Archive for the 'Software' CategoryPage 2 of 8

Fixing tab annoyances in Firefox 2.0

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Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 1 month ago
in Browsers, Firefox, Unix / Linux / *BSD software and Windows software
. 9 Comments

Firefox 2.0 has been out for a while, and the response to it has been mostly positive.

However, there were a couple of changes to how tabs work, and I, for one, didn’t like them at all. Looking around, I found the solution to one of them, and the other one was pretty easy to figure out.

Here’s the changes, and how to “undo” them:

1- “X” close button on every tab

This one, to me, qualifies for the “What were they thinking?” award. :) Don’t people know that you can close any tab simply by middle-clicking on it (yes, even on Linux)? Not to mention that the “X” button is both harder to click on than the entire tab, and makes it easy to close tabs by mistake, when you just wanted to select it? In other words, there’s already an easy way, and they add a more difficult way, which, besides, can easy lead to mistakes?

Sigh. Sorry about the rant. :)

Fix: open about:config, look for browser.tabs.closeButtons, and set it to 2 (no close buttons) or 3 (a single close button on the right of the tabs, like in previous Firefoxes - though, again, middle-click makes it useless).

2- tabs don’t get smaller past a certain point; if you have too many, you need to scroll the tab bar to see them all

Maybe I’m weird, but I have tab folders with 10-15 bookmarks of a particular subject, and I like to open them all, with a single click, daily. In Firefox 1.x, the tabs would get as small as they needed to be, to fit in the window. Now, they don’t get smaller than a certain size, and force the user to scroll.

To me, this is annoying. I haven’t found an option to completely disable this behavior, but I can make it virtually go away by reducing the minimum tab width to a much smaller value.

Fix: open about:config, and change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to a much smaller value, like 1.

AWStats fix for Portuguese search engines

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Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 1 month ago
in Unix / Linux / *BSD software and World Wide Web
. 2 Comments

If, like me, you use the current CVS version of AWStats, you may have found that, since they recently added Sapo to its list of known search engines, if your web site is located in Portugal (like mine are), your top search query is, suddenly, “Resumo“. Even if your site is in English. :shock:

“Resumo” is, in this context, Portuguese for “short version“, and it’s included by default in all Sapo queries. But why is this happening?

I’ve tracked it down to an AWStats bug, which I reported to the author, along with a patch. That patch, in addition to fixing that problem, also adds support for Clix queries. For more details, including the patch itself, please visit the SourceForge page for this bug.

WordPress 2.0.5 is out

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by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 1 month ago
in Blogging, Blogging software and Unix / Linux / *BSD software
. 0 Comments

As usual, get it from the usual place, and follow the instructions if you’re upgrading from a previous version. I’ve just upgraded 11 blogs in about a minute (most of which was spent backing up the databases and the files, in case Something Bad ™ happened).

List of changes here.

Apparently, there’s a new problem when running on a server with FastCGI installed: it may give a 500 error in some cases. If that’s your situation, there’s a workaround.

Flash 9 for Linux (beta) is finally available

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Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 1 month ago
in Browsers and Unix / Linux / *BSD software
. 0 Comments

(seen on ruimoura.net)

At last! Until recently, the newest version was Flash 7, which is only a couple of years old. But now you can download the Flash 9 beta, which is working perfectly here (SUSE 10.1)!

Now I can enter TotalWar.com again! :)

EDIT: just switched back to Flash 7. Some pages, such as this one, made the browser hang for several seconds each time I switched to that tab - and that’s in a fast computer. It seems the “beta” label is well deserved. :(

Reading blogs away from the computer

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 1 month ago
in Blogging, Email, Mobile phones, Mobile phones software and PDAs
. 8 Comments

Now that I work at home (and yes, I’ve been incredibly lazy… where are the new posts? ahem… any day now :)), I’ve discovered something about myself: I don’t like to read stuff on my computer.

Sure, I do a lot of that, anyway, but, for instance, there are a lot of blogs that I have subscribed in Bloglines… only I usually skip them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the content of those blogs - I do. I simply tend, repeatedly, to find excuses, other things I’d rather do at the time, and so on. However, I love to read them in other places - in bed, in a café, and so on. Whenever I’m alone, with nothing to do, and away from a computer.

Reading them in a mobile phone or PDA, then, is the logical answer (a laptop is still much too “PC-like”, with all its myriad distractions; when you can do everything, sometimes it’s hard to focus on just what you need to actually do). I currently use a Nokia 6630, which I’ve had for more than a year. I’ve tried several aggregators, and also the mobile Bloglines, which is accessed through a web browser such as Opera, and, while they work well, they’re too slow and cumbersome for my tastes. Therefore, I used a combination of newspipe (to convert posts from feeds to email messages) and Profimail (to access a mailbox through IMAP). Recently, I’ve dumped newspipe for rss2email, for reasons I’ll mention in a future post, and that’s what I have right now.

I’ve been considering other possibilities, though. As I said, a laptop isn’t a good idea here. I’d mostly like something a little bigger than the 6630, with a larger and better screen, and possibly a QWERTY keyboard (to do annotations and so on). The Nokia E61 seems to fit the bill (and it supports Wi-Fi, which would save me a lot of money in phone bills), though I wouldn’t like to spend too much money (after all, it’s mostly a luxury - I can keep using the 6630, or even battle my distaste for reading on the PC). A PocketPC (are they still called that, these days?) PDA might also do the trick, though the ones I saw recently would cost an arm and a leg (really, 800 euros!? what are they thinking?).

So, any suggestions / tips? :)

ProfiMail and the Gmail "untrusted certificate"

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 4 months ago
in Email, Mobile phones and Mobile phones software
. 5 Comments

If you read your email on a Series 60 phone, you probably use ProfiMail, a very nice mobile email client.

However, when you configure it to access a Gmail account, you will always get the “This site uses an untrusted certificate” message. Quite annoying, since it requires 2 key presses to pass. Every single time. There’s no option for “I know, just ignore it from now on”.

The cause of the problem is that Series 60 phones, much like web browsers, have a list of trusted root certificates, and the one Gmail uses, from Equifax, isn’t in it.

How to fix it? I search around, and didn’t find a single page with instructions on how to solve this thing. But, by combining this and this, I was able to remove that annoying prompt for good.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Using the phone’s browser (Opera also works), browse to http://www.ocasta.co.uk/cert.html. Click on the only link on that page.
  • It should prompt you to install the certificate. Accept it.
  • It should ask you what you want to trust the certificate for. Choose “Internet”.

This works on my Nokia 6630. Other phones may simply install the certificate, after which you have to go to Settings, Security, Certificate Management, and set the new Equifax certificate as “Trusted”.

Firefox tip: closing tabs with middle-click on Linux

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 4 months ago
in Browsers, Firefox and Unix / Linux / *BSD software
. 7 Comments

In Firefox, on Windows, it’s quite useful to be able to close tabs by middle-clicking on them. But on Linux, by default, what middle-click does (either on the tab or on the main page display) is to open whatever is on the clipboard in the current tab.

But you may prefer middle-click to work as in the Windows version. If so, just open about:config, then search for

middlemouse.contentLoadURL

and change it to False. Simple as that.

Assorted new releases

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 5 months ago
in Browsers, Instant Messaging, Unix / Linux / *BSD software and Windows software
. 1 Comment

First, Windows Live Messenger (formely MSN Messenger) is out.

I’ve only tried it out for a minute, and all of my contacts were still using MSN Messenger 7.5. Still full of ads, but there’s a Mess.be patch to remove them, and tinker with it, which I haven’t installed yet, but I’ve used the MSN 7.5 version for months, and it made it bearable. :)

One new feature: you can talk to people while “appearing offline”, now. Of course, they’ll instantly realize that you aren’t really offline…

Second, Opera 9 is finally out. Lots of new stuff to explore. It passes the ACID2 test, and is still by far the fastest modern browser in the world. Firefox is still my primary browser, but Opera is a joy to use. Also (via Pedro Fonseca), a list of 10 features you’ll find only in Opera. Note that all of them are for version 8.0 - the new version has even more unique features.

Windows Live Messenger final: tomorrow?

Published
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Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 5 months ago
in Instant Messaging and Windows software
. 0 Comments

According to mess.be, yes.

If you don’t know about it, it’s the next version of the software previously known as “MSN Messenger”, which most Portuguese refer to as either “MSN” or “Messenger”, never realizing that MSN is something else, and that there are other messengers. :)

And here are some of its new features, and some screenshots, too.

WordPress 2.0.3 and bugs

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 5 months ago
in Blogging and Unix / Linux / *BSD software
. 2 Comments

Yesterday, I updated my blogs to WordPress 2.0.3, the latest version. Today, when editing one of my comments, I discovered an annoying bug: it added escape characters (backslashes) to all quotes or apostrophes. The only way to get the comment “right” was to copy it to the clipboard, delete it and add it again… which would be even more annoying if it wasn’t the most recent comment. It also added some weird “are you sure?” dialogs when editing comments.

So, I searched around, and there’s a plugin to solve these 2.0.3 annoyances (and which will deactivate itself automatically if the version isn’t 2.0.3). It’s called WordPress 2.0.3 Tuneup, and it fixes:

* #2760 “Are you sure?” dialog for comment editing no longer appears
* #2761 “Are you sure?” dialog no longer adds slashes to info passed through it
* #2764 After editing a comment, you are properly redirected back to your original location
* #2776 New in version 0.2: “Are you sure?” dialog for user editing no longer appears
* #2782 New in version 0.3: “Are you sure?” dialog for link editing no longer appears
* #2806 New in version 0.4: Deletion of links works when JavaScript is turned off

I’m using it now, and it’s working great.

Drupal 4.7

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 7 months ago
in Unix / Linux / *BSD software and World Wide Web
. 0 Comments

Yup, it’s out. A lot of interesting stuff, too.

My first community, which no longer exists, used Drupal, some years ago. It’s a pretty powerful system, with lots of options, tons of plugins and themes, sane defaults, and pretty easy to use.

I think I’ll play with the new version in the next couple of days… I don’t know whether I’ll actually use it for something, or just play with it. We’ll see.

Filtering "evil" popup ads with Squid

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 7 months ago
in Software, Unix / Linux / *BSD software and World Wide Web
. 3 Comments

Sometimes, using AdBlock in Firefox may be too restrictive; by default, it blocks all ads, and you may just want to block the annoying ones: popups.
Firefox blocks them quite well, but it’s not perfect; some ad services have found ways to get around the blocker.

In this particular situation, I found that denying, in my Squid proxy server, the ad services which bypass the popup blocker, works very well.
This has the advantage of blocking them for a complete network, instead of just one PC, too. And it’s independent of browsers.

Popups are already annoying enough; to make them work around a popup blocker (which means that the user really doesn’t want to see them) is evil. So, the fact that these companies’ ads are blocked even before they get to the PCs is a nice bonus. :)

Here’s my current list, which I block using dstdomain in squid.conf:

.zedo.com
.paypopunder.com
.t2t2.com
.profredirect.com
.dellonlinedirectly.com
.farssearch.net
.searchs123.com
.freefa.net
.clicksor.com
.paypopup.com
.adserver.com
.yieldmanager.com
.fastclick.net
.tribalfusion.com

Whenever I see a popup ad, I just add its domain to the list. As you can see, it’s not huge - Firefox works quite well.
Enjoy. :)

EDIT: I’m not included popups which Firefox 1.5.x does block, or any other kind of ads. I can live with those - if not, I’d be using AdBlock.

EDIT 2: I’ll be updating this post whenever I find new ones. I’ve already added 2 domains since I wrote this post. :)

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal