December 2004 Entries

Again and again I and others get into a situation where my extensions are no longer working. I'm not sure how, but I do. So I try to uninstall the extensions and reinstall them. But this rarely works. So I have to do some manual cleanup. Looking at the overlays.rdf files in chrome/overlayinfo directory I always find some references to some old uninstalled extension. I always also find left over references in the chrome/chrome.rdf file.

Wouldn't it be possible to do some kind of automatically cleanup of, at least, the overlays.rdf files?

Hasn't anybody written an extension that does some XUL/RDF cleanup of the Mozilla files?

Are anybody else having problems like these?

The OpenOffice.org suite has positioned itself as a competitive alternative to proprietary products such as Microsoft Office and Corel's WordPerfect Office. One of OpenOffice.org's more advanced features is its ability to access external data sources from within its applications. Information repositories abound in both users' desktops and in a company's IT infrastructure. OpenOffice.org offers access to a whole gamut of data sources, ranging from standard OBDC/JDBC connection capabilities to localized access into text files, spreadsheets, and address books. The real highlight in being able to connect from OOo into a data source lies in its robust GUI for consulting and performing comprehensive searches. Users can make SQL-based queries or simple sort/filter searches and use the retrieved information within text documents or spreadsheets.
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Checking my mail this morning I saw 402 new mails in my Blog folder. Scanning the headers I quickly realized that this was just another comment spam attack. I'm running Movable Type as my blogging software and also have the MT-Blacklist plugin. And MT-Blacklist had forced moderation of 400 these comment spams. So the users of my blog didn't see any of these comment spams. Thanks MT-Blacklist. But I still have scan through all the comments checking to see if there's any valid comments in between and then deleting all those not valid. The comment spams are getting smarter and smarter so the comments aren't made from the same IP. They all come from different IP's. You can check my blog status here.

Currently the best method to avoid comment spam in Movable Type installations is to use the MT-Blacklist plugin. But there are other methods that you can use. Or perhaps combine to get even better protection.

Bayesian filter for MT
You will train your MT blog to learn about spams. The system started off quite dumb but as you train it, it will learn and become better at identify spam. Once it is sufficient trained, it will require little or no further maintenance. Training is just a fanciful word. What you are actually doing is blacklisting and whitelisting, except the system takes the whole content (not just IP or host) into consideration. Using these blacklist & whitelist which you tell it, it will attempt to guess (fuzzy logic) if other comments or pings are spams too.

MT-DSBL - Open proxy comment filter
This means that if your IP address is on a list of known open proxies (mostly used by email spammers, but recently by comment-spammers as well) you will not be able to post comments.

MTCloseComments
When executed this tag will change all open comments to closed comments on posts that are too old. This is controlled by an attribute on the tag or by the number of days for the main index.

SCode - Solution for comments spams
To cut the story short, I wrote a plugin to MT that will verify if it is a human before it allows comments to be posted. The idea is pretty simple: Display an image with a Security Code and demand the user to enter a Security Code manually before allowing posting to go through.

From MozillaWiki
Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird.

The Mozilla foundation has unveiled a new project called "Lightning" that will be tightly integrated into Mozilla's new Thunderbird e-mail client and sharpen the client's elbows against rival Microsoft's Outlook software. With Lightning, Thunderbird will have user features that may compete with Microsoft in the enterprise and thwart the software giant's size advantage by being free of cost.
Read article

Other sources:
From news.com
From Neowin

Interesting reply to posting by Michael McCallister

BTW:
The first release candidate for the upcoming Sunbird 0.2 release has been released. Read about it. Download it.

I wish you all a merry merry Christmas!

This holiday season, why not treat your family, friends and acquaintances to the gift of Firefox? We've set up a simple e-greeting program and, with the help from one of our talented design-team volunteers, we've uploaded some nice Firefox greeting cards for the holidays. Head on over to the e-greetings module, where you can send Firefox and Thunderbird greeting cards (you'll need to click on the little envelope icons to send a card). You can even add your own greeting card designs (please exercise good taste!) or vote on designs submitted by other sfx members.

The direct link to the Christmas card is here.

Den alternative kontorpakke OpenOffice er lige så nem at bruge som Microsofts udbredte Office-pakke. Det konkluderer en dansk brugerundersøgelse i forbindelse med rapporten om brugen af open source-kontorpakker i det offentlige. Det vil tilsyneladende ikke volde brugerne de store problemer, hvis hele den offentlige forvaltning gik fra Microsofts kontorpakke Office og over til at bruge den alternative OpenOffice. Ikke nok med at det offentlige kunne spare licensudgifterne, brugerne ville i det daglige også ganske smertefrit vænne sig til den nye kontorpakke. Det konkluderer den danske cand.mag Jacob Salmon i en brugerundersøgelse af overgangen mellem de to kontorpakker.
Læs nyheden her
Læs hele rapporten i PDF

Got this very funny and very very weird email yesterday:
Hi.My name is Daniel.I live in malmo. (sweden)I have some big proplem getting a drivers licens.I have failed 3 times to take my licens card.Do you know enyone that can hack himself in, and change the computer files so i can gett my licens.Could work in denmark to!.Tak!

We have just released Movable Type v3.14 which fixes the issue of extreme loads witnessed on servers under the strain of a massive spam attack. Because these attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity, we strongly recommend that all Movable Type users install this update. This is particularly important for any installation that is visible to the public on the web.
Read and download

The main changes in this new version are explained in detail below, but in summary, you can expect these updates:
- Unnecessary rebuilds upon comment moderation are eliminated.
- Generation of internal bookkeeping data for dynamic pages is not performed when using static pages.
- New weblogs default to having comment moderation enabled.

For those who remember the browser wars, Microsoft seems to be missing in action from the latest battle. In recent months, upstart browsers such as Firefox and Opera have lured more than 10 million users away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, largely because of concerns about IE's security problems. Microsoft is busy building and testing a faster, more secure version internally, but executives say it won't be released for at least another year, until the next version of Windows is done in 2006. They say customers can upgrade IE in the meantime with security patches and add-on features available from Microsoft and other companies that "extend" the software.
Read the article

I've blogged about Harry Potter before but this time it's something completely different:

Rowling has said that one of her characters will not survive her sixth book, but she refused to identify that character. Potter himself is safe, at least for now. Rowling has said her teenage hero will survive until the seventh and final book in the series, but has refused to say whether he will reach adulthood.
Read the article

Today I released two Movable Type plugins. Acronym and Favicon. Both plugins has been tested and works in version 3.x of Movable Type.

Acronym
The first one is just an updated version of Acronym. Acronym is a plugin for Movable Type that adds acronym tags to known acronyms. This text in a blog posting This is a XHTML test becomes this This is a <acronym title="Extensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</acronym> test which in the web browser is shown like this This is a XHTML test.
So go ahead and download Acronym.

Favicon
The other is a brand new one. Favicon is a plugin for Movable Type that adds favicons to comments and trackbacks. Favicons are small icons shown in the browsers location bar for better identification of a website. To the right is shown a screenshot of the Favicon plugin in use. If the user leaves a URL either in a comment or a trackback the favicon is being show next to the comment/trackback.
You can see a live example of the favicons by looking at the comment on this blog posting.
So go ahead and download Favicon.

OpenOffice.org just release yes another developer build of the OpenOffice.org 2.0 line. Build 1.9.m65 (680_m65).

New stuff:
- New First Start Wizard
- New toolbar
and loads or other stuff

Download
Release notes

Snapshot builds are developers builds and will be released every two weeks. They are showing the progress on the way towards OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Let me start of by saying: I haven't done this myself, so I cant answer any questions about it. I just found it interesting enough to post:

This is how I've manage to sync Mozilla Calendar with my Sony Ericsson T630. I use a program called MultiSync which has two plugins I use. A bluetooth plugin so I can connect with my phone and the Ximian Evolution plugin for my addressbook and calendar. As you probably know I'm not using Evolution as my calendar but it uses ics-files just as Mozilla Sunbird. I configured the plugin to use ~/.mozilla/sunbird/calendar.ics and then just dont use Evolution. Works really good with bluetooth. Just run the program and my calendar gets synced. That was the main reason that I bought a my new phone.

MultiSync is a free modular program to synchronize calendars, addressbooks and other PIM data between programs on your computer and other computers, mobile devices, PDAs or cell phones. MultiSync works on any Gnome platform, such as Linux. So no Windows sync yet.

From this page you can see which devices currently are supported. No Nokia phones support.

Ben Goodger writes:
I'm still working on a product plan for 1.5/2.0, but while that progresses I've also begun a lot of development work for 1.1. I really need to buckle down and finish off the various patches that I have in motion at the moment, before I lose any or they become out of date. What I'm doing right now: Mac Browser Profile Migration (Safari, MacIE done, Camino in progress, todo: OmniWeb). Mac Shell Service for Default Browser, etc. New Options Window, so that it works properly on OS X, GNOME (non modal, instant-apply settings) etc. And some ancilliary patches that pave the way for 1.5 and 2.0 features, like a patch that improves the look of tabs on Windows.
Read the posting

The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that it has placed a two-page ad in the December 16th edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation's fundraising campaign to support last month's highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.
The advertisement is the result of a donation campaign started about two months ago in spreadfirefox.com. It raised $250,000 in ten days.

- Read press release
- The advertisement in PNG
- The advertisement in PDF
- Buy the poster

These last few months have been extremely exciting for the talented developers at the Mozilla project. Their Firefox browser has re-ignited the browser wars and done what no one thought possible -- taken a substantial market share away from the security-problem-plagued Internet Explorer. Last week, various news outlets were reporting that Penn State University had joined a growing chorus of warnings, issuing a statement to staff and students, advising them to dump Internet Explorer and use alternate browsers such as Firefox. When I visited their site, I discovered that this is not the first time they have issued this warning. A few months ago, even US-CERT and the Department of Homeland Security suggested that users might want to use a different browser to deal with these security issues. Still, despite a seemingly endless parade of security issues, Microsoft's browser has managed to hold on to its position for an amazingly long time. Time, however, has a habit of chipping away at the sturdiest of empires. As I write this, over ten million copies of Firefox have already been downloaded since version 1.0 was released, just over a month ago. Meanwhile, version 1.0 of the Mozilla Thunderbird email package has just become available. It will certainly be fascinating to see how well it does in enticing people away from Microsoft's email package.
Read the article

Once upon a time, organizations had thousands of sheets of letterhead prepared by a commercial printer. These letterhead pages were then fed through a typewriter or, later, through a printer attached to a computer. Some organizations still do this, especially if they want colors, embossed text, or other fancy touches. But many smaller companies, and most individuals, now are very likely to print the letterhead and the letter at the same time, using a color laser or inkjet printer. This article describes how to create and use a letterhead with OpenOffice.org. Along the way you'll learn how to use a wizard, templates, styles, and even a field or two. The principles described apply to many other documents as well, so even if you don't need a letterhead, you should find this exercise useful.
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bugzilla.mozilla.org has been upgraded. It now runs version 2.19.1+. You can read about the new features available.

Bugzilla is server software designed to help you manage software development.

According to this article at Beta News the new AOL Media Player is built atop the company's Communicator XUL user interface framework.

Surprisingly, AOL Media Player is not based on AOL's Winamp platform, only utilizing Winamp's "Unagi" playback engine. Instead, AOL Media Player is built atop the company's Communicator XUL user interface framework. Communicator was first unveiled in beta form two years ago and eventually evolved into Fanfare.
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Update: AOL Media Player is NOT using XUL at all. AOL Communicator also does NOT use XUL. They are both built using wxWindows.
Thanks to Daniel Glazman for the comment. The article at Beta News has now fixed the misunderstanding and the quote reads:
AMP is built atop the company's Communicator user interface framework.

I've added TrackBack URL's to my RSS feed. This way a TrackBack aware RSS reader will be able to reply to entries.

The inclusion of TrackBack data in RSS feeds allows for the further automation of the TrackBack process. Currently, users wanting to send a TrackBack ping either must first locate the TrackBack URL and then enter it into their weblog tool, or use a "Bookmarklet" to extract this information from a page. With TrackBack data embedded in RSS, properly designed software applications can now automatically handle the discovery of the TrackBack URL, and ping it when appropriate. Tools designed around RSS aggregation can use the embedded TrackBack information to infer connections between posts.
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Robert Accettura writes:
We need some feedback from you on a new webtool. I've been working with Asa on a new webtool to help some of the problems faced by the evangelism effort. The tool uses a Firefox extension to allow users to submit sites that block Firefox, misrender, mangle, bust, destroy, or otherwise molest Gecko in some way/shape/form. Most of the data collected is automated (all but problem description category, and a free comment area), and it's completely guided. This forces users to submit valid clean useful data, with minimal effort.
Test the webtool
Install the extension
After installing the extension a menuitem called "Report Broken Website" appears under Help.

Screenshots here:
http://gemal.dk/misc/webtool01.png
http://gemal.dk/misc/webtool02.png
http://gemal.dk/misc/webtool03.png

Let me give a little background, that might help. In the beginning, there was Mozilla. The widget and graphics layers were written with Quickdraw using all of the old Mac OS API calls. The app ran on OS8 and OS9. Then Apple released Mac OS X and they wanted a whole bunch of apps to run on it with limited tweaking. They munged all the old APIs into a reduced set called "Carbon". These are mostly legacy APIs, C-based. Many of them have existed since 1984. Also "introduced" with OS X was a totally separate UI toolkit called "Cocoa" based on the NeXTStep objective-C toolkit, cleaned up and repurposed for OS X, called "Cocoa". These toolkits live independently for the most part.
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Hermed lidt fra de danske medier om Mozilla:

Mozilla-program udfordrer Outlook Express
Mozilla har netop lanceret Thunderbird, et mailprogram, der skal konkurrere med de kendte programmer Outlook Express og Eudora. Brugere skal ikke alene overbevises af solid sikkerhed - de skal konverteres.

Firefox-brugere klikker ikke på reklamebannere
Internet-brugere som surfer med Firefox-browseren klikker kun sjældent på online-reklamebannere. Det viser en ny analyse, som annoncefirmaet Ad-Tech har foretaget. Blandt Firefox-brugere er det i gennemsnit kun 0,11 procent, som klikker på en netannonce. Til sammenligning er tallet 0,24 pct. for Mozilla, 0,3 pct. for Netscape og 0,5 pct. for Internet Explorer.

Problemer med ung ræv
Problemet er, at webudviklerne ofte kun har udviklet deres sider til en browser, nemlig Internet Explorer. Det svarer til, at bygge en motorvej og kun tillade Mazdaer at køre på den, siger Henrik Gemal, der har haft en finger med i udviklingen af Firefox og fejrede udgivelsen af den nye browser med at arrangere et stort release-party på Ølbaren i København.

Ny Netscape satser på to heste
Netscape, som engang var Internet-kongen, før Microsoft slog til, satser på to heste med sin kommende opdatering af sit Internet-program. Den nye udgave vil både kunne fungere med Mozillas Gecko-nethåndtering, som bl.a. det succesrige Firefox og tidligere Netscape-udgaver bruger, og med Microsofts Internet Explorer. Dermed kan brugerne selv skifte, for mange netsider er programmeret til specifikt at fungere med Internet Explorer, selv om især Firefox på det seneste har vundet markedsandele. Den nye Netscape, som er gratis, forventes klar ved årsskiftet.

By now, anyone who has researched replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org knows that Writer is an acceptable, even superior substitute for Word. But word processing is only part of what the average user needs in an office program. What if you need to design a slide show in OOo Impress? Coming from PowerPoint, what can you expect? For starters, expect to feel nearly at home. Like the rest of OpenOffice.org, Impress is designed for an easy transition from Microsoft Office. Most of the same tools are available as in PowerPoint, and in the same places. This similarity means that, for most people, learning Impress is quicker than learning, for example, KPresenter. You may notice a slight change in name, and one or two features may be in different places, but you can count on locating basic functions without major problems. Now and then you may need to hunt for a feature, but if you assume that it's around somewhere, you'll be right more often than not.
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From http://groups.google.com/groups?th=3991d66986c16555

Today I made checkins on the NSS trunk and NSS 3.9 branch, resolving the following bugzilla requests:
Add Sonera CA certs (2) to builtin trusted CA list
Please add Staat der Nederlanden root CA cert
Please add QuoVadis root CA certificate
Please add SECOM Trust.net root CA cert
Add TDC root CA certs to NSS
Add UTN root CA certs to NSS

So after getting the approval the TDC root CA certificates have been added to NSS.

Branch Landing Complete. The Firefox trunk is now more or less synced with the last 7 months of Firefox development. Various small and not so small regressions abound, but we'll be catching those in the coming week. Once we've got a good fresh slate to work with, we'll be well on our way to 1.1!
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Read about Firefox:Branch Landing