Do you run Mozilla or Firefox? Do you want to know what Google thinks about the pages you visit (including perhaps your own)? Then check out Pagerank extention for Mozilla and Firefox browsers. Finally, a cross-platform browser extention to view standings in the greatest popularity contenst of the digital era. I'm using it here under Gentoo Linux with Mozilla 1.6 and it works great.
Internet Explorer users beware! The Department of Homeland Security is advising surfers to use other browsers in light of the recent severe security flaws in IE. A malicious website may be able to snoop your keypresses on the keyboard for things like creditcard numbers. Woops. Via /.
Google may be looking to give back to the world by opening parts of their source. Net4nowt.com is reporting that the internal Google project to do this was mentioned in a presentation to software engineering students in Melbourne, Australia. This could be anything from massively parallel, high-availability, fault-tolerant server software, to the code that powers their various web APIs, to anything else that is behind their kick-ass search engine.
Before anyone gets all excited, I haven't been able to find much independent verification of this. I believe the presentation may have been a seminar on June 18th at the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne. However, the seminar description doesn't mention anything on this topic. Anyone know of anything to back this up?
Via LXer.
Pursuant to the recent CGI changes at Freeshell, I'm slowly moving the backend of this site to CGI powered by PHP, instead of PHP scripts running inside mod_php. For most people, this is the exact opposite of what they want.
However, at Freeshell, the admin recently enabled the usage of suexec, letting us run our CGI scripts under our normal user accounts. This opens up all kind of goodies, like secure file writing, not needing to mark all files readable by the nobody user, etc. However, suexec doesn't work for PHP scripts running in mod_php.
So everything here must be converted to CGI scripts—running PHP. For the most part that works nicely, except one small bit that gave me trouble. I use a technique with Apache to fake the appearance of directories inside URLs. It uses some mime magic to force the webserver to execute a script that does not have a file extension. That let's me execute the script 'search' in an URL like http://foo.bar/search/apache to search for articles related to Apache (foo.bar is not a real site, of course).
Well, mime magic doesn't work for CGI scripts. So you can use this bit of Apache magic in your .htaccess file.
<Files search> SetHandler cgi-script</Files>
And it's like, wa-lah! Instant fix for crappy URLs. Just check
the $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] variable in PHP, which will return to you everything
after the hostname in the URL, to determine what content to display.
For more fun, read up on Apache Handlers.
If you've been keeping up with Blogzilla, you might know that Newsmonster 1.2.2 Pro was recently released for free. It is a "news aggregator" in the form of extensions to your web browser. It pulls RSS feeds from the sites you are interested and collects them all together for your perusal, making it easier to keep up with content.
For an application that is supposed to make your life easier, it is a pain to get working under Debian Woody 3.0 (stable). However, with a few quick, custom updates, you too can live in Newsmonster nirvana. These instructions assume you are using Mozilla.
I'm not 100% sure if this is required, but it helped get rid of some errors I saw when trying to run under the decrepit version of the First Lizard that comes with Debian Woody. Using 1.0.x just doesn't cut it these days—a quick upgrade to 1.5 solved my initial problems. You can find a deb source at apt-get.org. I used the repository at http://debian.relativ.org/. To do this, add the following line to your apt sources file.
deb http://debian.relativ.org/ .Then, after killing your browser, run an apt-get update
&& apt-get upgrade to bask in the glory of the 1.5 Lizard.
Getting Java 1.4 was the biggest hurdle to getting Newsmonster working in Woody. I had 1.3 installed from some deb source but that doesn't work. Newsmonster requires 1.4 but nobody packages 1.4 for Woody currently. But you can manually install it. Blackdown Java seems to be the best choice.
First, remove any installation of Blackdown java you have on your box, deb or otherwise. Then go to one of the Blackdown mirrors and find the appropriate j2sdk and j2re 1.4.x packages for your system, for me, I found them at ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/JDK-1.4.1/i386/01/. Down load the .bin files for GCC 2.9.5 to somewhere to install, like /usr/local, change the permissions to 700, and run them. Then create a symbolic link from /usr/local/j2sdk1.4.1/jre/plugin/i386/mozilla/javaplugin_oji.so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/javaplugin_oji.so (assuming you installed in /usr/local).
Read good instructions for getting the java plugin working under your browser if you have trouble.
Then, start up your browser. Check about:plugins to make sure that you have the java plugin installed. Make sure that java, javascript, and software installation are enabled in Mozilla. Then, as root, go and download Newsmonster by just clicking on the button. If software installation is enabled, you should be prompted to install, answer yes. Then kill your browser.
That's it. As your user account, start Mozilla and begin the setup process for Newsmonster. I'm still learning how to use it at this point, as the documentation isn't so great. But all in all, it is a nice bit of work.
One nice feature of Newsmonster is that you can add a feed to your subscription list right from your browser. Right click on the page of a blog you read (like LAB-Y), and select "Add to Newsmonster". Follow the instructions and blam-o, you've got a new subscription. This autodiscovery does work here at LAB-Y.
The only problem I've noticed so far with Newsmonster is that it doesn't work with Prefbar, my favorite Mozilla extension. Anybody have luck getting these two XPI apps working together?
Anyway, happy blogging!
Radiation from the cell will erase the mind
I had a few minutes to play with that Sanyo data cable I got a while back. Now I'm posting this from my cell. With just a bit of kernel-tweaking and these fantastic instructions, I'm ballin' with a wireless connection via my Sanyo-4900. Who can stop me now?
Sometime in the future, I'm planning on buying a laptop because I travel so much. I need to carry a mobile office with me, so I can get stuff done. To go along with that, as any geek would point out, I need wireless internet access from anywhere.
The best solution at this point seems to be using Sprint's Unlimited Vision service with a USB data cable. Some of these phones provide an ACM ppp device you can use to dial out and get reasonable wireless access. Another solution seems to be getting a PCS Merlin C201 PCMCIA card.
For anyone else who is interested, here are a collection of links to get you started.
If anyone knows if the Sanyo SCP-8100 works with Linux, I'd like to hear about it.