Jatecblog

This question was asked the other day on an IRC channel I was in: How do you make changes to about:config without opening Firefox. Though this may seem silly at first, there are quite a few reasons why this would be practical and necessary, such as wanting to deploy Firefox on multiple machines with the same about:config settings. Luckily, it is quite easy to set, but you may want to have Firefox in front of you while you do it.

For those of you who do not know, about:config is a way to modify more advanced features of Firefox. You probably do not want to mess with prefs.js unless you know what you are doing. You can learn more about about:config here.

Before continuing, close down all Firefox processes.

1. Navigate to your user profile and open prefs.js in a text editor.

2. Scroll to the bottom of the document.

3. Now enter your about:config hack in text form. For example, the about:config hack in this article would be represented as:

user_pref("browser.tabs.closeButtons", 1);

user_pref(" ", ); is the basic formula that is used. In the quotes you place the name of the preference as it appears in about:config. after the comma you place the configuration option, such as a number or true or false.

Now you can save the document. When Firefox is reopened with that profile, the settings will be applied. You can modify them further in about:config again.

I recently came across the Wakoopa website. For those who have yet to hear about it, Wakoopa is a social networking site for software. Their software is tracked for how much time they use by a small client application that sits in the notification area of the toolbar. Unfortunately, this client software is only available for Windows and Mac OS X for the time being.

It seems to me that whenever a company promises a Linux version of a program, it can take months or even years to actually get that said product out. However, I would like to start using something like Wakoopa now on my Linux boxes. I don't necessarily need the social features, even a small tool to track the usage of programs as I use them to just get an idea of where I spend by time would be useful. I already have the Timetracker extension to see how much I use Firefox, but I'd like to get a feel for other applications as well. For instance, I am using OpenOffice.org Writer right now to write this article, but I do I really use it that much? And how long do I spend using e-mail and that sort of thing in Kontact? I feel it would be all around interesting.

I have yet to find a comparable program on Linux to Wakoopa. I was simply wondering if anyone had any suggestions at the moment. I've already asked around IRC to no avail. Anyway, thanks in advance if any readers know!

The other day on StumbleUpon (I apologize for not having the link, but if someone can supply it, I'll be happy to put it here) a floppy disk notebook on sale for about ten dollars (USD). I decided to attempt this myself, and am actually quite happy with the result. You may want to make one. All I used were too floppies and a small stack of post it notes. I then drilled through the stack and put keyrings through the holes. I will warn that no two keyrings seem to be the same size.

Does anyone else have any quick and cheap geeky creations? I'd love to see them!

I realize that I've been gone for quite some time from here, but I will be getting back in the flow soon. I see I have many comments, which I will also try to get back to. Please bear with me for now.

Full screen terminals can be useful for many reasons. I particullary like being able to use them for writing as I have little to distract me. However, using Ctrl+Alt+F1-F* (depends on your setup) can often be slow to switch back to a graphical environment. When you use Konsole, as in this tutorial, you can quickly use a keyboard command to switch back to another virtual desktop. Also, you get many of the great features of Konsole and possibly a better resolution to read text. Konsole is the default console for KDE, but it can be installed (with many libraries) under GNOME and such as well.

1. Open up Konsole.

2. Go to Settings > Full Screen Mode to get the full screen mode. Now you may wish to take the extra GUI elements off of the terminal.

3. Now you can clear other elements if you wish.

You can access the menu bar options again with the right click menu.

If you would like to save the session for the future, you can do this under Settings>Save Session Profile. You can later access it under Session>(the name you've chosen). This should hopefully give you a similar feel to using a tty, but more feature-rich and with quicker access.

After falling into a rut with Internet Explorer 6 for years due to its dominance, Microsoft is finally starting to improve Internet Explorer. It began with Internet Explorer 7, which was a fast improvement, even if it didn't suit the needs of some power users. Some previous supporters of a practical Internet Explorer boycott, such as "Stop IE" threw in the towel. The site now no longer exists for that reason. Internet Explorer 8 may be working towards more improvements, but there is no telling when it will come out, or, such as was the case with Microsoft's Windows Vista, if it will no longer have many of the features promised. Here is what I think Internet Explorer needs in order to be able to be the choice of all web users.

Support for More Platforms
Sure at the moment Windows XP may be the most popular consumer desktop operating system, with Windows Vista being the more obvious successor. However, this may not be true within coming years. We may see a steeper rise in the use of Linux, OS X, and similar OSs. Cell phones and game systems may become more commonly used for Internet access. Whatever the case, Microsoft needs to port Internet Explorer to run in many different environments. I believe that if they want to be successful for years to come, they should give versions of Internet Explorer for the major desktop operating systems, as they did back with earlier versions of Internet Explorer where the browser ran on Unix and Mac OS as well. Depending on third party programs such as IEs4Linux doesn't cut it. Microsoft should also consider offering something similar to Opera Mini for various environments besides their own smartphones. For instance, Opera has versions of its browser for different game systems and a variety of cell phones. I personally use a version of it on my Nintendo DS.

Use Web Standards
Microsoft's main competitors, Firefox and Opera, and trying to support web standards completely. Many smaller web browsers, such as Konqueror and Safari, have the same goal in mind. In fact, all of these web browsers have a public build that passes a test meant to show compliance: Acid2. Konqueror even already supports many attributes of the upcoming CSS3. Though Internet Explorer 7 was an improvement over Internet Explorer 6 in terms of standards compliance, they are still behind compared to other browsers. I believe that Microsoft should completely stop supporting the proprietary technologies in Internet Explorer and focus on supporting the standards. Microsoft should also begin to support more than just the basics. For instance, Firefox and Opera both have native support for the SVG image format and Konqueror is fairly close by using a common KPart. Internet Explorer users must instead use a plug-in to use this image format, thus making it hard for web authors to use it. Microsoft should support the advancement of new technologies by simply supporting them!

Open Source it
Internet Explorer has always been free as in price, though recent versions claim the need for a Windows license. Therefore, Microsoft would have nothing to loose by ending their complete control over IE and its code. If Microsoft were to release Internet Explorer under an open source license such as the GPL, Microsoft would no longer have the need to dump near as much money into the program. Internet Explorer would theoretically be improved drastically as more people would be able to help fix bugs and add new features. Microsoft could even use a license similar to the Netscape Public License (which is both an open source license and a free software license) in which Microsoft would essentially be able to release the finished project under their own closed terms. As Richard Stallman says quite simply in On the Netscape License "Netscape can use our changes in any way at all—even in proprietary licensed versions of the software." In this manner, Microsoft could fine tune Internet Explorer beyond what the open source contributors create. The interested parties could get the open source version, but Micrsoft would not face as many issues with including it in Windows.

These changes may be drastic, but Microsoft can make Internet Explorer come out ahead if they truly put their mind to it. You may miss the obvious lack of mention for extensions, but I believe that Microsoft is already starting to encourage the use of these with the IE Addons at Windows Marketplace. With more power users and developers using IE, we should theoretically see more add-ons as well.

(Now I'm ready for everyone to tear this to shreds!)

Are you having issues with a blank screen during bootup and/or shutdown on your Ed/K/X/Flux/Something Ubuntu system? This is usually because your monitor does not support the screen resolution that the splash program is using. Luckily, it's easy to fix. If not, it may be an issue with your video card.

1. run sudo nano /etc/usplash.conf from the terminal. You should get a simple text editor with something similar to the below:


# Usplash configuration file
xres=1024
yres=768


2. Change the xres and yres values to something your monitor supports. For me, I changed xres to 1280 and yres to 800 for my Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop, as this is the only screen resolution it supports.

3. Press Ctrl+O to save and then Ctrl X to exit.

4. Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure usplash from the command line. You may have to wait a minute or two for it to complete.

Hopefully you should be able to reboot and see boot and shut down screens as I did. If not, you may have a bit more trouble fixing your problem.

This is a guest post by Tim, who has written on Jatecblog before. Tim runs Sacratee.

Since the release of object oriented programming in PHP, it has lead many people to write better and more efficient code, but still many programmers are unaware of this. I will show you a couple ways to make use of this not-so-new way of programming. Note, you must have PHP 5 to use the code below.

Modular System

With many new types of content management systems being created, it is no surprise people are making add-ons for them. This can be a pain if the CMS developer has not put in object oriented ways of streamlining the process of module development.

Below is some example code in which the user can easily add an item to a menu bar. First, the menu class the programmer of the application has implemented before hand:

myMod.php

As you can see, if makes the task much less tedious for the module developer.

Template System

Using PHP's OOP __ destruct method, we can easily have things run at the end of our script without specifically putting code there.

The above code would replace {name} with bob in template.html when outputted. Note, if you remove the reference to the class by overwriting $Template, that will call the __destruct method as well.

So there you go! A couple useful ways to use object oriented programming in PHP.