Opera stuff

Just discovered some of this stuff for Opera.  So far it's made my Opera experience a lot more enjoyable.

• How to make Opera look like other browsers
  
• Customize Google for Opera
• Firefox skins for Opera
  
• Del.icio.us buttons
  

Windows Firefox install size off the charts

Take a careful look at this picture - something* is very wrong.

Your first natural thought is probably that I simply have my cache set to ~500 MB or so. Wrong.

I don't think I ever adjusted my cache settings. Right now FF claims it's using a mere 50 MB for the cache.




If you're totally clueless to the cause of this issue welcome to the party cause I am too.

A weak shot in the dark would be addons, skins and all that other stuff.

Wrong. Wrong and wrong again.

A quick trip to Explorer clears up the confusion. I have two rather large PS (post script) files (200+ MB a piece). These are the results of some fairly large File->Print->Print to file operations.

So if you discover your Firefox (or whatever else) installation size is OFF THE CHARTS check out the folder in Explorer. Chances are it's just some other files laying around throwing off the numbers.


* Bonus points if you noticed that Windows gets the "last used" date all wrong. The screen shot (like this post) was taken @ 10/26/2007 however WinXP claims FF was last used on 10/22/2007. I've used FF at least 100 times since 10/22 !

Debian : Install Firefox

Tonight I made the switch from Ubuntu 6.10 to Debian 4. My first priority is getting Firefox (not Iceweasel) up and running. As you probably know this isn't a straight forward situation. After a bit of searching I still didn't have a clear cut answer.

The error I kept getting was :

./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I also got :

./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A quick search shows that most of the files missing live in :

/home/me/firefox
/usr/lib/iceweasel

Of the possible solutions this is the one that worked for me. I know it's not the prettiest fix but it will due.

1. Download and unzip Firefox.
2. apt-get install libstdc++5
3. Copy the libs from /home/you/Firefox/ to /usr/lib/ (or some other acceptable place).
4. Run firefox-bin from the directory you unzipped it in.

Other possible solutions :
Add /home/you/Firefox to your path
Create symbolic links from the libs in /Firefox/ to /usr/lib (or something)

Other files Firefox may complain about being missing :

libfreebl3.so
libnspr4.so
libnss3.so
libmozjs.so
libnssckbi.so
libplc4.so
libplds4.so
libsmime3.so
libsoftokn3.so
libssl3.so
libxpcom_compat.so
libxpcom_core.so
libxpcom.so
libxpistub.so

Ubuntu : Firefox crashes related to VLC plugin

There is a lot of confusion about this topic so I'm going to keep it short and sweet.

I was using Ubuntu 6.06 + Firefox + VLC plugin, life was good, everything worked.

Then I upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10. Shortly there after I noticed that I couldn't stream audio of the x-mplayer2 variety. As soon as the page which initiates the stream loads Firefox would crash.

I tried a number of fixes but they didn't work :

-reinstalled Firefox
-reinstalled VLC + its plugins

When I ran Firefox from the command line upon crashing this is the only error I would get :

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

After much Googling it came to my attention that the plugin which handles such media types (the VLC plugin) may be to blame.


Long story short : I noticed the latest version of the VLC plugin is 0.8.6 which Synaptic told me I had installed. However about:plugins in Firefox told me the VLC plugin version was 0.8.4

It seems that when VLC upgraded it only upgraded the libvlcplugin.so in these locations :

/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/libvlcplugin.so
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libvlcplugin.so

and not in this location :

/home/Me/.mozilla/plugins/libvlcplugin.so

So I deleted the above copy of libvlcplugin.so and then used Synaptic to do another re-install of the VLC plugin. I then copied libvlcplugin.so from /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/ to /home/Me/.mozilla/plugins/

Firefox no longer crashes when I visit the offending pages (sites that use the VLC plugin) however my streaming radio still doesn't work.

Hopefully this information will be of some help.

Teh Post 1yr Anniversary !

Today (or tomorow..maybe yesterday, I'm not really sure) marks the 1 year anniversary for Teh Post !

Woot !

Teh Post has come a long way. The first version of Teh Post used the standard lame-o blogger templates.  Now Teh Post boast features almost no other web sites have (look closely).

The very first post on Teh Post was about how a major web masters forum was cheating digg. Since then I've covered Opera, Linux, Windows, Grub, Enemy Territory, AdSense, Nvidia tweaks, a previously reported botnet (!), Wordpress, Firefox, Xubuntu, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Windows Live Spaces, Cricket (the cell phone company), MySpace, Web 2.0, Internet Explorer 6, Security, Motorola Hacking, Ad-Aware, Gnome, Cingular, Blogger and maybe a few other things I've over looked.

It's nice to have passed the year mark, many blogs and web sites never make it this long. I read once that the average life span for a blog is 9 months, I'm a full 3 months a head of the game !

Teh Post has strived to bring you consice, reliable and important information. I'm not in the business of posting crap everyday just to put new info out there or to keep up with the Jone's.

Many of the post here cover problems I actually had myself and then tracked down the solution for. Although a lot of my information can be found at other web sites I try to keep things short and to the point. There is nothing I hate more than going to a site to get some info for a fix only to find five some odd pages of unimportant crap.

After this one year of service I'd like to ask a question of you my visitors. Why don't yall ever leave me some comment love ?

Cheers and I look forward to another (more exciting) year. Keep an eye open for Teh Post in a news article near you ;)

Sincerely,
Management

ps. Get back to work, you're not being paid to believe in the power of your dreams.

;)

Web Design & Font Size aka Don't use small fonts retard

Many web masters seem painfully unaware of any news that doesn't come from digg, their favorite web master forum or some other social bookmarking site.

I've read two studies that show web browsing has become the new favorite hobby for many retired people. This isn't noticed by most web designers (or other people in general) because another study showed that older people (retired age) were less likely to interact when on the net. In the event they do "interact" there is a decent chance they are choosing to interact with people in their age range to avoid all the lame teenagers on the internet who "know it all".

Short version : there are lots of old people on the net but they aren't interacting

What does it all mean ?

This is the part that really gets me. I'm in my mid twenties and I run across sites all the time that use a 9px font for regular text. Are you retarded ? I have excellent vision and even I have trouble reading fonts this small. Furthermore, even if I can read it what makes anyone think I want to read 9px font for hours on end ?

Web masters do this in order to cram more content on the page for one reason or another. But in most cases they end up loosing visitors because the font is so stupidly small. Before anyone leaves me a comment saying "oh but duh you can resize the font doing XYZ". Guess what, not everyone knows that. Do you think your grandma knows that ? There is a good chance she doesn't. On top of that there are many web pages that have fixed sized fonts, they can't be enlarged. Why people engage in this level of stupidity is beyond me.

Short version : Hey web masters, make your fonts bigger and make them re-sizable. No one wants to read whatever it is your writing on a 9px font.

FYI : In firefox you can resize fonts by holding down the CTRL key and scrolling the mouse wheel (towards you for bigger, away for smaller). Also you can hold CTRL and press the + key. In IE I think you can go to View -> Font Size.

US Gov GPO site hacked ?

Can anyone explain this picture ?

Hoodia is an ingredient which many diet pill companies claim will cause weight loss. I was searching the net for information .gov sites had about hoodia and came across this.

How did a .gov site end up with a "buy-hoodia" type spam site attached to it ?



gpo.gov belongs to the U.S. Government Printing Office
purl.access.gpo.gov belongs to the U.S. Government Printing Office's PURL Information Page

What is a "PURL" ?, from the PURL FAQ :

1.1 What does PURL stand for?
PURL stands for "Persistent Uniform Resource Locator."

1.2 What is a PURL?
Functionally, a PURL is a URL.

Instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client, which can then complete the transaction in the normal fashion.


Any ideas ?

Opera : Change the default search engine

Here is an easy way to change the default search engine Opera uses.

1. Open C:\Program Files\Opera\search.ini


2. Find the search engine you want as the cut it's block of code excluding the stuff inside the brackets []


3. Past that code under [Search Engine 1] at the top.


4. Move the original code from [Search Engine 1] to where ever to cut the code from in step two.

Wordpress line break issue (<br /> , <br> & <p>)

So your awesome new Wordpress blog isn't doing line breaks (returns/blank lines) like it should after paragraphs and you need answers fast.

A "line break" is simply a blank line between sentences or paragraphs (much like the space between this sentence and the one above it).

I had this problem for about a week and it drove me crazy, I was sure it was a Wordpress problem until I discovered it was actually an issue with my theme.

Here are the symptoms ... These tags will not cause line breaks (returns) as they should :

<br />
<br>
<p>
</p>

Look inside your Wordpress theme css file and see if you can find something like this :

p {
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
}

If you do try removing it (only after making a backup of the code) and see if that works.

I had two instance of that type of code which was controlling how my post looked. After I removed the above type of code everything worked like a charm.

Ad-Aware update error

When you try to download an update for Ad-aware do you get an error that says, The downloaded definitions file could not be read, please update again ?

If so you've come to the right place !



The fix is very simple, do the following :

1. Open My Computer
2. Open the C: drive
3. Open the Program Files folder
   
4. Open the Lavasoft folder
   
5. Right click the Ad-Aware folder and chose properties at the bottom
   
6. Click the middle tab at the top called security
7. Place a check in the box for Full control
8. Click ok

You should now be able to update Ad-Aware with no problems.

The cause of this issue is that when Ad-Aware installs it does not grant you full control rights over the folder the program and definition file live in.

So when you try to download an update Ad-Aware tries to modify the definition files and Windows does not allow this so Ad-Aware generates an error.

The irony of it all is that Ad-Aware is the cause of it's own error due to it improperly setting the permissions on the folder it lives in.