Yet another post about firefox extensions

Previously I have written about various useful extensions for Firefox. Recently I have tested quite a few extensions that didn't make my "install these first" list and although I do not think any of these are of the "you are not browsing right if you do not have this" grade, but I find some of them rather nice additions to my web experience.

• CustomizeGoogle - is one of the subtle, yet extremely powerful extensions. Once you install it, suddenly your experience with Google search, GMail, Google Calendar and other Google products just becomes nicer. You get Google Suggest keywords while you type, GMail auto-redirects to an encrypted version, you get links to other search engines in your search results, Google Images starts to actually point to images etc.
• SpeedDial - if you ever used Opera, you already know what this is about. Basically, it adds a special location (you can configure it to be your home page) that shows thumbnails of several (nine by default) sites of your choice with handy shortcuts to go straight to these sites. I used to keep a lot of tabs open at all times in my Firefox sessions, in order to have all the reference documentation I need at hand at all times. Now I just assign relevant pages to my Speed Dial and voila, CTRL-1 gives me a tab with Apache 2.2 manuals, CTRL-2 - tab with MySQL reference manual etc. Or I can just open a new tab and click on whatever I need right there. Again, I can see people saying that this is just an unneeded addition to bookmarks and bookmark toolbar. Bookmark toolbar takes screen space. Bookmarks are nice, but since you cannot assign shortcut to a particular bookmark (as far as I know), Speed Dial actually does speed up getting to your favorite sites even if just a little bit. As an alternative, one can always use bookmark keywords (one of the more obscure Firefox features). For example, you can bookmark Slashdot.org and assign keyword slash to it. Then you use CTRL-T to open new tab, CTRL-L to switch focus to the location bar, type slash and hit enter. This is much faster, then browsing bookmarks menu with a mouse (especially for the keyboard oriented people like me), but not as fast or visually friendly as using Speed Dial extension. After all with Speed Dial you do not need to remember keywords. Note: Obviously some of these arguments are useless for people who use mouse more then keyboard. But I would guess that with one of the mouse gesture extensions you should be able to map Speed Dials to gestures.
  
• Secure Login - this one is even more subtle. If you are using Password Manager to remember your login information, you might sometimes be annoyed that it fills out your login info weather you actually want it or not. The Secure Login will change this behavior to a more appropriate. Every time there is a login form on the page, Secure Login will search the Password Manager for a fitting login/password combo and if it finds one it will highlight the form fields with yellow, light up an icon in the status bar and may, if configured, even play a sound. It will prevent the P.M. from filling the info into the form. Pressing a shortcut key or clicking a toolbar button will fill the form and submit in one motion (or just fill the form if you are so inclined). It can warn you if the form is attempting to submit something to a domain different from the page the form is located on and will show a popup to indicate where the form will be sent.
  
• Resizable Form Fields - does exactly what its name suggests. It allows you to resize text fields, text areas, combo-boxes and lists. Well... most of the time at least. I have seen a few sites where it doesn't work (probably due to absolute positioning or some other CSS tricks). But where it works it is a nice feature to have.
• TrashMail.net - will add a menu item "Paste a disposable email address" next to Paste. When used it will use trashmail.net site to generate a temporary email address. This is very useful when trying to read an article from some suspicious site that requires registration.
• BugMeNot - will use the bugmenot.com login database to login into those annoying sites that require you to register in order to read. New York Times is one of the popular examples. Yes, this is a morally questionable practice, but those compulsive registration dudes are just soooo annoying and I am not a lawyer to be able to properly read their "Privacy Policy" documents :)
• URL Fixer - this is probably the subtlest one. It will quietly fix basic typos in URLs. Ever typed www.google.con or wwww.gmail.com? No more.
• ScrapBook - this is one of the more non-obvious and extremely powerful add-ons. ScrapBook will allow you to properly gather and organize the data you mine on the web and will give you some tools to properly work with the materials. On a more particular note, ScrapBook will allow you to save a page or a fragment of a page completely to your hard drive. It will allow you to organize these fragments and pages into folders (same as you would organize bookmarks). It will allow you to mark up (same as with a highlighter pen) parts of the pages you saved and add notes and annotations. Since ScrapBook will actually save the data locally you will not worry about the data going off line or changing at the original location. This is a beautiful tool to do research on the web.

These are the extensions for a common user of Firefox that I have recently added to my add-on arsenal. Stay tuned for my post about some other extensions which are more useful to developers, hackers and power users.

VirtualBox - the VMware alternative

Yesterday I have discovered VirtualBox. In short, VirtualBox is yet another virtualization package. It provides more or less the same function as VMware, Xen, Qemu and VirtualPC. At the moment it is happily running a FreeBSD world build as a guest on my Fedora 8 workstation. I cannot say that my testing of this product is complete, as far as first impressions go, this is fairly favorable. Out of the features Lets split these impressions into three usual categories.

The Good:

• Support virtualization extensions of the modern CPUs
  
• Seems less I/O intensive then VMware
• Works on FreeBSD
  

The Bad:

• The GUI is somewhat clunky
• No script to automatically configure the kernel module and network

The Ugly:

• In order to activate the kernel module, I had to guess the location of the module source and run make && make install from CLI.
• In order to activate bridged networking I had to manually configure ethernet bridging
• Once the VM crashed without any reason
• Sometimes FreeBSD guest seems to have some problems with the virtual CPU.
  

Overall the experience was not all bad. There are some things which I think can be smoother, but it works. Good luck to the developers.

MySQL features I would kill for.

It seems that nowadays there is a trend in writing "top 10 features I want software X to have". I have seen at least two such posts about
MySQL, here and here. So, since I have been working with MySQL for a while, here is my list:

1. File per table backup mode for mysqldump that would work with --single-transaction flag


2. Clustering without the NDB in memory storage


3. Ability to turn logs (query, binary, slow queries) on and off without restarting


4. Ability to setup log filters (such as log queries using particular table into a separate file or log queries scanning more then 10K rows)


5. Ability to use bound variables in prepared statements properly (such as use variables in LIMIT or pass table names in the variables)


6. Proper implementation of views (proper, as in not involving running a select every time a view is queried)

Success of Ubuntu

I think that the existence of this blog post is a clear indication that Linux is succeeding on the Desktop :)

Fedora 7 and ATI binary drivers. An Ugly Hack.

There is a known problem with the recently released Fedora 7 and ATI video cards.

• Most recent driver (version 8.37.6) causes X server to segfault
• Older drivers do not support new Xorg versioning system (server reports 1.3 and driver expects >7)
  
• Xorg open source ATI drivers do not have support for anything past Radeon 9250 (due to ATI not disclosing specs)
• Xorg VESA driver doesn't support either 3D acceleration or multi screen and is generally rather slow

All this caused Michael Larabel (who seems to know most about the state of ATI drivers for Linux) to warn people not to upgrade to Fedora 7 just yet.
So, what do you do, if you already upgraded (like me)? Well, if you have single monitor and don't play games much, you can probably live with VESA driver.
Otherwise you can temporarily downgrade your X server to the supported version. Here is a short HOWTO:

1. Login as root
   su -


2. Add freshrpms repository
   rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
3. Install ATI proprietary drivers
   yum install ati-x11-drv


4. Start ATI even daemon
   service atieventsd restart


5. Download and install old version of Xorg server
   wget http://ftp.cica.es/fedora/linux/core/test/6.91/Prime/x86_64/os/Fedora/xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.2.0-6.fc7.x86_64.rpm
rpm -U --force xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.2.0-6.fc7.x86_64.rpm
6. Uninstall newer Xorg server
   rpm -e xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.3.0.0-5.fc7
7. Prevent YUM from upgrading Xorg again
   sed '/metadata/aexclude=xorg-x11-server-Xorg*' /etc/yum.conf
8. Configure Xorg to use ATI drivers using aticonfig
   
   1. CTRL-ALT-F1 to switch to console and login as root
   2. telinit 3
   3. aticonfig --initial for single monitor or aticonfig --initial=dual-head for dual monitors
   4. telinit 5

This is it. At this point you should have proper, 3D accelerated setup.
Most of the directions I have taken and adapted from this thread at fedoraforum.org

Update: There is a new release of the ATI drivers that works with Xorg 7.3 (somewhat). It is packaged by both freshrpms and livna and therefore there is no need to downgrade the X server anymore

Quest for web log analysis software

I am currently searching for a web log analysis package for our site. I have to say that the more I look at the available options the more disgusted I get. Basically what I am looking for is wel log analysis software with following features:

• Reading data from web server logs (not using custom javascript to record hits)
• Storing log data in a SQL database, so I can use SQL to generate custom reports
• Capable of generating custom reports with custom graphs and charts
• Capable of reading custom log formats (such as Apache LogFormat strings)
• Able to "drill down/zoom in" into the reports for more information
• Running on Linux, BSD or Solaris.
  

It seems that to get all of these is close to impossible.

Blogs are offensive

According to the report created by ScanSafe, 80% of all blogs contain "offensive" and/or "unwanted" content. I haven't read the report myself, but according to the post about it at Ars Technica, it is enough for a blog to have one instance of one of the "bad words" to be considered offensive. I suppose this is one of the rare cases where I prefer to stick with majority. Fuck, fuck, fuck.