Well one of my gripes with Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ has been cured at least, Firebug 1.5 now works after upgrades to Firefox 3.5.8.
Shame that I’ve found out my bash completion is broken. 
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010phpBB Hook to remove success messages
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Time for another phpBB hook, this time the aim is to remove the messages which irritate some people when a post has been made and instead redirect the user immediately to the default choice. A few considerations had to be made with this, firstly the administration panel is off limits as this uses messages for success and failure in some places. Secondly any page which goes back to itself by default is made confusing if there isn’t a confirmation, so these aren’t automatically redirected; a good example of this being the UCP preferences. (more…)
Sharing photos from N900 to Gallery2
Monday, February 1st, 2010I recently treated myself to a new mobile phonecomputer, so I bought a Nokia N900 which eXpansys eventually shipped to me. Now to the point, you can easily share content to Facebook, Ovi, and Flickr but I maintain my own Gallery2 installation and I wanted to upload my photos there as well. Luckily the sharing infrastructure is pluggable, so all I needed was a plugin which I found. 
Configuring it was a bit of a headache so here is how I did it. (more…)
Why do I bother?
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Updated my desktop from Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ 9.04 to Ubuntu ‘Karmic’ 9.10, the upgrade process worked flawlessly. Sadly the number of regressions has kind of taken the shine of the various improvements to the distribution.
The big kicker for me is the breaking of VLC and/or Gnome Screensaver, now VLC fails to suppress the screensaver in full screen which is kind of useless when you want to watching anything over 5 minutes long. To workaround this I use gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit to prevent the screensaver from activating, and set a command to kill that after 2 hours. The next problem I’ve observed is that even when the suppression and the film have both ended, the screensaver still doesn’t want to activate for ages; leaving my desktop burning the image into the screen until I lock the screen myself. Not a problem but I often hit the hay with a film on and usually fall asleep midway through, got up yesterday morning to find my desktop sat there still being projected from my display. LP #428884.
My second gripe is Flash player under a x86-64 installation using nspluginwrapper and the x86 Flash player provided in the repositories works, what’s so bad about that? Well you can’t actually click on any controls on the Flash object, which kind of rules out embedded YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc. roll on <video> with Ogg Theora. I resolved this by purging the packaged Flash and nspluginwrapper, and then installing the native 64 bit alpha version from Adobe.
Finally Firebug 1.5 doesn’t support 64 bit builds of Firefox, which to be fair Mozilla don’t support so I don’t really have a problem with this. You need to get an older release from the 1.4 branch, I’ve heard that the 1.6 alphas work again.
Good grumbling done for the morning!
December Desktop
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
PHP function: is_serialized()
Friday, October 23rd, 2009I needed a way to detect if some values were serialized or not, annoyingly PHP does not provide a method for this. I’d also rather not perform unserialize() on everything to check for a serialized string in the name of efficiency, so instead I came up with a simple function to detect serialized data. The result of my endeavours is a function that checks a string for basic makers of the PHP serialization form, it only checks the variables type and not any deeper values inside arrays or objects, if this preliminary testing is successful then unserialize() is invoked to provide the final proof. The unserialized form is available as an option argument passed by reference and the return value is a boolean, true for boolean or false otherwise. You can find the function on Gist or below. (more…)
Vacuum Firefox on Ubuntu
Thursday, October 15th, 2009It was suggested to me to use vacuum places to improve my Firefox awesome bar performance, as I’m still using Firefox 3.0 which is packaged with Jaunty; I do have 3.5 installed I just use it for testing sites at the moment. However realising that I didn’t need an addon a single line of bash will probably do what I want I headed to Google and found an explaining it all and a suitable one-liner to optimise all my Firefox SQLite DBs.
You will need the sqlite3 package installed and you should close Firefox prior to running the command.
for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done
September 2009 Desktop
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
HP strikes back
Friday, July 31st, 2009Hewlett Packard, and others, strike back with ever more excessive cardboard gluttony; the Register has the details.
BT’s feeble attempts at a cardboard indulgence.
