Tag Archive for 'firefox'

Experiments with the eee

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 5 May 2008
in Play
. 3 Comments

It’s been a while since I last handled the eee.

I haven’t gotten around to changing the default Xandros OS to either Ubunty or Fedora. Frankly, the OS works just fine for me. And as long as I can get a command-line and an internet connection, I’m a happy camper.

But it’s been an unusually quiet weekend so I decided to focus a bit more on this cute little monster.

First off, an upgrade. It was a simple matter of doing a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. The bad side is, since the OS uses unionfs, the 4GB storage is now down to only ~260MB free (or around 83% in use). I’ll have to look at the repackaged updates from the XEPC project, if the storage factor becomes critical, but for now, I can live with this.

Next, the OS change. I did attempt to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the eee, but hit a snag while creating a USB bootable flash disk. I had a spare 1GB flash disk at hand, and was able to dump the netboot image from the Ubuntu archives. For some reason, the eee cannot recognize it. Again, I’ll have to dig into this later, but as I’ve said, Xandros works fine for me for now so I’ll stick with it at the moment.

Since I cannot change the OS, I opted to optimize whatever I have for now. One major “annoyance” is the screen real estate (i.e., the lack thereof). Firefox, for example, have large chrome properties that need to be slimmed down. I’m using the basic display mode for Xandros, so there’s desktop screen space is not a primary concern. Since I mostly use the eee for browsing, I need to trim the fat off Firefox.

I had to download the TinyMenu extension. This reduced the menu to a vertical one, which is nifty since I was able to move the navigation bar buttons alongside it. I reduced the space even further by using a minimalist theme called Mini Firefox. I then hid navigation bar buttons that are currently disabled through some tweaks in userChrome.css:

#back-button[disabled="true"], #forward-button[disabled="true"],
#stop-button[disabled="true"], .search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

The result:

Reduced Firefox chrome

Firefox 3 to support offline apps

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 13 February 2007
in Play
. 0 Comments

Firefox’s next major iteration will feature support for offline applications.

This was revealed by Mozilla developer Robert O’Callahan.

Callahan mentioned that the offline app support builds on a few “quasi-standard” APIs — “WHATWG client-side storage, jar: URLs, and WHATWG online/offline sensing” — and will incorporate a new API for “storing application pages in the ‘offline cache’”.

“That’s just a new ‘rel’ keyword for the element. So it should be pretty easy to add this to any browser,” Callahan said.

Google is among those perceived most likely to benefit from this development.

“Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google. So it’s a very cozy relationship,” Read/WriteWeb said.

“The Mountain View company has a number of best-of-breed web apps — and if it’s not building them, it’s acquiring them (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc),” so Firefox development plans suits Google’s plans as well, the blog said.

This provides “another piece of the Web OS/office puzzle”, Google watcher Philip Lenssen said.

Google provides free applications like Gmail, Docs and Spreadsheets, and Calendar that transform the web browser as an online office productivity suite.

Quickie roundup

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 1 November 2006
in Play and Work
. 2 Comments
  • Starting today, we’re on DST, so a one-hour shift in the work sked. Yaiks.
  • Last weekend, we were off to Taal Vista Lodge in Tagaytay for the Tech University, a two-day company event. The first day started off with an “Amazing Race”-style tech challenge — a battle of wits to solve real-world cases in 30 minutes or less. At stake: a 4GB iPod nano for each group member (five per group, two categories, SMB and enterprise). Unfortunately, we didn’t win, so there goes the nano. :P
  • Sunday was capped with a teambuilding activity, complete with a motivational talk by APO Jim Paredes (something about creativity — I didn’t get to go through that one straight on, had to chow on the sumptuous buffet breakfast at the Cafe-on-the-ridge, heh).
  • Got sick on purpose yesterday, so I could be with Peng and Gab at home. I really needed that. Tiyo Paeng was raging, so we snuggled in bed, and went through three “American Tail” DVDs (Gab’s current fave). Didn’t catch the endings, though, as I dozed off a few times in between.
  • Question: you’re a system admin in a big-time government installation, handling a fairly large environment, when you come across a problem of the mail queue backing up because of multiple incoming connections (in the thousands), half of which are spam. The spam don’t get through, of course, but still you face the problem of the growing queue, so what do you do?
  • I’m getting the hang of Firefox 2.0. The del.icio.us bookmarks extension by Yahoo! is constantly nagging me about uninstalling the Google Browser Sync extension, though. I also saved some precious screen real estate, with the chrome settling on less than 100 pixels or so of the top part. Coolness.
  • Gone blog reading again, when the case load was low. I’m totally hooked on Google Reader. Stand-alone RSS readers are so overrated, but I still find them useful for offline reading so I still keep one at hand: why, Feedreader, of course.
  • On to more Lifehacking, I’m using Password Safe to, er, keep my passwords safe. I used to keep a GPG-encrypted and signed text file for that, but then after 50 or so accounts (including 10 something just for work — talk about single-sign-on!), it got a bit tedious. Thanks, Bruce Schneir!