April 2003 Entries

If you're a Mozilla developer Guide to the Mozilla string classes is a must read. It has just been updated.

The guide will attempt to document the plethora of string classes, and hopefully provide an answer to the age old question, "what string class should I use here?"

If you use a modern CSS-capable web browser, like Mozilla the pages of gemal.dk are now automaticlly printer-friendly.

This is done through the use of a print-media stylesheet! Just print the page or use Print Preview in your web browser to get the print styles on paper.

On the screenshot to the right you can see the print preview of the site. Notice that the site menu which normally appear at the right is gone. Click on the screenshot to get a larger version of it.

Technical stuff
The print stuff is done via the use of the following tag:

Gecko Browser Statistics for gemal.dk is now available.

You can also download a script that generates the Gecko statistics so you can see the stats for your own site. Download it here.

The hit rate of Gecko based browsers at gemal.dk is now 15%.

Gecko is the rendering engine inside web browser such as Mozilla and Netscape. A rendering engine is the core piece of software inside the browser that turns HTML code into a readable Web page.

Gecko features amazing support for open web standards and existing web content, is built from the ground up with security in mind, and is available on more than a dozen platforms - it is the clear choice for internet enabled applications. It's robust, full featured, secure and cross platform.

I weekenden holdt vores loge Stoffers Riddere arrangement. Og hvilket et!

Orienteringsløb/skattejagt i Dragørområdet kombineret med sandslotbygning, tidstælling, krabbefodbold, brunch osv. Kanon arrangement!

Om aftenen endte vi på Kellerdirk hvor
Madonna Jam spillede.

Billedet er taget med min Nokia 7650.

Der kommer flere billeder fra loge arrangementet snarest muligt på stoffersriddere.dk.

- Everything you need to know about Mozilla Branding
Mozilla.org's branding strategy. When to use "Mozilla Application Suite" and "Mozilla Thunderbird" and "Mozilla Firebird".

- Why Use Mozilla?
Almost all the reasons are listed here...

- The Amazing Netscape Fish Cam
View the large fish tank at Netscape. A true classic!

- Styling the Amazing Netscape Fish Cam Page
How to bring the old layer styled fishcam up to date with current web standards.

My Mozilla article is featured in the Lockergnome Webmaster Weekly.

Lockergnome (pronounced lah-ker-nohm) is Chris Pirillo and his digital gang who distribute personality-driven tech newsletters.

YABU - Yet Another BrowserSpy Update!

Email Address Verification Information
Verify the existance of an email address!

A sidebar with the latest postings to gemal.dk is now available to all Gecko based browsers which has sidebar support, such as Mozilla and Netscape 6/7. Konqueror also has support for sidebars.

You can see your current sidebars via the View -> Show/Hide -> Sidebar or just hit F9.

Gecko based browsers
Click the button and add the sidebar:

Opera users
Add gemal.dk sidebar to Opera

Internet Explorer users
Get a real browser like Mozilla.

Read more about sidebars:
- at netscape.com
- at devedge.netscape.com

Been seeing a couple of Movies lately:

People I Know
Dull movie. The plot is OK but then it fates into nothing. Ending in nothing.



Daredevil
I thought that bad movies about wanna-be superheros was something in the past. Apparently not. My favorite quote is when Daredevil and Elektra Natchios are standing on top of a building with the view of the dark and polluted industrial city and Elektra says "This is soo beautiful".

A short recipe for building Phoenix/Firebird on OpenBSD

Mozilla checkins:
- Memory cache should be based on amount of physical RAM: This should speed up Mozilla since it allows the cache to use a lot more memory than previously.
- CRAM-MD5 authentication

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has stopped providing funding for a project which involves OpenBSD, apparently because OpenBSD lead developer Theo de Raadt made statements which could be considered anti-war to a Canadian newspaper.

The grant from DARPA to fund the POSSE project has been canceled.

Read more:
- The Emerging DARPA Reasoning
- OpenBSD loses funding due to anti-war statements
- DARPA pulls OpenBSD funding

New version of SecClab has been released. Secclab is a XPCOM Component that implements some PKI functions.

This new version implements form-signing in Netscape 7.0, 7.01 and 7.02, Mozilla 1.0.1, Mozilla >=1.1 and Phoenix.

Just finished watching Bowling for Columbine
What a documentary! It's great. 5 stars of of 5.

In a breathtaking opening, he reminds us that United States armed the terrorists they are fighting today. Then, he wonders about the reasons of this violence. Is it rock music (we meet singer Marilyn Manson), violent films or history? No, it's simply fear. Moore proceeds in a scientific way throughout the film, i.e. he puts forward hypotheses and then tries to check them by collecting various testimonies. A highlight is the interview of the brother of one of the terrorists of the Oklahoma City bombing who used his farm as a lab to create homemade bombs. Review

A film to watch urgently, as a testimony to the state of chaos in the U.S.

Do yourself a favor and read some of the stuff at bowlingforcolumbine.com

Americans once again prove themselves to be some of the most stupid of all the humans who walk the Earth.

Snapshot of a mother breast-feeding her child = kiddie porn?

Hero is a cool cool movie. The fighting in this movie is really cool and it's a visually experience. Visually the movie is a tour de force with some of the most beautiful cinematography ever committed to film.

The following was posted to the OJI newsgroup:

Sun's Java Plugin team and Browser Java team have investigated a lot of bugs which related to Java, and focus on OJI/Liveconnect 's stability and performance.

We have blueprint of redesign and the solution is to achieve the following three goals:

- Prepare to Meet Thy Doom
- Mozilla status update
- Tutorial: Creating a Mozilla Extension
- Customize Mozilla for multi-user community
- Why Am I Getting All This Spam?

BrowserSpy can now tell you the number of CD ROM drives you have, the CD ROM Drive letters and can also try to open the CD ROM drives!
Internet Explorer only

Check it out!

The purpose of this document is to describe, from a very high-level viewpoint, the start of the document loading process. We start with the request to load a particular link in a particular window, and proceed up to the point at which the data stream is dispatched to the proper handler. The final goal is to find the correct stream listener to pump the data into when necko calls OnDataAvailable (e.g., we may find the HTML parser as the stream listener to give the data to).

Read the article: Document Loading: From Load Start to Finding a Handler

The new name for the Mozilla based stand alone web browser Phoenix is Firebird
The new name for the Mozilla based stand alone email client Minotaur is Thunderbird

I'd really hoped for just Mozilla Navigator and Mozilla Mail which would be soo much easier! Mozilla doesn't seem to think PR.
"You have to download Firebird and/or Minotaur....
I just doesn't sound right.

"You have to download Mozilla Mail...
would be soo much better. Everybody would know what you were refering to.

Update:
The components are gonna be called:
- the Mozilla Firebird browser
- the Mozilla Thunderbird email client

Logo's:
Mozilla Firebird/Thunderbird Logos Version

Links of the weekend:
- Open-source team fights buffer overflows
- IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office
- A Corporate-Friendly Makeover for Open-Source IM
- Can open source win big business?
- Mother of invention: Mosaic gets ready to celebrate its 10th anniversary

Headers Information
Check the headers that your client sends.

Made it onto Netscape DevEdge! Read the article

Linky version 1.5.0 has been released!

Install it here.

Linky 1.5.0 is a complete rewrite with many new features:
- Select links Dialog
- Preferences panel
- Dupe URL detecter (will remove all dupes URL's)
- Option to install into Personal Chrome folder

And all the cool features from the last version:
- Opens all links in a selection in new tabs or windows
- Finds and opens link in plain text in a new tab or window
- Opens all links on page in new tabs or windows
- Open all links that appears to be linking to an image in new tabs or
windows
- Shows all links that appears to be linking to an image in one new tab
or window
- Open all links that appears to be linking to an image in one new tab
or window

Screenshots here

Tested and works with Mozilla and Phoenix!

I almost got slashdotted. Here are some statistics for gemal.dk:

Apr 2003
48.600 visits - 139.420 hits

Mar 2003 totals
52.477 visits - 304.729 hits

Feb 2003 totals
45.310 visits - 295.776 hits

Statistics generated by Webalizer.

My article made it to Slashdot.

Also remember to check out my Mozilla and Phoenix extension Linky. Linky is a very simple addon that makes it possible to open links and pictures in tabs or windows via the context menu.

If you would like a rich-text editor in your web application, you should read the Rich-Text Editing in Mozilla article.

Mozilla 1.3 introduces Midas, an implementation of Microsoft Internet Explorer's designMode feature. The version of Midas in Mozilla 1.3 supports the designMode feature which turns HTML documents into rich-text editors.

My latest article is Using Mozilla in testing and debugging web sites where I describe some very cool features in Mozilla which will enable you to quickly find and debug errors in your web site and web applications.

For example the JavaScript Console, Cookie Manager, View Selection Source, JavaScript Debugger, HTTP Headers, etc...

So go ahead and read it!

OpenOffice gets programming kit
AOL asks FCC to lift IM restriction
Phoenix rises from Mozilla's ashes
Mozilla development roadmap

Software updates:
- SecureCRT 4.0.5
- Sun Java JRE 1.4.2 - beta
- OpenOffice.org Developer Release 644_m7
- QuickTime 6.1
- WinAmp 2.90

Instituttet for Fremtidsforskning har normalt nogle meget spændende artikler, som jeg nogle gange læser. Men nu er jeg simpelthen så træt af dem!

Deres site virker kun med Internet Explorer! Det er der sgu ikke meget fremtid i. Jeg har nu i lang tid prøvet at få dem til at rette det, men de nægter åbenbart. Jeg har kontaktet dem et par gange, men jeg hører aldrig noget fra dem og de har ikke rettet noget.

Grunden til at man ikke kan logge ind med Mozilla og andre Gecko baseret browser skyldes en simpel JavaScript fejl:

Error: reklame is not defined
Source File: http://www.cifs.dk/
Line: 105

De har følgende:
<div id="reklame">

hvorefter de prøver følgende:
reklame.style.visibility ="hidden";

Hello! Har de aldrig hørt om getElementById? Det ser ud til at det hele kunne fixes med:
document.getElementById("reklame").style.visibility ="hidden";

De skriver selv på deres site:
Hver dag træffer virksomheder og organisationer valg. Strategiske valg, der ofte skal træffes hurtigt, og som har stor betydning for fremtiden.

Jeg tror deres beslutning omkring deres website var lige lovlig hurtig. Jeg håber ikke at de har fået et webfirma til at lavet det. I såfald skulle de få et professionelt webfirma til at lave det. Et webfirma for hvem nutidens og fremtidens webstandarder betyder noget.

Jeg troede ellers open source og lign var noget som man også i fremtiden skulle bruge og forholde sig til, men det er åbenbart forkert. Måske regner de bare med at Microsoft overtager verden.

Min arbejdsgiver, TDC, har netop lanceret deres nye site hvor alting selvfølgeligt fungerer i alle browsere, det være sig Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape og Opera. Det er faktisk ikke særligt svært. Man skal faktisk bare kode korrekt. Hvis man koder korrekt, dvs efter gældende internet standarder, vil ens site helt automatisk virke i alle nyere browsere, dvs. dem der overholder W3C's DOM.

Jeg kan forstå at man afstår fra at supporte Netscape 4.x og Internet Explorer 3 pga sikkerhedsmæssige ting samt det store arbejde det er at få disse meget gamle browsere til at spille. Men at man næger Netscape og Mozilla brugere adgang til instituttet's website er simpelthen for dårligt!

Ikke overraskende så validere deres site overhovedet ikke. TDC's site validerer fint.

Om igen Instituttet for Fremtidsforskning!

Hvis du også syntes det er noget møj så send dem en mail

Unpatched IE security holes
There are currently 14 unpatched vulnerabilities.

101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot
101 things that one can do with the Mozilla browser component (version 1.2) that one cannot do with IE (version 6.0).

Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor
IE5+/Mozilla 1.3+ for all rich-text features to function properly.

Mozilla 1.4 Alpha Released - Release notes

What's new:
- Mozilla 1.4 contains about 1000 new bugfixes, including changes to improve performance, stability, web site compatability, standards support, and usability.
- Mozilla's bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.
- Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
- Mozilla now has smooth scrolling. It is disabled by default. To enable it, use about:config to add the boolean preference general.smoothScroll with a value of true. To disable smooth scrolling, set the value of the pref to false.
- Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a "delete junk mail" menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
- Pop-up blocking has been streamlined to improve usability.
- XPInstall and theme install for Mac OS X has been restored.