February 2009

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2009.

Update 2010-03-29: This plugin is deprecated. I’ll leave it here for download, but you should use Open With instead.

I am fed up with the increasing obsolescence of Konqueror. It simply fails to deal with much of the Ajax bling and javascript doodads that are all over the web now. Facebook is nearly unusable, Slashdot has unusual formatting errors, and banking sites fail in odd ways. Compatibility changes daily as web developers tweak their javascript and CSS. Last month I switched back to Firefox.

Still there are times when I’m viewing a site in Firefox and want to switch to Konqueror. Konqueror has an easy “Open With” submenu, but no such thing exists for Firefox. Instead, everybody has written their own Firefox extension to support their personal choice of browser. Often with platform-specific requirements. And now I have too!

Behold, Open With Konqueror!

You’ll have to approve installations from my site to proceed. If you are the type of person that uses KDE, chances are you already know how to do that. I have also submitted it to addons.mozilla.org.

Credits: I copied this extension from IE View Lite by Grayson Mixon. I modified it in the following ways:

  • Replace all references to IE with Konqueror in dialogs, variable, and extension names
  • Include Konqueror icons from the Crystal SVG set in resolutions of 16×16 and 32×32
  • Change the path of the browser to use to “/usr/bin/konqueror”, the default in Kubuntu

Tags: ,

Sometimes running Bacula is a real pain. It’s too much infrastructure for someone who doesn’t use tape backups (we just use a big RAID store). But today it saved me.

It all began when I accidentally copied /home/tyler/bin on my laptop to another workstation’s /bin. I have a lot of little scripts and doodads for my personal use in /home/tyler/bin, but none of them are named for real executables in /bin. So I think, “No big deal, just manually remove those scripts from /bin and no harm done.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,

At home I use a router flashed with DD-WRT v.24 SP1 with OpenVPN support to connect to the office private network. I upgraded from v.23 SP2 a few months ago. When I did so, I discovered that OpenVPN doesn’t seem to start automatically. Let’s fix it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,

Update 2011-09-18: This post is out of date. See the latest release here.

You may have noticed the slick new header images on tolaris.com. Try resizing your browser. The site’s theme and header images will resize to match, sliding apart as needed while maintaining the right depth.

The artwork was done by my talented friend Josh Smith. Several of his photographs grace the walls of my home, and his daughter – in convincing us that breeding may be pretty neat after all – is incidentally responsible for the existence of my own child. I commissioned Josh to replace the boring old header image (and its limiting static width) with a sliding array of images late last year. I am extremely pleased with the work. From time to time, I may change the command-line text (currently using dpkg to install “Hello World”), just for fun.

The resizing and sliding is accomplished by using CSS. I am using a modified form of the Tarski WordPress template. I love Tarski’s options and clean design, but fixed-pixel-width websites are dumb. So I’ve overridden many of the Tarski theme’s settings to use percentages rather than pixel widths.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags:

There is a bug in the version of wine supplied with Ubuntu Hardy. This causes the version of Internet Explorer installed with ies4linux to hang when loading sites via HTTPS. I use IE for a few sites written back in the dark ages, and for testing a site’s layout before publication.

Aside: tolaris.com’s neat new automagically expanding header images look terrible in IE 5/6. I have no intention of fixing this. If you’re reading my site, you probably know better than to use IE for everyday browsing.

In October I recompiled wine from the Hardy source packages with the proposed bug fix. But I never announced it. If you missed that, you can find it in the repository.

Tags: , , ,