How can I get it back?
See http://communities.vmware.com/thread/188366 for the gory details. I hope this can get resolved in a timely manner :-/
Update:
Someone with a brighter mind then me suggested to use Windows System Restore feature. Excellent idea, everything is working again. I’ll still go for the VMWare support because such a thing should clearly not happen.
Add comment January 11th, 2009
If you’re one of the few poor (thousands, worldwide) users, you will be pretty surprised and upset once you find out why your downloads suddenly don’t work in your shiny new FF3 installation.
So what happened?
The FF developers decided that their Windows Application should respect the OS security settings. In my case, I use IE only for Windows Update, thus I put the update service from microsoft into the trusted zone and set the default seurity zone settings to high. I just don’t trust IE at all.
Why did this work the years before? Because I used FF for downloading everything else and until now FF didn’t respect this setting, which was a great life safer for me.
To make things worst I haven’t yet figured out a way to disable this behaviour in FF3, which means I’ve to suddenly lift the security settings for the complete system! As you guessed I’m pretty pissed about this.
Update: filed a bug report, excited to see what happens to it.
Update 2: Report closed within hours as Wontfix because it’s a deliberate change.
Update 3: My report has been marked as duplicate in favor of bug 445158 (which contains more information and, interestingly, has been opened by someone with an mozilla.com email address. Does that weight more then my request?)
Update 4: First comment on the report from another pissed user. I couldn’t say it in better words.
Add comment July 13th, 2008
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve certainly noticed the growing number of prototypes of casual games implemented in browsers using their latest canvas and related technologies.
Actually, this is the kind of start of revolution you’ve been seeing in every computer generation at the beginning, this is just a repeating pattern. Just remember how the PC started around 1992/1993 with their first 3D games and mobile phones started a few years ago, too.
How long will it take until we’ve something like ScummVM ported to a browser? Or Another World? Or think about the Sierra Classics.
Add comment May 24th, 2008
I’ve been running my own IMAP server for over 8 years now. Back when I evaluated possible options, I was fond of having all my mails remote accessible on my server and being able to do server-side filtering with sieve.
However, back then there existed no practical solution with the software I was using (Mozilla Mail, now Thunderbird), so sieve was just a word but I couldn’t use it (and I probably was lazy to do it by other means). I think I remember that Eudura had support for it.
Anyway, by sheer luck I came across the sieve extension for Thunerbird! I couldn’t believe, but it is true and it works.
Actually, the extension not a real up to par GUI filter interface what Thunderbird offers natively, it’s a more spiced up telnet to simply access the server side filters and work on them. But that shouldn’t degrade the extension, because it’s really all you need!
I instantly converted all my Thunderbird filters to sieve and, voila, no need to depend on a client to do the mail filtering.
This gave me quite a bite when I starting using my Nokia E61i with my imap server, because there’s no filtering capability available (and if it would, it probably would be too annoying for me to sync all the filters for it), but now that problem is solved too.
In case you’re wondering what IMAP solution I’m using: it’s cyrus imap using sasl. But don’t ask me about details. I set this thing up nearly a decade ago, carried this installation through all my hardware changes, first via chroots, now with vserver, but I almost entirely forgot how I sat it up, nevermind the master password :-)
I’m thinking about upgrading the architecture, switching to DBMAIL, etc, but there’s also this voice inside: never touch a running system. And, yes, cyrus is runnig well and haven’t failed me in years.
Add comment March 21st, 2008
Once again I’ve updated the phpdoc.vim plugin which is an improved version from the one found at vim.org. I finally got around to give it it’s on place to exist.
Stuff recently added:
Add comment January 16th, 2008
See the gory details in http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43450.
Basically, there are function which expect strings and the implicit _toString() call on an object will leak memory. Testcase:
< ?php
class Foo {
function __toString() {
return 'foo';
}
}
for ($i = 0; $i < 1e5; $i++) {
$o = new Foo;
# leaks
md5($o);
# does not leak
#md5($o->__toString());
# does not leak either way
# strstr($o, 'f');
#strstr($o->__toString(), 'f');
if ($i % 1e3 == 0) {
printf("%u: %1.2f KB\n",
$i, memory_get_usage(true) / 1024);
}
}
Add comment November 30th, 2007
In my last post I talked about a patch to reverse the behavior when using the mouse with the control-key to use the new full page zoom in Firefox 3 beta 1. Well, it seems like there’s an obvious simple soluation already possible: just set the hidden config mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines to -1 instead of 1 and there you go. Now that I created a patch to Firefox for the same behavior makes me feel like using canons to shoot birds . . . anyway, I now know what it takes to build Firefox from source on Windows, might come in handy one day ;-)
Add comment November 28th, 2007
I really couldn’t stand the zoom behavior with the mouse the way it has been changed for Firefox 3. However zooming is such a crucial part for me I want ahead, set up a custom build environment and after hours of fiddling a patch came out.
This patch honors the (hidden) preference zoom.reverse when doing the actual zooming with the mouse (mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action == 5). You can download my custom build of Firefox 3. It’s for Windows only and it’s just a zip file, no installer required. Unzip, change the hidden pref (hint: about:config) to true and there you go. You can start it along any existing Firefox version however you probably want to start it with a custom profile first with -P otherprofile so it doesn’t temper with your existing one. By default you can only run one instance of FF, if you’re sure you want to run them simultaneously, use MOZ_NO_REMOTE.
Add comment November 25th, 2007
While hacking on performance and a soon to be released customer site, it occurred to me that parsing the JavaScript we use is a pretty huge bottleneck. For CSS and JavaScript we use minification and compression and we even use domain aliases to parallel image/resource downloads.
We currently haven’t the templates connected to the CMS yet, but the raw time is currently between 700 and 900ms. Maybe it can be justified because the layout isn’t Web 1.0 style (i.e. many round corners, shadows, etc.).
What puzzled me was the “loading time of JavaScript was around 300ms”, see this picture:
That’s quite a long time. It may is not that good visible from the chart, but nearly everything following the JavaScript is hold until it is read, which delays the complete loading of the rest of the page.
Since behind the scenes the actual request is in reality using Minify, it’s not just plain serving (but for this scenario the JavaScript has already been cached).
So I took a look just at the JavaScript loading, see this:
What’s that? Roughly 30ms vs 300ms?
The only realistic guess I’ve at the moment is: parsing the JavaScript.
This single request loads the following libraries:
Maybe I’m too optimistic but it hit me a bit that JavaScript parsing still does take so long. Given that the JavaScript is cached (ideally) things such a huge problem, but still. It was frustrating that I could trim down the >1s request to ~700ms but not further and for most of the part just because it takes as long as it needs it.
1 comment August 17th, 2007
When it comes to configuring Mediawiki to have very short URLs, according to the Mediawiki documentation it seems the possibilities are endless. It you go through he page, in Austrian we would see it’s like “Kraut und Rüben”, which means something like it’s a mess, unordered, crowded.
My simple goal was: have the shortest possible article URLs, ideally http://server/Article and not http://server/dir/index.php/Article.
With a simple .htaccess file and some modification to the LocalSettings.php I was able to get it working:
.htaccess File:
RewriteEngine On
# Backward compatibility for old installation
RewriteRule ^wiki/index.php/(.*) http://intranet.netcare.at/$1 [R=301]
# Only rewrite uppercase Words because they signal the title for the pages to
# handle. Everything in lowercase is expected to be "internal"
RewriteRule ^([A-Z].*) index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]
LocalSettings.php changes:
$wgScriptPath = "";
$wgScript = "/";
$wgArticlePath = "/$1";
This is simply a “it works for me” scenario. I did some testing and it seemed everything is working fine. However I also think the way I use Mediawiki just scratches the surfaces. We’ll see if it works out.
Add comment August 10th, 2007