Firefox 2.0

Yesterday Firefox went crazy on me. Attempting to add a bookmark in any of the four ways crashed the browser, not just randomly, but every frigging time.

I thought I'd run it from the command line and see if any console messages were thrown. Big mistake; turned out that v1.5 had precedence in the path, and it grabbed this opportunity with both hands. It first informed me that Firefox was not my default browser, and asked me whether I wanted to make it so. It then proceeded to trash my extensions and themes gleefully: none of them worked when I opened 2.0 again.

I left things in this state last night. Before embarking on a painful download today morning, I wanted to check whether I could tweak the profile files and fix things. I renamed the extensions.cache and extensions.rdf files, and voila, the add-ons returned as if nothing had happened, and even had the gall to pretend to ignore me when I asked them where the fsck they had been.

Outing Xymphora

Here's a thought (an unfounded one, I hope): considering that Xymphora is most probably Canadian, is named Andrew -- as evidenced by the RSS feed information -- and had a root canal this Monday, wouldn't this be sufficient information for somebody with enough resources at their disposal to track him down?

WTF?

Joel is now blogging about SQL injection attacks?

Cricket talent in India

Nirmal Shekar writes:

In an age of boosterism and saturation coverage of a sport that is almost a religion in this country, truth tellers are not easy to come by. And, it is for this reason that Dilip Vengsarkar, Chairman of the BCCI's National Selection Committee, must be applauded for his courage and unblinking honesty.

"To be honest, India doesn't have exceptional talent now," Vengsarkar told pressmen after chairing a meeting to select the Indian team for the ODI series in South Africa.

Here's a contrarian thought: Vengsarkar's statement could be construed as an indirect assurance to the current crop of overpaid bozos in the team that their places are safe, and they don't have anything to worry about hungry youngsters nipping at their heels.

It's not really a contradiction

From a Guardian article via The Hindu:

Polls are relatively straightforward. When compiled reliably they are supposed to tell a story in digits. That story may be contradictory (people say they want more social services and less tax)...

It's not a contradiction because there are ways to fund social services through means other than taxation. I haven't thought this through, but what about the government competing with private companies by providing services, and using all the profits to fund social programs? They can also make money (which they do already) by running lotteries.

Press releases and Yahoo

You come across a 'news' story, find that it's from the Yahoo domain, and think it's a legitimate bit of journalism. But look closer, and you'll find that it's a press release (a careful scrutiny would have revealed the presence of 'prnews' in the URL), not subject to the rigours of checks for accuracy and editorial oversight.

Browser rivals playing catch-up?

I don't think so.

Like great minds thinking alike, the Internet's two main competing browsers unveiled new improved versions just days apart last week.

Please, give me a break.

Both browsers now provide built-in search windows, so that one does not have to open a new Google, Yahoo or MSN page to search on a keyword.

Incorrect again. Firefox has had the Google search bar from, like, the pre-1.0 days.

I also don't think the emphasis on anti-phishing protection features is really warranted. Is this probably because Microsoft is touting this feature as a competition-beater?

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Well, finally I got it right and managed to download the right version of CD #5.

There was a twist in the tale, though; after downloading the ISO image, I found that I had run out of blank CDs. After a bit of head-scratching, I figured out the solution: mount all my five ISO files and make YAST use the resulting file system as an installation source.

Result: I've finally, yes, finally, managed to compile and install the Crystal window decoration. The effort was worth every bit of the struggle. Check out this screenshot.

An unintended benefit of permanently mounting the CD images in /etc/fstab is that my system has become very snappy as well, for whatever reason. Plus, installation of additional packages from the hard disk is, of course, much faster.

Replatforming

I heard this word for the first time this week, from two different people. Question: in what way is this different from, say, migration? If not, why do we need a new word at all?

Methinks this falls under the same category as re-branding 'Testing' as 'Assurance'.

Alright ...

... now I'm really pissed: SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD5.iso from here is actually the remastered version, but somebody mistakenly named it without the 'Remastered' tag. Another eight-hour download, only to end up with a file that I already have. Maybe I'm missing something here, but if the remastered version of the CD is identical to the original one, why is YAST not able to pick up packages from it?

Huh?

This has got to be the most inane and senseless letter to The Hindu that I've ever read (it's about the veil controversy in the UK):

Those advocating the removal of the veil feel the burqa hampers effective communication. What more is required to prove the degradation of values than the fact that we cannot accept a woman dressed decently and respectfully but would love to see her in indecent costumes? We put forward the most inane and senseless reasons to support our argument.

Straw man? Non sequitur? Slippery slope?

Remastered my ass

I have the first four OpenSuSE 10.1 CDs (did I mention that I'm now on an unlimited download plan?); I found that I needed CD #5 for installing the KDE development packages, so off I went to the download page. There I found that the ISO images were now adorned with the moniker 'Remastered', whatever that means. I didn't pay much attention to this and went ahead with the download. Big mistake. When trying to install the packages from this CD, YAST refused to proceed and kept whining that I was shoving in the wrong CD.

Googling reveals that the FTP mirrors contain the original ISOs as well as the 'Remastered' ones. Grrr.

Selling out to The Man

Considering how my Conexant How To page seems to be one of the main sources people turn to for installing Conexant USB ADSL modems, I've decided to try and make some moola off of it; I'm going to see if Google AdSense accepts the page.

Update: It turns out that there's no need to ask Google to accept my page; if I'm already an AdSense member, I can simply paste the AdSense code in any other page or site that I want (subject, of course, to Google's policies).

Firefox 2.0

I decided to wait till the dust settled down and 2.0 was well and truly available via getfirefox.com before downloading it. I had tried the release candidates, but didn't feel like abandoning 1.5.

There seems to be an issue with installing 2.0 over an existing 1.5 installation, i.e. an upgrade; updating my extensions or installing new ones failed with the 'installLocation has no properties" error. I ended up starting with a clean slate and downloading all my extensions -- ahem, add-ons -- again.

Anyway, 2.0 is way faster than 1.5, which alone is worth the cost of upgrading. Also, the spell check feature -- dotted red lines below misspelled words a la Microsoft Word -- is really really nifty. Makes posting to the blog a breeze.

Oops. When I click on the 'Check Spelling' button provided by Blogger (yeah, I'm like that), nothing happens. The error console says 'spellcheck is not a function'. Oh well.

Oh my!

From a COLA post:

>> The question isn't what matters.
>> It's the answer that matters,
>> you <expletive> moron.

> You know a person has no stance or
> debating ability when they
> consistently have to use
> personal attacks as part of
> their argument.

Those are called "ad hominems" there, wjbell. And you, without exception, have no stance or debating ability despite your refusal to resort to ad hominems, you microcephalic toad.

Explosions in Baghdad

Here is a video from an Arabic news channel about the recent explosions in an American base in Baghdad. There are all kinds of unconfirmed reports going around, claiming that the extent of the American casualties in this attack is being suppressed.

What stands out in this footage for me is the humongous explosion that you see at about 3:50 or so minutes into the video. Considering that the camera is quite a few kilometers from the base, I can't imagine how powerful the explosion must have been to produce that kind of a blinding flash of light. It was Diwali yesterday, so I guess I'm paying more attention to such things than I usually would have.

Here's a shoutout

... to anocturne :-)

Some Smalltalk

I have a small shell script that backs up my blog archives; it has a bunch of calls to wget for all the archive files since April '04, which is when I started blogging. Since I don't know shell scripting all that well, the script is not even intelligent enough to figure out the current month and use a for loop.

I decided to redo the script in VisualWorks. Problem was, I kept getting the exception related (I think) to Seaside that I mentioned earlier. I bravely stepped into the debugger, and I don't know what I did, but I now started getting another exception, something that seemed more fundamental; I wasn't even able to open the image successfully [*]. Back to a fresh base image (BTW, loading Seaside in this fresh image went through incredibly smoothly -- probably on account of all the downloads of the dependent packages the last time).

I managed to do nearly all the things I wanted to do, except for one thing: create a single tar.gz file that contains all the archive files. The GZipWriteStream class seems to create only single files. My not-so-elegant workaround is to feed all the archive files one after the other to the output .gz file's stream, in effect creating a single huge HTML file. Definitely not elegant.

[*] Coincidentally, Episode 6 of the Industry Misinterpretations podcast talks about image-based development and ways to recover from situations similar to mine.

Spelling bee contests

1. Why is ESPN, of all channels, broadcasting a spelling bee contest?


2. More important, why the hell am I watching it?

Both very valid questions, but my post is about the need for such competitions: the quirkiness of the English language. It almost seems like making a virtue of a necessity, and brings to mind the glorification of design patterns, when some people consider them as nothing more than ways to overcome the deficiencies of some programming languages.

What's happening in Georgia

There's an article in The Hindu today by Vladimir Radyuhin about the situation in Georgia.

Ignoring the pro-Russian bias in the article, what struck me the most about it -- apart from its incisiveness -- was this: how the big powers conduct their, for want of a better phrase, geostrategic business in such a brazen manner, readily discernible to any literate person willing to pay attention to these issues, and yet get away with pulling the wool over the majority of their populations with their fake concerns for things like democracy, human rights and free trade.

Staying on the subject of Russia, here's something from Rigorous Intuition:

You may know that Israeli President Moshe Katsav is facing indictment for the rape of two female staffers. Earlier this week in Moscow after a brief public appearance with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Vladimir Putin remarked "Say hello to your president. He really surprised us." The New York Times notes that the microphone "was quickly turned off as reporters were ushered from the room," but Putin was overheard to continue. "He turned out to be quite a powerful man. He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him."