Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
Firefox 2.x has a built in session manager. When the browser is restarted after a crash, it re-opens every window/tab that was open before the crash. This behaviour is very annoying to me, as I never properly close Firefox, but always just halt my machine.
If you want to disable session managing in Firefox, type about:config in the URL bar. Next search for the ‘browser.sessionstore.enabled‘ key and double click it so it’s set to ‘false‘.
If you’re running the Tab Mix Plus extension, you’ll also want to disable its session management in the Tab Mix Plus options dialog (Tools → Tab Mix Plus Options → Sessions → Disable ‘Enable Session Manager’).
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
Interesting review of a book:
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why: A review.
Thus, the KJV [King James Version of the bible] consists of Jesus’ words twice refracted through the prism of translation. Second, Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was based on handwritten copies of copies of copies of copies, etc., going back over a millennium, and today is considered one of the poorer Greek New Testaments.
[…]
Many people have a vague notion that all the original biblical texts are preserved in vaults somewhere, and translators work from those original texts. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. The earliest surviving versions of the gospels are handwritten copies dating from centuries after the original texts were written. Also, we don’t just have a single version of each gospel; we have many versions, and even more fragments. The trouble is, none of the versions agree with each other. As Ehrman puts it, there are more points of disagreement between manuscripts than there are words in the Gospels.
[…]
Also, we may have a document from the fourth century and one from the eighth; but the latter might have been copied from a second-century document, making it closer to the original.
And yet, some religious people base their entire faith on the Bible, and regularly use it to deprive other people of the right to live their life the way they want to. Mankind’s lack of intellect sometimes really amazes me.
Sunday, July 15th, 2007
Bad vista!.
Bad Vista blog.
Thanks Mafkees. :-)
Friday, July 13th, 2007
Gravitronic lets us know that a patch that implements namespaces in PHP has now been committed.
The last time I took a look at the roadmap for PHP6, it was still undecided if namespaces would make the cut. Seems like they have now (although they could still revert the commit, like they did with namespaces in PHP5 if I recall correctly).
The main idea of the proposal is to attack one target and this target only – the Super_Long_Really_Annoying_Enormous_Class_Names that lately became the bane of big project developer. All other things are considered secondary to this goal – no attempt to make some different include model, packaging model, etc.
— Namespaces – can we keep it simple?
Some examples of how it currently works:
Defining namespaces
Referring by full namespace name
Importing
Though I can't quite put my finger on it, it somehow still seems like a bolt-on to me. Ah well, better than nothing, right?
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Here’s a quick list of the Firefox extensions I’m currently using:
- CookieSafe
Deny/allow cookies per-site.
- DOM Inspector
Inspect the DOM tree. Useful for debugging Javascript stuff.
- Download statusbar
No more Downloads pop-ups. This extension puts all your downloads in a bar in the bottom of the window.
- Firebug
This extension shouldn’t be missing from your firefox plugins list if you’re a web developer. It does too many useful things to list here. Just get it.
- FireFoxMenuButtons
Add menu-buttons to the Customize Toolbar for often-used menu items.
- FlashBlock (disabled)
Block Flash from playing unless you click on the flash movie. This helps a lot if your browser crashes a lot due to Flash. My firefox never crashes, unless I visit a site that requires Flash.
- HTML Validator
Shows a little icon in your status bar that shows if the current site validates as valid HTML. Doesn’t require an internet connection but uses HTML Tidy.
- Link evaluator
Check if all the links on the current page are valid.
- Live HTTP Headers
Spy on the headers sent and received by Firefox.
- Media Player Connectivity
Play media in stand-alone movie players. Ideal for Linux where media players can’t be embedded.
- NoScript
Disable/Enable Javascript per-site. Good for security.
- ScrapBook
Keep offline copies of websites.
- Tab Mix Plus
Extra Tab settings.
- URLParams
Allows web developers to easily modify HTML forms (including hidden fields). Ideal for quick and easy testing of web forms.
- View Cookies
Display cookie information in the View Page Info dialog.
- View dependencies
View all Link Rel elemens in a page, such as images, CSS, Javascript, etc.
- View Source With
Edit Forms and stuff in your favorite editor. Also doubles as ‘Open with…’ functionality.
- Web Developer
Handy tool with lots of stuff for web deverlopers.
Monday, July 9th, 2007
If you want Vim to recognise files with other extensions as a certain syntax, this tip is for you. For instance, many people name their include files in PHP .inc (Coincidentally, not a very smart thing to do, but anyway). But Vim won’t recognise files with the .inc extension as PHP. Here’s how to deal with that:
Edit your .vimrc and add the following lines:
if has("autocmd")
augroup php
autocmd BufRead *.inc set filetype=php
augroup END
endif
This will make Vim recognise .inc files as PHP files and treat them accordingly (syntax highlighting and whatever else you’ve set Vim up to do with PHP files).
Security note: It’s not a good idea to name files that will be included ‘.inc’. Bad configuration of your webserver may make the source of those file available unparsed through your webserver. Either name them .inc.php, or don’t place them in a dir under your webroot.
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Unauthorized spying on U.S. citizens’ international tele-communications will continue, as an appeals court in Cincinnati dismissed the case brought against the Bush administration to stop the surveillance activity.
The illegal wiretapping program was authorized by Bush after the 9/11 events and allows the monitoring of (amongst others?) international telephone calls e-mail.
“The Bush administration is basically left free to violate an act of congress with impunity – the foreign intelligence surveillance act, which congress adopted over 30 years ago to prevent the executive from engaging in precisely this kind of unchecked surveillance,” Goodman [ACLU] said.
“They are effectively saying you can’t show that you’ve been wiretapped and you’ll never be able to show that you’ve been wiretapped because the whole thing is so secret.”
The reason the case was thrown out: The appeals court panel ruled that the groups and individuals (ACLU on behalf of other groups including lawyers, journalists and scholars) who brought the lawsuit did not have the legal right to bring the challenge. Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, a Sixth Circuit judge (appointed by Bush naturally), said: “The plaintiffs failed to show they were subject to the surveillance and therefore do not have standing for their claims.”
Kind of hard for the people that do have standings for their claims to sue, as basically everything from McDonald’s coffee-recipe to how many sheets of toilet paper Bush uses on the toilet has been classified under the National Security/Terrorism Threat strawman. So, if you want to sue, it has to be you who they’ve been spying on or the case will get dismissed. But you can’t know you’re being spied on, since everything is classified.
Land of the Free indeed.
Sunday, July 8th, 2007
My mom recently bought a new budget-laptop that came installed with Microsoft Windows Vista. Now, I’m no Microsoft fan, especially not when it comes to Windows, but that’s just me. It’s perfectly fine for my mom and non-power users in general. I basically try to spend the smallest amount of time in Windows as I can. I’ve got a Windows 2000 machine at work, for billing my hours (yeah, I guess my work couldn’t afford a decent billing system that wasn’t created at Windows-R-Us) and I occasionally help my parents out with their Windows machines. It’s not too bad, as long as I don’t have to spend too much time in it.
Since Windows 98, there’s been a steady growth in quality in Windows. 98 Pretty much sucked, 2000 was reasonable and XP was very decent. But everything’s gone down the drain with Vista. It’s amazing how many leaps back an Operating System can make in so much time. I’d already heard how bad Vista was, but it really blew my brain. I’ve only spend, like, an hour on it, setting it up and (un)installing various applications, but here are some of the things I noticed straight away:
- Slow
My Deity, this Operating System is slow! I mean, sure, this is a budget PC with just a 1.8Ghz processor and 1Gb of memory, but come on! There wasn’t a moment when this machine wasn’t swapping like crazy, and all I was doing was updating the virus program and installing Mozilla Thunderbird. That’s it! Two tasks, and Vista grinds to a halt. Bye bye multitasking, hello 1992! My mom’s old machine was a 300Mhz/380Mb machine running Windows 2000, and it was much, much faster than Vista on her new machine. Unacceptable! Even my MOM thought it was slow, and she was used to a 300Mhz machine!
- Annoying security
The security on this thing is annoying. Just about anything you do causes the screen to darken and a pop-up to appear saying how evil running applications is and how you should be careful, etc, etc. Hello?! We’re just running a setup program that wasn’t even downloaded off the Internet! Improving security wouldn’t have been that hard. Simply make every program that could possibly download anything from the internet (browsers, chat programs, email clients) download all their stuff to a separate ‘download’ folder, and then warn the user when running something from this folder.
- Accounts
Unless I’m terribly blind and/or mistaken, there are no separate accounts anymore in Super Vista Home Basic Anniversary Edition. I had kind of expected better security of Vista, and most notably, easier account separation so the n00bs could also understand it. Something easy such as installing ‘dangerous’ programs (Internet Explorer, Outlook) as separate users with separate passwords and then allowing the ‘default’ user to execute these programs as that user without a password. That would give users a fair amount of protection against not just viruses but also spyware and other nasties. But there’s nothing like that at all, and you can’t even build your own setup, like I was used to under Windows 2000. That’s a bit of a shame. Or totally pathetic, actually. I guess it’s back to Windows 95.
After about one hour of working with it, Vista was driving me insane. Most versions of windows have done so, but usually only after I’ve had to work with them all day long or when I have to install new hardware or do something totally unexpected such as trying out a new application. Vista had me up the wall in less than an hour. Impressive.
There’s only one conclusion: I’m installing 2000 again or perhaps get my hands on a second hand XP version (I’m already looking forward to the Gestappo-like activation). Vista’s as bad as everybody said it was. Vista’s bad, even for a Microsoft product. Wow.
Thursday, July 5th, 2007
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We are proud of the diversity of content in our journal, covering Python User Groups from around the world, conferences and other events, open-source projects and the use of Python in commercial organisations.
Thursday, July 5th, 2007
Why is it that so many media players omit the stop button in their interfaces? I guess I missed the meeting where it was decided that the stop button was useless and shouldn’t be featured in players any more. A stop button is not useless, and not having one is very annoying because:
- I often have to walk away from the PC and if there was a nice song playing, I want to hear it from the start again. Media players that don’t have a stop button don’t allow me to simply restart the song by pressing the stop button and the play button. I’ll have to unpause the song and drag the progress meter back to the starting position (which often doesn’t work correctly in players) or I have to skip to the next song and then skip backwards, or I have to double click the song to play it from the beginning (which doesn’t work in a lot of players either).
- I listen to radio streams a lot and when I have to leave the PC for a moment, I’ll usually stop the stream. Now, I could use the pause button to do that, of course, but the problem is that streams are always buffered. So after unpausing the stream playback, it’ll play a small buffered bit of the stream and then stop playback and reconnect to the stream. Most media players I’ve encountered don’t even do this correctly, as they usually skip to the next radio station in my playlist.
- When I really like a song, I’d like to listen to it a couple of times straight away. With a stop button, I could just stop and start the song so that it starts playing again from the beginning.
What’s the big problem with providing a stop button? I guess developers don’t see the added value or something. And when you write a patch for the player so that it does contain a media player, the developers won’t accept it because they don’t think it adds anything. Well, obviously they’re wrong since there’s somebody that took the time to create a patch for it.
Considering the enormous amount of media players out there, it’s strange that there isn’t a single player that’s really really good. I’ve tried them all, and they’ve all got their defects. Either they don’t have a stop button, they’re too slow when they need to read my music collection, the playlist management sucks, don’t do streaming audio, etc.
Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to keep on trying every new media player that pops up until I find one that does get the job done.
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