technolalia

Reboot

johnl — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:59:19 +0000

Email address remains valid, but all further postings will be found there, as will links to my various and multifarious projects.

Lug Radio Live 2009, and OggCamp

johnl — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:52:40 +0000

The schedule has been announced, tickets made available, website given a retro look, it’s time to goto Wolverhampton for Lug Radio Live. Just the Saturday rather than the weekend as previously, but never fear, Sunday offers OggCamp, “an open source, open culture and social media unconference.”

Blimey, never thought I’d look forward to going to Wolves, Southern softie that I am.

Counting Firefox Bookmarks

johnl — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:48:13 +0000

The 3.n series of Firefox saw the introduction of the SQLite database to manage bookmarks. This opens up all sorts of scripting possibilities, and is the proverbial Good Thing. But Firefox’s own interface and tools are unsatisfactory; for example, there’s no simple way of finding duplicates.

Even getting the total number of bookmarks is tricky, but I have found a way of doing this using the search function. Simply open the bookmarks library (Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks), click on all bookmarks and put a colon ( : ) in the search box. Click on bookmarks list toolbar (‘Name’ is highlighted in blue in the screenshot below), and voila! the total appears.

Note that a slash ( / ) can give a lower number if you have non-URL bookmarks, for example, about:mozilla, or some javascript bookmarklets. Presumably there can be entries that don’t have colons in them, though I’m scratching my head as to what they are.

Firefox bookmarks library showing total number of entries

Ubuntu One

johnl — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:43:44 +0000

Ubuntu One now available in private beta, and I have just installed it, thanks to an invite from Dean Sas (tip o’ the hat to him).
This might be the dotmac equivalent I’ve been wanting; easy to use, integrated into the desktop, and extensible.
Then again, it’s not free software, there’s concern about the trademark, and it’s not full of features, as is to be expected from a beta.
More when I’ve played around with it.

Slowly but surely

johnl — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:44:05 +0000

It being the beginning of the month, I always check the latest NetApps browser statistics, to see Firefox advance and Internet Explorer decline.

This month marked a minor breakthrough for linux: for the first time, breaching the 1% mark. Presumably this measures desktop systems connecting to the net, and as with all things web should be taken with a pinch of salt. It may only be 1%, but nevertheless, a visible mark of linux’s increasing use.

ROT-13 strikes back

johnl — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:33:09 +0000

Apropos of the most recent loss of data by H.M. Government, a rep from the bane of my former Windows-using life, McAfee Anti-Virus, speaks thus:

“Had the data on the memory stick been encrypted, its loss would have posed no risk,” said Greg Day, a security analyst with internet company McAfee. [Guardian]

And never mind the quality of the encryption, or keys being lost. “Security is a process, not a product” as Bruce Schneier said 8 years ago.

Triaging Firefox Bugs

johnl — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:21:41 +0000

Today I spent a couple of hours triaging Firefox bugs on OS X as part of the bugdays. I did this once or twice many moons ago; as all things XUL rock the web, I hope to do this more regularly. Aside from contributing to the whole mozilla project, it’s a good way to learn about it.

Downloaded the preferred nightly, named Minefield, and installed it alongside the regular Firefox; no conflicts, which did slightly concern me beforehand. Bookmarks etc loaded fine. Then went to the bugzilla page of bugs needing checking, opened up a bunch of tabs, and tried reproducing the problems. First bug was with a webpage – that always happens, in this case the bugzilla home page has a link for the Quick Search plugin that states “requires Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7.” Installed fine on the alpha, and has carried over to Firefox proper. Bug 448385

Went through 7 or 8 bugs, confirmed some, doubted others. One problem is that I’m on OS X 10.4 (oh how passé) and some of the bugs were reported with 10.5. Ah well, it might narrow down the cause and fix.

Fasthosts: Just say No

johnl — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:24:57 +0000

Following on from the great password exposure debacle (in which one of my clients was caught up), Fasthosts are once again setting new records in incompetence. This time edugeeks went down because Shaft Toss took 52 hours to replace a broken disk!

There’s only one thing to do when faced with such farces; move to a capable host.

(And evohosting are offering free hosting til August 25th)

Ubuntu at Lug Radio Live

johnl — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:42:55 +0000

Lug Radio Live returns to Wolverhampton, and so does Ubuntu UK, whose stand I will be planning and manning. Expect to have Ubuntu cds thrust into your hands at every opportunity!
L.R.L. blog hard
Ubuntu UK wiki page

.oxt files on OS X and Ubuntu

johnl — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:18:52 +0000

Having downloaded some OpenOffice.org templates for use with NeoOffice, I landed up with two .oxt files on my desktop. OS X didn’t recognize the format – the icons were blank sheets of paper – and NeoOffice didn’t want to import them, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Although the documentation claims you can install them “by a double-click on the *.oxt file in your system’s file browser” this doesn’t work on OS X or on Ubuntu. That’s what RTFM does for you.

Turns out .oxt are some sort of tarred .xml file, containing the OOo additions and various meta data.

Help was at hand with The Unarchiver, far superior to Apple’s built-in extractor, and open source (MIT license) to boot. Once the files were unpacked, I had folders on my desktop with all the templates within, importable through OOo. Later found that Stuffit Expander can cope with .oxt as well, but that’s proprietary and naff.

For Ubuntu, File Roller unpacks .oxts just fine.