June 2003 Entries

Microsoft may have unwittingly started a revolt against its Internet Explorer (IE) browser by discontinuing it as a standalone product and blurring the future of the current version, IE 6. Earlier this month, Microsoft admitted it would not release any new versions of IE as a standalone browser. Instead, the software giant said that the next version of IE will be an integrated part of the Windows operating system. The move has led to unrest among companies that rely on their customers to access services over the Internet and led some analysts to conclude that IE's virtual monopoly and status as the de-facto browser standard is about to come to an end.
Microsoft may be scoring own goal with IE plans

Mozilla 1.4 released!. Read the Release notes.

Netscape 7.1 is also released! Read much more about it at DevEdege.

Got a lot of exercise this weekend. Biked from Østerbro to Allerød and back. Around 29km (18 miles) each way. We also needed it after eating a huge ice cream at the famous Lydolphs Isbar Fridag. You get huge and very cheap ice creams. But there's always a queue. We had to queue 20 minutes to get the ice cream.

I was trying to fix my mother in law's PC. It's a Compaq and it was getting blue screen of death BSOD once in a while while starting up. It was running Microsoft Windows 98 so I though that I could just reinstall it. So I started to install Windows XP. First off course removing the old Windows 98 using a command prompt. I booted using the very good boot disk from bootdisk.com.

Everything when OK until I rebooted. BSOD. Damn... so it wasn't Windows 98 or a faulty driver that was the cause of the BSOD. I even tried removing both the sound card and the modem and the printer. Still BSOD but only when you first started the PC. After getting the BSOD you can just reboot and it started perfectly. Weird. Plain weird.

Could it be due to faulty RAM? Faulty motherboard? Dunno. Your guess is as good as mine.

More problems
The printer was a HP LaserJet 3100, which isn't supported by Windows XP. You can't even download drivers from their website. You have to order a CD-ROM with the drivers. Well after a bit of searching I finally found a place to download the driver.

The modem give me huge problems. I couldn't get a dial tone. It's a SupraExpress 56i Pro modem but Windows XP detected it as a Blue Sonic modem. I just couldn't get it to work. I tried everything. Removing it, reinstalling it, installing a standard 56K modem. Nothing worked. I simple gave up. Now I'm gonna find an old modem they can have.

Movie
Sunday afternoon we went a saw Rabbit-Proof Fence. Great great movie!



Three little girls. Snatched from their mothers' arms. Spirited 1,500 miles away. Denied their very identity. Forced to adapt to a strange new world. They will attempt the impossible. A daring escape. A run from the authorities. An epic journey across an unforgiving landscape that will test their very will to survive. Their only resources, tenacity, determination, ingenuity and each other. Their one hope, find the rabbit-proof fence that might just guide them home. A true story.

They actually did these "kidnapping" of aboriginal girls up until the 1970. Scary! Read some of the comments made about the movie.

Then we ate at Guldanden which is a great place for Sunday dinner. They got a great deal on a dinner. DKK 95,- ($14) for the diece of the day on Sundays. DKK 300,- ($46) for a dinner for two with wine and beer and really nice snacks and appetizer.

These are the weekend's update to the software that I use:
- Miranda IM v0.3
- Macromedia Shockwave Player v8.5.1.106
- Sun Java JRE v1.4.2
- Google Toolbar v2.0 beta
- BSPlayer v0.86.499

Netscape 7.1 has been released!

The Netscape pages hasn't ben updated yet!

UPDATE:
The link doesn't work anymore! But Netscape 7.1 is coming out soon.

Whenever you create a new profile with Mozilla an extra subdirectory (blablabla.slt) is added. This is for security reasons. This way hackers can't take advantage of a predefined location for a Mozilla profile. For more information see bug 56002.

Anyways... Sometimes it's a pain having these .slt subdirectories added. Network administrator or when you try to sync two profiles on different PC's.

So here's the solution:
Using a Command Prompt you can easily create a new profile without adding the .slt directory. This is done using the -CreateProfile command argument. But first a bit of magic!

Being part of the Mozilla project is really cool. There's a constant improvement in the application! Internet Explorer is a great browser too, but it havn't really improved much lately. The Internet Explorer team seem to be figting security breaches, etc. Mozilla on the other hand, build on a secure foundation, keep improving the browser. Making it faster, smaller and cooler!

Here are some of the checkins to Mozilla made this morning:
- leaking GDIs when table cell contains an image
- Freetype code leaks all over
- XBL needs better URLs and line numbers Fixes stuff like this: "chrome://bar.xml#whatever (getter)"
- nsImageLoadingContent shouldn't malloc as much
- Spring cleaning of unused XPCOM code
- Cookie leak regression

You can always see all of the checkins from the last 24 hours here!

Mozilla 1.4 is about to have its third release candidate.
More info at adot's notblog

Will a New Netscape.com debut with Netscape 7.1?
Read more over at MozillaNews.org

And from the more weird department:
- Mysterious Net traffic spurs code hunt

Software releases:
- SecureCRT 4.0.7
- QuickTime 6.3
- Adobe Reader 6.0
- jv16 PowerTools 1.4 RC2

Went to the movies last night. Saw a French thriller À la folie... pas du tout. This is one of these movies that you should just go see it without reading anything about it. Some reviews have a tedency to reveal stuff about a movie that just shouldn't be revealed. This is such a movie.

All I can say that this film is about, without revealing too much is: Angelique, a young student, is in love with a married doctor. We see her attempts to make him leave his pregnant wife.

More info about the movie:
- in Danish
- in English

Read all about the new MSN Search Prototype Web Crawler.

Other search news:
- MSN search bot a glimpse of ambitions
- What's it Going to Take to Beat Google?

Just checked into Mozilla is better integration of Mozilla and Java Plug-in. You can read all about the Browser side Java integration proposal.

A screenshot is also available here.

And for those how like code, here's the patch.

The Danish Royal Family just switched to Linux today! The site is full of open source. Runs Apache on Linux with PHP.

On the site you can read all about the Danish Royal Family. Denmark is the oldest monarchy in the world. Dates back to around year 958 with Gorm the Old.

The website is developed and hosted by TDC.

Some people had problems viewing my site using Internet Explorer 5.5. The reason for this is that IE5.5 wrongly loads my print stylesheet.

I have the following:
<style type="text/css" media="print">@import "css/print.css";</style>
which specifies that if the user prints one of my pages it should load my print stylesheet. The print stylesheet hides some of the stuff that is unimportant when printing my pages, like the navigation etc.

But IE5.5 just ignores this and loads it all the times. This way the navigation is lost when using IE5.5.

I've now fixed this by using some advanced CSS rules that only modern web browsers like Mozilla and other Gecko based browsers understands.

Stupid stupid IE. Why dont you get a modern browser with popup removal and no security problems? Why dont you get Mozilla!

Did some cloth shopping yesterday. I'm getting married this summer and I was missing a nice shirt and tie for the big party.

I've already bought the suit for the wedding. It's a cool cool Jill Sander suit. One of our friends owns a nice fasion shop called Litoral. This is where I bought the suit. So yesterday I got a good price on some nice shirts and some ties. Now I just have to choose...

John Harris writes:

As I mentioned in earlier emails to this group, a few of the developers on the Jalama Project have been working on porting the webclient 1.3 to the MAC OS X and though we are not completely done we are at a point where the software is usable and satisfies the needs of embedding our xul application within a java canvas.

We have the webclient running with the CAMINO_0_7_RELEASE mozilla release with full rendering and navigation functionality but need another week to tie up some loose-ends before contributing our changes to the webclient project.

Rewrite part 3 of the Mozilla's cookie code has just landed. The cookie code really needed a rewrite and the fix has landed in 3 phases. This is the final one!

Cookie rewrite, phase 3

Improvements are:
- better memory efficiency of the base cookie storage class
- merge cookie files
- COMify it
- etc etc ... read the complete patch

Har lige set udendørsforestillingen Ivanhoe i Dyrehaven. Det er Det Kongelige Teater det står for forestillingen som opføres i Ulvedalene i Dyrehaven.

Landskabet i Ulvedalene kalder jo nærmest på historien om Ivanhoe, den arveløse ridder, der vender hjem fra korstogene og kastes ud i et blodigt opgør om retten til den engelske jord. Hele landskabet inddrages i scenografien, der fører os gennem en ridderturnering og stormen på Mørkeborg! Men midt i det hele står det tætte, centrale drama om mennesket Ivanhoe, som formørket af sine oplevelser på korstogene må finde sin nye identitet, splittet mellem de to kvinder i sit liv.

Microsoft Cancels Development of Internet Explorer for Mac:
Microsoft: No new versions of IE for Mac
The Mac OS version of IE has not received a major update since early 2000.

Yet another reason go get Mozilla. The best browser around! Download here.

And earlier this week:
Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 to be Final Standalone Version

Mozilla Related Blogs with last update dates are now available here.

The page lists Mozilla related blogs and their last modification date. This way you dont have to visit all of the blogs to find out if anything has been updated. Just visit the blogupdates page.

It's updated every hour!

Internet Explorer Exposes Sensitive Information

A vulnerability has been identified in Internet Explorer, which exposes sensitive information to "msn.com" and "alexa.com".

While this is a known "feature" when the "Show Related Links" option is activated in Internet Explorer, there is a bug, so that Internet Explorer will keep transmitting the information to "msn.com" and "alexa.com" after "Show Related Links" has been de-activated. This occurs whenever "Ctrl+R" is used to reload a page.

Yet another reason to use Mozilla.

- Bell tolling for PNG graphics format?
- Microsoft moves into antivirus realm
- Sun seeks to simplify Java for wireless
- The .zip Standard Splinters
- Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 2 Coming Soon
- Instant Messaging's Achilles Heel

Så er jeg lige blevet tappet. Hvis du ikke allerede er bloddoner så er det bare se at komme igen.

Og undskyldningen med at "min blodtype er den mest almindelige så de behøver nok ikke mere" holder jo ikke da den mest almindelige blodtype også er den som de behøver mest blod af.

The next version of Linky will include a Download links option. I already have it working! You select some links and select Download links and the links are download to a directory of you choice.

But for this to work in the way best I could need some beta testers.

So if you're running Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird and would like to help me test out the next version of Linky please use my feedback form to sign up.

I could really need some MacOS and Linux testers. Windows users are of course also very welcome.

Sign up here

Linky is a Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird extension to the context menu that provide you with the following; Opens all links in a selection in new tabs or windows, Finds and opens links in plain text in a new tab or window, Opens all links on page in new tabs or windows, etc.

Mozilla 1.3 won the Best Web Browser award in PC World magazine's 21st Annual World Class Awards!

Mozilla won in the Staying Connected category.

The browser wars may be over, but browser innovation isn't. For five years, the open-source community has hacked away on Mozilla, a free program that is now stable, speedy, standards-compliant, and full of useful features. Unlike Internet Explorer, Mozilla blocks pop-ups with a built-in tool, manages cookies and passwords site-by-site, and includes both an IRC chat client and a powerful mail reader with intelligent spam filtering. You can surf multiple sites in one tabbed browser window (as you can in Opera, another alternative Web browser we like).

Download Mozilla:
Mozilla 1.3.1
Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 1

Saw Dogville last night. It's written and directed by Lars von Trier. Dogville is shot on a stage set with no actual buildings. Dogville is essentially a schematic diagram drawn on an extended stage and defined with an absolute minimum of set pieces. So no expessive sets or CGIs.

The beautiful fugitive, Grace (Nicole Kidman), arrives in the isolated township of Dogville on the run from a team of gangsters. With some encouragement from Tom (Paul Bettany), the self-appointed town spokesman, the little community agrees to hide her and in return, Grace agrees to work for them. However, when a search sets in, the people of Dogville demand a better deal in exchange for the risk of harbouring poor Grace and she learns the hard way that in this town, goodness is relative. But Grace has a secret and it is a dangerous one. Dogville may regret it ever began to bare its teeth...

Be sure the visit the Dogville Official website.

Been reading this interesting interview:
Interview with Ximian's Nat Friedman

9. Do you have any plans to move to the Gecko HTML rendering engine for Evolution or are you going to continue to improve and maintain gtkhtml?

Nat Friedman: When we started developing Evolution, Gecko was incomplete and way too big, and especially ill-suited for editing HTML, which we needed for the mail composer. That is why we needed to write our own HTML widget.

Gecko has matured a lot since then, but of course so has GtkHTML (it uses Pango now, and can edit tables and so on). I think there is still a need for a lightweight HTML widget that does all the things you need for mail, but we'd certainly accept patches to use Gecko in Evolution. It would be nice not to have to maintain an HTML widget, but right now that doesn't seem plausible. Maybe someday.

8. What changes have you made to OpenOffice.org when compared to its vanilla version?

Nat Friedman: We've done about six months of heavy development on OOo, all focused on improving consistency across the desktop and compatibility with Microsoft documents.

We don't _want_ to have any delta against the upstream OOo tree, so we're going to be working to get all of those changes upstream now that this release is done.

Just returned from a 4 days vacation in Karrebæksminde Feriecenter. Really nice! So check out the pictures.

All the hot air ballons are all part of the 23th danish championship.

The danish portal Jubii got a new layout. It's the first design change they had since the start of 2000. Well... they managed to mix content and ads so that it's impossible to tell the difference. But that must be some kind of design parameter for all big portals.

Denne her er sgu skæg! Fik lige en mail som åbenlyst er sendt til den forkerte adresse. Men det var en mail med en salgsopstilling på, hold nu fast, en ståltrawler med fuldt shelterdæk.

Det er Mæglerfirmaet N. B. Ferdinandsen & sønner som åbenbart mente at jeg skulle se et godt tilbud.

Det var sendt til en af mine mailadresse på @mail.dk domænet.

Nåå... men hvis der er nogle som er interesserede i sådan en krabat kan de se ham her.
Pris med delvis tonnage kr. 4,2 mill. uden tonnage/fiskeritilladelse kr. 2,1 mill.

Mit firma skal godt nok flytte fra Titangade til Teglholmen så måske skulle jeg slå til. Så kunne jeg sejle fra Østerbro til Teglholmen hver morgen. Supercool!

• Linky menuitem moved up before properties to avoid conflict with normal Windows context menu. The last menuitem on a Windows context menu is always properties.
• Better installation. Will check for dupe jar file in personal chrome folder and global chrome folder to avoid double Linky menuitem.
• Added more sorting options in Select Links dialog. Select links by text input.
• Added MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1 license stuff.
• Size of Select Links window is now being remembered.
• Fixed one last use of old preference. All Linky preferences are called extensions.linky.
• If you're getting install error -239 it's not Linky's fault but bug 109044

Install Linky version 1.7.1

If you find any bugs or have any enhancements feel free to file bugs.

Version 1.8.0 of 4getmoz has been released!

4getmoz is a script for 4NT users to download Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird.

What's new?
- adding Mozilla Firebird support
- adding Talkback running detection

4NT is a command prompt replacement for Windows.

Microsoft to abandon standalone IE
Microsoft is phasing out standalone versions of its Internet Explorer Web browser, according to statements attributed to IE program manager Brian Countryman in an interview posted on the software giant's Web site.

Redmond's Scanning the Net
What can you learn from studying Web posting patterns?

Creating XPCOM Components
Creating XPCOM Components is about Gecko and about creating XPCOM components for Gecko-based applications. The book is principally a long tutorial that describes the steps you take to make your C++ code into a component that can be used in Gecko, but it also discusses all of the tools, techniques, and technologies that make up XPCOM.

Joel Spolsky has switched to from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firebird
Where it gets interesting, is, approximately, today, because, for the first time, the Mozilla Firebird browser has finally caught up with Internet Explorer. After downloading virtually every Mozilla release over the last three years, this is the first browser I'm actually going to make my default web browser. All the little problems are fixed. It loads fast. It's not ugly and clunky. My beloved Alt+D/Ctrl+Enter work perfectly.