At least it's better than Robin Williams, who made me singlehandedly not watch Bicentennial Man, no matter how much of an Asimov fan I am.
I still think this is going to suck, but at least I might watch this one...
I hope that decision gets undone quickly. If I'd want to google slashdot, I'd google slashdot. strl-l, site:slashdot.org [whatever I want to search for], arrow down, enter.
The old slashdot search, though not perfect, at least allowed you to easily narrow down searches on several criteria. That is what I'd like to see more of.
Of course, chances are that this indeed is a temporary solution, used only because the old search still gives that infernal internal error message.
Kartoo (previously mentioned here) has been doing visual search results for quite a while already; I'd even say that's the most useful application of Flash that I've ever seen.
Probably because (the title notwithstanding) it wasn't an article about Linux, but one about a wide variety of (semi-)interesting things Linus said on that cruise. Linux of course is a very important part of that, but not the only thing Linus has an opinion on.
Negative comments about weblogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm seeing a lot of negative comments on weblogs out there, and (even though this is slashdot) I'm somewhat confused by them.
Just because you personally don't find the content of the average weblog interesting, should this really mean weblogs don't have a reason for existing?
Personally, I'm extremely grateful for weblogs, as they allow a lot more people to communicate, and for me to discover that communication, then would happen before.
* I read the weblogs of my favorite authors, knowing as one of the first people in the world when they finish the next chapter, decide on a title of the book, but far mroe important, getting all sorts of interesting insights into the creation of the book, into the links to real world events and the reasons for why certain things are what they are - this heightens my appreciation of said books.
* I read the weblogs of the key people working on developing the next version of my favorite software. A lot of Mozilla (to name one of/.'s favorites) developers for example have weblogs, and if you don't have time to read bonsai, these weblogs are often an easy but effective way to stay up to date on development. And it's more than just software. The weblogs from people in the various W3C working groups, the weblogs from the figureheads in various movements and organizations... All of them can provide fascinating insights into a world you'd otherwise never see anythign from but the end-result.
* I read the weblogs of various friends and acquaintances I have scattered all over the world. Weblogs are to email what usenet is to mailinglists. Pull, rather than push. I get the information when I want it, adn it still allows me to keep in touch with people I'd otherwise not have time for. Sure, the stories about their cats and dogs are completely irrelevant to 99.999% of the people out there; why would this not be perfectly okay? It matters to them and to the people who matter to them. Nobody's forcing you to read these weblogs... And every now and then one of these people will have something very profound to say, or will have dug up a really interesting piece of information, or came up with a really good joke... And then other people link to that, often in other weblogs, and the information propagates. And that's good too.
No matter how all of us might feel superior to the average 'blogger', no matter how all of us can whip up a solution that's both more convenient and technologically superior to this "Blogger" in a matter of hours... these are things that don't matter. It's the sharing of ideas, the communication, the links and bonds... that's what matters. Most of it is static, most of it will never be read by anyone. But all of these people maintaining weblogs are part of... I don't know... of something big. Somethign big like 'the internet', but more efficient. The information is presented in a more coherent fashion. If you've read one weblog, you can easily grasp the way any other weblog works, and for the average person out there, a weblog is a way more efficient way to communicate than the personal homepage as it existed 5 years ago.
After previewing I pulled almost all links from this comment - if you're really interested in the weblogs of the people I mentioned here, go and search for them...
With Mandrake 9, I had to install Mandrake 9 to get my internet connection to work. The only option I had to manually set (choosing from two) was that I was on a LAN. The ethernet card and network were automatically detected, and the option for automatically getting an ip assiged from the dhcp-server was preselected. Next, next, next and my internet connection was working.
With windows, I spent hours on hours checking and unchecking vague checkboxes that didn't tell me anything, trying something, rebooting, trying somethign else, rebooting again, installing 'clients', 'adapters' and 'protocols' and never a source for help in sight.
Linux might not be perfect. The amount of drivers out there for old Taiwanese scanners is abysmal, and if you wander too far off the beaten path you will quickly need to start doing 'scary' things through the commandline, but for basic functionality, it far outpasses windows in ease of use.
On the rare occasions when I use IE, I am doing so while spoofing the IE user_agent string to appear to be (now) Netscape 7. And I'll happily click away from any and all sites that then go on to block me.
Instructions on how to change the IE user_agent string can be found here.
If a bunch of us geeks would start going over all PC's in computer labs and the like to change the IE useragents, this could lead to endless fun. (And perhaps some more realistic percentages for the various browsers - undoing the Opera damage.)
Does anyone know if it's possible to selectively allow pop-ups on some sites you visit, but disallow from all others?
It is, though for now you'll still have to edit a preference file to do so.
As is described here, you need to add three lines like these to your user.js file (create if necessary):
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "trustable");
user_pref("capability.policy.trustable.sites", "http://www.usefulsite.net");
user_pref("capability.policy.trustable.Window.open ", "sameOrigin");
Bug 166442 has just added a popup manager (like the cookie and image managers) to build a blacklist of sites that aren't allowed to open popups. It's mostly been backed out again due to performance regressions and it not working perfectly yet, but work on per-site popup blocking is being done, and I think that by the time 1.2 is released it should be possible to do things like this without needing to edit any preference files.
I believe Mozilla is dual-licenced; you can use it under the GPL if you want.
tri-licensed actually. You can use it under either the GPL, the LGPL or the MPL.
Though actually, Mozilla isn't yet completely tri-licensed. There are still a grand total of four missing hackers who will need to approve their contributions being relicensed.
So if you know David Nebinger, Uncle George (fear the jokes in reply to this), Makoto Kato or Thierry LeBouil - let them get in touch!
Here are the new XPIs for Mozilla 1.1 final. You need to click on
the platform-independent enigmail XPI and *one* of the platform-dependent enigmime XPIs.
More to the point, why isn't there an individual tab close button as part of each tab?
It's been proposed (of course) and this was marked wontfix - this gets way too crowded (you should have seen the mockup screenshots - created by the people actually proposing this) and makes it likely you accidentally close tabs when meaning to switch between them.
Middle-click on the tab itself (or ctrl-w) to close tabs will have to do. And indeed these options do so admirably.:)
Bug requests for a pref on this have been shot down before (for example bug 131037), but if you submit a new bug where you clearly explain the way you're browsing and why in that scenario the new closing method is undesirable, you might have a chance. Don't go into a lot of options - only request left-to-right versus right-to-left with a hidden pref.
You can also just fix the behaviour yourself. If you only try a new mozilla version every few months it'd be worth it. I'm asuming you use windows for the following - if you use linux you should be able to figure out the differences yourself:
In your mozilla/chrome directory (note: mozilla itself, not the profile) there's a file toolkit.jar - backup this file and then unzip it in its current location - so you have subdirectories chrome/toolkit/content/...
Open the file tabbrowser.xml in your favorite text-editing program (notepad should do) and locate the line:
else if (index == this.mPanelContainer.childNodes.length - 1)
this should be on line 761. Edit it to:
else if (index > 0)
save and rezip to toolkit.jar. Make certain the directory structure is the same as it was before - so all content in the zipfile is located in a subdirectories with content/ being the first subdirectory.
Run mozilla and enjoy tabs that close from right to left. If somehow this doesn't work (most likely a problem with how you zipped the archive) restore the backup and try again.
As I am reading the page, I see a link, and middle click (Or Right Click & Open in new Tab), and a new tab opens. I go and read the page.
Why would you interrupt reading the current page to go and look at something new? I always middle-click links and immediately forget about them again until I'm actually done reading the current page. That's why "open links in the background" is so infinitely useful. Click and don't be bothered by it anymore until you are ready for it. (This has the added benefit that by that time, the page will be completely done loading.)
But indeed, I see your point - when browsing the way you do the new behaviour is less useful.
However, I have the feeling the majority of users making use of tabbed browsing will not browse as you do - and for those users the change makes a lot of sense.
Hitting the checbox in: edit, preferences, navigator, tabbed browsing: "load links in the background" will make opening tabs in the background the default action - no need to even bother with the shift key anymore.
Other nice touches for tabbed browsing: Try dragging a plain text link - http://www.mozilla.org - to an ampty area of the tab bar (if you have many tabs open: near the close button) - this will open a new tab with that link. Dragging the link to a tab itself will load the link in that tab.
Middle-click on a tab in the tab bar will close the tab.
Dragging a bookmark from the personal toolbar onto the tab bar will open that bookmark in a new tab.
I don't think it's ever been ctrl-tab. Maybe in multizilla - but not in mozilla. ctrl-tab has been used for switching the focus between frames/location bar since at least the 4.x days, and this is not going to change.
However, as you mentioned, everything is configurable. In this case, you need to create a file called userHTMLBindings.xml in the res/builtin/ directory and edit it according to the instructions found here.
Well, I know Asa makes those roadmap graphics, but I have no idea what program he uses. I assume however that it's just something like Photoshop or the GIMP.
why do tabs now have to close left to right, prey tell?
Because this allows for hugely more efficient browsing if you follow more than one link per page.
Imagine googling for a specific subject. You open the first five links and keep the results page open for further searching if by some strange impossibility the first five results werent what you're looking for. So now you hit ctrl-pagedown to go to the next tab, which has the first search result. You quickly glance over the page but it isn't what you were looking for. ctrl-w closes the tab.
Now with the old behaviour, the tab to the left would be focused. But you don't want that tab! You want the next result. So you have to manually focus the next tab again (oh, bother). And when you close that one, the same friggin first tab focuses and you once more have to manually go to the next one...
With the new behaviour however, the tab to the right gets the focus - when you're done with the first search result and close the tab - the second search result shows. And when you're done with that one, the third one shows. No other actions needed than closing tabs.
Imagine the use of this for reading forums, or archived mailinglists, or... well, everything that consists of a collection of links where it matters in which order you read them. Yes, it is somewhat disconcerting to see the behaviour change like that when you were used to the old way - but change is good! Give it a few minutes, really try to see the use of it, and you'll almsot certainly come to see that the new way to do this is a vast improvement.
at what point are the developers going stop adding new crap and just focus on fixing bug's?
Never. Though for example the Netscape engineers working on Mozilla might be directed to work only on fixing 'real bugs', many other contributors will always remain interested in extra features that they personally could really use, and contribute patches for these features. And (as long as they don't add too much bloat / are obviously useful for more than a handful of users) those patches will continue to be accepted and Mozilla will continue to become a better, more feature-rich browser.
You know you got to rethink things when mozilla is using 200MB's of ram!
I'd be very surprised if you're seeing such memory usage with 1.1 - Mozilla's memory usage has improved dramatically over the last few months.
There are several bugs on pattern matching image blocking - and one of them has a patch. The contributor commented that he was going to rewrite that patch, and that this might be a while - but work definitely _is_ being done on this, and with a bit of luck we should still see it by 1.2
Slashdot Mirror
At least it's better than Robin Williams, who made me singlehandedly not watch Bicentennial Man, no matter how much of an Asimov fan I am.
I still think this is going to suck, but at least I might watch this one...
I hope that decision gets undone quickly. If I'd want to google slashdot, I'd google slashdot. strl-l, site:slashdot.org [whatever I want to search for], arrow down, enter.
The old slashdot search, though not perfect, at least allowed you to easily narrow down searches on several criteria. That is what I'd like to see more of.
Of course, chances are that this indeed is a temporary solution, used only because the old search still gives that infernal internal error message.
Kartoo (previously mentioned here) has been doing visual search results for quite a while already; I'd even say that's the most useful application of Flash that I've ever seen.
I'm seeing a lot of negative comments on weblogs out there, and (even though this is slashdot) I'm somewhat confused by them.
/.'s favorites) developers for example have weblogs, and if you don't have time to read bonsai, these weblogs are often an easy but effective way to stay up to date on development. And it's more than just software. The weblogs from people in the various W3C working groups, the weblogs from the figureheads in various movements and organizations... All of them can provide fascinating insights into a world you'd otherwise never see anythign from but the end-result.
... I don't know... of something big. Somethign big like 'the internet', but more efficient. The information is presented in a more coherent fashion. If you've read one weblog, you can easily grasp the way any other weblog works, and for the average person out there, a weblog is a way more efficient way to communicate than the personal homepage as it existed 5 years ago.
Just because you personally don't find the content of the average weblog interesting, should this really mean weblogs don't have a reason for existing?
Personally, I'm extremely grateful for weblogs, as they allow a lot more people to communicate, and for me to discover that communication, then would happen before.
* I read the weblogs of my favorite authors, knowing as one of the first people in the world when they finish the next chapter, decide on a title of the book, but far mroe important, getting all sorts of interesting insights into the creation of the book, into the links to real world events and the reasons for why certain things are what they are - this heightens my appreciation of said books.
* I read the weblogs of the key people working on developing the next version of my favorite software. A lot of Mozilla (to name one of
* I read the weblogs of various friends and acquaintances I have scattered all over the world. Weblogs are to email what usenet is to mailinglists. Pull, rather than push. I get the information when I want it, adn it still allows me to keep in touch with people I'd otherwise not have time for. Sure, the stories about their cats and dogs are completely irrelevant to 99.999% of the people out there; why would this not be perfectly okay? It matters to them and to the people who matter to them. Nobody's forcing you to read these weblogs... And every now and then one of these people will have something very profound to say, or will have dug up a really interesting piece of information, or came up with a really good joke... And then other people link to that, often in other weblogs, and the information propagates. And that's good too.
No matter how all of us might feel superior to the average 'blogger', no matter how all of us can whip up a solution that's both more convenient and technologically superior to this "Blogger" in a matter of hours... these are things that don't matter. It's the sharing of ideas, the communication, the links and bonds... that's what matters. Most of it is static, most of it will never be read by anyone. But all of these people maintaining weblogs are part of
After previewing I pulled almost all links from this comment - if you're really interested in the weblogs of the people I mentioned here, go and search for them...
With Mandrake 9, I had to install Mandrake 9 to get my internet connection to work. The only option I had to manually set (choosing from two) was that I was on a LAN. The ethernet card and network were automatically detected, and the option for automatically getting an ip assiged from the dhcp-server was preselected. Next, next, next and my internet connection was working.
With windows, I spent hours on hours checking and unchecking vague checkboxes that didn't tell me anything, trying something, rebooting, trying somethign else, rebooting again, installing 'clients', 'adapters' and 'protocols' and never a source for help in sight.
Linux might not be perfect. The amount of drivers out there for old Taiwanese scanners is abysmal, and if you wander too far off the beaten path you will quickly need to start doing 'scary' things through the commandline, but for basic functionality, it far outpasses windows in ease of use.
700MB rewritables aren't exactly common yet, though due to Mandrake they have become so for me...
Instructions on how to change the IE user_agent string can be found here.
If a bunch of us geeks would start going over all PC's in computer labs and the like to change the IE useragents, this could lead to endless fun. (And perhaps some more realistic percentages for the various browsers - undoing the Opera damage.)
As is described here, you need to add three lines like these to your user.js file (create if necessary):
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "trustable");
user_pref("capability.policy.trustable.sites", "http://www.usefulsite.net");
user_pref("capability.policy.trustable.Window.ope
Bug 166442 has just added a popup manager (like the cookie and image managers) to build a blacklist of sites that aren't allowed to open popups. It's mostly been backed out again due to performance regressions and it not working perfectly yet, but work on per-site popup blocking is being done, and I think that by the time 1.2 is released it should be possible to do things like this without needing to edit any preference files.
Though actually, Mozilla isn't yet completely tri-licensed. There are still a grand total of four missing hackers who will need to approve their contributions being relicensed.
So if you know David Nebinger, Uncle George (fear the jokes in reply to this), Makoto Kato or Thierry LeBouil - let them get in touch!
No, there currently isn't. There's a RFE open on it though, so by the time Mozilla 1.4 is released... who knows?
Middle-click on the tab itself (or ctrl-w) to close tabs will have to do. And indeed these options do so admirably.
Bug requests for a pref on this have been shot down before (for example bug 131037), but if you submit a new bug where you clearly explain the way you're browsing and why in that scenario the new closing method is undesirable, you might have a chance. Don't go into a lot of options - only request left-to-right versus right-to-left with a hidden pref.
You can also just fix the behaviour yourself. If you only try a new mozilla version every few months it'd be worth it. I'm asuming you use windows for the following - if you use linux you should be able to figure out the differences yourself:
In your mozilla/chrome directory (note: mozilla itself, not the profile) there's a file toolkit.jar - backup this file and then unzip it in its current location - so you have subdirectories chrome/toolkit/content/... Open the file tabbrowser.xml in your favorite text-editing program (notepad should do) and locate the line:
else if (index == this.mPanelContainer.childNodes.length - 1)
this should be on line 761. Edit it to:
else if (index > 0)
save and rezip to toolkit.jar. Make certain the directory structure is the same as it was before - so all content in the zipfile is located in a subdirectories with content/ being the first subdirectory.
Run mozilla and enjoy tabs that close from right to left. If somehow this doesn't work (most likely a problem with how you zipped the archive) restore the backup and try again.
But indeed, I see your point - when browsing the way you do the new behaviour is less useful.
However, I have the feeling the majority of users making use of tabbed browsing will not browse as you do - and for those users the change makes a lot of sense.
Hitting the checbox in: edit, preferences, navigator, tabbed browsing: "load links in the background" will make opening tabs in the background the default action - no need to even bother with the shift key anymore.
Other nice touches for tabbed browsing: Try dragging a plain text link - http://www.mozilla.org - to an ampty area of the tab bar (if you have many tabs open: near the close button) - this will open a new tab with that link. Dragging the link to a tab itself will load the link in that tab.
Middle-click on a tab in the tab bar will close the tab.
Dragging a bookmark from the personal toolbar onto the tab bar will open that bookmark in a new tab.
I don't think it's ever been ctrl-tab. Maybe in multizilla - but not in mozilla. ctrl-tab has been used for switching the focus between frames/location bar since at least the 4.x days, and this is not going to change.
However, as you mentioned, everything is configurable. In this case, you need to create a file called userHTMLBindings.xml in the res/builtin/ directory and edit it according to the instructions found here.
Well, I know Asa makes those roadmap graphics, but I have no idea what program he uses. I assume however that it's just something like Photoshop or the GIMP.
There are several bugs on pattern matching image blocking - and one of them has a patch. The contributor commented that he was going to rewrite that patch, and that this might be a while - but work definitely _is_ being done on this, and with a bit of luck we should still see it by 1.2