Google, for quite some time, has been redirected clicks on links in their search results to www.google.com/url?…. While I don’t approve of such practices, I didn’t mind it so much since this is presumably an effort to improve their search results. That changed recently, when I noticed that my history in Safari was filled with entries containing that URL as the title. Considering the fact that I often use the history to re-find a page with pertinent information, this is bordering on making my browser usage useless. Note: I tend to cmd-click links so they show up in new tabs. If you just click the link, the title in the history is correct.
Text Compression Code Released
After it’s original post, I got a request for the code I used in my text compression technique. I’ve not gotten around to cleaning up the code and separating it from it’s test environment so it can be distributed separately. You can read more about it in its own page.
Sometime soon, I’ll get around to releasing my code for fetching old Escape Pod episodes that I hinted at earlier.
Common Media Player Framework
About 3 weeks ago, Kevin (developer of NitoTV) and I decided it was a bit silly how we were each writing playback mechanisms on the AppleTV with little to no collaboration between us. So, we decided to write a Common Media Player Framework, which is licensed using LGPL.
Kevin sent me the code he used for DVD playback inside NitoTV as a place to start. I stripped it down to a smaller piece, and started the framework. After I had it doing basic playback, I worked on overlays to provide feedback to the user. Now, hitting up and down changes the overlays between normal, chapter view, audio/subtitle selection, and zoom.
Using Newer Subversion in Xcode
I use MacPorts to get a whole host of utilities. In addition, I’ve always used it to obtain later versions of subversion that the one provided with the OS. Xcode, on the other hand, is locked into using the version of Subversion which is installed in /usr (currently version 1.4.4 where as I have 1.6.3). Since I often work in the command line, eventually I will use the newer version of Subversion on a directory which I also use in Xcode. This causes a problem since the command line utility will upgrade the local repository format in such a way that old versions of Subversion (Xcode’s) cannot use it.