July 2004 Entries

Some really nice checkins landed this week. Here are just some of them:

Rename Livemarks to Live Bookmarks
Live Bookmarks is a more descriptive and telling name than Livemarks.

Turn on the new RSS extenions and add it to the installer
Mozilla Thunderbird is now a RSS reader as well

Bookmarks fixes merged from aviary branch
All the cool bookmarks stuff is now available in trunk builds of Mozilla Firefox

Favicon handling merge from aviary branch
All the cool favicon stuff is now available in trunk builds of Mozilla Firefox

Cool checkin comment of the week: bug 227344
kungFuDeathGrip for mouse event

Some stuff that's not quite ready yet, but slowly coming along:

Allow bounce/redirect of mail messages
Bounce extension 0.0.3. It's REALLY development phase code. Only people who wants to help me with development should download and install.

Virtual folders
David is doing some great work for this feature. Virtual folders is a folder which doesn't physically exist, but shows the results of a search across other folders. Like Google Gmail.

If you need help updating or creating an extension for Firefox 0.9, you can use the Firefox install.rdf generator.

Many applications create and manage directories containing cached information about content stored elsewhere, such as cached Web content or thumbnail-size versions of images or movies. For speed and storage efficiency we would often like to avoid backing up, archiving, or otherwise unnecessarily copying such directories around, but it is a pain to identify and individually exclude each such directory during data transfer operations. I propose an extremely simple convention by which applications can reliably "tag" any cache directories they create, for easy identification by backup systems and other data management utilities. Data management utilities can then heed or ignore these tags as the user sees fit.

Read the full spec

There's both a bug request about implementing it in Mozilla and OpenOffice.org

Here's a small peek at what's coming in Movable Type 3.1. Though Movable Type 3.0 was a Developer Edition, this release will be available for general users, and we'll be making it available as a free update for licensed users of 3.0. Dynamic PHP publishing, controllable on a per-template basis, Post scheduling, Subcategories, Application-level callbacks are just some of the new things.

I've been playing around with Movable Type 3.0 and it's nicer than 2.x. Not nicer in the way it looks, but nicer it the way it works. Faster building times, etc. My Acronym plugin also works in version 3.0.

This release of Movable Type 3.1 is currently scheduled for release on August 31

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Each month I parse the access.log file, which is around 400MB, and generate the Gecko Statistics for gemal.dk. I just updated the statistics and included some numbers from way back in 2002. Check it out.

The good news is that the Gecko usage is now at 40%. In June 2004 40% of all hits to gemal.dk was made by Gecko based browser. A Gecko based browser can be a Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape or some other browser that uses the Gecko engine.

This is not a big surprise since gemal.dk is a very Mozilla oriented site. According to my Webalizer statistics the IE6 usage is around 35% but slowly decreasing. IE5.5 and IE5 is around 2% each. Netscape 4.x is at almost 2%. That's scary. I can understand why the Netscape 4.x users did upgrade to Netscape 6 but now when you have both Netscape 7 and Mozilla you gotta upgrade. The web is much nicer experience with a modern Gecko based browser.

OS wise, Windows XP is still way ahead. It's at 54%, with Windows 2000 at 16% and Windows 98 at 8%. Linux is around 5%.

If you like to generate your own Gecko Statistics you can use my script. It's available free to download.

I've added branch support to my 4getmoz script. 4getmoz are now able to download 0.9 branch versions of Mozilla Firefox and 0.8 branch version of Mozilla Thunderbird.

4getmoz is a Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird download script for 4NT users. 4NT is a command prompt replacement for Windows.

I use 4getmoz every morning to get the latest nightly builds of Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. I just open a 4NT Command Prompt and type 4getmoz all branch

Dansk sprogpakke klar til Mozilla Firefox. En gruppe danske udviklere har frigivet en indtil videre uofficiel sprogpakke til Mozillas letvægtsbrowser Firefox. Sprogpakken skal installeres oven på en eksisterende version af Mozilla Firefox 0.9.x. Udviklerne arbejder på at lave en samlet dansk version af Firefox. Indtil videre ligger den danske sprogpakke på et midlertidigt dansk websted, men udviklerne forventer, at pakken snart bliver tilgængelig fra den officielle Mozilla-hjemmeside.

Mozilla Firefox på dansk

Now that the new locale stuff has landed it's now impossible to find out the build ID of a Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird from the command line.

I used to look in the en-US.jar file for the locale/en-US/global/build.dtd file. That file contained the Build ID. But that file doesn't exist anymore.

With Mozilla 1.x it's no problem since you just look in the toolkit.jar file for the content/global/build.dtd file. That file contains the Build ID.

Perhaps it's about time to add a global file that contained the build ID, like I propose in bug 179052 .

But I've commented in bug 217217 about the missing option to detect the build ID. If you got a way around this let me know.

I'm not sure I understand what's in the different branches:

Mozilla 1.x is Mozilla 1.x. Very easy, since there's only nightly builds or releases.

Mozilla Firefox is tricky. I'm seeing latest-0.9, latest-0.9.1 and latest-trunk. What's the difference between the 0.9 and 0.9.1? And what's in the one and not in the other?

Mozilla Thunderbird is also confusing. Here there's latest-0.7.1, latest-0.8 and latest-trunk. What the difference?

Is there a document describing the difference between those builds. I can see some here but not in regards to the difference directory.

Can someone explain?

Var til et ganske spændende foredrag i går. Linux-baseret settop-boks hos SSLUG.
Kenneth Geisshirt og Tomas Krag vil fortælle om at lave en linux-baseret settop-boks med MythTV. Først vil de introducere settop-boks som koncept og diskutere MythTV. Bagefter vil MythTV blive demonstreret.

Beskrivelsen af MythTV fra deres site er:
MythTV is a homebrew PVR project that I've been working on in my spare time. It's been under heavy development for two years, and is now quite useable and featureful.

Tomas, som er en gammel kollega, havde lavet sin egen lille settop boks. Prisen var omkring de 5.000 kr. Den kørte så MythTV, som kan hentes til de fleste større Linux distributioner, og det så sgu fedt ud.

Basalt set er det en boks man sætter ind mellem tv antennen og sit TV. Settop boksen giver så adgang til en masse advancerede feature. Fx live TV hvor man kan pause en udsendelse og gå ud og lave kaffe om komme tilbage og se videre, uden at have mistet noget af udsendelsen. Du kan bruge en webbrowser til at programmere hvornår og hvad der skal optages. Der er fotoalbum, CD og DVD afspiller support. Samt vejr, RSS og MAME support. Og en masse mere.

Du kan se alle overheads her.

Firefox 0.9/0.9.1/0.9.2 for Windows incorrectly register themselves as the default handler for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and GOPHER transactions, causing them to launch multiple windows or throw errors. This has been reported as bug 246078 and is also being discussed in a mozillaZine thread. This .REG file should fix this problem on a given installation after you have told Firefox to make itself the default browser.

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Let me start saying: I dont agree with all of the stuff he writes but he has some points. I've posted links to Andkon's article before and people reacted strongly.

When a user first goes to the main Firefox page (or gets redirected from a Firefox button), they are greated with a huge-ass logo and a huge-ass picture of a car, yes a car. Then, they might notice a bit of text that goes something like this: "Firefox 0.9 is the award winning preview of Mozilla's next generation browser." What's a preview and what's next generation? These aren't brillant catchwords that will lead the user to read on, but they are downright boring phrases that will make the user leave.

Read the essay Taming the Beast: The Solution to Mozilla's Hidden Marketing Problem

Let me start saying: I dont agree with all of the stuff he writes but he has some points. I've posted links to Andkon's article before and people reacted strongly.

When a user first goes to the main Firefox page (or gets redirected from a Firefox button), they are greated with a huge-ass logo and a huge-ass picture of a car, yes a car. Then, they might notice a bit of text that goes something like this: "Firefox 0.9 is the award winning preview of Mozilla's next generation browser." What's a preview and what's next generation? These aren't brillant catchwords that will lead the user to read on, but they are downright boring phrases that will make the user leave.

Read the essay Taming the Beast: The Solution to Mozilla's Hidden Marketing Problem

SpellBound is a port of the spell checker user interface from Mozilla's Composer that enables spell checking in web forms (e.g. html textarea and html input elements - html input password elements are not checked by SpellBound). This allows you to spell check forms (e.g. a comment on a message board, etc.) before submitting them.

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Just a quick summary of the Extensions that I use for my Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Launchy
Enables you to open links and mailto's with external applications like IE, Opera, Outlook, GetRight.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird

Linky
Increase your power to handle links. Open multiple, Open images, etc.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird

Mnenhy
Allows you to define a custom set of header in a mail to be shown.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird

Web Developer Extension
Adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. Fx view CSS.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox

Adblock
Adblock is a content filtering plug-in. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox

Popup Allow
Allows popup windows to be opened while the Caps Lock key or the Insert key is held down.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox

LastTab
CTRL-TAB to switch to recently selected tabs.
Works in: Mozilla Firefox

Plus two company internal extensions. I've developed two extensions for the company that I work for. One for their CMS system and one for thier ebusiness platform. Some true time savers. Mozilla Firefox rocks! Soon more people will realize.

Most people who switch to Mozilla or Mozilla's Firefox browser quickly notice that the browser is pretty bare. It contains exactly what you need to browse the Web -- no less and no more. And while there's a lot to be said for running a lean, clean program, sometimes you long for more features, a little extra functionality. Enter Extensions, little programs that you can add to Mozilla or Firefox to make the browser do what you want it to do. There are now close to a hundred extensions available for downloading. Most work perfectly; others are a bit buggy.
Building a Better Mozilla

I'm sad to see that they didn't mention either Linky or Launchy in the article. They mention ieview, but I still think that Launchy is much much better than ieview.

Last week, there were two separate reports of flaws in Microsoft Internet Explorer that could jeopardize your security. One flaw made it possible for pop-up windows to install programs on your machine that could steal banking records. Another flaw, in both Explorer and a Microsoft web server program, made it possible for a hacker to implant malicious code in an otherwise legitimate Web site that could, once again, steal your data.
Need Another Browser?

Robert O'Callahan has written a little essay about how scrolling currently works in Mozilla. Lets just say that scrolling is rather complicated.

Get some insight

Corporations and home users have different needs when acquiring a standard suite of productivity software--for example, a word processor; spreadsheet; and database, drawing and presentation software. A company typically buys hundreds or even thousands of copies at one shot, at a steep discount, and has to buy something that works for everyone--the highest--rather than lowest-common denominator...

Read article

I've just launched a new version of Blogupdates.
Blogupdates lists Mozilla related blog entries sorted by date. So instead of having to visit all of the Mozilla related blogs you just come to this page and you can see which blogs has been updated.

The new version features amonst other a much better listing of the Mozilla related blogs.

Other improvements are:
- Instead of listing the blogs sorted by date, it's now sorted by the blog entries date. So all of the entries from the blogs are collected and then sorted by date. This makes the listing more "correct".
- Unicode support. Both Daniel Glazman blog and others feeds are now shown correct.
- Planet like listing.
- Image support. If you have an image in your feed the image is now shown. Check my RSS feed on how-to.
- Open/Close all entries. If you dont like the entries to be inline you can turn it off.
- Blog entries older than 1 week are not shown. This makes the list smaller.
- Smaller codebase. It makes it easier for me to maintain.

So why read Blogupdates and not planet.mozilla.org?
- Mozilla only related blogs listed. Planet.mozilla.org have all kind of non Mozilla related blogs included.
- News notification. You can see which entries are new since you last visited.

Technical stuff:
Blogupdates is coded in Perl. It uses some Perl Archive Network">CPAN modules fx XML::RSS, Unicode::String, HTML::Template, Date::Manip. It runs and rebuilds the page every 30 minutes.

There are times when you need to perform some task over and over, or when a task is complex enough that doing it manually makes it hard to get it right. OpenOffice.org macros allow you to save a sequence of operations with a single name so you can do the same thing repeatedly. Automation is a first cousin to macros. It lets another application control OOo and make things happen without user intervention.

Read the article

Get OpenOffice Beta 680_m45

DicOOo: On/Off-Line Dictionary Installer & Dictionary Packs

XUL-Node is a rich user interface framework for server-based Perl applications. It includes a server, a UI framework, and a Javascript XUL client for the Firefox web browser. Perl applications run inside a POE server, and are displayed in a remote web browser. The goal is to provide Perl developers with the XUL/Javascript development model, but with two small differences: * Make it Perl friendly * Allow users to run the application on remote servers, so clients only require Firefox, while the Perl code runs on the server. XUL-Node works by splitting each widget into two: a server half, and a client half. The server half sends DOM manipulation commands, and the client half sends DOM events. A small Javascript client library takes care of the communications. The result is an application with a rich user interface, running in Firefox with no special security permissions, built in 100% pure Perl.

XUL-Node