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Moving and using Firefox Plugins on Swiftfox

Dante Regis — Mon, 21 May 2007 02:20:53 +0000

So, have you ever heard of Swiftfox? If you are coming from google, probably yes. It is just like Firefox (the same source code) but it is compiled with optimizators for the major CPUs avaiable. So, it will perform better on your machine. It’s like having Firefox on Steroids. So, since it has the same source code, you can use your existing extensions (and install new ones) as well as use your plugins. There’s an platform independent installer on the website, but if it does not import the plugins for you, or, for some reason, you have installed it using another method (like Automatix, or tarball), you can create soft links from your existing plugins to use them on swift fox.

1. Go to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

2. Do a ‘ls -l’ so that you can see where the link points to

3. Now, create links on /opt/swiftfox/plugins to the original files

Tip: ln receives the target and then the name for the link (I always misplace them)

Example:

Giving ls -l you find out that the java plugin (firefox-javaplugin.so) is in /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so. So you do a

ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so /opt/swiftfox/plugins/

Swiftfox will automatically use the new plugins.

making webpages with great colors

Dante Regis — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:27:19 +0000

I’m just a programmer. Period. I work alone, so I have to build both code and web page layout for my software, but I’m no designer. To top it all, I’m color blind. So, I choose the colors, they look great to me, but everyone else with a normal vision will protect their eyes from such a terrible color scheme!

Maybe you’re not a color blind person, but you may have faced trouble choosing colors for your web site. You try two, three, ten times and it just can’t get right. Your designer friend though, can do that in 35 seconds, of which 30 are spent opening Dreamweaver.

There’s a tool on the web that intents to help people like us. It’s called Color Scheme Online v 2.0. It helped me big time. You go to their website, and click on a color (or type the color code on one of the inputs on the left). The site will then show you 12 colors that match with the one you provided. Along with their codes in RGB and Hex.

Great value tool! Try it out. There’s also a desktop software download there, but I haven’t tried that out yet.

ruby on rails

Dante Regis — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 07:02:39 +0000

A colleague at work, Chico Ary http://chicoary.wordpress.com/, came to me talking of a new language “Ruby”, and a web framework built on top of it, “Rails”. I must admit that at the time I did not give it much attention, just making a mental not to take a look on it.

What a shame. I’m sorry Ary! Rails speeds up web development on a way that makes it bleeding fast! To give you an example, I was working on that time customizing an open source application built on PHP. It was a job that had already taken me 4 months, not counting the months the application itself took to be developed by the community. I took the hard decision to abandon PHP and rewrite the application from scratch after I met the power of Rails. And, believe me, 15 days later, 65% of the software was already ported on a much more scalable way. Now, 2 months later, the software is at production stage and I’m working on bugs and new features.

And, best of all, Ruby, the underlying language, leaves the code readable for anyone. Give it a try, get Rails here and Ruby here.

Howto Debug JavaScript on Internet Explorer

Dante Regis — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 06:39:15 +0000

First things first: I’m a Firefox evangelist. The problem is: people do use IE. There’s nothing we can do about that – even if we convert everyone to a browser (a real one, I mean), today, at this right moment, most people use Internet Explorer.

So you face a deal: your javascript is working perfectly on Firefox, but problems arise on IE. What should we do? The only message you get from the “browser” are things like “Unknown Error on Unknown Line”. Perfect, right?

Normally, you would fill the code with alerts like “Got into the loop”, “i = 10″ etc. It works, most of the time, but if, say, your loop iterates 100 times it’s quite annoying. Well, googling around a bit, I found 3 ways to help you out. (1) Microsoft Script Editor, (2) Microsoft Script Debugger, (3) Javascript Debug Window.

The first one comes bundled with MS Office 2003. Since I cannot afford (and wouldn’t, even if I could) a copy of a software that costs more than the computer it runs in, and at work we use Office 2000, I could not test it.

The second one, is avaiable for download here, and works fairly well. There’s a big problem, though: It only worked for me when running as Administrator of the machine. Well, running IExplorer is already a security issue, running it as Administrator is like asking to be hacked.

So, it left us with using a debug window. It opens a window that will output the text you send to it through the new debug() function. Just place the code on your page and you should be OK. I took this tip from Isocra website, all credits go to people there!