» Firefox Plugin for Tomboy
A great new Firefox plugin has been created that allows you to create new Tomboy notes from selected text in Firefox, check it out here.
July 22, 2008
July 15, 2008
» Create Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials
I have been trying to come up with some more ways to make this site and the content more helpful for the community. In my searching for new “features” I came across the Firefox feature of “Smart Keyword Search”. This post is two part. One, I’ll outline how to create a Smart Keyword Search item in Firefox specifically for this site and second create Smart Keyword Searches for any website. This will allow you to quickly and easily search this sites contents anytime you need instruction on a topic!
Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials
To create a Smart Keyword Search for this site you’ll need to first right-click on the blog search field. The search field is found on the top left above the Donate button.
The resulting window will ask for a name and a keyword. The name is just for your use, allowing you to organize multiple keyword searches. The keyword field is the keyword you’ll need to use to quick-search the site. In the example below I used “Ubuntu Tutorials Search” for the Name and “ut” for the keyword.
Click “Add” to save the changes. You can now quick-search this site for whatever it is you’re looking for by entering “ut <search term>” in your address bar. To search for posts related to vmware, for example, you’d use:
ut vmware
Searching can be done from any tab, so you don’t even need to pull up the site first. Quickly find the tutorials you need, simply and easily.
These steps work for any search form you can find on the web. Right-click, “Add a Keyword for this Search…”, enter the keyword, and you’re done.
Other Points of Interest
July 8, 2008
» Improve Application Startup Times With Preload
If your computer habits are anything like mine you probably have a set of applications that you use nearly every time you log in to the machine. Let me guess.. Firefox? Pidgin perhaps? Thunderbird or Evolution? You may have more or less, but it is common for a user to use the same applications regularly. Wouldn’t it be nice if those commonly used applications could startup faster? That is possible with a tool called “Preload”.
Installing Preload
The preload service is available through the main Ubuntu repositories, and can be installed by clicking the link below or running the command:
sudo aptitude install preload
A few things to note now about using Preload. First, this will not improve boot time. Preload monitors recurring applications and, after establishing a pattern, will preload those binaries into memory at startup. Given that it also has to establish a pattern you may not see a performance increase immediately. Give it some time though, you’ll start to see a difference soon enough!
Other Points of Interest
July 2, 2008
» Browser Mix on Technometria
As long as we're on the subject of Technometria stats, here's the browser breakdown for last month on Technometria:
- FireFox - 41.80%
- Internet Explorer - 33.76%
- Safari - 12.65%
- Mozilla - 9.06%
- Opera - 1.79%
Roughly two-thirds of the visitors to Technometria were using something other than Internet Explorer. Granted, this is a pretty geeky crowd.
Of the Firefox users, roughly 30% were using version 3. Of the IE users, roughly 40% were using version 6. Only four visitors the entire month were using IE 5.5. I had a few IE 8 visitors.
June 25, 2008
» Install Adobe Acrobat Plugins For Firefox
I recently blogged about installing the Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 8.04. For those that followed that tutorial you may also be interested in adding the Firefox plugins for Adobe Reader as well. These will also require the Medibuntu repository, which I’ll review quickly here.
Configuring the Medibuntu Repository
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
Installing the Mozilla Acroread Plugins
sudo apt-get install mozilla-acroread acroread-plugins
The acroread-plugins package will provide support for completion of fillable forms and javascript. The mozilla-acroread package will provide support for mozilla, firefox, galeon and konqueror.
Enjoy!
Related
June 22, 2008
» Firefox Shortcut Keys
Not long ago the USB mouse that I’ve been using with my laptop finally died. Granted it may have been due to me stubbing my toe on my backpack and crushing it during the middle of the night. In any event, I’ve become pretty proficient in the use of keyboard shortcuts in Firefox at this point. I thought I would share a few with you.
Navigation Shortcuts
Forward, backward, home, address bar and search bar can be done via keyboard shortcuts:
alt+Left Arrow : back
alt+Right Arrow : forward
alt+Home : Home
ctrl+L : address bar
F6 : address bar
ctrl+K : search bar
ctrl+K+Down Arrow : toggle search engine down
ctrl+K+Up Arrow : toggle search engine up
Tab Shortcuts
Opening, closing and navigating your tabs can be done via these shortcuts:
ctrl+t : new tab
ctrl+w : close tab
ctrl+Page Up : previous tab
ctrl+Page Down : next tab
ctrl+tab : next tab
alt+num (1, 2, 3, etc) : tab number
ctrl+shift+T : open recently closed tabs
ctrl+r : refresh tab content
ctrl+shift+r : force-refresh tab content
ctrl+u : view tab source
Are there any shortcuts that I’ve missed? If you’ve got anything to share, comment.
Related
June 18, 2008
» Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH
I have been tunneling all of my web traffic over an encrypted SSH connection for some time now. Considering the fact that I travel a lot, I’m very regularly on untrusted, insecure networks. I prefer to secure those connections (web, IM, email, etc) by creating an encrypted SSH connection and pushing the traffic through it. Today I also found a method for also pushing DNS requests through the same tunnel. This ensures total privacy between yourself and the SSH Server.
Step 1: Creating the Tunnel
Creating this private connection you’ll need a remote SSH server to connect to. Mine runs at home in my garage on an old Pentium III 500MHz box (yeah, the kind most people threw away long, long ago!). I connect to this tunnel using:
ssh -D 8080 -fN user@server
This creates a SOCKS compatible proxy, which is a requirement of the DNS forwarding. Other methods on the interwebs suggest using ssh -L or similar, which are not SOCKS compatible proxies.
Step 2: Forwarding DNS
If you’d like to also forward your DNS requests (ie; the site addresses you type into your browser), you’ll need to change a setting in Firefox. This can be done by accessing the address about:config, and entering this string into the configuration:
network.proxy.socks_remote_dns
Change this value to “true”.
Step 3: Using the Tunnel
The last step is to configure your browser to use these new settings. In Firefox 3 (I hope you’ve upgraded by now), you can activate/toggle these settings via:
Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network > Settings
Select “Manual Proxy Configuration” and add localhost to the “SOCKS Host:” field, followed by port 8080 (assuming you’ve used the port in the example above).
This will then forward your web traffic through the SSH tunnel and DNS requests will also be forwarded.
You may want to check out the FoxyProxy plugin for a simpler way of toggling this on & off.
To deactivate the tunneling and use the local DNS again simply revert Step 3 back to “Direct Connection to the Internet”.
Related
June 13, 2008
» Mozilla Firefox Easter Eggs
I ran into some Mozilla Firefox easter eggs this afternoon. Do you have any more that I don’t know about?
Visit these addresses in Firefox 3:
Also some other interesting things to find:
about:config
about:cache
about:credits
about:license
about:buildconfig
(Reference to the “warranty” is a warning message and I’m sure its a joke. Refer here to previous warning messages prior to this one.)
Related
February 29, 2008
» Fun with YUI, IE and JavaScript
I still develop JS in basically the same way I did back in 2001. Back then IE had more of a stranglehold on the browser market, but it was a horrible JS development environment. So one would use Mozilla with the Venkman debugger to make things a li
February 1, 2008
» Apology Issued To Mozilla
For those who read my post in your RSS reader, and then came to my blog in hopes to comment, you will notice the post removed. For those of you who are frequent readers of my blog, and have been reading for a while, you have probably noticed that I do this on occasion. Here’s my problem: I’m extremely passionate about technology and various products, and as such, I tend to act without thinking. I certainly have no intention of spreading FUD, especially via the Ubuntu Planet. This is an ongoing lesson that I keep learning over and over, and yet I don’t seem to get the hint. Thus, the reason for this, and other posts.
Mozilla- I apologize for rushing to conclusions before making an intellectual and educated decision about the post regarding blocking bugs in the browser. I should have followed up on more research, formulating a more educated decision before posting. I have no excuse, other than my lazy nature to argue while building on a sandy foundation. Even though I may not agree with how the development of Firefox, or Gecko, is progressing, I was out of line with that post. Please accept my apology.
I do hope, however, that you take a closer look at the code, maybe even with the stringent attitude that the OpenBSD team has towards its OpenBSD operating system, and stabilize the browser. My experience has been that Firefox has been unreliable since version 1.5, progressively getting worse. While the delay of Firefox 3 may be improving the code base, I worry that the browser is getting bloated and unstable. Please take these criticisms seriously, as they are coming from a fan who loves the product, but is looking at either running Konqueror or Epiphany on my Ubuntu machine as a replacement. I would love to see Firefox completely displace Internet Explorer in the market, but at this point, I’m beginning to have my doubts.
Thanks,
Aaron
» Firefox 3 To Ship VERY Buggy
WOW. That’s all I have to say. Firefox 3 will prove to be exceptionally buggy when it ships. According to the New York Times (NYT- learn to code nice URLs), Firefox 3 will ship with 8 out of 10 blocker bugs. 80% people! And people call me crazy for noticing the browser getting less and less stable on each release? Heh.
Here’s my take on the matter. Mozilla has lost touch of what it takes to develop an open source application. Rather than focus on release dates and features, you should work out bugs, ensure code quality and then design in the latest and greatest. Luckily, they’ve been pushing back the browser, which means higher chances of getting these blockers out of the browser. However, for me, Firefox 2, as instable as it is, works just fine. What are the necessities for upgrading to version 3? My opinion is, work out the bugs, and ship the browser with 8 out of 10 bug blockers fixed, rather than the reverse. Firefox is turning into an app the quality of OpenOffice.org.
At this point, I would recommend ditching Firefox for a more stable, and less bloated open source browser, such as Epiphany or Konqueror. Both have proven to be extremely flexible and reliable, and they’re available on every distro. They are certainly not bug free, and I’m not expecting Firefox to ship with 100% bugs fixed. However, I would like to see better reliability out of my browser, I would like to see less memory leaks, and I would like to see better handling of buggy extensions.
I guess only time will tell, but I’m not looking forward to the release of version 3.
January 30, 2008
» A Few Cool Ways To Use RSS Feeds
So what is all this RSS hype? I've known about RSS feeds, what they are for, and how to use them for quite a while. It's not like they are new or anything! It wasn't until recently that I started to actually use them though. I didn't know what I was [...]
December 21, 2007
» A look at Firefox 3
Firefox 3 beta 2 came out this last week. After reading some of the press it has gotten, I decided to give it a try.
I went to the beta download page where there are several language options available for downloads built for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I selected the English (US) version for Linux and was given a bzip2-compressed tar file to download.
I would imagine a lot of less experienced Linux users would have no idea what to do with a tar.bz2 file as this is different than the way most common distributions package software (e.g. RPM files or DEB files.) I'll explain what I did to try Firefox 3 on my Linux system.
I downloaded the file to my /tmp directory. Then, I created a ff3 directory in my home directory:
shellprompt% mkdir ~/ff3
Then, I went into that directory and extracted the files.
shellprompt% cd ~/ff3
shellprompt% tar -xvjf /tmp/firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2
At this point, I could run Firefox 3 by running ~/ff3/firefox/firefox, but I wanted something a little simpler, so I created a symbolic link in my ~/bin directory called ff3. Alternatively, you could use an alias command for this (e.g. 'alias ff3=$HOME/ff3/firefox/firefox').
shellprompt% cd ~/bin
shellprompt% ln -s ../ff3/firefox/firefox ff3
After that, I could run Firefox 3 by running the command ff3. I highly recommend you terminate any other Firefox processes (i.e. your distribution's Firefox 2 installation) so there's less possibility of the two fighting.
First impressions
It looks a little different, but not too much. All the familiar elements are still there. The first thing I noticed was the bookmark sidebar looked cleaner.
As I opened a few pages in different tabs, I noticed Firefox 3 does respond snappier than Firefox 2, confirming the reports that Firefox 3 employs much better memory management than previous versions.
Next, I checked out some of the cool features I'd read about, like the added functionality of the location bar.
This stuff is pretty dang cool! First of all, the location bar features a drop down button and an autocomplete feature just like it did before, but the drop-down list includes page titles and the autocompletion matches against titles as well! Again, the layout of this was markedly cleaner than similar features in Firefox 2 and the response was refreshingly snappy
Here's an image showing the new drop-down location bar list in action.
Next, an image showing the autocompletion matching against URLs and page titles. I typed ron p and several pages from my recent history were displayed in the location bar drop-down list. I'm not sure how they're ordered, though.
Another nifty feature of the Firefox 3 location bar is an even-easier way to bookmark pages with one click!. A small star icon is displayed at the right side of the location bar (next to the drop-down button). If the inside of the star is uncolored or white, the page is not bookmarked. If you click the star, the inside of the star becomes yellow and the page is bookmarked. Click the yellow star and a small popup appears allowing you to configure where the bookmark goes in your bookmark heirarchy. Very cool!
Here's a look at the unbookmarked location bar.
Below: The location bar after clicking on the star to bookmark the page.
Below: Clicking the "bookmarked" icon to activate the bookmark options dialog.
Another nifty new feature I discovered while preparing this post: When Firefox 3 displays a file upload form, simply clicking in the filename text box activates the file selection dialog. That's at least one less click!
I'll continue exploring this new beast and maybe report some more on what I find. So far, however, this is the most stable Firefox beta I've ever used and that's saying something.
November 8, 2007
» display: inline-block
I'm not an HTML/CSS guru, but I do know my way around and I do try to use "semantic HTML" and CSS for styling wherever possible. I hate tables for layout, if for no other reason than they're a big mess and hard to read, and I do all my HTML by hand (or generated programmatically, e.g. by Markdown, Markaby, or Haml).
So I'm a little bit surprised that even lil' ol' dabbler me has more than once wished to put blocks together in an inline-like flow, e.g. for a photo gallery or other dynamic grid-based layout, and yet the big guys are content to fall back on tables. Maybe I can afford to be more puritanical as a hobbyist.
I dug into the issue once again, determined to finally grok the CSS box model
and view model once and for all. I don't know if I got that far, but I do
understand enough about display: block and display: inline to see why it
doesn't work the way I was hoping it would work. It boils down to a block
element will seek the left edge of its parent.
But, there *is* a way to do precisely what I want to do in CSS 2.1. It's called display: inline-block, and it says to layout block elements in the inline flow. If you're still lost about what I'm driving at, there's a nice live demo and screenshot of display: inline-block at quirksmode.org. Alas, IE and Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, etc.) don't support this display mode. But in browsers that do (e.g. KHTML-based browsers like Konq and Safari), it's a thing of beauty.
So we need a workaround for Firefox and IE. You could revert to tables if you detect those browsers, but I like to keep the HTML unchanged. You could use float: left, and that works very well unless your blocks are different heights. So you can force your blocks to be the same height, and possibly use overflow: auto to give scrollbars as needed (or hide the overflow or let it just overflow or whatever).
So here's a little example. The blue blocks use display: inline-block and the green blocks use float: left.
.inlineblock {display:inline-block; border: solid blue; width:150px;margin:5px;} .floatleft {float:left; border: solid green; width:150px;margin:5px;}
Lorem
ipsum
ipsum
dolor
sit
amet
The
quick
brown
fox
Lorem
ipsum
ipsum
dolor
sit
amet
The
quick
brown
fox
Do play around with it by resizing your browser and dusting off that Konquerer or Safari browser to see how the blue blocks look when rendered correctly.
I think it's a crying shame that firefox doesn't render this properly. Maybe the complacent table-hugging masses haven't made enough noise. Let's make some noise.
While I'm on the subject, I highly recommend css_browser_selector.js method of doing browser-specific CSS.
November 6, 2007
» Decent Spaces
One of the more drool-inducing features of Leopard (for geeks, anyway) is Spaces, Apple's virtual desktop implementation. I'm a big virtual desktop fan, and I'm glad to see it working its way into the mainstream. And all things considered, Spaces is a decent (and beautiful) implementation.
But there are some bugs. I hope that we will see them worked out. Some of the bugs are in Spaces itself, some are probably with 3rd party applications. The most notable, and annoying, problem is buggy application switching. When you cmd-tab to switch applications, you are taken to the space with that application. This is good, but it must have given the Apple developers heartburn because in some ways it flies in the face of the "Apple Way", which thinks of an application as a whole not as independent windows. That's why the menu bar is at the top, and it's behind the design of the dock. But what happens when there's a Terminal window on this Space, and on that Space? The natural thing should be, switch to the terminal window in this Space. If that's not what the user wanted, well you can't be expected to read minds. But when I cmd-tab to Terminal, I am always taken to what Leopard apparently thinks is the master Terminal Space, regardless of whether I have a Terminal window in this space, which Terminal window I last used, etc. Bad news. As a workaround, I just put Terminal on all spaces and thank my lucky stars it has tabs now. This affects most multi-window applications to some degree, but it's most annoying with Terminal and Adium.
On a related note, I'd expect cmd-` to switch between windows of the same app on different Spaces, but it only switches between windows on the current space.
Some applications, especially Firefox and to a lesser extent Thunderbird, have focus bugs that may be related to spaces. Sometimes when I switch to Firefox (with cmd-tab), the window is not in focus and is not brought to the foreground. The menu bar reflects that I'm in Firefox, and I may have moved spaces to get there, but it's in the background. I have to switch to it with cmd-` (or, horror of horrors, with the mouse). I imagine this is the sort of thing that Apple and/or Mozilla will hammer out soon. There are other Firefox irritations but they're for another post—if they haven't been fixed by then.
So far, nothing too surprising. Virtual desktops is hard to get perfect, and various Linux window managers have been floundering for years or even decades. Overall, I'd say they're off to a smashing start. I have two other more minor irritations. First, I'd like the current application to stay the current application when I switch spaces with the keyboard, instead of switching to the topmost application in the new space. This is because I often want to choose an application (by cmd-tabbing to it), then navigate to another space where I want to open a new window (e.g. Terminal). This is a design decision, of course, and one that people tend to fall on either side with about 50% probability. The second is keybindings. I'd like to switch spaces with cmd-ctrl-hjkl (Vim keybindings). Maybe we'll find a way. I'd also like to have more keyboard operations, especially "move me and this window to the {left,right,up,down} space".
October 21, 2007
» Firefox - My Addons/Extensions
Thanks to the great “Extension List Dumper” extension, I’m happy to share with all of you my favorite extensions and a short little bit about each of them.
Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.1.2/Adblock Plus 0.7.5.3
This is a great extension for blocking ads. Using the Filterset.G component provides me with automatic updates which tell Adblock Plus which pictures are ads and which are valid content. I quite enjoy this one and don’t get the flashing ads nor do I get the buzzing bees anymore 
synic saw this tonight and asked me what it was. I run Download Statusbar in “Mini Mode” and never use the standard download dialog provided from Firefox. If you prefer to show all of your downloads near the status bar at the bottom, the Download Statusbar is for you.
FireGPG provides me with a quick and easy way to use my gpg keys. I can sign, verify, encode and decode messages in my gmail by clicking the extra options this extension gives me. I’m sure it works in Yahoo! Mail and others as well. I regularly get mail that is signed with someone’s gpg key, this is very nice for that reason.
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer 1.0.1
Foxmarks is in my opinion the best bookmark synchronization tool. Google has one, other people have one, but Foxmarks gives me something that those others just can’t. I get the ability to manage all of my bookmarks from the safety and security of the extension itself. Setting up the account, updating and synchronizing can all be done from within my Firefox browser. I don’t have to go to a web page and agree to terms, it just works.
I use this feature off and on though I really like its concept. When you add this extension, you get a little coffee mug up near your search box. Every day when you open your firefox, it will automagically load your chosen sites into the browser for you. Customizations can be made for each day, weekends and the whole week IIRC. Its a great little extension.
If you’ve never used StumbleUpon, you’re missing out. This extension provides you with hours of entertainment. Think of it as social networking on crack! You’ll be so addicted to “stumbling”, that by the time you get tired of it, you realize its morning. I absolutely love the StumbleUpon extension.
If you’ve never been to tinyurl.com, check it out, but this little plugin will help you make long web links into short, manageable ones you can give to your friends. Never again will you have to copy and paste http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=111843562736606607846.000001132f1a80671132d&z=13&om=1 but rather http://tinyurl.com/3bx3yv. Now isn’t that so much better?
I’ve recently discovered a couple more that I find interesting. I’ll report back to you all when I’ve tested them out, but here’s a quick list for your enjoyment:
ScribeFire - Blog from Firefox
Firefox Showcase - Hit F12 to show a quick preview of all of your tabs. Reload and browse here too if you like.
What are your favorite extensions. What ones did I miss? I’d love to hear from you about some that will make my Firefox even better!
Cheers,
Herlo
October 12, 2007
» Horizontal Scroll Bug in Firefox
An annoying bug in Firefox is that it detects the horizontal scroll sent by synaptic as the back/forward actions rather than scrolling. To fix this you need to go into firefox and type about:config in the location bar. And then filter for mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.
You need to set the action to be 1 (2 is forward/back) and set sysnumlines to true.
so it should look like:
mousehweel.horizscroll.withnokey.action = 1
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines = true
and then you will be able scroll properly!
You can also disable the scroll completely if you don’t want it at all by adding Option “HorizScrollDelta” “0″ to the input section of xorg.conf
October 6, 2007
» IceApe
Lately, I’ve caught the IceApe bug (IceApe is a rebranded/renamed Mozilla Seamonkey), and I’d like to share my enthusiasm about it.
First, a friend of mine got me hooked. Steve Dibb, a Gentoo user (yeah, I know. 
), loves it, and has been using Seamonkey ever since I’ve known him. Being a heavy Firefox advocate, I tried everything in my power to show him the One True Browser, but he refused to budge. Now, rather indirectly, he’s got me using IceApe. How did that happen?
Well, running Debian Sid on my laptop, due to the better hardware support than Ubuntu at the time, an X11 update came down the pipe. With this update, IceWeasel had the ability to crash X by selecting an unfocused tab. The way to get around this bug, was to start IceWeasel in safe mode, disabling any and all extensions. This was fine for the occasional here-and-there, but when it came to web development, I needed my extensions. Wondering what to do, I realized that IceApe used the same Gecko 1.8 rendering library as IceWeasel, so I installed it and gave it a try.
First impressions weren’t that great. The default theme is the same theme that Netscape and the Mozilla Suite was using back in the day. Not to terribly exciting to look at. Further, it doesn’t have any real way to manage extensions and add-ons through the browser. However, as I started fiddling with it, I noticed the insane amount of configuration options, and it actually was using less resources than the combination IceDove/IceWeasel that I was using. Getting the same amount of work done with the same or better productivity is always a plus in my book. And if it uses less RAM than previous setups, I’m all for it.
Since installing and running IceApe, it’s been flawless. It would be nice if there was a better way to handle extensions, and it would be nice if some of the extensions that I use would work with it, like Firebug. All-in-all, however, I love it. It’s snappy, powerful, and full of config’ing. Since running it, I haven’t seen the need to go back to the IceDove/IceWeasel combination. One suite, IceApe fits all my needs very nicely. I’d highly recommend it.
August 19, 2007
» Firefox Extensions List Update
I just updated my Ultimate Firefox Extension List For Junkies page. I added a new category of “Past Extensions” and updated the list of my “Current Extensions”. Of course, if there are any comments on list, I am curious as to what they are.