The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

After a prolonged hiatus, I've final started posting pictures to our gallery again. After I got my DSLR back in February, I posted pictures a couple of times only to have the Gallery software fall apart and output weird errors or fail to make thumbnails and resized images. After two software updates and some PHP customizations, it finally started working again last week.

So, in the last week, I uploaded pictures from a March visit to Rebekah's dance studio, a September visit to the Baltimore Aquarium, an October visit to Carter's Mountain Orchard, and our trip this weekend to Rocky Gap State Park. There are plenty more pictures to come, too. My favorite subject continues to be Sara Ellen, of course.

I'm pretty happy with my camera and the pictures I've been able to take. I need to work on my landscape images. Especially in this part of the country, shots of the distance tend to have haze, which really takes away from the beauty of the subject. I haven't quite figured out what to do about that. I'd also like to do some macro photography, but that'll require an additional lens that'll have to wait until at least next year.

Most of my shooting has been done using my 17mm-50mm f/2.8 lens. The 50mm f/1.4 turned out to be too restrictive for varied subjects. At some point, I'll get a telephoto lens that'll allow me to capture far-away subjects. I'm particularly interested in shooting the Blue Angels. And I still want to get an off-camera flash. Some day....

Opera Mail just grew up. A lot. During the past two years, the Opera Mail team has been working feverishly to improve robustness, stability, performance, and user experience. The results of our labor will soon be available in the final release of Opera 9.5 (previously referred to by the code-name "Kestrel"). Check the full changelog (once available) for the list of changes since 9.27. Below are some additional notes that didn't quite fit in the changelog:

Known Issues

• On the initial check after upgrading, all deleted feed items still available in feeds will be redownloaded. In other words, if a user performs an upgrade installation all old feed items will be downloaded again and marked unseen. Since feeds generally contain about twenty-five items, this won't be too bad, but it's probably still worth preparing for. A user with existing feed items could, for instance, label them or add them to a filter to keep track of them, then press the Update button in the Feeds view (Feeds > Read Feeds) to force updates for all subscribed feeds. Note that it's possible to get never-before-seen feed items in addition to redownloaded feed items, so users should take care when deleting apparently redownloaded feed items. Feed items that have been downloaded with a previous install, but have not been deleted should not be duplicated.
• The Check/Send button no longer changes into a Stop button during server communication. Users that have customized the toolbar won't get the new button and the old button will permanently be stuck at Stop. Reset the toolbar to fix the problem.
• The Delete button has gone through some changes, so users should make sure they reset their mail view toolbars. If not, it's possible that messages may be inadvertently deleted when trying to undelete messages from, for instance, the Trash view.

What to Expect when Upgrading

The process of upgrading from previous Opera releases is straight-forward. On the first start-up after installation, Opera will notify the user that the mail database needs to be updated. During this process, Opera Mail will not be accessible. The update generally goes quickly, upgrading several thousand messages per minute. When the upgrade process is finished, the user will need to restart Opera before Opera Mail is accessible. After restarting Opera may take a long time to start up, sometimes in excess of thirty minutes. This is a necessary part of the upgrade process, so don't interrupt it!

Note: Once this process begins, Opera Mail can no longer be downgraded! Users should create a backup of their Mail directory before upgrading.

Attention POP users: If users with POP accounts set to "Leave messages on server" empty their trash, Opera will delete the trashed messages on the server. Users can disable this behavior by setting "Permanent delete=0" for the relevant account in accounts.ini. Also, there's no longer a warning when disabling "Leave mesasges on server": all messages on the server will be deleted automatically.

More information about some of the behind-the-scenes changes in Opera Mail will be available in the coming weeks.

Transformers and Stardust ended up being my favorite Summer 2007 movies. This year's favorites are still up in the air, but I'm rooting for Iron Man and Hancock.

Here are my theater movies for Summer 2008:

• Iron Man (May 2, 2008)
• Speed Racer (May 9, 2008)
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (May 22, 2008)
• Get Smart (June 20, 2008)
• Wall-E (June 27, 2008)
• Hancock (July 4, 2008)

And the wait for video list:

• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (May 16, 2008)
• Kung Fu Panda (June 6, 2008)
• The Happening (June 13, 2008)
• The Incredible Hulk (June 13, 2008)
• Wanted (June 27, 2008)
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army (July 11, 2008)
• The Dark Knight (July 18, 2008)
• The X-Files: I Want to Believe (July 25, 2008)
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars (August 15, 2008)

Two days ago, we announced we had achieved 100/100 on the DOM portion of the Acid3 test. Later that evening, a bug was found in the Acid3 test itself. The bug was fixed and the WebKit team announced that they had achieved 100/100 on the DOM portion of the test and they had pixel-perfect rendering, making them the first to achieve two of the three pass conditions (congrats on that, by the way!).

Today, we'd like to announce the same. We have achieved 100/100 with pixel perfect rendering:

This screenshot is copyright Opera Software ASA and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Windows and Linux users may test this out themselves by downloading the GOGI build available from the Opera Labs. A note about these builds: GOGI, short for Generic Opera Graphics Interface, is a tool our Core team uses internally to develop our cross-platform/cross-project code. It has a very simple UI, which is nothing at all like Opera for Desktop. It is in no way meant to replace Opera for Desktop and we don't expect to duplicate any GOGI features in Opera for Desktop. It also lacks some security features, and thus we recommend that it not be used for regular surfing. Furthermore, please don't file bug reports about problems you find in GOGI.

Now, WebKit and Opera have reached the same point and have the same challenge: optimize enough to run test 26 in 33ms.

At the beginning of March, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) released Acid3, a web standards spot-checking test. As with Acid2, the goal of the test is to improve interoperability between web browsers. The Acid3 test consists of 100 DOM sub-tests, which assess a browser's support for DOM, CSS, SVG, and ECMAscript, as well as some rendering tests. To pass the test, a browser must render the test pixel for pixel identical to the reference rendering, pass all 100 DOM tests, and animate the test smoothly. So far, Opera is the only browser to pass all 100 DOM tests (more on that in a bit). Information about the pass rates for browsers is available in Wikipedia's excellent article about Acid3.

While browser vendors implement the same web standards, their implementations are sometimes incompatible due to bugs, different interpretations of the standards, or missing functionality. Incompatible implementations increase the development time and decrease the innovation of web sites/applications. Thus, the WaSP Acid tests establish a compatibility baseline that web developers can count on during development. That is, once browser vendors pass the tests.

As with the Acid2 test, the Acid3 test should not be viewed as a race. It's all about improving interoperability and making the Web a better place. If only one or two browsers pass the test, the test isn't a success and the Web can't improve. It's important that all major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) pass the test. The Acid2 test was released in April 2005, yet three years later only final releases of Opera and Safari pass it. That means web developers still can't rely on the functionality in Acid2 as a baseline. It'll probably be at least two or three years before the functionality tested it Acid3 can be used as a baseline.

Opera's Progress on Acid3

At Opera, we rely on web standards to allow us to render live web sites correctly. Interoperability allows us to use a different rendering engine, yet render web pages the same as other browsers. That's one of the reasons we've put a lot of focus on the Acid3 test since it was released:

• Opera's latest final public release, 9.26, scores 46/100 on the test and has some significant layout problems
• The initial alpha of Kestrel, released in September 2007, scores 58/100 on the test and has some small layout problems. At that point, we had not done fixes specifically for the test, which is a testament to the rendering engine improvements in Kestrel
• Our latest snapshot release scores 77/100 and has some small layout problems
• Our latest internal build (screenshot below) scores 100/100 and renders the test almost perfectly! We have some work to do still, but we expect to have that taking care of shortly. UPDATE (2007-03-27): a bug was found in the Acid3 test, which may affect our pass rate

This screenshot (and the screenshot it links to) are copyright Opera Software ASA and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

This is the first time a screenshot of GOGI, our internal testing platform, has been released publicly. Core developers and testers use GOGI for their development, so they have a platform-independent setup. Also, Core testers do regression testing in GOGI before Core fixes are released to the Desktop Team build. That said, Kestrel may not pass the Acid3 test, even if internal builds do. Some of the internal fixes are experimental and they need regression testing before they can become part of a Desktop release. We hope to have a public test build within the next couple weeks that passes the test.