Sean's Blog

About a week ago I posted two search plugins, one of IEEE OUI and one for RCC. Now that I’ve taken the time to get Firefox 2, I noticed that there was a different way do search plugins. So, without further ado, you can download the IEEE OUI or RCC Search files.

http://blog.sean-ward.com/wp-content/uploads/blog.sean-ward.com/2006/10/rcc-search.xml

However, you can just go up to the search bar, and install it that way without having to download the files, browse to c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins and drag and drop, as I made sure to include the HTML code to allow autodiscovery. Mind you that if you have both of them installed already, they won’t appear in the search drop down menu.

At work, we assist students with registering their computers on the network, as well as their gaming consoles. If I happen to be the one to register the gaming device, I tend to check the hardware address by doing a OUI at http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml. Even though the page is in my Firefox bookmark toolbar, I looked for a way to make the process more efficient. The only thing left to do, short of memorizing the entire listing, was cut down or eliminate the time it took wait for the page to load and place focus on the input box. I could only think of one way: make a Mozilla-Search plugin.

I was reminded of a search plugin a former employee, Joe, had made to search our website’s wiki installation. I doubt few people currently use it right now, but there it is. A quick Google search later, some testing, and I had a IEEE OUI search plugin ready to go.

To install the plugins:

1. Extract the .src and .gif (or .png) files to the plugin directory, which is typically found in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins
2. Close Firefox
3. Open Firefox

To use the search features, the following are the most useful searches:

• By hex value, e.g. 00-12-5a
• By base 16, e.g. 00125a
• By company, e.g. Microsoft

You can use this to search anything in the OUI listing, but those searches listed above give you the most important results.

One of the more useful extensions I was told about by Joe at work was Spellbound. However, when Firefox got updated to 1.5.0.1, Spellbound broke. A quick Google today uncovered a page about a working Spellbound for 1.5.0.1, which is great. I’ve been adding content to RCC’s website (which uses a mediawiki), and being able to spell check without having to copy and paste into a different program will save me plenty of time.

Joe also managed to create/modify an extension that searches the RCC wiki.

Update 2006-02-18: click here to install the Spellbound that works with Fx 1.5.0.1. It is from here. Click here for the English (US) library.