Sean's Blog

I saw this article to lifehacker on Digg as well as, well, lifehacker. All this does is link to an article on the Google Maps Help Group (here) site that tells you what to do, which is rather straight forward.

1. Type about:config into your address bar on Firefox 2. (I don’t know if this will work on earlier versions or not.)
2. In the Filter line, type singleline. It should automatically list one option in the area below named editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines.
3. Double click anywhere on that item and a dialog box will pop-up. Change the value to 2.

Simple enough, right? Well, a user on Digg, Otto, mentioned that there are other options for this setting in the comments for the article.

0: Paste content intact (include newlines). This is the default for the Linux version.
1: Paste the content only up to (but not including) the first newline. This is the default in all other versions.
2: Replace each newline with a space
3: Remove all newlines from content
4: Substitute commas for newlines in text box

I’m sure he pulled this from some other location, but he didn’t cite, and if I really wanted to know, I’m sure I could find out. As tribute, here is Otto’s homepage.

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.

I was doing my typical blog/site hopping, moving from one story or article to another, when I came across Publishing 2.0. The first post I read over was Bloggers Are So Wrong About Media. As you might be able to tell from the title, it’s his opinion about how bloggers are convinced that blogging will bring down the current media giants. I agree with him that it may not be done the way some think.

He mentions in this post as well in one this past Tuesday that bloggers oftentimes do not do a good job explaining the blogging technology. When the majority of the population enjoy holding a daily newspaper or any other type of publication in their hands instead of reading the same articles on a screen, how are you going to get them to use a feed aggregator? Most people wouldn’t know what you meant, and so “bloggers explaining blogging technology” is only part of the issue.

When I was in college, I took a class titled Technology Systems in Socities. One of the instructors (there were two; they alternated every 4 weeks) commented that the purpose of the class was to educate us so that we could go out into the world as technologists; so that we would have an understanding of how technology and systems interacted with human cultures. Everyone who uses Internet and web technology should take the time to explain it to others, especially those who you want to use the technology; you are using the technology, thus you are a technologist… do something with your knowledge.

I guess I got a little off topic there, but it’s still relevant. As much as I like Firefox and Thunderbird, I’m not going to get people to switch to it just by talking about it; I need to show it to them and explain it. I put Firefox on Danielle and John’s laptop and showed him why I used it and certain extensions. I showed my mother it as well, and tried my best to explain its usage. I formatted my brother’s computer, and he wanted Firefox and GAIM on it. Chances are, had I not shown them the programs in the first place, they wouldn’t have used them.

As for blogging, I sort of knew about various things dealing with blogging, such as trackbacks and the like, but I had to dig my way through it to figure out what it all meant and how to work with it. Yes, I choose to host it on my own site instead of going with a specific host like Blogger or Xanga or LiveJournal, but I wanted to be able to easily backup my data and change things around if I wanted. Eventually I found drupal and have been using it for a month or so, and the modules available made blogging easier, but I had to research stuff and try them on my own.

All in all, I can see why he made the post he did, as well as the update to it. I personally don’t think that Web 2.0 will bring about a sort of communism, as he mentions. In a conversation with my father around Christmas, I said that, but then changed it to socialism, which I would now say would be more a derivation of socialism, such as democratic socialism perhaps.

I think Publishing 2.0 is worth reading. I know it’s now been added to my delicious “blogs” tags. This overall post may seem disjointed, but I spent about 5 hours on it, going back and forth between reading, writing, and working.

It’s like an epic saga. Firefox enters, claiming to be the salvation for the tiny hamlet. In his effort to save the hamlet, he gets fooled into harming it. Once this is realized, he does something that redeems himself to the hamlet.

That is what the Performancing toolbar is: Firefox redeeming itself for the memory issues.

This may not mean anything to you, but for me that means I can login to my website via a Firefox extension and add blog posts. I don’t even have to open a new tab or anything. I can do it while looking at the page I want to comment on.

I’ve noticed that Firefox is only using a third of the memory it was using before, so I’m down to about 115,000K instead of 350,000K. You have to take what victories you can get.

Other factors in the memory issue:

• I am using the Tab Mix Plus extension, and that probably accounts for a bit. I only say this because TM+ has a session saver as well as a undo tab deletion feature. I’m sure options like that require a bit of information to be stored in memory.
• The amount of memory Firefox uses is also dependent on the websites that are loaded. I run into the most issues with large memory issues at work, probably on account of the pages I have open.
• A direct comparison with IE isn’t fair, as IE is integrated with the operating system, and chances are, some of the memory is uses is hidden elsewhere. A quick check of a personally calculated total of memory usage is about 70 below the amount listed by Task Manager.

Since the computers I tend to work on have 512 MB or more of memory, it isn’t too big of an issue. I’m sure there’s some setting or chunk of code that’s causing the issue that will be worked out sometime soon. Hell, I’ve used Windows for so long it doesn’t really bother me.

Since Firefox 1.5 was released, I’ve had issues with my memory usage for Firefox running up my memory anywhere from 200,000K to 350,000K range. Yes, that’s up to 350MB just for Firefox. For all intents and purposes, that sounds like a memory leak to me.

After some Googling and other research, I found the cause of the memory issue. The current version of Adblock available on the Firefox extension page is 0.5.2.056. However, in the forums for Adblock, they have a link to a release of Adblock with the version of 0.5.2.056+. Yes, a damn plus. And so you don’t have to deal with this issue, the forum where I found it is here.