I called, they said the driver had the order and was delivering it now. It arrived 45 minutes later with no apology.

I won’t be using them again.

If you need to get ahold of me there’s always email, Google Chat, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz. Least those don’t get hacked… much.

I hope you all have a successful new year in twenty-eleven. Build more! Code more! Write more! Do more! Those are certainly my goals!

By the way, I found that Christmas Tree image by Nicu on Open Clip Art Library using Google Image Search, opened it in SVG-edit, moved the star to the top of the tree and changed its color to yellow, scoured it and then saved it to my web server. Took about 10 minutes in total!

Speaking of Christmas trees, it’s probably high time for me to update my own red and green online decoration. Soon!

Oh, and as I write more posts on my blog, you should be able to see Google indexing the SVG images from my site here. Note that these are not raster fallbacks. Hope that means something to you.

I would love to tell you that I was able to install and test IE9 Platform 3 tonight. There seems to be a lot of good things in there (SVG improvements, canvas, audio, video) but the main problem is that it’s built on the fragile Windows stack. That’s not to say that other OS stacks aren’t fragile, but this is just tonight’s frustration.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Happy Meal with extra cheese. Sony Vaio laptop.

Download and run iepreview.msi.

The installer downloads and tries to install KB2120976, KB2028560, KB2028551 first.

In the process of doing this, it aborts and says:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2739.

The failure window in the installation wizard has an “Installation Help” button. This button does nothing.

Thanks for the help!

Do a little sniffing around the web and find this page which tells me to run regsvr32 from an elevated command-line prompt to register the JScript DLL.

I do that.

Installer gives me the same exact error.

Then I decide to look at each one of the KB security patches. Each one tells me that I have to “Install the Genuine Windows Validation Component”. No matter what browser I try this in, it never seems to take – I always end up clicking on “Genuine Windows Validation, Alternate Method”. This gives me an .exe that I run that gives me a code to punch into a web form that tells Microsoft that I have a non-pirated copy of their software so I should be eligible to download software that will fix their software.

Right.

In each one of these patches, I get a dialog box that says

The update is not applicable to your computer

So this must be why the installer is failing, I guess? Maybe I could dig into why this problem is occurring, and hack around it. Let me just look at the source of the installer… oh wait…

So is this a broken installer? I’m not the only person who’s had this problem so far… go to the IEBlog announcement and search for ’2739′.

P.S. I also love how the IEBlog redesign doesn’t let me link to individual comments anymore.

P.P.S. I am really trying to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, but c’mon…

I met a lot of people, almost all for the first time face-to-face. I listened to a lot of amazing talks. I missed too many talks because of the parallel tracks

Didn’t connect with Webkit guys the way I would have liked, but did have some good meals with Opera and Mozilla folk. Great times. Wish there had been more time for shmoozing and geeking out.

I came away feeling pretty good about Microsoft and SVG. I felt even better about Google and SVG. Brad really came through for us in a lot of ways.

Apple who?

I also felt pretty good about the reception to some of my pet projects that I’m working on as part of my SVG Interest Group efforts: Scour and SVG-edit. Both of which were mentioned in several other talks before I even got a chance to talk about them. Hoping to have lots of progress to talk about next year…

• Safari 4 Beta (81.93%)
• Chrome 2.0 Nightly (81.39%)
• Internet Explorer 8 (0.00%)
• Some more recent Firefox builds (3.5b latest, pre-3.6+SMIL)

Great to see Chrome 2.0 with SMIL enabled (like Safari 4)! I’m really looking forward to the next wave of modern browsers: There’s enough SMIL enabled in Opera, Safari 4 and Chrome 2 that you can start to do some really fun things.

Now you can read on for some complaints leveled against Konqueror 4.2.1.

I recently got some VMs working on my Macbook for Ubuntu and Kubuntu and I wanted to add a column to my SVG support chart for Konqueror 4.2.1. Unfortunately I can’t really figure out what happened to Konqueror.

Konqueror tries to display the SVG test frame at 100×100 pixels because it no longer understands % (the image has width=”100%” height=”100%”). It also does not properly resize the image to the containing element (the <object> element has an explicit size that should override it according to the spec). Ironically if I remove the width/height attribute from the SVG file (the lacuna value is 100%), then everything behaves properly. Now I have to write a script to take out the width/height from all the test suite files?

Also, when testing the SVGF 1.1 test suite locally for comparison, Konqueror only shows me the text contents of the <desc> element instead of the actual SVG shapes. WTF? How can Dolphin (the file manager in Kubuntu) get the preview more or less correct and Konqueror cannot?

So how’s that move to WebKit going on the KDE side?

I have some UI quibbles too: Konqueror doesn’t let me View Source (CTRL+U) for an SVG document (must consider it an image?). Also when viewing source of a local HTML file, Konqueror brings up Kate (a text editor). Kate doesn’t actually show me the local file though, it shows me a copy that Konqueror has made in /tmp/. If Konqueror is browsing a local file it should bring up the editor with that actual file.

So how do I report bugs for these?

The konqueror web page hasn’t been updated for a year and a half. The ksvg2 web page hasn’t been updated for almost 4 years. The khtml.info page is now a parked domain. I went to bugs.kde.org and signed up. Then I searched for any bugs with ‘svg’ with “Zero bugs found”. I notice that there are products: ksvg, ksvg2, konqueror / kthml part. I’m guessing one of those is it. So I opened one bug.

I’d appreciate any information that KDE gurus can share. If Konqueror is still active and under development and the KDE guys want that to be the default browser for the KDE system, I suggest they get a web page up and keep it active at the very least. A second goal would be to not degrade major functionality from previous releases, but we know the KDE history so I won’t go there.

1. View and edit from any computer connected to the web in a password-protected fashion
2. View and edit locally from my personal computer when offline
3. View and edit from my mobile
4. Automatically sync to one central list
5. Private with occasional times when I might want to share
6. Ability to arbitrarily categorize, sort, filter

That last requirement really kills any plain-text solution without some other higher-level tool/markup.

Now that I have an Android phone with a WebKit browser, requirement #3 becomes easier to fulfill.

Google Docs actually comes the closest to meeting all the above requirements were it not for one important thing:

I’m sure the Google engineers are working hard on this important feature, but describing the existing application as ‘available offline’ is kind of stretching it at the moment.

What’s your favorite warm beverage in the winter?