Safari 4 beta and WebKit release analysis

February 24th, 2009

Earlier today, Apple released a beta version of Safari 4, with the version number 528.16.

As is common knowledge, Safari is based on the open-source WebKit rendering engine, which releases nightly builds. For reference, the current WebKit version is 520.1+.

Because WebKit is open source, using WebKit’s version history tracker, it’s possible to determine the following interesting information:

* The Safari-6528 branch was created on January 29th based on the state of the WebKit trunk at r40289, from January 27th.

* There have been 75 merges of code (presumably bug fixes) into the 6528 branch since then. The last of these merges was r41097 (merging r41091) on February 19.

* The release is tagged in WebKit svn as r41182, the/releases/Apple/Safari 4 Public Beta tag.

This means that the Safari 4 beta is based roughly on the state of WebKit as it was at the end of January, one month behind current development. Considering the importance of WebKit to Safari in general, and Mac OS X as a whole, a one month delay for QA purposes is probably pretty good.

Kudos to all of the people working on WebKit! Keep up the good work!

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Week of Open Source Releases: Unlockupd 1.0.2

February 23rd, 2009

The first piece of software I’m releasing this week is an updated version of Unlockupd. Unlockupd is a Mac OS X daemon that works around a bug in lookupd, a system service which is required for proper operation of Mac OS X 10.0 – 10.4. If lookupd fails, the system quickly becomes unusable. Unlockupd periodically checks lookupd’s status and forces it to restart should it fail.

Fortunately, the bug has been fixed in Mac OS X 10.5, which does not have a lookupd service, but it was present in Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4.

Unlockupd was first released in 2004, and it really should have been released under an open source back then. Better late than never, though. At this point, it’s really more of an historical relic than a useful program, but hopefully someone will find some use with the code.

More information is available on Unlockupd’s web page, including download links for Unlockupd and its source code. Unlockupd is licensed under the GPL v3.

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New Blog

February 22nd, 2009

Hi! I’m John Bafford, and welcome to my website.

Long overdue, this new website and blog are now live. I’ll be talking mostly about PHP and related technology — I’ve spent the last almost ten years writing PHP (and JavaScript) code, as well as a smattering of Perl, Python, and other languages, after many prior years writing in C/C++. Expect some Mac talk as well, on occasion.

To “celebrate” the new website, throughout this week, I’ll be doing a number of (in some cases, very belated) open source releases of some software I’ve worked on over the years. There will be a somewhat Mac focus to some of these releases, but even it you don’t have a Mac, hopefully, you’ll still find them interesting enough to follow along, and I’ll get to the PHP-related content soon enough.

If you have questions or comments, feel free to comment here, or send me an email from the feedback form via the button at the bottom of the page.

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WordPress Comments Vote Plugin Released

January 9th, 2009

WordPress Comments Vote plugin released. More details on The Bivings Report, my employer’s blog.

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