Another Opinion Among Many

Now that Firefox 3.0 is out, I bet there will be a ton of reviews of this milestone release.  I must say that it seems to be a lot more stable than it was.  The Mozilla team have really created an interesting monster this time.  I’ve been using the version on and off since it was first branched in the trunk.  it was scary to run at times back then.  I must say, though, that, since the RC1, its been quite stable and I don’t even know if I remember when it crashed, which is more than I can say for any of the 2.x versions.  I am not going to go ahead now and review what I’ve already commented on in earlier posts.  Kudos to the Firefox team, I say.  Now, guys and gals, can you somehow get your heads out of your asses and provide a switch to turn off your “improved” address bar?  Its the ADDRESS bar, not the “lets search any goddamn browser/search slowing term that you’ve ever typed or not tymed so that we can be your browser of choice for longer than you want us to be” behavior??? That’s my only peeve about the 3.0 version of Firefox.  The address bar is no longer an address bar.  Its a way to make you think Firefox sucks.  Give us a choice!

Of course, I write this in the new and improved, but hardly hyped, Opera 9.5 Kestral. The Wordpress editor is still funky in Opera, but its a lot better than it was.  Like, what’s the deal with you hitting “enter” like you would in any other browser to go to the next paragraph or thought and to be thrown to the TOP of the paragraph you just wrote? That behavior’s just gotta stop! I do like all of the other reasons that I’ve liked Opera, though.  Its FAST and its FAST.  Yes, its fast.  Pages seem to want to render like they’re supposed to and they arrive in front of my face in a speedy way.  Its too bad that it crashes on java applets all the time, though.

Damn, this is starting to look like a review. Its not - its just a rant. Rant, I say!

So, a few weeks ago, Ubuntu “upgraded” Firefox 2.0.0.12 (which is a decent release) to Firefox 3 Beta and I couldn’t view any java applets any more.  The reason is because some of the file paths are changing and the plugins need to be linked to a different spot.  I had to try Opera but it crashed.  That left me with Konqueror, which is not native to Gnome, for the time being.

That has just changed.  I just found Bug #173966 and there was a hack proposed that helped me to get back on track.  The solution, for now:

cd  /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so .   <–note the “dot”

Your plugin path might be different, but that’s where one place mine can be found (actually, its a symbolic link to the plugin, which is in  /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so)

I’ve made a few additions to the original post about hacking your Hardy Heron to accept Java as it stands.  Check it out and read the comments too.  Jazz has added a lot to what I’ve said.  Don’t forget to visit the forum thread that started this all.

Have you done the nutso and “upgraded” or tried out the development release of Ubuntu’s Hardy Heron? I did.  I decided to use the command “update-manager -d” to run Gutsy Gibbon’s Update Manager with the flag to update the distribution to the next release.  Currently Hardy is at 8.04 alpha 3.  For those Debianites, this would be like changing your /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to the “testing” sources and doing the “apt-get dist-upgrade” command after “apt-get update”.

The upgrade went reasonably well with only one temporary show stopper.  Java GUI apps stopped working when I upgraded.  It seems that there’s a bit of a bug in Sun’s Java 6 that doesn’t agree with the new x.org server (from what I gather).  They will fix it in Java 7, which will be a while yet.  Thankfully, I found this ubuntu forum post, that helped me solve the problem.  I used the sed line:

$ sudo sed -i ’s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g’ /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

I hope that this will help you too!

ADDENDUM:

• One thing that you will find is that after every Java update and many X.org updates, your java will stop working again.  Adding the “replacement” string “FAKEEXTN” again should fix the behavior.
• As noted by jazz in the comments (Please read the comments on this post), there are different paths for x86 and x64.
• You may or may not require the additional hacks to the /usr/bin/<java application> script to make it work.  I didn’t for Azureus or Frostwire.
• Any time someone says to “paste” or write a command with the SUDO command or to do “as root“, think before you copy
• Read the MAN PAGE for SED (and AWK) before using it.  Its a powerful command.

Addendum 2: (this is a short one)

Don’t expect anything big with Firefox for this one, at the moment, as Firefox 3 is the designated upgrade from the 2 branch (whether I approve or not - I’m testing and submitting bug reports) ad there seems to be a problem with java and FF3.   If you know how to get it working, let me know.  There are a few little things about FF3 that are great, but, mostly, I hate FF3.  It sucks the biggest moose appendage at the moment.  I yearn for the simple days of Phoenix 0.1…

To answer your question, Macbros,

I am hosted with a company called DSTinternet, and yes they’re fast! I did a lot of research before I unleashed my wallet on them and I couldn’t find enough negative about this company to not use them. The pricing seems to fit my budget and the features are fantastic! The company responds to support requests nearly instantly via the chat box off the site. I haven’t tried phone support yet, so I don’t know if the number will be reachable from Canada. My only gripe is that the use the Plesk control panel and I’m used to cPanel. I’ll have to see if I can simply add IP addresses to a ban list, as I can with cPanel, or if I have to add them to my .htaccess file manually (which I will, you spammers!). They allow FTP access so whatever!

As far as the rest,

This site runs on Wordpress. I usually am running a nightly build from the development repository. I’m not quite nutso enough (but close) to go with SVN commits, but the snapshot may not work for me every time either. I test the installation with similar plugins and theming on my own computer before I replace what’s working on this site. I don’t “upgrade” every night - more likely every 10 days or so. The current version is 2.3 alpha.

I am using a completely hacked and modified version of the Fresh theme, which was ported to Wordpress by LEMONed from the original design by Wolfgang Bartelme. I haven’t even left the structure intact, as I’ve moved stuff all over the place. The theme is based on a header, footer, body, subfooter, and sidebar. It has 3 sidebars (2 custom ones for individual pages, to which I employ the Page Template function) and 3 footer/subfooters. It will not always be the one I use. There’s something being cooked up in the background…

This site uses these plugins:

• Antileech - Prevent errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth. By Owen Winkler.
• Archivist - Selects a defined number of (random) posts from the archive and shows them on the front page By Martin Chlupáč.
• Bad Behaviour - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. By Michael Hampton.
• Compact Monthly Archive - Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
• Digital Fingerprint - adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts. By Kirk Montgomery.
• DoFollow - Disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. By Kimmo Suominen.
• Extended Comment Options - This plugin allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. By Mark Kenny.
• Extended Live Archives - Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe. By Arnaud Froment.
• Fancy Pullquotes - Creates pullquotes of given text to appear with a magazine-like style By Giorgio Gilestro.
• Google AJAX Search - Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site. By http://dancameron.org.
• myQuote - myQuote is a simple and small Wordpress plugin which enables you to place a Quote or Text on your website. By Jesper Avôt.
• Photopress - Photopress adds some image handling tools to Wordpress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. By Isaac Wedin.
• Recent Comments - Retrieves a list of the most recent comments. By Nick Momrik.
• Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
• The Excerpt Reloaded - This mod of WordPress’ template function the_excerpt() knows there is no spoon. By Kaf Oseo.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualisation. I Like Pi! By Christine Davis.
• Wayback - generate a list of posts from a previous period. By Chris Goringe.
• WP Grins - A Clickable Smilies hack for WordPress. By Alex King.
• WS Tooltips - Let’s you display cool JavaScript fading tooltips! By Christopher Hartmann.

For the moment, that’s all, but I will be changing and moving things around now and then. I have more plugins installed but not activated.

That’s about it for now.  If I’ve left anything out, I may add to this post later.