grack.com

UPDATE (July 7, 2010) Daniel Herding sent me a story about his adventures with Avira’s latest version. Looks like they’ve just paved over the problem.

We’ve been seeing a number of reports that our DotSpots Chrome extension is being reported as infected with the HTML/Crypted.Gen malware. There’s not a lot of information on Avira’s site about this malware, except that it’s a ‘trojan’ with ‘low damage potential’.

Looking back through the archive.org history of grack.com, I realized that I’ve used three off-the-shelf products to blog over the last decade: CityDesk, Typo (a Ruby blog engine) and Wordpress.

My favorite of the three was CityDesk. It was a very simple CMS with a decent custom scripting engine. Its big disadvantages were 1) that its data was stored in a Microsoft Access database 2) its data was basically a big binary blob that didn’t work well at all with source control, 3) I couldn’t push stuff into it from the command-line (ie: various testing snippets that I like to save) and 4) the scripting language was too limited at times to do what I wanted.

I’ve been searching for a complete EBNF for XML 1.1 without much success. I found one for XML 1.0, but I was hoping to avoid manually patching it for the XML 1.1 changes.

In the end, I decided that it would be easiest to just parse the EBNF directly out of the specification. Here it is, for reference:

I was surprised a few days ago with a new layout for Google News on one of the machines I use. I haven’t seen it reported anywhere yet. I came across it tonight while testing and grabbed a few screen captures in case it disappears.

The biggest change is that each story now has a bordered box around it and the stars introduced recently have been moved to the right-hand side of the story. Each story has a drop-down menu associated with it, but the only option in there is “Email”. This drop-down has the class “share-icons” - possibly a new location for a “share in reader/buzz” option.

Looking through the DOM, it appears that this is called the new “blended” story style.

There’s a comparison that I was pointed at today showing the difference between a number of different modern encoders. The Theora 1.1 demo on that page looked particularly bad, so I decided to investigate.

I downloaded and compiled the latest versions of libogg, libvorbis and libtheora from xiph.org. I ran the encoder example (as the other test did), but discovered that it does support two-pass encoding, contrary to what was stated on the other test’s page. I ran a few different two-pass encodes (including one with soft rates), but didn’t get a lot of variability between results. Overall, however, my newly re-encoded version is significantly better than the one on the other page.