Adobe AIR 1.5 has been released today for Mac OS X and Windows. Linux is still at version 1.1.

So what’s changed that I can see so far? I couldn’t find any release notes (yet). For one thing, Flash Player 10 is now included. For the Mac, its at version 10,0,12,36. For Windows (XP), it’s at version 10,0,12,37. It does not however, update the Flash plugins for your other browsers.

I also did some Javascript benchmarks using the SunSpider Javascript benchmark, to see if perhaps AIR 1.5 includes the new Squirrelfish rendering engine for WebKit.

All tests were done on Mac OS X 10.5.5 (the smaller number the better, of course):

Safari 3.2  (5525.26.12) — 6530.0 ms, result

FireFox 3.03 — 3211.6 ms, result

Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit — 2523.6 ms, result

According to my results, Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit’s Javascript is approximately 2.59x faster than Safari 3.2, and approximately 1.27x faster than Firefox 3.03. So is it Squirrelfish? Likely. Extreme? Maybe.

According to the Surfin Safari Blog (for WebKit), Squirrelfish Extreme in the nightly builds is about 3.38x faster than Safari 3.1. But since I have Safari 3.2, I guess that’s close enough? It can’t be Squirrelfish (plain) because Squirrelfish non-extreme is only 1.59x as fast as WebKit 3.1. But then it can be just general Javascript improvements as detailed in a blog post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball, so who knows?!

Here’s the user-agent for Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit (Mac):
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21

All the version numbers in the AIR 1.5 user-agent are older than Safari 3.2 (Mac) though, which is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.26.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2 Safari/525.26.12

So the evidence is inconclusive for Squirrelfish. Still no SVG support in Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit though, no surprise there

(UPDATE): According to this new Adobe blog post, Adobe AIR 1.5 includes Squirrelfish, but does not mention the Extreme variant.

Technorati Tags: Adobe AIR 1.5, changes, squirrelfish

1. Navigate to the “/Library/Internet Plug-Ins” folder
2. Delete the “QuickTime Plugin.webplugin” file
3. Restart Safari

Go to http://www.apple.com/trailers to test.

Technorati Tags: quicktime question mark, safari

1. Open Terminal.app, and type in the next 3 commands:
2. sudo chown <your_user_name>:staff ~/.Trash
3. sudo chmod 700 ~/.Trash
4. killall Finder

Technorati Tags: blogging

1. Download RealVNC
2. Launch it
3. Select the “Options…” button
4. Select the “Full Colour (all available colours)” radio button in the “Colour and Encoding” tab

Selecting any other colour level will make RealVNC close abruptly after connection.

Technorati Tags: vnc, leopard, os x, xp, vista, windows

Technorati Tags: atimi

When on the road, I have the whole repo with me and can check-in my changes, revert, etc. When I get home, I can push my changes to my server and that can act as my “backup”. Although with Xcode 3.0 and its “snapshot” feature, I can sort of simulate this, but I would use that as a last resort though.

Technorati Tags: Linus Torvalds, git, distributed version control, Google

I have made the appropriate changes (uif2iso.c), as well as fixed the warnings (version 0.1.2). I have made a diff of my changes also (uif2iso.diff.txt).

Technorati Tags: uif2iso, Mac OS X, invalid argument

Of course, in Java, it cannot be done in a cross-platform way. You can certainly launch a process in Java, then terminate that process you created, but you cannot know if a certain process is running and terminate that. To do this, you will need to have native code, and the way Java interfaces with your native code is through JNI (Java Native Interface).

In subsequent blog posts, I will write about how I coded this “Process Manager” JNI library using NetBeans — creating a process management library that can can return a list of running processes (and their process ids), as well as terminating the process by process id. The libraries I created were implemented in C, using NetBeans, on the Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu) platforms using NetBeans 6.0.1.

It turns out it was easiest in Linux: you can easily list all the running processes through Java code. Processes are directories under “/proc”, with the directory filename as process id. Inside the directory itself is a text file with the filename of “status”, and the first line contains the process name. Of course to terminate this process by process id, you will still need to use native code.

Technorati Tags: NetBeans, JNI, Java Native Interface, cross-platform, process management

Of course, if you are using  OS X’s included Ruby, just go to your command line and update Ruby gems normally (make sure you update rails with all its dependencies). Make sure to also update your environment.rb (in your Rails project configuration) to reflect the version of Rails you will be using.

When installing NetBeans, the whole bundle is installed using user “root” (read, write, execute privileges) and group “admin” (read and execute privileges only). The JRuby package is installed “inside” the NetBeans app bundle, and it has the same permissions. The current “user” needs to have “write” permissions to this JRuby directory, for NetBeans to update the gems:

• /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 6.0.1.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/ruby1/jruby-1.0.2/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

Either that, or you run NetBeans as root. If you want only users from the admin group to have access to this feature of NetBeans, do a “sudo chmod -R g+w <dir>”, or if you want everyone to have this write access, just do a  “sudo chmod -R a+w <dir>” where <dir> is the directory path I referenced above.

Well, if anyone has trouble running NetBeans with Ruby on Rails, post a comment — I might have encountered your problem and solved it already, so I might be able to help.

Technorati Tags: NetBeans, Ruby on Rails, JRuby, Mac OS X