kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Open Source

Adding Favicons to your Firefox 3 Bookmark Toolbar on the Mac

A ridiculously long title to describe a very simple function which has been missing from the Mac version of Firefox since 2.x.

On windows, Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar will display the Favicons along with the text for the items in your bookmarks toolbar.  Something I’ve always done to conserve space in that toolbar is to blank-out the titles and rely solely on the icons to identify the bookmark I want.

The trouble?  The Mac version of Firefox doesn’t display the favicons in the toolbar.  Suffice to say that this has been more than a tad annoying, but until tonight I’ve simply put up with it.

Thankfully I found a short & sweet article that Gina wrote over on LifeHacker which led me to both a Firefox Plugin and a website to get me back my icons.

The steps to get the icons back are short and sweet.

  1. Download the plugin Stylish
  2. Do the obligatory Firefox restart
  3. Visit UserStyles.org and download this style for Stylish
  4. Done!!

It was really that simple, and now I’ve got my icons on my Mac.  Though they are spaced apart much further than on Windows, it’s a damn sight better than not having them at all.

Hardy for the Home – Part One: Gearing Up

One of the projects that’s kept me busy for the past couple of months (30 minutes at a time…) has been the realization of my home server strategy.  I’ve decided to start a multi-part series on both the hardware and software setup that I’ve chosen and will link to some key resources for anyone who might want to take on a similar project.

In the house, we’ve got four computers running various editions of OS X and Windows.  What I’ve been looking for is a solution which would serve all these platforms seamlessly.

The first part of the project was to sift through the guts of all the computers that I had in my house and see if I could get something put together which would serve the duty of the home server.  The server needed to perform a few specific functions:

  • Backup Server
  • Web Server (LAMP)
  • SFTP Server
  • DNS Server

In addition, I may extend the capabilities of the server to include:

  • VMWare Server
  • TorrentFlux Client

With those requirements in mind I set about scrounging through the working, and not-so working hulks that I had laying around the basement.  I was able to come up with the following configuration:

  • P4 1.5GHz
  • 512MB DDR SDRAM
  • 3 NICs (Onboard + 2 — will explain later)
  • DVD Burner (just in case)
  • 2x 80GB IDE Drives
  • 1x 40GB IDE Drive

The first priority is to get some backups going for the house and get some of our data copied.  There were two priorities for the backup: seamless and automatic.   This last item is particularly important because as many experts have noted a backup is useless unless it will happen automatically for you.  If you have to think about it, you won’t do it.

After looking at the hardware configuration it was obvious I was going to need some additional storage.  2 80GB drives would hardly do to backup data from four separate computers.  So I picked up a 500GB Western Digital MyBook.

And with that the gear was complete.  Now all I had to do was image the franken-box with a copy of Hardy Heron and actually put it to use.

Firefox 3 Released

I realize that I’ve been rather delinquent in my blogging recently, and to be honest, that may continue in the coming weeks.  That said, I needed to get this out and spread the word, if a little late, that Firefox 3 has been released.

Go download it!  I’ll wait….

There now… doesn’t that feel better?

Many of the extensions have already been upgraded to work with the new version, and others are sure to follow soon.  I’ll keep an eye on things and try to let you know when PortableApps releases Firefox3.

Also, if you download today (or by 10:00am PT tomorrow), you can be among those participating in Mozilla’s Guinness World-Record attempt.

WordPress 2.5: The rubber hits the road

WordPress LogoWordPress 2.5 is out, warts and all, for public consumption today.  Many users are opting to wait for a burn-in period to take place before taking the plunge.  Several major updates from WordPress have had a point-release take place within days, usually to fix a security flaw.

I have installed it on the sandbox where I’m playing around with the Options theme and won’t be applying the upgrade here until I’m ready to move everything over, including the theme.

The biggest complaint from most is the redesign of the admin pages.  People don’t like change.  There is added functionality and a brand new layout to the admin screens.  After having played with it for only a couple of days, I find myself fumbling around a bit still… but overall the new look isn’t too bad.

Many of the links I used most often are now displayed in the main admin toolbar (blue links) while the less often used links are in the grey bar at the top of the page.  These are the high-level nav buttons like the dashboard.  I think this design will indeed prove effective for people who spend quite a bit of time in the admin console, but will be more difficult for casual users to adopt.

I’ll be posting updates to both the Random Image Selector plugin and the Admin Links Widget in the near future to ensure compliance with the WP 2.5 code.

WordPress Woes: Read the Damned Instructions!

Recently some of you may have noticed some instability with the theme on this blog. The theme on the blog seemed to reset to the WordPress default without any rhyme or reason. I assumed it was one of the many plugins I had installed to try to provide additional content or functionality on the site. I tried enabling and disabling all of the plugins but to no avail, there didn’t seem to be anything that would correct the problem outright.

After several hours of frustration, I came across an article on coderemedy.com which provided an explanation, and pointed me at Scott Burkett’s blog for a solution.

What it boils down to is this: I use Alex King’s WP-Mobile plugin to permit the blog to be viewed on small mobile devices (like my own Treo 700wx) and this plugin was not set up correctly. I made the assumption that the plugin behaved like any other and didn’t read the readme file. Suffice to say there’s an extra step with this plugin and I didn’t follow it.

Once the plugin is uncompressed there is a second wp-mobile directory which needs to be moved into your wp-content/themes directory. The directory structure looks something like this:

wordpress/

    wp-content/

        themes/

        plugins/

            wp-mobile/

                README.txt     (where the solution is!)

                wp-mobile.php

                wp-mobile/

                    comments.php

                    index.php

                    style.css

Once the move is complete, the directory structure looks like this:

wordpress/

    wp-content/

        themes/

            wp-mobile/

                comments.php

                index.php

                style.css

        plugins/

            wp-mobile/

                README.txt     (where the solution is!)

                wp-mobile.php

See? Simple! Just read the damned instructions.

Admin Links Widget for WordPress 1.1.0 Released

Well after a far more successful 2007 than I could have imagined, I’ve released the first significant feature update to the Admin Links Widget.

First, THANK YOU to everyone who has downloaded the widget.  It has been downloaded an astonishing 2300 times since the inaugural release on August 14th of last year.

The most significant changes for this version are the addition of two new links that you can add to your site:

  1. Edit This Post
  2. Edit This Page

These links provide you the opportunity to edit a specific page or post from a link in the sidebar whenever you’re viewing a single page or post (ie not the front-page, or a search result).  This is particularly useful for blogs which don’t have an edit link built into their current theme.

Please take a moment and download the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.  And as always, if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on the blog.

Flickr Fight Follow-up: The proof

After the post I did a couple of days back about FlickrFight using images and not attributing them to the photographers who took and own the images, I thought it might  help to actually point to some of the things that FlickrFight is doing.

First off, they’re not copying the images, they are getting them from the Flickr API.  As a result they have access to all the information required to properly attribute the photos, and I sorted that out after five minutes of looking through the Flickr API documentation.

Here are two Creative Commons licensed images that came up in my search for Sunrise vs. Sunset:

Photo Credit: onurati on Flickr
Photo Credit: onurati on Flickr

Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr
Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr

Get it together, FlickrFight.  Attribute the photos!  Everything you need to know is RIGHT HERE.

Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

I’ve always been a bit of a stats monkey when it comes to… well pretty much everything.  I like to know how many there are, how long it takes, how much it costs.  I want the numbers.  But more than that, I want accurate numbers and often times in the past trying to get accurate numbers for website traffic has been a real challenge.  Google Analytics does a great job of  tracking every hit to my blog, but unfortunately it tracks mine too.  This conundrum led me to the Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin.

This plugin does a great number of things and has an options screen as long as my arm.  Aside from having the ability to ignore administrators, it also has the ability to add in tracking to all of your outgoing links and downloads.

If you use WordPress and you use Google Analytics you need this plugin.

Sun Acquires MySQL

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced yesterday that they have acquired the Open-Source database platform MySQL. This is a huge purchase and one of the largest acquisitions of an Open Source entity that we’ve ever seen.

The goal, says Schwartz, is to put a Fortune 500 vendor behind the innovative technology powering many next generation web-based services. To accomplish that goal Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP” (and MAMP, WAMP, and of course Sun’s own SAMP…).

Support of open source projects is nothing new for Sun. They have been a positive force behind several other projects in the past including Java, ZFS, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. This bodes very well for the future of MySQL and companies offering other higher-priced options for production databases will be watching very closely to see what edge this provides in the Enterprise space.

With the acquisition Sun picks up “clients” who may not be using Solaris, or even Java in their implementation but are major players in the Web 2.0 market. These include Google, Facebook, Nokia and WordPress. Kudos to Sun for putting some more muscle behind the Open Source movement, and here’s hoping some more major corporations will now be willing to take a “leap of faith” and make more use of a proven and effective open-source technology.