Three cheers for Mozilla/Firefox :)

I feel bombarded with all these animations which come up on various webpages, especially on news websites. These constantly moving animations are such a distraction that sometimes its just like I felt while working in the smithy shop during my first year of engineering.

Solution: In Mozilla/Firefox change the preference( in about:config) image.animation_mode to "once" and the animations will play only once and stop give you peace of mind.

Gmail in ICEWm sucks

This is the first time I used gmail while logged on with ICEWm window manager. While composing a message even pressing a space bar gives a spike touching 100% processor usage!!

Could it be the Javascript which is playing spoilsport? Even backspace is working as if the machine has had half a dozen Buds! Even my Pentium133MHz old box works faster than this.

For the record: blogger also crashes if I use the gui button for adding html links (irrespective of which window manager I use).

Cascades(Nvu) Review - II

Reading the recent "Nvu Wishlist" by B.Smedberg, I finally thought of gathering up the few ideas I have had about the CSS editor, during the few hours I tested Nvu 0.50. Carrying on from the CaScadeS UI review, here are a few suggestions (feature requests/improvements) that would make CaScadeS more user friendly and an easier to use tool for a beginner.

• Right-click menu in the left pane for the listed style sheets. The menu could contain choices like: disable, delete, unlink stylesheets and/or view in a text editor.
• (OT) Add a menu to change the style sheet being used without the need of firing up CSS editor.
• Better way to save the changes done by CSS editor. Presently, one can only save the changes if he saves the document immediately after closing the CSS editor. Whereas, if any other change is made between closing the css editor and saving document, all style changes are lost.
  
• Comments. All the features like "Up Button", "Down Button", and "Comments" are basically providing better way to organize your style sheet. I'm sure experienced users can appreciate the importance of a well organized and commented stylesheet. I understand that the css editor is aimed to make style sheet generation easy for beginners as there is no actual text editing involved. But providing the feature for commeting is a must have.
• CSS editor should stop using absolute paths for style sheet file name and other style definitions like background-color as it breaks the web page viewing almost every time when it is published.
• When CSS editor is started, it should focus on either the only style sheet linked to the webpage(internal or external) or it should focus on last used style sheet or the one which is enabled. Right now, the focus is on none. Also, when a users clicks on "Refresh" focus is lost again.
  

With all the effort needed to get accustomed to using the CSS editor with Nvu, these changes (and more as they keep popping in my head now and then) will definitely help in making Nvu a web-authoring system for newbees.

The (unofficial) manual for CaScades can be found here. I was referring to it yesterday, and due to its lack of structure and flow, I'm planning to update it soon. Suggestions/critiques are invited to make it a better reference.

KDE Discovery!

Useful or not? Don't know! But here goes:

If you want to use a window out of a grouped task bar window list, instead of clicking and selecting, hover your mouse over it, and roll the mouse-wheel. The window focus will cycle through the list of windows in that group.

Good Luck Akbal.

Akbal, good luck for future. Just thought that I should say good bye, as I'll most probably not wake up early to see you off.

I hope your application process finishes in regular time so that you come back soon. And this time, with your wife.

I'm sure we will be seeing each other in 3-4months back home. I envy you as you will be eating home made food(be careful, I advise joining a fitness club!) and enjoy at University Point. I can't wait to go back home. I'll catch you there mate....Enjoy and have a nice time.

Which File Extension are you?

Which File Extension are You?

Which OS are you?

Which OS are You?

Form items in Firefox improved

Garrett LeSage has improved the way form elements are displayed in Firefox. Form fields are much enahanced and buttons actually give a feeling of being pressed when you click on them. You can download the second version of his forms.css from his blog. The second version include an improved display of radio buttons over the first one.

This is another example of how easily Firefox can be improved if you don't like it.

Nvu 0.50 is out

New version of the WYSIWYG html editor, Nvu, is out. Download it from here. Features include:

1. State-of-the-art Gecko rendering engine


2. Syntax highlighting (New)


3. Positioning rulers: Horizontal and Vertical


4. CaScadeS. The inbuilt style sheet editor


5. Bidirectional text capability


6. Internal HTML validator


7. Spell Checker

and more....

Linux Discoveries

I just discovered two wonderful Linux programs which rival any of similar ones available for Windows(but are not free...hehe).

Kile

Kile is a TeX/LaTeX editor with an easy to use GUI. Kile also has other fantastic features like auto completion of latex commands, project manager, easy insertion of citations and bibliography manager, etc. If you are using similar program in Windows, Kile is another reason for you to shift to Linux.

K3b

You are afraid that on Linux you will have to burn your CDs using age-old command-line terminal? Here is the solution for you:K3b. K3b is a CD and DVD burning software optimized for KDE. Its GUI can challenge any other commercial programs available (for windows) in the market. You can easily copy a CD, make audio CDs, and even write your own DVD with it(DVD authoring tools are different from K3b). Although I was happy using the commandline for my CD/DVD burning needs, but K3b discovery has given me another good reason to explain to my friends the benefits of shifting to Linux. Check out the list of features K3b has to offer.

Gone are the days when people used to say that one won't be able to adapt to Linux after being a M$ Windows user. There are so many programs available in Linux ranging from Kids education to C++ programming, 3D imaging, and professional quality image editing softwares. And the best thing is:Its free!!. I'm sure if you grab one of the Linux distros from DistorWatch and try it, you will be surprised how easy it is to work in Linux.

Bush-Cheney Corp's IT knowledge

Cheney: factcheck.com
Bush: Internets

Duhh!!!!

Bush Kerry debate II

The Bush and Kerry debate number 2 just started at Washigton University. And from Bush's expression, it just looks like he has already lost it.

Gooooooooooooooogle

Lately, there were many posts on the web speculating that Google is planning to introduce a new browser of its own. While people are still speculating and without any concrete evidence, Google has been busy introducing its Google Print and Google SMS services to the world.
Looks like this is just the start of things. Lets see what Google has in store for everyone!!

Windoze and NAV

Phew!! A couple of days ago I helped a friend re-enable his Norton Antivirus realtime protection. The process took about 4 (four) hours!!

Details:
My friend has a Dell machine and uses WinXP Pro. He complained that his scheduledl virus scans did not start and there was an error whenever he tried doing a manual scan. So when I got some time, I went fully loaded (Knoppix Live CD, a CD-RW containing Firefox, Thunderbird, Spybot, AdAware, Zone Alarm, Norton Corporate(University license allows students to use at home. Hence is a legit copy!!) AV, and PMagic boot floppies.
I tried changing settings and stuff but the scan would not start. I asked my friend since when was this happening. He said since he did some settings change, installed SP2 and a system restore!! :( I have never trusted a system restore and this SP2 was a bigger pain. So to be on the safer side, I did a manual update of the virus definitions and tried a manual scan after rebooting. Nothing!

Finally, I decided to uninstall NAV and redo the installation. When I tried to uninstall, it asked for a password. I figured that being NAV corporate client version it might require some special password, which obviously I didn't know. So back to google searching for solutions. The most promising(and dangerous) one was: manual uninstall.

Backed-up the registry in case I screwed up the manual uninstall. Then I started the steps of manual uninstall one-by-one. Symantec spills a lot of registries when it installs the antivirus. It took me almost an hour and a half to finish it. And still I'm sure there would be some registries present indicating previous NAV install. Somebody should sue Symantec for screwing up the users machine even when they have unistalled the software.

Reboot. Check antivirus. Absent. Install again. Done. Manual virus definitions update. Reboot. Realtime protection was still not on. But I was able to scan the machine. Live update wasn't working either.

Realtime protection was set to ON after another reboot. That was a breather... But liveupdate was still not working. After a bit of searching, I checked the list of Remove/Install Programs. Lo and behold, Live update which should have been there was not listed. I started the liveupdate setup and got it to work in the end.

His NAV client is working fine now. Also as the SP2 has a firewall, I told him the the rest i.e. Firewall, and malware check will have to wait for next time. I just hope everything stays the same the next time visit him for pending things. You never know when problems will be there in your Windoze OS.

:) It feels nice to be using Debian after seeing these kind of things.

DVD backup on Linux

I was finally able to backup a DVD that I bought on a DVD+R and a DVD-R. I had been planning on doing this for a few days, but did get down to it. So yesterday, I did a little search about DVD writing in Linux and how to copy the data from a DVD to your HDD. Here is how I did it:

1. Copy data from the DVD using the following command and you will get an iso image for the DVD.
   $ dd if=/dev/hdd of=/data-disk/dvdimage.iso


2. To write the iso image to the DVD-R or DVD+R, use the command
   growisofs -dvd-compat -dvd-video -Z /dev/hdd=/data-disk/dvdimage.iso

You will get an exact copy of the original DVD. The DVD I copied did not have a region lock, so I don't know what happens if your hardware is not for the same region. I will try doing that if I can get hold of some other region's DVD (..he he ..just for fun).

I didn't get the max speed from the writer even though it can support it 8x. The writing speed also depends on the media used, which may not be fully supported by your hardware. To check media support use the following command:
dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/hdd

Above /dev/hdd should be changed to your dvd drive's device listing. And /data-disk/ is a partition (25GB) on my HDD for huge data storage. For copying a single sided DVD you should have more than 4.2GB of space. For double sided its around 8.3GB. For the backup process, I used my NEC ND2510a Dual Layer DVD writer.

Beware! JPEG virus exploit is here.

As expected, someone has already put up an exploit making use of the JPEG vulnerability announced by *Misrocoft* about a problem in their GDI driver that processes the way JPEG images are displayed. It was posted on Usenet today (26, Sept 2004). More detailed information can be found at http://www.easynews.com/virus.txt and it also contains the link to the file, so be careful.

Using feed readers

Yesterday I had just bumped into Liferea(Linux Feed Reader). A free RSS, ATOM, etc feed reader for linux users. I was impressed with its ability to show feeds like I reading good email without junk. It is also capable of searching feeds from Feedster and showing it to you, all from within Liferea. Smart isn't it?

And just after an apt-get today I found new official packages for mozilla-thunderbird 0.8 were available for my Debian box. Thunderbird also has a nice interface for a feed reader. It can be made much more powerful by adding the Feedster search feature of Liferea.

The only feature I was expecting theses feed readers would have is to show comments too. Wouldn't that make the blogs like really "tiny" newgroups. Hope the people using newgroups do not stop using them with all this blogging thing happenning now.

N|vu nightlies coming soon.

N|vu the standalone version of Mozilla composer will be soon available as a nightly version build on an old PC. The builds will be FC2 based. This info was given out on the main dev's blog.

What about nightlies for other architectures? Hey, its progress being made, albiet step-by-step.

Spread Firefox : Button campaign!!

The Spread Firefox team has announced a preview release of their beta website. They are aiming to get a million downloads for Firefox's latest 1.0PR release. Also, the site will monitor the number of visitors which are referred by your webpage/weblog with a new set of shiny buttons available from the same site. I'm sure the target of a million downloads will be achieved easily as was the case with the Download.com review campaign. However, I noticed one surprisingly odd thing regarding the Button campaign:

Most of the Mozillazine.org hosted weblogs do not support Firefox buttons!!

Out of the 24 hosted weblogs, only 8 of them support the "Get Firefox" buttons. That is only 1 out of 3!! And out of the 8 which support those buttons, they are obvious on only 5 of the weblogs. By "obvious" I mean that one doesnot have to scroll the page to make the button visible. Also, there are some dead blogs among them. If the dead blogs are not considered, its still only 8/18 ~ 44.44% of support from the very people who are closely linked to Mozilla.org/Firefox. (I did consider Asa's blog in the 5, but it could be debated as the button on his blog is visible but hidden and looks like the part of the image on the left side of the page)
The Mozillazine.org hosted weblogs should have been the first ones supporting the buttons as these people are linked to Mozilla.org more than anyone else. The button campaign should have started from within the Mozilla.org community. Still, it would be a good move if the Spread Firefox team contacts the respective weblog owners and requests them to include "Get Firefox" buttons on their weblogs.

Nvu CaScades UI review

I have had a hard time learning how to use Nvu's CSS editor. While I was learning myself, I did write down a few points to remember and over time it has developed into a decent tutorial/manual(although now that I read it again, I think it needs a redo for better flow and structure). It can be found here.

Also, there have been others like me who struggled to find ways to use its functions. Below is a simple review of CaScadeS's UI from a beginner's point of view:

Nvu CSS editor, CaScadeS, is a very easy way to style your webpages. It is capable of using inline style rules, internal style sheets or even external style sheets. You can easily have alternate (multiple) style sheets attached with your webpage when using it. And the final style sheet code produced by the CSS editor is standards compliant.

However, for the new users the CSS editor is something they have to "learn" to use rather than being an "intuitive" interface. Here are a few suggestions on how to improve it:

1. Saving of the style sheet should be made more obvious. As of now, style sheets can be saved by first creating/editing rules in the editor, closing it and then clicking the "Save" button in Nvu. Untill unless someone tells the new user that he has to follow this procedure to save the style sheet, I don't think he would beable to "discover" it himself.
2. Buttons like "Link elt." and "Style elt." need to renamed to something more obvious. As Nvu is aimed at a general user and not at web designers, the button's function should be such that it "speaks out" its own function. Even having tooltips for these buttons would be really helpful.
3. I have read somewhere that the "Down" button is still pending implementation. I wonder how hard it would be to implement it when the "Up" button is already working (though the opposite way!).
4. The CSS editor window design has some serious bugs. For example, if there is an image linked by a rule and the corresponding image's path is too long, users loose the visibility of "Close" button.
5. Automatic focus on default style sheet. When one opens the CSS editor, no style sheet is selected and the user just gets a blank right-pane. A style sheet should be automatically selected (may be the default one). This way the right pane won't look plain blank but show basic info about the selected style sheet.

And for those who know the web designing well, it would be really helpful to include a feature to add comments in the style sheets. Every web designer knows that when a style sheet becomes larger, comments are the only tool to make logical sections in the style sheet.

I hope the Nvu developement team considers the suggestions given above and implement atleast some of them to make the css editor a better tool accompanying Nvu.