Matthew's Weblog

Our story so far, 30 hours after installation… Bad Behaviour 191, Spammers 1. Now that’s a winner!

OK, so I’ve been fighting comment spam here for the last 2 days… 7981 comments deleted and a number of options tried – but hey, I found that three people actually submitted real comments and I didn’t know it! Worse, it’s frustrating my wife (3800 spams on hers). I didn’t want to use a captcha because I find them annoying. However, I will resort to that if necessary and these next steps don’t work. So now it’s time for the heavy artillery.

Enter Bad Behaviour (plus the addon add-on log reader). I’m hoping this will resolve it, but if you have any trouble, let me know. If you don’t know how to get me, guess! Odds are you’re smart enough to figure out my email.

Even if this works, then I have to figure out the trackback issue. Pesky Vikings…

So I’ve upgraded to 1.0.6 and now there’s a problem with conflicting extensions. I finally found out that the crashes I was seeing were related to Live HTTP Headers and SessionSaver conflicting so that I couldn’t upload files. However, I was using both on earlier versions and it didn’t seem to conflict.

So now we see the Eclipse problem – an application based on plugins can’t efficiently test interactions between them, and clearly the sandboxing is incomplete in FF. In addition, who can take responsibility for the fix – the core team, the SessionSaver people, the Live HTTP Headers, or does it take a village to fix this bug?

I love Firefox, but this is driving me nuts. I use both extensions regularly and want to keep them active since it is a pain to restart the browser every time I want them – so now I’m reduced to using IE to upload files! Talk about counterproductive…

And sadly I’m not in practice enough to be able to suss out the issue myself. Sigh.

OK, organized as best as possible by my current usage:

Active and I couldn’t live without them:
SessionSaver .2 0.2.1.027 – “SessionSaver will auto-track and restore your browser exactly as you left it — every startup, every time. Not even a crash can faze it…” – this is my #1 extension and absolutely essential. Never browse without it. On a fresh install, this is my first download. Get it now.
Adblock 0.5.2.039 – does what it says. Pretty cool.
Download Manager Tweak 0.6.3 – makes it easier to control your downloads.
Add Bookmark Here 0.5.2 – Makes filing bookmarks easier.
FLST 0.7 – Brings focus to the last selected tab when closing the active tab.

Active and used every day:
ScrapBook 0.13.7
Duplicate Tab 0.5.1
PrefBar 2.3.1
lori (Life-of-request info) 0.1.0.20050201
CTC 0.3 – Close Tab Context (menu) puts an option in the context menu to close the active tab. Very handy.
LastTab 1.0.5 – modifies Ctrl-Tab to switch to recently selected tabs, rather than always go from left-to-right.

Active and used occasionally (but still important):
Copy Plain Text 0.2.1
undoclosetab 20041125.3
Web Developer 0.8
Live HTTP Headers 0.10
SubmitToTab 0.2.1

Nice-to-have:
Copy Plain Text 0.2.1
ReloadEvery 0.5
DictionarySearch 0.7
Configuration Mania 1.05.2004110501
Rot13 Encoder/Decoder 0.1
Calculator 0.7
ieview 0.84 – launches current page (or link) in IE
Launchy 3.9.0 – Launches the page (or source) in various places, including IE. Like ieview on steroids.
FirefoxView 0.31.1 – the reverse of IEView… adds a context item in IE to view the page in Firefox
Checky 2.5 – Checks the HTML/CSS against various validators
Ext2File 0.2.8 – Exports an extension list to a file (so I could make this post!)
Open Source in Tab 0.1

Played with and then haven’t used:
Plain Text Links 0.2
Linky 2.3.0

Tried to use but haven’t figured out yet:
Magpie 3.1.2
BugMeNot 0.6.1

Not used yet but sounded cool:
Keyconfig – assignable hotkeys for your favorite stuff
DOM Inspector 1.0
LoremIpsum Content Generator 0.4.1
Sage 1.3.1
Nuke Anything 0.2
jsLib 0.1.245
Minesweeper 0.8
View Cookies 1.2
Mozilla Calendar 0.8.3+
Calendar Help 0.1
Feedview 0.9
RequestPoison 0.5
EditCSS 0.2.3
Drag And Drop Upload 1.0
Download Sort 2.5.0
Leech 1.5.0+
webcache 0.1
Googlebar
Privacy Fox 0.3.7 – View short privacy policies for sites
Policy Manager 1.3.2004081801 – allows you to set Javascript (maybe others?) policies for specific sites, like the Zones stuff in IE.
Right Encoding 0.1 – Lets you see a page’s encoding (language and character set) and manipulate the selection. Should be useful if you’re debugging a page that appears odd in other character sets?
SwiftTabs 0.2.1 – move to next or previous tab via keystroke. I just haven’t learned the keystrokes yet…

Didn’t really work out (but not their fault):
spooFX 0.3
SpoofStick 1.05

Just plain didn’t work like I wanted:
Research Buddy 1.01
Slogger 0.5.11

Hated it!
RadialContext (and I can’t get it uninstalled!)

I don’t know…
PrefButtons 0.3.2 – I may be using these buttons but I’m not sure… too many extensions!

# DISABLED EXTENSIONS: (5)
Bandwidth Tester 0.4 – out of version sync
miniT (drag+indicator) 0.4 – out of version sync
Toolbar Enhancements 0.16.2 – out of version sync
Tab X 0.5 – Messed with my tabs closing, and I couldn’t have that
ForecastFox 0.5.9 – Would make my browser lock at 100%, usually when I was offline. Might have been something about being disconnected, but on a portable machine that was catastrophic because SessionSaver is still only 85-92%.
Retro Find 1.1 – makes the Find toolbar go away and gives you a dialog box instead. I didn’t like it.

(I’ll be adding more links and descriptions but don’t want to make people wait… if you don’t see it here, look on the Extensions Mirror or Mozilla Addons)

So here are configurations that I use, gathered from a handful of locations. Add to the user.js file to enable them, or manipulate the values through about:config

// Change main bar to normal Google search:
user_pref(”keyword.URL”, “http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=”);
// Find As You Type Configuration:
// Set this pref to false to disable Find As You Type:
user_pref(”accessibility.typeaheadfind”, true);
// Put an end to blinking text!
user_pref(”browser.blink_allowed”, false);
// Enable pipelining:
user_pref(”network.http.pipelining”, true);
user_pref(”network.http.proxy.pipelining”, true);
user_pref(”network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”, 8);
// Delay before starting to draw HTML page… Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref(”nglayout.initialpaint.delay”, 0);

More configs… add the following code to your userChrome.css file:
/* Make the Search box flex wider
(in this case 300 pixels wide) */
#search-container, #searchbar {
-moz-box-flex: 300 !important;
}

and some stuff that I haven’t tried but looks interesting…
userChrome.css:
/* Remove the Go and Help menus
(These are just examples. Try changing “Go” to “Edit” or “Bookmarks”) */
menu[label="Go"], menu[label="Help"] {
display: none !important;
}
/* Change cursor for links that open in new window */
:link[target="_blank"], :visited[target="_blank"],
:link[target="_new"], :visited[target="_new"] {
cursor: crosshair;
}
/* Change cursor for JavaScript links */
a[href^="javascript:"] {
cursor: move;
}

user.js
// Click on throbber to go to Mozilla.org:
user_pref(”browser.throbber.url”, “http://www.mozilla.org/”);

Also, these look like a good combo: a definable location for the cache and how to use a profile on removable media…
—
Specify where to store the cache

To specify in which folder the cache is stored, add the following code to your user.js file:

// Path to Cache folder:
user_pref(”browser.cache.disk.parent_directory”,”C:\Path To Cache”);

Remember to use two backslashes for the path separators if you’re using Windows, e.g. C:\Path\Path To Cache instead of C:\Path\Path To Cache.
Run Firefox from removable media

This advanced tip makes it possible to run Firefox from removable media, such as a USB memory stick. This will allow you to run Firefox with your personal settings from any computer, even those that don’t have Firefox installed. It has only been tested on Windows XP/2000. The basic instructions are as follows:

1. Copy the Firefox application folder and your profile folder to the removable medium. In this example we will use R:\Firefox for the application folder and R:\FFProfile as the profile folder, assuming the drive letter for the removable media is R:.
2. Create a simple batch file called R:\Firefox.bat with the following line:

start \Firefox\firefox.exe -profile \FFProfile

3. Optionally, disable the disk cache to reduce the amounts of file writes to the removable storage by entering about:config in the address field of Firefox and set browser.cache.disk.enable to false.

The reason why a batch file is needed instead of a simple shortcut is that a shortcut uses absolute paths, and since the actual drive letter for the removable media may change depending on which computer it is plugged into, the relative path used in the batch file is guaranteed to work anywhere.
—

And adding new search options to the right-hand searchbar

So I’ve decided to document my current Firefox setups since I’m setting up a third (fourth? fifth?) time and am tired of rediscovering bits I forget. In addition, people keep asking about bits that I haven’t written down and I want to be able to provide one place for people to look. Here it begins!

First, the main tweak guide I use and a description of other tweaks in the context of an article.

from the old FAQ:
How do I disable the rule that forbids portforwarding on port 81?

You will need to do two things to avoid port conflicts.

First choose a new port that you want to let the IPCop interface listen on. Do not choose 8080, 800 or 80 as squid is listening on 800 and if you have DansGuardian installed, it listens on 8080 and port 80 is used by webservers.

You need to edit the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file, search for all instances of 81 and replace with your new port. Once you have done that, save your work and we need to restart the web server with the following command:
killall httpd
httpd -DSSL

Next we need to adjust the port forward page to allow you to forward port 81, but restrict a forward on your new port.

Edit /home/httpd/cgi-bin/portfw.cgi

Find line that looks like this:

my @tcp_reserved = (81,222,445);

Change the 81 to the port number that you previously chose.
Save the changes.

You can now port forward on port 81.

[ ] 1.1 [ ]1.2 [x]1.3 Version 1.3 only