About a year ago I filed a minor bug report against the Camino browser, noting that text selection didn’t work quite like “real” Mac apps, where if you double-click a word and then drag, you select by words (likewise for triple-clicking and paragraphs). I quickly learned that this bug went back almost seven years.

Activity on the bug for most of those years consisted of people marking other, new reports of the issue (there were usually a few each year) as duplicates of that original bug. It was kind of sweet, like postcards from a friend you don’t see very much anymore.

This actually happened two months ago.

I learned of my achievement via a mail administrator wondering why thousands of pieces of mail (spam, it so happened) getting forwarded to my GMail account were bouncing back. The bounce messages didn’t say “mailbox full” or “user exceeded quota” or anything like that, so even I didn’t know what was going on at first.

So, there’s a bit of a stink brewing about Comcast’s SMTP blacklist. Once again, Comcast decided to block mail forwarded from the Well to Comcast addresses, and they have been raising similar havoc elsewhere. Nothing gets people pissed off like messing with their email.

It’s possible that Comcast’s admins are well-intentioned, but it’s also possible that this is part of a business strategy to push people from small ISPs (who sporadically get blocked by Comcast) to Comcast itself (which happens never to get blocked by Comcast).

According to this article, Universal Music is planning to launch a site that will offer free downloads and generate revenue via advertising. It’s called “Spiral Frog”, which I think is a great name – for a high-school kid’s web design business. Oops, sorry, it’s only the first paragraph and I’m already getting snarky. The placekeeper site they have up does have a nice clean faux-Web-2.0 look to it. Universal’s own website is strangely silent on the subject, as of right now anyway. The site is slated to launch in December 2006.

If you own a 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4, or 15-inch PowerBook G4 and are having trouble getting to this page to see whether your battery is included in the recall Apple just announced, here’s a copy of the chart:

I just checked, and the battery in my 15" is in the recall. I feel special!

Update: Apple has updated their chart to more accurately reflect the batteries covered. See the official page for more.

In the wake of OpenDarwin’s shutdown announcement, Apple has launched Mac OS Forge, a home for selected open source projects from Apple and from the community.

The present site feels a bit like a stub – e.g. the WebKit link still goes to OpenDarwin – but it’s good to see Apple stepping up to the plate. Just seeing tickets and commits from Real Apple Developers is exciting. And I give them bonus points for using Trac, too.

So, a serious security hole in Rails was announced this week. There’s a lot of bashing going on about “security through obscurity.” I’ve always understood STO as sustained secrecy about known (or possible) vulnerabilities, which seems different from the Rails team’s provisional waiting period between the initial announcement and the full disclosure. (And the patches themselves told the story, for those familiar with the source.)

Not that there weren’t legitimate problems with their patch release process. They definitely made mistakes they can learn from.