California Wildfires Close to Home

I'm one of the fortunate ones who hasn't been required to evacuate my home here in Southern California. I live in San Bernardino County, where several blazing fires have been causing devastation the past couple days. Last night when getting home from work, I was surprised to see a handful of people with cameras around their necks standing in the driveway of my complex and staring at something off in the distance. I glanced over my shoulder and was shocked to see tall orange flames very clearly. After parking, I walked back over to investigate, taking our digital camera and analog video camera with me. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the fire was actually quite far away, and the still camera couldn't zoom in far enough to take a good shot, although I got some good footage on my video camera. It turns out that the fire was in Running Springs, roughly 10 miles away. I found a good map (courtesy of this article) that shows how close the fire is. I live near the "R" in Redlands, near the bottom-right corner of the map below:


For up-to-date information on the fires in San Bernardino County, see this page on sbcounty.gov or search Google News.

Mitt Romney is a Mormon... So What?

I fully realize that the subject of Mitt Romney being a Mormon (that is, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) has been written and blogged about countless times. In fact, that's one of the main reasons why I'm writing this article. I find it fascinating (and at times frustrating) that this issue seems to always be raised whenever anyone talks about Mitt Romney. What, if anything, does the fact that Mitt Romney is a Latter-day Saint have to do with his U.S. presidential candidacy? I would like to briefly examine this question and offer some points of consideration.

Why does it make any difference?

Many journalists and bloggers try to spin Mitt Romney's religion as some secretive, mysterious extremist sect that consumes his every thought and makes him incapable of making his own decisions. Non-scientific, loaded polls are often cited as evidence that Americans are concerned about having a Mormon president. I have no doubt that many Americans would be concerned about it, but this is largely a result of the media's typically negative slant when discussing the religion, not to mention pastors' sermons preaching against a church that they would have their parishioners believe is a "cult." (I'll return to that argument in a moment.) Although I do not know Mitt Romney personally, I get the distinct impression from perusing his Web site, watching video interviews and debates, and reading quotes concerning his political views that Romney is a very intelligent individual who thinks for himself and carefully chooses his positions based on what he feels is best for his country. There is simply no evidence to suggest that he has any ulterior motives, nor is there any reason whatsoever to believe that he does.

To Christians

At the third Republican debate, Mitt Romney responded to a question about his religion as follows:

"I think it's a fair question for people to ask, what do you believe? And I think if you want to understand what I believe, you could recognize that the values that I have are the same values you'll find in faiths across this country. I believe in God, believe in the Bible, believe Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe that God created man in his image. I believe that the freedoms of man derive from inalienable rights that were given to us by God."

Having been raised as a Christian, I can attest that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is indeed a Christian church. It is founded on the teachings of Jesus Christ as found in the Holy Bible and as revealed to ancient and modern prophets who receive revelation directly from God and His divine Son. Time does not permit me to go into great detail about the doctrines of the Church, but I would direct the reader to be cautious about selecting sources of information on this subject. Many articles about Mitt Romney and specifically about the Church are written by people who have an extremely limited understanding of the teachings of the Church, and much of what is written by journalists in regard to the religion is very confusing. Naturally, the most accurate source for learning what Mormons believe is to seek answers directly from the Church itself. The best online resource is www.mormon.org, an official site of the Church that discusses the most fundamental doctrines and provides answers to frequently asked questions. Another reliable Web site is www.lds.org, the Church's main site. I publish a podcast (a free, downloadable collection of MP3 audio files) called Introduction to Mormonism which primarily consists of talks given by prominent Latter-day Saints, and although the collection is not produced by the Church it may also be a useful resource.

To All

Whether you consider yourself a religious person or whether you believe in no religion at all, Mitt Romney deserves to be recognized for his achievements and qualifications that make him a top presidential candidate. Mitt Romney is a well-educated individual with a keen business sense and a knowledge of politics and foreign affairs that is simply remarkable. He has high moral standards. He is a strong leader. He is a firm believer in the Constitution of the United States. I invite everyone to browse through Mitt Romney's campaign site including his brief biography and his positions on the major issues, and consider him because of who he is and what he stands for.

In closing, I would like to leave you with a few words from Martin Luther King, Jr. that sum up my feelings about considering a candidate for United States president: "I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'"

Uninstalling Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac

If you have trouble with Safari 3 Public Beta and you want to revert to Safari 2, the first thing you should try to do is run the uninstaller that came with it. If you already trashed it, you can download it again from here.

If the uninstaller doesn't work for some reason, you can try restoring the original Safari application and WebKit framework using the hidden backup made by the installer. You can find the backup by clicking on the Finder in the Dock, then pressing Command-Shift-G and typing or pasting "/Library/Application Support/Apple/" (without quotation marks). Details can be found here, plus you'll need my freeware app Invisibility Toggler to see the hidden archive. After running Invisibility Toggler, click on ".SafariBetaArchive.tar.gz" and press Command-D to duplicate the file. Remove the period from the copy's file name, then run Invisibility Toggler again. Double-click on the archive, then double-click on the second archive if necessary. You should now have a folder containing the old Safari application and WebKit and JavaScriptGlue system frameworks. If you can't figure out what to do from here, please check the discussion thread linked below at the Apple Discussions forum.

Based on a tip from "boxhead" on the Apple Discussions forum.

What's New in Safari 3 Public Beta

(Subscribe to the Tech Pulse podcast to hear discussion of Safari 3 Public Beta, scheduled to be recorded LIVE this Saturday at 5 PM Pacific!)

Safari 3 Public Beta is now available for Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 and, in case you haven't heard, Windows XP and Vista! While that's really cool in and of itself, this article will focus on what's new in Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac (version 3.0, build 522.11, released 11 June 2007), and will examine whether it's worthwhile to install the beta version on your Mac and whether it's truly a "Firefox killer" as Apple would have you believe.

Inline Search—Showing All Occurrences At Once
This is definitely my favorite new feature in Safari. I've long lamented that Safari 2.0.x and earlier had an annoying "Find" window that pops up when you press Command-F (or go to the Edit menu, select "Find," and then select "Find...," which I can't imagine many people do). In the old days, you had to do all your searching from that annoying little window, and you could click Next or Previous buttons to find individual occurrences of your search term. I'm very pleased to say that that is finally gone. Observe the beauty of Safari 3:


That's right. Inline searching. But not only that, this is multiple occurrence inline searching, which means that every instance of your search term will be highlighted at the same time. (Firefox has a similar feature, but it's not enabled by default and it's really ugly in comparison.) Safari's visual effects are very cool, too: the rest of the page dims to make the matching phrases stand out, and each time you press Return or Enter (or click on an arrow next to the number of matches found), the next instance on the page is highlighted with an eye-grabbing 3D "pop" effect as the white highlighting switches to a bold orange highlight with white text.

If there are more than 100 matches on the page, then only the active occurrence is highlighted (in orange). If there are fewer than 100 occurrences of the search term on the page, the current match is highlighted in orange while all other matches are highlighted in white (or with a white border, if the page background is dark).

Improved Window Session Recovery
Firefox 2 (again with the Firefox comparisons...) has a really handy feature built in that allows you to reopen recently closed tabs, and it also has an option to restore the last windows and tabs automatically the next time you open the browser. Safari 3 tries to copy this, and although it falls way short of Firefox, it's markedly better than what Safari 2 offered (which was next to nothing). In Safari 3 Public Beta, there are a couple of new options in the History menu:


Unfortunately, at least as of the current Public Beta, Apple has chosen to not include recovery of individual tabs, even though (in my experience, at least) it's much more common to accidentally close a tab than to close an entire window. On the other hand, since tabs aren't enabled by default in Safari 2, a lot of users probably don't use them anyway, so they might find the Reopen Last Closed Window feature much more handy than I do.

The "Reopen All Windows From Last Session" feature (which becomes enabled after you quit and reopen the application) is again a great addition to Safari, although it would have been nice to see a feature in the Preferences to do this automatically when Safari starts up like Firefox, Opera, and Netscape can do.

Tabbed Browsing Improvements
The biggest change to tabbed browsing is that you can drag a tab out of the tab bar and into its own window, which is a pretty cool trick. You can also do this by selecting "Move Tab to New Window" from the Window menu, or you can "Merge All Windows."

Also, users can now reorder tabs in a window just by dragging them around—yet another feature found in other browsers that's finally making its way to Safari.

Noticeably Missing: Anti-Phishing Functionality
Strangely, Apple has chosen not to include the Google-based anti-phishing functionality that was announced at last year's WWDC, and which has been rumored to be included in private developer builds of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard since last October. There doesn't seem to be any mention of Safari's planned anti-phishing capabilities on Apple's updated Leopard pages. Was the feature canned, or is it still undergoing private testing and just wasn't ready for inclusion in the public beta? Time will tell—Leopard is still on track to ship in October, just four months away. For what it's worth, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Opera 9, and Netscape 8 and 9 all include features to block fraudulent Web sites, so if Safari 3 does not include this, it would be the only major cross-platform browser to not do so. Anti-phishing protection would be a natural complement to the rest of the new security features in Leopard, so I hope to see it in Safari 3 when Leopard ships.

Upgrade Now, or Wait?
So, Mac users, should you install Safari 3 Public Beta now, or just wait until Leopard? Ultimately, that's up to you, but here are some things to consider:

• Safari 3 Public Beta comes with an installer package that replaces Safari 2.x on your Mac. It also comes with an uninstaller, so you should theoretically be able to revert to Safari 2 without any problems, although I haven't tried it yet. If you decide to install the public beta, you might want to make a backup copy of the old Safari application first and put it in a safe place. UPDATE, 14 June: If you want to restore Safari 2, please read these instructions first.
  
  
• Another note about the installation process: a system restart is required, which some people may find annoying in some cases. Plus, the fact that the beta comes with an installer (as opposed to just a drag-and-drop app), combined with the fact that the install requires a restart, seems to strongly indicate that something other than the Safari application itself is changed by the installer (presumably the WebKit underpinnings). If that scares you, you may want to avoid this.
  
  
• On MacFixIt, many users (especially those with G5-based Macs) report problems getting Safari 3 Public Beta to launch, but your mileage may vary. For what it's worth, it's working fine for me on my first-generation MacBook Pro (Core Duo). Also, if you rely heavily on third-party plug-ins or Safari add-ons, you might want to wait on testing Safari 3 Public Beta because several add-ons may not work with the new version yet.
  
  
• If your company has a policy against installing beta software, if your system is used as a critical file or print server, if it would be a major setback to you if Safari stopped working properly, or if you're a highly paranoid or anxious person, it's probably not wise to throw beta software onto your machine.
  

Firefox Killer?
Is Safari 3 a "Firefox killer"? Apple sure advertised it as such in Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote, showing a market share pie chart with Internet and Explorer and Firefox, which switched to a pie chart showing Internet Explorer and Safari instead (implying that Apple would like to totally wipe out Firefox, which is obviously a pipe dream). I've been a Firefox user for years, and I love it. Sure, it's not as "Mac-like" as Safari or Camino, but I'm addicted to certain extensions (Adblock, Filterset.G Updater, and Flashblock) that provide functionality that just doesn't exist in Safari. And yes, I'm aware that there are Safari add-ons that can add these features, most notably PithHelmet, but 1) it's not free like Firefox extensions are, and 2) whenever there's a major new update to Safari, PithHelmet (like other add-ons) often totally breaks the browser until the third-party developer releases an update. Not everyone wants ad blocking in particular, but that's beside the point—the point is that Safari is just not as extensible as Firefox, and power users may find its lack of easy extensibility frustrating. Web developers will probably start using Safari for Windows to test compatibility with the default Mac browser, and speed freaks might switch to Safari because of its speed, but don't expect Safari to completely overtake Firefox's market share anytime soon.

For more commentary on Safari 3, tune into the Tech Pulse podcast, which debuts LIVE this Saturday, June 16, 2007, at 5 PM Pacific (8 PM Eastern). Tune in at that time via talkshoe.com.