The PumaCode.org Blog

For the benefit of anyone who may Google this in the future: just spent the better part of tonight trying to figure out why I suddenly couldn’t debug PHP in Eclipse without throwing crazy, unhelpful errors about “process model delta” and an asynchronous message filter of some sort.

Long story short: Eclipse is built on the Standard Widget Toolkit which, in turn, depends on various rendering libraries depending on the system it’s run on. At least on 64-bit Linux, one of those dependencies is the Mozilla XULRunner library and some other related libraries. I had recently installed the Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 build from an Ubuntu PPA (personal package archive) which also installed a new version of XULRunner.

I uninstalled the Firefox 3.1 beta and the XULRunner beta. No more Eclipse errors. (It may work with only uninstalling XULRunner and leaving Firefox, but at this point I’m so tired I can’t even remember what I was trying to debug in the first place, so that test will have to wait for a later time…)

So I guess I must have been living under a rock for the past several years because I had no clue that GoDaddy offers free SSL certs to open-source projects. Good for you, GoDaddy! Intrigued by this, I looked around a bit more for some commentary on this offering.

I found this article on Linux.com where they discussed this move with GoDaddy president and founder Bob Parsons. He talks about how wonderful open source is, how much they use it at GoDaddy, and how they wanted to give something back to the open source community. He says these licenses are renewable for free each year as long as the project remains open-source.

So I’m liking what I’m reading, and follow a link to his personal blog entry from February 2005. More gushing about the benefits of open source, and how a side benefit of open source is that it “keeps Microsoft sharp”. He refers to Firefox as an “up and coming browser” that has Microsoft worried. True enough.

And then comes the next paragraph: “I personally prefer Microsoft’s Internet Explorer”, he says. “The reason I use Internet Explorer is because I’ve become used to it”. OK, fair enough… lots of people have somehow grown “used to” IE. I believe it’s referred to as Stockholm Syndrome.

But then he drops the bombshell: “I also think it’s a fine piece of engineering that only keeps getting better”. A fine piece of engineering, he says. Keeps getting better, he says. OK, I may even be kind enough to grant that he isn’t at all technically qualified to comment on what type of engineering went into IE.

But “keeps getting better“?! He said this in 2005, after IE6 had been out for almost four years without a single update! IE7 was still a year and a half away, and was still to be made available only in Vista! Keeps getting better, Bob? KEEPS GETTING BETTER?!!

Sorry, Bob. That good will that I had almost built up for you over the past five minutes is now gone. Hope you’re still enjoying IE, Bob. It’s actually released a new version in the four years since you wrote that post. I’ve heard it even has tabs now.

Ever since making the switch to Ubuntu last year, my longing for TortoiseSVN on my development PC has been growing stronger. Not strong enough to consider switching back to Windows, but frankly all of the Subversion clients I’ve tried for Linux are pretty terrible.

But today, I happened across the NautilusSvn project on Google Code, and let me just say that my faith in the open source community to deliver a great visual Subversion client has been restored. This is still an alpha-quality project under active development, but already it is very promising and they are releasing “stable snapshots”.

I installed the 0.12 version — very easily I should add — and was subsequently rushed headfirst back into my TortoiseSVN-like comfort zone of attractive, recursively-relevant status icons on my project folders, plus a great commit dialog complete with changes list on which I can double-click entries to view diffs for them. And it even integrates the wonderful Meld diff viewer.

So, my heartfelt thanks to the NautilusSvn development team for all their efforts put into this wonderful project. I certainly look forward to the continued development and improvement of this tool!