Discourse.net

April 15 Approaches

I’ve been doing my taxes today. And undoubtedly tomorrow.

I believe that taxes are the price of civilization, but did they have to make TurboTax even less fun to use than it was last year?

I suppose I could offload the hassle to an accountant, but given that I’m fairly careful about claiming what I can claim — but don’t believe in pushing the envelope — I can’t believe one would save me enough money to justify the expense unless they went too far.

I Guess I'm a Pusher

Seth's Blog: "Firefox is a gateway drug"

Test Drive the New Firefox

Word is, the new Firefox 3 is a big improvement over version 2 — faster, cooler, etc.

Personally, I have so many plugins running that I don’t just wait for a new firefox to be out of beta but wait about three weeks for all the plugins to catch up. (Betas tend to break plugins, and many plugins lag even the final releases.)

But it’s nice to read that there is a way to Try Out Firefox 3 Risk-Free with a Portable Version. Theoretically, if you follow the instructions you can run F3 without hurting your F2.

Maybe this weekend….

Grrr.

It is ridiculously difficult in Windows XP to map a network drive to a Webdav-enabled folder on the Internet that is password protected.

Having tried and failed to do so on two computers, despite trying a host of client-side hacks, I’m grumpy about it.

Thanks to two of said hacks, I can see the folder as a “network connection” but even so I still can’t map it. Alas, I need to map it to make some convenient things happen.

And, yes, I should use Unix. But I depend on WordPerfect…

Search Plugins for Miami-Dade Public Library

Thanks to the kind work of librarysearch.org volunteer Johnathan Mayo, there’s now a browser search plugin for the Miami-Dade Public Library System catalog.

I’ve got to learn to write these. It looks so easy, but my first try bombed…

Latest Firefox Version Has a Little Problem

Slashdot | Serious Vulnerability In Firefox 2.0.0.12

“Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12, mere hours old, is vulnerable by default to a directory traversal trick, via the view-source mechanism. Although mitigated by the NoScript plug-in, this is quite a serious bug — the default installation is vulnerable from the get-go.”

This Wubi Thing Looks Seriously Cool

This looks good: Wubi - The Easiest Way to Linux.

From the Wubi FAQ:

How does Wubi work?

Wubi adds an entry to the Windows boot menu which allows you to run Linux. Ubuntu is installed within a file in the windows file system (c:\wubi\disks\system.virtual.disk), this file is seen by Linux as a real hard disk.

Is this running Ubuntu within a virtual environment or something similar?

No. This is a real installation, the only difference is that Ubuntu is installed within a file as opposed to being installed within its own partition. Thus we spare you the trouble to create a free partition for Ubuntu. And we spare you the trouble to have to burn a CD-Rom.

Dare I try this at work?

Geeky Humor: Upgrading Vista to XP

via Slashdot, this is really funny: Review: Windows XP:

Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Little Things That Make Me Happy

I love it when someone codes up a solution to a little daily problem.

So a big Thank You to Justin Somnia for his Resizable Form Fields for Firefox plugin.

Miro Reaches 1.0

After ages in betas, Miro — the open source, high-quality, multi-channel, DRM-free, internet TV and video player — has finally reached version 1.0. Thank you Participatory Culture Foundation who make Miro possible.

Get Miro while it’s hot. (Warning: this is a 24MB download, and it’s popular, so it may be a bit slow.)

Hmmm. 2,500 channels. Is there anything on?

Dinosaur Forced to Evolve

For many years — nine to be exact — I have used Sidekick 98 a calendaring / to-do-list program that I am very fond of. I particularly like the way it allows me to define multi-day projects (e.g. trips out of town) with a bright text bar that extends across the dates and makes a month at a glance easy.

Like other rabid Sidekick 98 fans, I accept no substitutes: Sidekick 99 was a lousy, stripped-down nonfunctional mistake. Sidekick 2000 or whatever they called it wasn’t even worth thinking about. And then Starfish Software cratered. Someone got them to do a Y2K patch, which was necessary, and I thought I was good for long while.

I sure didn’t expect that there would be a Year 2006 bug. Yes, even with the Y2K patch, Sidekick 98 gets very unhappy about dates in 2006 and 2007.

So it may be that the time has come to find myself a nice iCal compliant calendar with good privacy features (desiderata that leave out the two biggest contenders, Outlook and Google Calendar).

Hard to make the move, but getting harder not to. And hard too to pick what to move to. Whatever I pick has to be something I can have resident on both office and home desktops, with data transferred via a USB drive (can’t be solely via the net since I want it on my laptop too, and that’s not always in use where there is internet access).

Nothing seems to offer the great color-coded monthly views I’ve gotten to depend on. But the two leading contenders are scrappy Rainlendar and sleek Essential PIM. (I don’t think I like the look of Time & Chaos, which is more contact manager than scheduler, so that’s a third, outside, choice.)

Advice anyone?

Scary Linux Distro Eats Hard Drives Like Candy!!!

Ubuntu may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop’s hard drive. (But you can work around the bug.)

Speaking of Scary Linux Distributions….

Sunk Costs

Should I change from Scrapbook to Zotero?

MT 2.6x --> MT 4.0x Anyone?

Has anyone actually upgraded a MT 2.6x installation to the current version?

The instructions suggest you upgrade to MT 3.5 first, and even have a link to the MT archive where it is said to reside. But when I go there it looks awfully blank….

I suppose it ain’t seriously broke, so maybe I shouldn’t try to fix it. But maybe a test site just to see….

How Did You Spend Your Vacation?

Monday was Labor Day, a federal holiday in these United States, making a three-day weekend.

I spent quite a lot of it looking at a computer that kept saying this:

We’re sorry; the installer crashed. Please file a new bug report at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+filebug (do not attach your details to any existing bug) and a developer will attend to the problem as soon as possible. To help the developers understand what went wrong, include the following detail in your bug report, and attach the files /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman: Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity”, line 210, in
main()
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity”, line 205, in main install(args[0])
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity”, line 58, in install
ret = wizard.run()
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py”, line 358, in run
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py”, line 989, in process_step
File “/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py”, line 743, in progress_loop
RuntimeError: Install failed with exit code 139; see /var/log/syslog

Mind you, I was doing something that may be fairly silly:

• take a moderately ancient machine with a tiny ISA drive with Windows on it,
• shove a low-budget SATA card into it, a Rosewill RC-209
• ignore the fact that the BIOS will see the drive but won’t offer to boot from it
• leave Windows XP on the ISA drive
• install a massive (half-terrabyte!) drive on the SATA card
• partition the drive to give Windows a little more room to play
• install Ubuntu to the bulk of the SATA drive.

It was the last step that kept croaking. Even thought the CD I burned passed all integrity checks.

So I filed a bug report. Currently, I’m downloading the alternate Ubuntu installer, and doing a full scan of the (brand new) disk’s integrity in case it has some physical fault. Takes a long time to scan half a terrabyte.

Earlier, a similar install using the same model card and a similar SATA disk alone on a similar computer (without the attempt to dual boot on two drives) went swimmingly.

But this one would croak even if I unplugged the ISA drive with windows on it. So There’s Something Funny Going On….

Update: disk checks out fine.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Super Grub Disk I managed to rescue Windows from a non-functioning entry I’d put into the MBR. Three cheers for the Super Grub Disk! I’m now back to where I was 40 hours ago!

(Lest anyone feel too sorry for me, this isn’t my main machine, and I actually like solving problems like this, even (especially?) if I caused them.)

Vista Apostasy

Jim Louderback, outgoing editor of PC Magazine, writes about why he’s soured on MS Vista. Money quote: “If Microsoft can’t get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.”

I wonder what former PC World editor, and Vista enthusiast, Ed Bott has to say about this.

Ed Bott's Contrarian View of Microsoft DRM

It’s commonly believed that Vista’s built-in DRM is a Bad Thing. I think it’s bad because any time they put features in my machine that are meant to control me rather than letting me control the machine, I think the natural order of things is being undermined. Plus if the machine can do one thing I can’t control, who says it can’t be leveraged to do other nasty things to me?

It seems, though, that some people also blame Vista’s DRM for other evils, including performance problems (I hadn’t heard that). Ed Bott, who although he is a Microsoft fan in the way of a super-power user has in my experience always proved to be fair-minded, says it Ain’t So:

Over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, in between two-hour daily workouts with a snow shovel, I read a remarkable paper called A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. And I wasn’t the only one. According to Technorati, the paper has so far been linked by more than 250 blogs, and Google News finds more than 100 citations to the paper in mainstream online publications.

Too bad it’s just so wrong about so many things.

In fact, I read the whole paper - all 10,224 words of it - seven times that week, and lost count of the number of exaggerations, half-truths, unsupported statements, and flat-out errors in it. It’s a big steaming pile of FUD, with just enough truth sprinkled on top to make it seem like there’s some substance underneath it.

I don’t profess any expertise here, but it’s interesting. There’s more where that came from, and at Busting the FUD about Vista’s DRM.

20 More Possible Reasons Not to Use Vista

There are a few reasons to use Vista and lots of reasons not to. Here are 20 more candidates for the second group from Softpedia:

Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company.

Microsoft makes no secret about the fact that Windows Vista is gathering information. End users have little to say, and no real choice in the matter.

…

The Redmond company emphasized numerous times the fact that all information collected is not used to identify or contact users.

I don’t for a second doubt that Microsoft means this. But that’s not the right question: the issue isn’t how they use it; the issue is how they store it. If the data are collected and stored in a manner that retains a personally-identifiable character, then either Microsoft or someone who handed it a subpoena (or warrant) could use the data to link an IP number to whatever else is collected. And on this question the article is silent — which means that while this may or may not be worth worrying about, we can’t actually tell for sure either from this story or from Microsoft’s Vista Privacy Statement (indeed, from the sound of the latter, it does sound as if at least some of the data are kept individualized rather than aggregated). And until we know more, chalk up more reasons not to use Vista.

Microsoft has an additional collection of 47 Windows Vista features and services that collect user data. However, not all phone home and report to Microsoft. Although the data collection process is generalized across the list, user information is also processed and kept on the local machine, leaving just approximately 50% of the items to both harvest data and contact Microsoft. Still, Microsoft underlined the fact that the list provided under the Windows Vista Privacy Statement is by no means exhaustive, nor does it apply to all the company’s websites, services and products.

Seriously Cool Software

Sandboxie describes itself like this:

When you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the progam to the hard disk via write operations.

For example, if you run the Freecell program to play a game, it starts by reading the previously recorded statistics, displaying and altering them as you play the game, and finally writing them back to disk for future reference.

Sandboxie changes the rules such that write operations do not make it back to your hard disk.

The illustration shows the key component of Sandboxie: a transient storage area, or sandbox. Data flows in both directions between programs and the sandbox. During read operations, data may flow from the hard disk into the sandbox. But data never flows back from the sandbox into the hard disk.

If you run Freecell inside the Sandboxie environment, Sandboxie reads the statistics data from the hard disk into the sandbox, to satisfy the read requested by Freecell. When the game later writes the statistics, Sandboxie intercepts this operation and directs the data to the sandbox.

If you then run Freecell without the aid of Sandboxie, the read operation would bypass the sandbox altogether, and the statistics would be retrieved from the hard disk.

The transient nature of the sandbox makes it is easy to get rid of everything in it. If you were to throw away the sandbox, by deleting everything in it, the sandboxed statistics would be gone for good, as if they had never been there in the first place.

Sandboxie and the Web

Protecting your Freecell statistics using Sandboxie may be a good idea when a less qualified player comes along, but you will probably want to play most of your games outside the sandbox. On the other hand, you may want to run your Web browser inside the sandbox most of the time. This way any incoming, unsolicited software (spyware, malware and the like) that you download, is trapped in the sandbox. Changes made to your list of Favorites or Bookmarks, hijacking of your preferred start page, new and unwanted icons on your desktop — all these, and more, are trapped in and bound to the sandbox.

You could also try a new toolbar add-on, browser extension or just about any kind of software. If you don’t like it, you throw away the sandbox, and start again with a fresh sandbox. On the other hand, if you do like the new piece of software, you can re-install it outside the sandbox so it becomes a permanent part of your system.

Sandboxie intercepts changes to both your files and registry settings, making it virtually impossible for any software to reach outside the sandbox.

Sandboxie traps cached browser items into the sandbox as a by-product of normal operation, so when you throw away the sandbox, all the history records and other side-effects of your browsing disappear as well.

Which means, if I understand it right, that it would be safe to run IE with ActiveX turned on? It might even be safe to run Exchange???

Experts Agree

Experts Agree: Power Corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Actually, kidding aside, the first link is to an amazing NY Tiimes op-ed, The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me, that talks about how just as rich people get inured to expensive things and think so much less of breaking them, so too powerful people come to think much less of the feelings and needs of others:

getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them.

Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians). Professor Keltner and his fellow researchers describe it as an instance of “approach/inhibition theory” in action: As power increases, it fires up the behavioral approach system and shuts down behavioral inhibition.

Strangely, this article never once mentions George W. Bush.

The second link is to an Australian study that suggests that using Powerpoint (and the like) makes it harder for audiences to absorb facts:

“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”

I believe it.

Between Data Loss and the Subpoena Lies ... the Shadow

Vista Shadow Copies — Helpful to Users, Even More to EDD Recovery? reports that even when you overwrite files in Vista they’re not really gone. In one sense, this fixes a big glitch in XP and its predecessors: if you saved a new version of a file over an old one, the old one did not go to the ‘trash’ folder to hang around for recovery. It was gone, or at least gone enough that it would take a lot of luck and high-class computer forensics to recover. Now, “Shadow Copy” prevents this:

Have you ever accidentally saved over a file you were working on? Accidental file deletion or modification is a common cause of data loss. Windows Vista includes a useful innovation to help you protect your data: Shadow Copy. Available in the Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise editions of Windows Vista, this feature automatically creates point-in-time copies of files as you work, so you can quickly and easily retrieve versions of a document you may have accidentally deleted. Shadow copy is automatically turned on in Windows Vista and creates copies on a scheduled basis of files that have changed […] It works on single files as well as whole folders.

So this feature is great for emergency recovery. And of course for discovery in lawsuits too.

Is Your PC Ready for DST?

Here’s an easy way to check if your PC is ready for Daylight Savings Time, which will begin this Sunday in most of the US (several weeks ahead of the old schedule).

Click on the Daylight Saving Time (DST) patch tester.

Looks like I’m ready:

Remember, “Spring forward, Fall back.”

WP X3 Inside A Linux Environment? Could it Be?

So I’m wondering if this remarkably kludgy system — Running Windows as a VM on Linux with VMware Server — would be the solution to running WordPerfect inside a Linux environment? You’d need a reasonably fast machine, and I don’t have one to spare right now, but as soon as I have a few spare days (yah, right)….

Pandora's Peculiarities

I love Pandora, but it has done two strange things recently.

I recently took the Secunia Software Inspector out for a spin, and it in addition to finding all sorts of obscure software that it thought needed updating, and I thought needed deleting, it also found multiple outdated copies of Java and the flash player. So I deleted them all except the newest. Alas, now that I had only the newest version of the Flash player, Pandora stopped working -- it was convinced I was blocking the flash player from storing its data locally, even when I wasn't. I laboriously followed the directions in Pandora's FAQ and went through the flash privacy panel (I hate that obscure thing) and gave Pandora the rights to everything short of my first-born, but no dice. I eventually had to uninstall version 9.x of the flash player and downgrade to 7.x to make Pandora work again. This is odd.

And then there's the station I created with Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy". That's one weird station.

Whine

Codeweavers, the people who make Windows apps run under Linux, have just released version 6.0 of CrossOver Office, with a ton of support for popular applications, notably World of Warcraft.

But according to the CodeWeavers - CrossOver Office - Change Log, they still don't support the one application I need most of all: Wordperfect for Windows.

Home Network Backup Advice Sought

I'm planning to add a computer to my home network which will act as a combination of a media server and backup for our other desktops. It's going to have two or three Very Big Disks, with only the media partition backed up locally. All the other disks and partitions will be used only to back up other computers on the network. I'd been toying with buying a purpose-built NAS, but they seem temperamental, or expensive, or sometimes both, and this just seams easier and cheaper.

But I'm unsure exactly how to set this up. Ideally I would download or even buy some sort of tool which would load on the machines that need to be backed up and would automagically image the desktops in the dead of night and have a restore function I could run from a floppy or a CD. This dream tool would create a new image once a month, say, and incremental backups nightly. Each new image would, I suppose, have to overwrite the old one, as even the Very Big Disks are not going to be big enough to host multiple images from the many pretty big disks lurking on the various machines on our network.

Most of the machines that need backing up are running Win XP SP2, but one is dual-booting XP SP2 with SUSE, one runs SUSE alone, and one runs Ubuntu. For starters I'm most concerned with copying the XP2 machines and partitions, since they have work stuff on them, but in the long term I expect to transition the household to some flavor of Linux since Vista doesn't seem acceptable. (There may be a holdout gaming machine for the kids if they are sufficiently persuasvie.)

I have a licensed copy of Win XP currently installed on the server-to-be. Inertia has an edge, but I could scrub it an put in some flavor of Linux. I've read both good and bad things about Norton Ghost 10.0 and Acronis, but little good about how either work for backing up to a network drive as opposed to attached storage. The feedback on Ghost suggests that the new version doesn't image, and that the old one, which does, wants to be run from a floppy -- that's not a standalone, run in the background app. Worse, I fear I'd need one copy per machine I'm backing up -- that gets expensive!

I found a list of Free Hard Disk / Partition Imaging and Cloning Software, but I don't really want to trust something this critical to an unknown tool.

I don't much like to bleg, but if anyone is doing this at home and has advice or pointers, I'd be grateful for it.

Beware Stale Adobe

Adobe Reader versions before 8.0 are now considered dangerous. Get your 8.0 here.

Cooliris: A Fun Firefox (etc.) Extension

Once in a while Lifehacker's Download of the Day is something neat. Today is one of those days, as they have Cooliris Preview (IE/Firefox/Safari):

Simply mouse over any link or thumbnail image, then point to the little Cooliris icon that appears next to it. In a second or two you'll see a pop-up window containing the page, image, or even video. This isn't just a screenshot, however you can actually play the video or interact with the page, clicking links, filling out forms, etc.

Best. Extension. Ever? It might just be. Cooliris changes the way you interact with the Web, and for the better. Cooliris Previews 2.0 is free for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers.

Get Cooliris for firefox here. I'm having fun with it.

Firefox 2.0 - Maybe Next Week

OK, this is pretty impressive. Almost all of the 26 Firefox extensions I have installed at home are already ready for 2.0. 

Only seven extensions I currently have installed are not ready.  Of these two are just frills (Shazou and Timetracker).  Spelling is built in, so I won't need Spellbound.

Of the other four that are not yet ready, there is one which I'll certainly miss but can manage without (Autofill). There is really only one showstopper -- TabMix Plus. And the developer of that says he needs a week or so to get it ready.  So it looks like I will only have to wait a week or so to upgrade to 2.0.

Here's the list of what I use with info on upgrade status drawn from the amazing Bill's Big List of Firefox® 2.0 Compatible Extensions

Ready for 2.0

Adblock Plus
Chatzilla
CoLT
del.icio.us Complete 1.3
Download Statusbar 0.9.4
dragdropupload 1.5.21
EditCSS 0.3.6
ErrorZilla Mod 0.1.1
Extended Statusbar 1.2.5
FireFTP 0.94.4
Gmail Space 0.5.1
Googlepedia 0.4.1
gTranslate 0.3
MR Tech Local Install 5.3.1.1
ScrapBook 1.2.0.6
Searchbar Autosizer 1.1.2
Video Downloader 2.0
View Source Chart 2.4.05
X-Ray 0.8.1

Not (officially) ready for 2.0

1. Autofill
2. Bugmenot 
3. Shazou
4. The functionality of Spellbound is, I gather, built in to 2.0
5. TabmixPlus is not ready yet, but should be ready Real Soon Now 

   I REALIZE THAT FIREFOX 2 IS GOING TO BE RELEASE ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24. A NEW VERSION OF TAB MIX PLUS IS GOING TO BE RELEASE SHORTLY AFTER THAT, IN LESS THAN A WEEK. PLEASE BE PATIENT, FOR NOW YOU CAN TRY THIS VERSION EARLY.
   http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3515

6. Timetracker
7. Wayback (but this is somewhat obsoleted by ErrorZilla)

Firefox 2.0

Firefox 2.0 is now available for download from this Index of page. Starting tomorrow firefox users should get automated downloads or reminders.

Personally, I'm going to hold off for a few days until I know that my favorite plugins have compatibility updates.

UPDATE: In her comment below, Cathy Gellis points out that the Mozilla folks are asking people not to download this version this way for good and interesting reasons.

Told You So

First IE7 vulnerability identified.

Live Dangerously

Download IE7.

IE Has Trouble Displaying Some .png Images

One of the things that can drive you crazy is aiming for cross-browser compatibility. Usually the problem is that things look wrong.

But sometimes the problem is that something you can see fine in one browser is simply invisible in the next. Looking at source confirms that both browsers are seeing the same code -- one is just not doing anything with it. Drives me nuts.

So it's very good to at last have an answer that I've found a known bug: IE just can't handle some .png images. It was hard to debug because it can handle others. But IE cannot handle all .png images. Sometimes IE does not display .png images at all. Yes, there is a bug in Internet Explorer and it does not display some .png ('portable network graphics') files.

(I'm saying this very pedantically so that the next poor guy who has to hunt for this on Google has an easier time of it.)

Today's Gripe: NVu

NVu is a pretty good lightweight WYSIWYG HTML editor. It produces nice clean output without all that cruft that commercial products seem to insist on. But it lacks support for the BLOCKQUOTE tag. Which makes it a pain for me to use. [Yes, yes, I know that blockquote is deprecated in favor of style sheets. But it's easy, and does exactly what I want to do when insetting quotes. And 'deprecated' doesn't mean obsolete!]

Update: And I wish it had a spell checker too....

What Unix Can Feel Like

In the course of an informative account of his efforts to install MythTV (open-source TiVo), David Weinberger perfectly describes what Unix feels like to many people:

I am a slightly competent Unix user who can grep his way out of a paper bag, so long as no regular expressions are required, but that's about my limit. So getting Linux-based MythTV installed feels like it requires me to issue complex magical incantations. Get one syllable wrong, and instead of the mouse turning into a white charger, you've given your sister boils for seven years.

Firefox and Thunderbird Updates

While we wait for super-fast Firefox 2.0, here are updates hot off the press: Firefox 1.5.0.4 and Thunderbird 1.5.0.4.

Firefox 1.5.02

Firefox 1.5.0.2 is out. Probably a big deal if you use a Mac. For the rest of us, here's the (somewhat paltry?) list of bugfixes.

The Joys (ahem) of Linux

I finally got around to putting SuSE on the blank partition on the family computer, the fastest machine in the house. Now Junior Junior has Ubuntu in his room, Junior Senior has SuSE (both on old PII/400s) in his room, the router turns off their Internet access at hours when we don't want them online, and the family machine is dual-booting SuSE and XP. My desktop is next, but that will require repartitioning, which means some backing up first.

The basic SuSE install was painless, and while it's a close call so far I think I like KDE better than Gnome.

Setting up printers was not anything close to painless. I have a Laserjet printer running off a network print server, and I took the default printer type SuSE offers, which was CUPS when (thank you Google and linux.org) what I should have done was specify it as an LPR printer. In my defense, I was fooled: As part of its default CUPS printer install SuSE tests to see if it can see a printer, and by giving it the IP number and the (non-standard) port I passed that test. It just flunked the actual printing thing. But it's finally all sorted, and now Junior Senior's machine can print to the LaserJet too. (In contrast, printing to the LaserJet from Ubuntu had been seamless and painless: it took about three minutes to set up.)

Getting 3D to run on the ATI Radeon x800 has been a different sort of adventure. Having carefully followed the directions I found online, I find that my own user has 3D, but the kids' users do not. I can more or less overcome this by manually changing a 660 to a 666 in an obscure file, but often it changes itself back. I suppose I'll have to figure out how to program SuSE to modify the file every time a user logs in. That will require the program to have superuser rights, which requires a password I am not giving my kids, so I have to find a way to do that which doesn't expose the password either. It not that I don't trust them, I just want my kids to hack into the guts of this machine rather than waltz into it. Why deny them the pleasures I had as a teenager?

We do have a second network printer, a very nice color printer, a handsome housewarming gift from my parents, one which has proved invaluable for homework projects. It seems, however, that SuSE isn't going to be printing to the Canon iP5000 any time soon:

Dear Mr. Froomkin:

Thank you for contacting Canon product support regarding Linux drivers
for the iP5000. We value you as a Canon customer and appreciate the
opportunity to assist you.

While considering the desire to provide the best possible support for
Canon's products, Canon must make decisions on which products to support
when new operating systems are introduced. Currently, Canon has decided
to support only the Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh operating
systems. We understand, and sincerely apologize for any frustration you
have experienced if your operating system falls outside of these
categories, but we hope that you understand our rationale.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance with your
iP5000.

Sincerely,

Raymond

One of the Great Bug Reports of All Time

Via Bruce Schneier, here's one of the great bug reports of all time.

People With Too Much Time on Their Hands

via Boing Boing comes news of a Firefox plugin converts dollars to barrels of oil.

Click one of those links for the broccoli action picture.

(Although, now that I think of it, if it updated in real time and worked for any currency, it might actually be useful....)

ReBlog Looks Good But Is a True Beta

reBlog by Eyebeam R looks like something I am going to use when it gets out of beta.

It's another fork of feed on feeds, with an attempt at a fancy front end that both succeeds and yet makes me want to get in and do my own RSS because it's just not the way I want it.

But in addition to being a moderately classy server-side feed aggregator, reBlog offers the potential of creating a link blog with ease, so I can make a feed of all the posts I wanted to blog about but didn't get around to, and run it as a sidebar, or a separate page. There's a full-text quoting feature too, which I can see incorporating into some classroom blogs, and just to make it super-easy reBlog integrates with WordPress, Movable Type, and soon with Drupal and other goodies. Alas, the MT integration is for versions 3.1 and up, and this blog is still at 2.6.x. But all my other blogs are wordpress, and someday, in my copious free time, I may try to convert this one...

At the moment, however, there's a bad bug in reBlog that's dropping error messages like

Warning: Unknown class passed as parameter in .../reBlog/refeed/library/RF/ClientController.class.php on line 740

So unlike google's gmail, this is a real beta, and I'm going to wait a version or two until they clean it up.

From the about ReBlog statement:

What is a reBlog?
A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software.

Why should you reBlog?
reBlogs are useful to individuals who want to maintain a weblog but prefer curating content to writing original posts. They can also enable organizations to tap the contributions of their employees, members, and communities-at-large in order to easily redistribute relevant content.

What if I don't want to blog anything?
reFeed, the RSS aggregating component is damn sexy and worth using if you just want to read lots of content and not be constrained to one computer.

Happy Geek News

The small minority of you who care about such things will be overjoyed to learn, as I was, that the server-side rss newsreader feedonfeeds, which had become something of a moribund project, has been forked into FeedOnFeeds-Redux (FoFRedux).

FofRedux 0.2 offers small but noticable improvements over Fof 0.1.9, notably the introduction of category sorting for feeds, and FofRedux 0.3, due out RSN, sounds as if it's gonna be great.

One More Reason to Just Say No to Windows Vista

From what I've heard so far, Windows Vista, the planned successor to WinXP, is objectionable on moral grounds as it instantiates "DRM" and thus cripples your computer. But for those not entranced by arguments that having other people able to decide what your computer can do is a bad idea, here's a more practical concern: Vista set to swallow 800MB of RAM. That's just for the OS. Wait until you see how bloated the programs are.

Last week we installed SuSE on an Pentium II/400 we had gathering dust. So far it works great, although KDE is no speed demon with the limited RAM and tired old graphics card card on that one.

The next step is to turn a couple of the newer, faster XP machines into dual boot systems. Perhaps by the time Vista becomes a standard the whole family can be weaned onto some flavor of Linux?

Taming Firefox 1.5

Ever since I installed Firefox 1.5 (and later 1.5.0.1) I have had nothing but grief. Freezes. CPU spikes usually in the 50s -- which meant it took 20 seconds for anything to happen -- but sometimes much higher, verging on 100%, which meant nothing happened however long I waited. Even if I didn't get a CPU spike, going away from the machine with Firefox open in a window, even in the background, would make it freeze up, requiring that I use the task manager to kill it.

The problem was especially bad when I loaded a particular large and complex web page that I use several times a day (no, not this blog) -- not only did it load slowly, but it would bring Firefox to its knees every time. And yet it worked fine in 1.07.

My first Google search suggested it was probably a plugin issue. I duly changed from Adblock to Adblock plus. I used less aggressive Adblock settlings. I replaced my tab manager with something that had a better reputation for playing nice with others. I removed this plugin, then that one. (See below for a list of what I'm running now -- an only partly restored list from what I used to use.)

Nothing worked.

I disabled the prefetch. I turned off Bfcache -- the caching of recently viewed pages -- losing the lightening back and forth which was one of the best reasons to upgrade.

And of course I followed the directions at InternetWeek to play with settings in about.config to reduce the cache. And I carefully followed the directions as to what settings to use in place of the defaults for the about:config setting in browser.cache.memory.capacity.

Nothing worked.

But at last I can report that I think I have found the magic bullet: Ignore the directions in the cookbook about setting browser.cache.memory.capacity to 15000 if you have up to 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe 32768 if you have a full gig. I have a full gig of RAM, and it's not shared with my graphics card, and my problem only went away when I shrank browser.cache.memory.capacity to the absurdly small 8192.

That worked.

Here's what I'm running at home at present in the way of extensions. I used to use Tab Mix Plus, and preferred its features to some what I'm using now, but it seemed to cause conflicts with some other plugins.

Enabled Extensions: [17]

• Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.0.1 - Synchronizes Adblock with Filterset.G
• Adblock Plus 0.5.11.2 - Filters ads from web-pages. Now with whitelisting and synchronization.
• BugMeNot 1.3 - Bypass compulsory web registration with the context menu via www.bugmenot.com.
• ChatZilla 0.9.70 - A clean, easy to use and highly extensible Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.
• Copernic Desktop Search Toolbar 1.6.3.904 - Copernic Desktop Search Firefox Toolbar.
• EditCSS 0.3.5 - Stylesheet modifier in the Sidebar.
• IE View 1.2.7 - Open pages in IE via firefox menus
• Mozilla SpellCheck Libraries 1.0.1.0 - From the Mozilla Thunderbird 20050727 Nightly Win32 Build
• MR Tech Local Install 4.2.1 - Local Install power tools for all users.
• ScrapBook 0.18.5 - This extension helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections.
• SessionSaver .2 0.2.1.031 - Magically restores your last browsing session.
• SpellBound 0.7.3 - Adds spell checker support to web forms and extensions.
• Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.8.8 - Enhances control over some aspects of tabbed browsing.
• undoclosetab 20051204 - Adds Undo Close Tab.
• View Rendered Source Chart 1.5.02 - Creates a Colorful Chart of a Webpage's Rendered Source
• Wayback 0.2.2 - Displays an archived version of the webpage.
• X-Ray 0.5 - See the tags on a page without viewing the sourcecode.

• Firefox (default)
• Nautipolis for Firefox 1.5.0.1 - Nautipolis for Firefox, based on icons from art.gnome.org. Includes support for help, inspector, downloadstatusbar, downloadmgr, calendar, quicknote, offline and toolbarext.

Tuesday Morning is Off to a Great Start

Something called HTCPIP.DLL is trying to access 213.105.33.222:8080. My firewall blocked it. Normally when a new program tries to phone home, I do a search of my disk to find out what directory it lives in, to see if it is part of something I approve of. And I do a google search to see what other people say it does.

In all the years I've been doing this, this was the first time both searches turned up negative. Regedit reveals one entry with the value HTCPIP.DLL in the registry at My Computer\HKEY_CURRRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Explorer Bars\{C4EE31f3-4768-11D2-BE5c-00A)C9A83Da1}\FilesNamedMRU\000\ (Type REG_SZ)

This is of course as clear as mud.

So I ran an online virus-checker. The only thing worth worrying about was a downloaded file carrying something that identified as "Backdoor.Win32.Breplibot.v"... but there's nothing with that exact name at google either. (The Backdoor.Win32.Breplibot family doesn't sound very nice, though.)

Have I got a virus so new that no one has recorded it? Is it sitting in some Sony-rootkit-like partition I don't even know about?

Zonealarm 'phones home'???

Via The Inquirer, the provocative Is your firewall spying on you?, pointing to this Infoworld item by Robert X. Cringley fingering my favorite software firewall, ZoneAlarm:

A Perfect Spy? It seems that ZoneAlarm Security Suite has been phoning home, even when told not to. Last fall, InfoWorld Senior Contributing Editor James Borck discovered ZA 6.0 was surreptitiously sending encrypted data back to four different servers, despite disabling all of the suite’s communications options. Zone Labs denied the flaw for nearly two months, then eventually chalked it up to a "bug" in the software -- even though instructions to contact the servers were set out in the program’s XML code. A company spokesmodel says a fix for the flaw will be coming soon and worried users can get around the bug by modifying their Host file settings. However, there’s no truth to the rumor that the NSA used ZoneAlarm to spy on U.S. citizens.

To which the Inq adds,

In the meantime you can work around it by adding:
# Block access to ZoneLabs Server
127.0.0.1 zonelabs.com
to your Windows host file.

The hosts file on my windows XP setup would be c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. [On a Windows 95/98/ME machine, look in c:\windows\hosts; for Windows NT or 2000 it should be at c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.]

Here's what I'd like to know: By adding this line to the hosts file, will one also block other things from Zonealarm ... like downloads of updates? And if not, how do I test if it's working to fix the 'phone home' problem? (And if so, how do I know when it's time to take it out?)

NSA On How To 'Sanitize' Word & PDF Documents

Lawyers especially will want to take note of this very useful document identified by Cory Doctorow. It seems the NSA's Architectures and Applications Division of the Systems and Network Attack Center (SNAC) Information Assurance Directorate, no less, has released a long report on Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF.

It's released as a pdf!

Firefox 1.5 Due Today

TheInquirer.com claims that Firefox 1.5 is coming out today. But there's nothing on the website yet.

Feed on Feeds, Atom, and the Vanishing Author

My RSS newsreader of choice is something called feed on feeds (FoF), which is a light weight server-side aggregator with easily customized CSS. It's certainly not for everyone -- you have to have a unix-based server, it helps to be a bit of a control freak, and you absolutely have to hate glitz -- but I really like it.

FoF was built to read RSS 1.0, then tweaked to read Atom feeds too. And it does that pretty well. But I have run into one bug I don't know how to fix. RSS 1.0 reports the name of the author of a post in a field called "dc:creator"; FoF expects that and knows how to display it. But Atom puts the author inside nested "author" and "name" tags -- and FOF just seems to ignore those. That makes it hard to read the increasing number of group blogs which only offer an Atom feed since you don't know who the author is.

I've found the place in the FoF code where the interpretation of the dc:creator tag happens, but it seems linked to building and reading MySQL tables, and since I don't speak MySQL, I know better than to play with that. I tried emailing the author of the FOF, but no reply. He's commented on this blog in the past, perhaps because he has some sort of search going looking for mentions of feed on feeds, so that's why I'm posting this here.

Hey Steve Minutillo, you still out there? Please?

Plug-Ins Considered Harmful?

For some time now, I've been planning something that I hope will be interesting and useful, that will be based on some sort of content-management platform.

I don't want to say too much about it, but for present purposes imagine that it is organized a little like a newspaper, with sections each operated individually. Unlike a newspaper, here the "front page" will consist primarily of an aggregation of the "inside" sections, or perhaps of teaser versions of the full content that is actually located in the "sections".

All content will be open for comments. Readers will be free to go straight to the "sections"; indeed if they are reading the "front" and try to comment, that will take them inside the appropriate "section".

I want to use free tools that have a substantial user community, and do as little modification as I can get away with, in order to minimize the tech support I'll have to do. I'd love to use Slash as the engine for this as it is very strong on the integration of a front and 'inside' sections, plus has lots of other community-building features, but Slash just isn't user-friendly enough for either the posters or the commentators. Plus Slash requires mod_perl, which just won't play nice with other things going on the machine I have available.

Currently, I'm looking at WordPress, with each section being a separate blog, and the "front page" as a sorted aggregation of the RSS feeds. [This requires a tiny bit of work, as WordPress and the most common plugins want to treat each RSS/Atom/whatever feed as a separate thing rather than a contribution to a melting pot.] WordPress is certainly friendly enough, and I like the ability that its reliance on themes give me to have a constant 'look' for the site but maybe vary the color scheme a bit for some sections. Perhaps WordPress is a little light on the cool tools. But then maybe I can live without the glitz. Even so, that still leaves out a few things that I think are essential.

For example, to make this particular site nice, I think I need robust and good-looking threaded comments. And Wordpress, out of the box, doesn't do that (yet). There is a threaded comments plug-in, but I'm very reluctant to commit to it because of its effects on the upgrade path. Will it work with the next version of Wordpress? Who can know, when one is at the joint mercy of the Wordpress developers and of the plugin writer. Or, what if a future version of Wordpress has threaded comments, but in a manner incompatible with this plugin? Then I have to find some way of translating the historic comments into the new schema. (Not all this project will, I hope, be total ephemera.)

I could hunt around for a different CMS that already does what I want -- I am, for example, learning about Drupal -- but there are not that many with a sufficiently large installed base that I feel comfortable committing to them.

But one thing that this has made clear to me is that from the perspective of someone trying to find the right tool for a project, even (especially?) a person who wants to use open source tools, there's a real disincentive to committing to a project that relies heavily on extensions and plug ins that are not supported by the core designers of your software package. By doing so, you not only put yourself at the mercy of there being appropriate upgrades for the main branch, but also of the plug in and, worst of all, the interactions between the two.

Remove RTF Cruft From Clipboard

This looks useful. PureText is a free tool that removes RTF cruft (fonts, etc.) from stuff in your clipboard.

I can already do that via the wonderful wonderful Clipmate, but PureText looks as if it takes even fewer keystrokes.

Spotted via Lifehacker just before I was about to stop reading it on grounds of obviousness.

Get Linspire for Free

The makers of Linspire, a unix distribution that works hard to be compatible with user expectations bred by windows are giving it away for the next few days. I learned of this via slashdot so of course the servers are overloaded right now...

Opera Browser Free Registration Offer

Opera, the alternative alternative browser, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. They'll give you a free registration code for the full, ad-free, version if you send a note to registerme@opera.com before midnight tonight.

Search in Textbox Extension for Firefox

A while ago I posted this software wish:

... if only there were a tool that would let me search inside the text that I am posting to input boxes on web forms before I actually post it.

I say "almost answered" because this extension still has rough edges, e.g. "find" doesn't actually work for me -- I have to use the "find (regexp)" option for it to do anything. It could use better shortcuts, especially one to repeat a search. But oh am I happy to have it.

Does Firefox Forgive?

I am not one who frequently blegs here. But.

Suppose that, like me, you are an astoundingly bad typist. And suppose that, like me, from time to time, despite nice tools like the autofill plugin, sometimes you mis-enter something into a web form. Like, say, your email address without the final “u”.

And suppose that Firefox remembers this for all time and puts it in alphabetical order above your real address. And suppose further that the little bitty box into which you are suppose to enter an email address is too short to see that the final letter is missing, so you have to remember. And suppose further that you often don’t.

In such a case, you would dearly like to edit firefox’s list of recalled dropdown entries…without deleting them all and starting over.

Where do they live? Can this be done?

Of the Vista of the alcohol it is

Perhaps because I grew up bilingual, I have always been very fond of machine translation stories. I posted my favorite machine translation joke a long time ago, so I won’t repeat it here. It’s amusing, though, that real life now approximates my joke, as you see from the Lost in Translation web site:

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of “Telephone”? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!

It’s not a true game of multilingual ‘telephone’ since it translates the phrase back into English before each iteration instead of being a true round-robin, but it’s nevertheless amusing to see what happens when you take a phrase like “out of sight, out of mind” and run it through five different translations:

Here’s the first try:

Translated to French:
Hors de la vue, hors de l’esprit.

Translated back to English:
Out of the sight, of the spirit.

Translated to German:
Aus dem Anblick des Geistes heraus.

Translated back to English:
From the sight of the spirit out.

Translated to Italian:
Dalla vista dello spirito fuori.

Translated back to English:
From the sight of the spirit outside.

Translated to Portuguese:
Da vista do espírito fora.

Translated back to English:
Of the sight of the spirit it are.

Translated to Spanish:
De la vista del alcohol está.

Including Asian languages gets us even farther afield:

Translated to Japanese:
?????????

Translated back to English:
From vision from heart.

Translated to Chinese:
???????

Translated back to English:
From version from heart.

Translated to French:
De la version du coeur.

Translated back to English:
Version of the heart.

Translated to German:
Version des Inneren.

Translated back to English:
Version of the inside.

Translated to Italian:
Versione della parte interna.

Translated back to English:
Version of the inner part.

Translated to Portuguese:
Versão da parte interna.

Translated back to English:
Version of the internal part.

Translated to Spanish:
Versión de la parte interna.

A New Use for the 'Backspace' Key

Ed Bott comes through again, with another tip of the day for something simple that I never knew:

Move back to the last page: Your hands are on the keyboard and you want to quickly return to the previous page you were viewing in your browser window. Don’t move your hand to the mouse - just press the Backspace key, which has the same effect as clicking the Back button on your browser’s toolbar. (This tip works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.)

Much easier than Alt-Left Arrow. Now, if there were an equally simple replacement for Alt-Right Arrow. And a nicer way to move among tabs in Firefox instead of Ctrl-tab, which I find to be a very awkward key combination.

And — my biggest wish at present — if only there were a tool that would let me search inside the text that I am posting to input boxes on web forms before I actually post it.

Firefox 1.0.4

The latest bugsquash release is out.

Handmedown Laptop Reborn Under Ubuntu Linux

Recently we came into possession of an old Dell Latitude laptop that my mother finally replaced with something more functional. By the time it came into my hands it was not doing too well. Loading a browser and trying to get to a web page took several minutes. Slow doesn’t begin to describe it. That was a shame, as I’d kind of hoped to give it to the eight-year-old as a homework machine, which would have allowed me to give my equally creaky old laptop to the eleven-year-old for the same purpose.

The laptop was running Windows 2000, but the chip was a hardy PII/400, so that shouldn’t have turned it into such a slug? Poking around a bit, I learned that it had only 128Mb of memory, which seemed like the likely culprit. Fortunately the 128Mb was all in one bank, leaving the other free. Last week I filled the empty bank it with a 256Mb SoDIMM, and all of a sudden the machine came to life. Sprang to life would be an exaggeration, but it was functional instead of a doorstop. But it didn’t run win98 games or run fast, so it didn’t seem the ideal machine for an eight year old.

For my next trick, I got a copy of the Ubuntu Linux Live CD. Ubuntu is an especially user-friendly Linux distribution built on the solid foundation of Debian. A Live CD is one you can run as a program, instead of as an install, to see if your devices will be recognized and to see what the look and feel will be like.

Ubuntu seemed to recognize everything out of the box except the wireless cardbus card. Unfortunately, there is no Ethernet connection on this elderly model, and I was a little nervous on relying on my limited nonexistent Unix configuration skills to make the wireless card go. A little Internet shopping revealed that the docking stations that used to sell for well over $100 now are being dumped, used, for peanuts, so I got one of those. Ubuntu saw the docking station port off the Live CD without a hitch.

Providentially, this week my kids both decided to learn HTML (I have studiously avoided prodding them to get interested in computer stuff; either they do or they don’t). So when I told Younger Son that I could turn the machine into something that was “very good for web pages” and which had this fun worm game on it too (“Gnibbles”), he liked the sound of it.

So this weekend I installed it. No dual-boot, the hard drive is too small, just pop it in and go. The install took a long time, there was one error message about fonts, but everything seemed to Just Work when it was over — including recognizing both the Ethernet port AND the wireless card.

It’s pretty cool. So far there have only been four minor problems:

• There was no documentation that I could find on how to get the laptop to see my network printer that runs off a print server. I finally guessed it was a “Linux printer” (not the default choice), entered the IP number as the “host” and the obscure queue name in the queue, told it I had an HP1200, and bingo! up came a list of drivers, with the first on the list marked “recommended”. That didn’t work. Choosing the second on the list, the first one with an “hp” name, did work.

• Somehow, the eight-year-old managed to drag one of the menu bars off to the left side of the Gnome desktop, where they blew up into giant icons which chewed up a third of the desktop real estate. I was utterly unable to drag it back. Some googling found that someone else had this Gnomish issue, and that the only fix is to copy the icons to the main desktop, where the shrink to normal, delete the icons on the left, then create a new menu bar on the top. I did that, and it worked, but it was a very frustrating experience until I found the fix in a discussion group online.

• Synaptic is a powerful and (relatively) friendly package manager, but it’s not perfect yet. I tried to install a bunch of things onto the machine, and I have no idea where half of them went. They claimed to download fine, but when the install was over, for half of them there were no icons on the desktop, nor in the applications drop-down menus. Maybe if I install them one at a time….

Update (5/4): I think the problem has something to do with this Desktop file thing. But what if anything I can do about it remains opaque.

• None of the firefox internal upgraders like “get more extentions”, “get more themes” or the firefox updater itself seem to work at all. They start up a window, but it stays resolutely blank. How do I install firefox extensions under Ubuntu?

But the eight year old seems very happy.

Windows: Even When It's Easy It Makes Me Grumpy

The horrible thing about my relationship with MS Windows is that you get so used to believing that so many simple things are unnecessarily hard (today’s peeve: those dropdown boxes for directory/drive searches that are too small, and only go down from where it thinks you are). You get so used to doing it the hard way that you stop looking for easy ways, even when they exist (and when you finally find them it just makes you grumpier).

So, thank you Ed Bott for today’s seemingly obvious Tip of the day: Instantly maximize any window:

Are you tired of trying to hit the tiny maximize/restore button in the top right corner of a window? There’s an easier alternative: Double-click anywhere on the title bar. The entire title bar acts as an oversized toggle. Double-click to maximize the window; double-click again to restore the original window size.

I suppose that should teach me for smugly looking at so many of the past tips and saying “Well, of course, everyone knows that. But in fact, what I mostly feel is irritation: why wasn’t this more obvious?

Just to Tide You Over

No serious blogging today as I’m busy reading some pretty good stuff produced by my students. So here’s the INQ’s Top ten Firefox browser annoyances just to tide you over.

Update: Ed Bott calls this list “lame”. He’s more than half right: the list leaves off the big stuff (like it’s too darn slow to start up and could render faster, cf. Opera). But it does include three very fair critiques, I think:

1. Couldn’t patches be patches rather than mega-downloads?

2. Thunderbird should be renamed Firefox Mail for marketing reasons, and available as a bundled download so I can give newbies a single URL.

3. And, most, importantly, programs in the suite should share the GRE better.

FreeCiv 2.0 !!!

The following announcement is reported not just because it’s great news, but also because it will serve as a test of how frequently Eldest Child reads this blog:

Freeciv 2.0.0 has been released and is available for download.

Changelog is somewhat slashdotted, so I’ve reproduced it below:

======================
Welcome to Freeciv 2.0
======================

This is release 2.0.

Thanks again to all our developers, who continue to work so hard.

This release includes lots of changes, outlined below.  Those who
are interested in seeing the detailed changes should check the
ChangeLog file.

WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 1.14.2
 - Research cost has doubled, effects of science buildings doubled. SETI
   now improves Research Labs instead of giving free Research Labs to every
   city. Isaac Newton's College now improves all the player's universities.
 - New units: AWACS and Workers.
 - New option: national borders.  Units inside your borders do not cause
   unhappiness under Republic and Democracy.
 - It is no longer possible for one player to be in alliance with a player
   who is at war with another player you are allied with.
 - The Civ2 ruleset now has waste.  Default ruleset does not.
 - Incite costs changed, now cities closer to capital, with units and with
   buildings have much higher incite cost.
 - Killing a defending diplomat now costs you 1 movement point.
 - Units now have multiple, configurable veteran levels.
 - Team mates now pool their research. You may opt out and research
   individually by cancelling the 'Team' treaty.
 - Server has voting on commands and options. You need over 50% of votes.
 - When moving a unit from a transport on an ocean tile to a land tile,
   you lose all movement points.
 - You can specify a list of players that you would like to share victory
   with, using the 'endgame' command.
 - Nations added: Swiss, Afghanistan, Ethiopian, Assyrian, Columbian,
   Elvish, Galician, Hobbits, Indonesian, Kampuchean, Malaysian, Martian,
   Nigerian, Quebecois, Sumerian, Taiwanese, Austrian, Belgian, Phoenician
   and Mexican.
 - New wonder: The Eiffel Tower. Makes AIs love you and improves reputation.
 - The building requirements of several buildings have been changed.
 - The whale special is reduced to 2 food, 1 shield and 2 trade.
 - Settlers / Workers / Engineers can never get veterancy.
 - Trireme's high sea loss now considers veterancy level (green 50%,
   veteran 25%, hardened 5%, elite 0%) before being divided by 2 if you
   have Seafaring or 4 when you reach Navigation (previously only fixed
   at 50% before being divided).
 - Glacier terrain is now unsafe for land units (15% chance per turn of
   being lost). Also doesn't count as coastline for Trireme safety or Fish
   and Whale generation. Roads/railroads can be built but all units (worker
   too) get 15% chance per turn of being lost any way!
 - King Richard's Crusade is now made obsolete by Robotics (previously
   Industrialization).
 - Fixed tech costs based on the number of prerequisites of the tech
   in the tech tree.
 - Nations have preferred nations to fork off when civil war occurs.
 - AI is much improved, and does not use 'double-move' any more.
 - AI now conducts diplomacy with you (and against you).
 - New difficulty level: Novice.  It severely handicaps the AI players.
 - Smarter autoexplorer and autosettler code.
 - Modpack options vastly improved: You can customize buildings,
   add buildings as requirements to units, restrict technologies to certain
   nations, have split technology trees, gold upkeep for units, new units
   and terrain flags and lots of other options.  (This is still done by
   editing configuration files with a text editor.)
 - Fewer popups (eg choose the new government from the menu directly)
 - Alternative map topologies, e.g., real support for isometric and
   hexagonal maps and "donut" map wrapping.
 - Incomplete support for drawing civ3 graphics.  See the civ3gfx tileset.
 - Global observer can observe the entire game.
 - New method of settings map dimensions: Just use 'size'.
 - Modified map generators.
 - Initial units can be selected with a server option.
 - 'Home' key centers on your capital.
 - Drag and drop goto.
 - Player authentication with optional passwords.
 - You can start the server and set server options from the client.
 - You can meet with other players for 20 turns after your units have last
   met, and you can exchange embassies when meeting.
 - You can bind the server to a given IP on multihomed hosts.
 - New client dialog which uses multicast to find servers on your LAN.
 - Compress network traffic and send only a delta (diff) of the data.
 - GTK2 client can now run in fullscreen mode.
 - GTK2 is now the default client (the code base also features fully
   functional GTK1, Xaw and native Win32 clients).
 - Convert charsets as they are sent between client and server.  All data
   files are now in UTF-8.
 - New (and incompatible) metaserver.
 - New ALSA sound plugin.
 - The s(entry) command no longer doubles as a means to put units on
   boats - use the new l(oad) command instead. 
 - Many more (smaller) changes, and massive changes under the hood.

Firefox 1.0.3

Firefox issues another security update. See the Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3 Release Notes or just download the latest version.

Protect Yourself from Unwanted ActiveX Controls and Macromedia 'Persistent Local Shared Ojbects'

The world needs this: The indefatigable Ed Bott explains how to Protect yourself from unwanted ActiveX controls. (Although, in fact, cautious folk like me have already done the equivalent by manipulating our settings manually.)

Meanwhile, the really paranoid, will be worrying about persistent cookies set by Macromedia Flash applications. And will be turning off the persistent ‘Local Shared Objects’ with a fix from Macromedia. There’s even a neat Firefox extension called objection, which will allow you to control these in Firefox for Windows.

Firefox on Steriods

Firefox on steroids. Nothing the advanced user will not have done already, but a very nice step-by-step guide for the rest of the world.

Firefox 1.0.2

Firefox 1.0.2 — a security update.

Waiting for Sunbird

While waiting for Mozilla Sunbird to at least get to a more advanced beta stage, I’m still relying on my old trusty calendar program, Sidekick 98. And I really rely on my calendar because while I have a head for figures I have no head for dates.

Sidekick 98 has been temperamental lately, especially on my office computer, and I’ve wondered if that might be because that machine has less memory than my home machine, I run lots of things at once including memory hog wordperfect, and my calendar file must be enormous. If that’s right, possible solutions are to start a new file with less data (but that means a lot of manual copying of annual events and all of my life for the next N months) or move to the still-pretty-beta Sunbird (ditto on the copying) before it feels robust and full-featured enough to rely on.

Run Linux Under Windows

I’ve always thought that I would want to run windows under Linux, thus my interest in things like cygwin has always been sort of low.

But these Cooperative Linux folks seem set on making Linux-under-windows a viable idea. After all, “Cygwin is not a way to run native linux apps on Windows. You have to rebuild your application from source if you want to get it running on Windows.” But with cooperative linux, maybe not?

Dog on its hind legs, or something cool? I can’t quite tell, although it seems to me that Linux under Windows would not be nearly as robust as the other way around.

Firefox Security Update

Firefox 1.01 is available for download. It a security fix, and degrades performance on internationalized domain names — that, so far, most US web users won’t need — to protect against some types of misleading site names.

Saving Word Files as Wordperfect

Some time in the last two years those charming wonderful pro-competitive people at Microsoft have removed Word’s ability to save a file as Wordperfect. I rarely use Word, and if I need to read a Word file into WP I could always have WP do it for me, but I don’t like to be herded like this. Silently degrading my software’s capabilities is NOT NICE.

Fortunately, there’s Graham Mayor’s WordPerfect converter for Word which reinstates the old functionality.

A Great Rant About Software Design

Groupware Bad. Everyone in certain circles is going to link to this, so I almost didn’t, but then I figured that I seem to have an unusually diverse set of readers — legal, technical, political and others — so why not.

You have to love lines like,

If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

…which captures one of the problems here at UM: software that sells command and control for the sysops is much more likely be deployed than stuff that lets us actually do stuff.

As for this remark, I’m sure it will be quoted a lot:

So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

The last graph even strikes me as true.

(spotted via the insightful Many2Many social software blog)

Nvu Almost Ready for Prime Time

Nvu (N-view —> “new view”, geddit?), my favorite souped-up HTML editor is now in 1.0 Beta pre-Release 3 (Version 0.81).

Seems to work well, even though it’s not 1.0 yet.

One More for the Faculty Desktop

Thanks to a recommendation from Ed Bott, I’m adding Copernic Desktop Search to my list of what belongs on the faculty desktop.

Anything else I should be adding?

Firefox Exploit Update

That “fix” I blogged about yesterday for the Shmoo Group’s Firefox exploit gets unfixed when you close and re-open your browser.

Information on a more permanent but alas more complicated fix can be found at tech.life.blogged.

UPDATE: This item was originally posted at 7:22am this morning. Some time between then and now, Firefox posted an update which fixes the problem. Quick work! [For the windows users who wrote me with their worries, the file you want is: firefox-1.0.en-US.win32.installer.exe . Just download it, then run it.]

Linux's Main Hurdle

Joho the Blog: The Myth of MythTV

“Shouldn’t be a problem” in linux-talk means that it requires only one Linux Day to get up and running, where a Linux Day equals 8 hours of hacking by someone who knows linux inside out (Greg), 12 hours of “helpful suggestions” from a Windows user, and two pizzas.

You could write the same thing about Windows, only sometimes the problems are insoluble, but the selling point is that the problems tend to happen when you add something after the initial install.

If You Use Firefox You Need To Read This

Someone has come up with a Firefox exploit — one that doesn’t affect IE users!

You can find links to the details, at