On the prospects of creating a headless Firefox

I've often wondered how hard it would be to make a headless version of Firefox. HTTPUnit is nice and all but if you want to ensure that everything is behaving as it does in a real browser there's nothing better than using a real browser.

So setting aside all questions as to difficulty does the idea of a headless Firefox even make conceptual sense? You'd at least need some way to script or control the behavior externally. But let's imagine you designed a feature where by hovering over an event you triggered an Ajax request or caused some DOM fragment to be constructed on the fly. In order to get the headless browser to do that you'd need to either have to tell it to simulate the mouse movement or tell it to artificially fire the hover event for the element in question.

(Lesser known) things I like about Leopard

1. Calculator.app sports a fully functional RPN mode. It's had RPN mode since Panther but it always seemed like a shoehorned afterthought. Switching to RPN never produced any change in the UI and RPN really demands a multi-line display. Now it has one. There's one quirk I've noticed: when you type a number and press enter, the number gets pushed up the stack (as it should) and then gets duplicated on the line below (not as it should). As soon as you begin to type a new number, the doubled entry disappears but it should never have appeared in the first place.
2. Calculator.app can now also display digit seperators.
3. The Airport menu (from the drop-down in the menu bar) now shows lock icons next to those networks which are protected. You can see at a glance if there are any available networks that are open.
4. Hitting command-backspace from any NSTextEdit field will delete from the cursor to the beginning of the line. This means TextEdit gets the "feature" I most miss when I'm away from TextMate.
5. iCal.app no longer changes the size of your window when you switch from (say) month view to week view.

ECMAScript 4 Overview (final draft)

The final draft of the Overview that describes what's going to be in Javascript 4 (E4) is online as a pdf.

Interestingly, this represents a point of departure from previous Javascript updates in that the group will provide a "reference implementation" in ML! And I though all that time I spent working in ML back in college would surely go to waste.

You can grab the standard SML release for Mac (as a DMG even) from here.

Bike to Work

I biked to work last Friday. No different from any other Firday at previous jobs except that I now work 42 miles from home. So my commute took 3 hours.

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Download the KML file.