mirrors all my development sites in separate Apache Virtual Hosts. Each one then gets it’s own port, which allows me to check them on local networks, in Parallels and, if I want, remotely via IP address.

To advertise two local vhosts over bonjour, something like this in httpd.conf should work:

<IfModule bonjour_module>
RegisterResource "Site 1" / 9001
RegisterResource "Site 2" / 9002
</IfModule>

After restarting Apache (sudo apachectl graceful), local copies of Safari should see the two sites, “Site 1” and “Site 2” in Bonjour bookmark listings. In 10.4, they show up. In 10.5, only “Site 2” shows up. No matter how many directives are included, only the last one will be visible.

I’d love to be wrong about this, but it seems that something broke this function in Leopard.

A faster way of checking Bonjour entries is to open a terminal window and run the following command:

mdns -B _http._tcp

That will show a live updating list of current multicast (Bonjour) entries. Under 10.4, I get the following after adding the above directives to httpd.conf:

16:10:14.517  Add     0 local.     _http._tcp.     Site 1
16:10:14.667  Add     0 local.     _http._tcp.     Site 2

However with 10.5, I get this:

16:12:52.597  Add     1 local.     _http._tcp.     Site 2
16:12:52.598  Add     1 local.     _http._tcp.     Site 2
16:12:52.598  Add     0 local.     _http._tcp.     Site 2

What I’d really love to do is figure out how to register and respond to multiple Bonjour names. That way I could have each vhost be a named host and each staged site accessible at a url like site1.local and site2.local. So far I haven’t had any luck getting that working.

Here are two cheatsheets showing the table-structure of WordPress versions 2.3 and 2.2.2. Click the thumbnails to download the PDF.

WordPress 2.3

WordPress 2.2.2

I created these to help transition some custom category queries from WordPress 2.2.2 over to the terms tables in WordPress 2.3. Table keys are in bold.The pages were generated by a small AppleScript Studio app I never quite cleaned up enough to release, it reads MySQL dumpfiles then spits out nice looking tables in OmniGraffle.

From the sed manpage:

-i extension
   Edit files in-place, saving backups with the specified extension.
   If a zero-length extension is given, no backup will be saved.  It
   is not recommended to give a zero-length extension when in-place
   editing files, as you risk corruption or partial content in situ-
   ations where disk space is exhausted, etc.

This doesn’t work:

sed -i -e's/apples/oranges/' file.txt

The key thing here is that the extension after the -i flag is not optional. If you leave it off, sed assumes you’ll be entering it via stdin, which isn’t allowed and yields this error:

sed: -i may not be used with stdin

The solution is to send a zero-length extension like this:

sed -i '' -e's/apples/oranges/' file.txt

Careful with this, it could be really dangerous with poorly crafted commands.

For some reason I’ve put off setting up SSH key pairs, probably having something to do with how arcane most of the setup instructions appear. Tonight however, I’m unexpectedly preparing to transfer a client to a new hosting account on Media Temple and enjoying key-pair access to their new repository.

Media Temple doesn’t yet support svn:// access to Subversion repositories, only svn+ssh://. So, having been pushed, I finally decided to make my life easier with SSH key pairs.

The best tutorial I found was Allan Odgaard’s: Subversion support and ssh key pairs. Without ssh key pairs, all the fantastic Subversion integration in TextMate won’t work with svn+ssh:// repositories.

However there’s one crucial piece of information missing from that: Permissions.

If access to the SSH configuration files is not properly assigned, the ssh pair won’t work. No meaningful errors at connect time, just silent, infuriating failure.

The ~/.ssh directory permissions need to be set to 0700 and the authorized_keys file needs to be set to 0600:

chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 0700 ~/.ssh

If group or world have write access to authorized_keys, key pair authentication will fail.

Valerio Proietti, author of the MooTools JavaScript framework wrote a benchmarking tool called SlickSpeed. This tool runs a number of JavaScript libraries against a suite of CSS selector tests. The source is available from Google Code, I downloaded a copy so I could run tests against the most recent versions of Prototype, MooTools and JQuery against one another.

Results are in milliseconds (ms), smaller numbers are better. Asterisks indicate errors returned during the test.

All tests were served and run from a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Core Duo, iPhone tests were run on a 1st Generation 8 GB model. Firebug was disabled for the Firefox tests.

A few things which are immediately apparent:

MooTools is a solid performer. Not the fastest and not the slowest, but Valerio Proietti’s code is consistently impressive.

JQuery has gotten significantly faster in the most recent version, John Resig is also writing really good code.

At least as applies to Valerio’s set of selector tests, JQuery is the fastest library on iPhone, nearly twice as fast as MooTools and almost three times faster than Prototype. Joe Hewitt’s iUI project uses Prototype, how much would iPhone performance benefit from switching to JQuery?

The Webkit team is writing some seriously crazy speed optimizations. If they could just get Safari to stop leaking memory we’d be all set (don’t go looking all smug Firefox, you’re standing in a puddle). As it stands now, when Leopard ships Safari will have the fastest JavaScript engine available. The difference between jQuery and Prototype on Webkit and iPhone is surprising, iPhone runs JQuery nearly three times faster than Prototype using the same browser core.

Firefox runs faster in virtualized Windows than it does native on the Mac. Camino (Mac native version of Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko) was slightly faster, but still not as fast as Firefox Windows.

I’ve got one project wrapping up soon which used MooTools and I’ve been very happy with it. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of buzz about JQuery and might be working that into another project. These tests were mostly just done to satisfy my own of curiosity.