soledad penadés

I wonder if there’s a way to make Netbeans save its ‘workbench’ more often, so that when it is reopened again, it shows the documents I was really working on the last time I touched Netbeans.

Unfortunately, what it does now is saving these snapshots only when I close Netbeans. Which isn’t very helpful if I forget to manually close Netbeans before turning off the computer, or if I can’t resume after suspending and have to reboot, etc. It might probably show me some files which I finished editing eons ago and might even belong to a totally different project altogether.

To make my case clearer: Firefox’s Well, this is embarrassing… feature works exactly the way I would like Netbeans –and in general, pretty much every other piece of software– to work. We do not have Quad cores and hard disks in the order of the Terabytes for performing fancy visual effects only; it would be great to have some of that computing power diverted to simple yet very satisfactory and rewarding functionalities such as saving the status of the programs frequently so that we didn’t have to think about What was I doing before X happened?.

The menu for this week consists in: an appetizer of iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone development ethics coming from unsustainable sources, and some slices of funny spam which may produce you constipation, a main dish based in Opera Unite topped with a little bit of failure from Microsoft (to give a bit of a sour taste), and for a sweet and fragrant dessert, PyGTK. There’s an optional disgustingly sour liquor for whoever which dares to try, made with proprietary software being used in a new installation in a school.

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Just had a look at the first alpha from Firefox 3, codenamed Grand Paradiso. Yeah, Firefox THREE!

The Mac version has something that other platforms won’t feature: a switch in the way browser elements (also known as widgets) are drawn. For Firefox 3, they will use the Cocoa widgets, which were used previously in the Camino project (another branch of Firefox aimed at having a real Mac OS X look and feel; I talked about Camino before).

Although the notes point at Cocoa widgets being slower than Carbon ones, I felt the performance being quite better in my tests. I tried with some pages that render slowly in Firefox 2, like Google Analytics or Google Mail. In Grand Paradiso, they are smooth, even with some nice deceleration when scrolling up or down.

I don’t know how much of that performance increase has to be attributed to the new graphics rendering engine, Cairo. Although there are some rendering glitches, like some underlines which have 2 pixels instead of just 1, it looks better in general. For example, xplsv.tv, which has a small typeface (verdana 10px), now it’s way more legible, when in Firefox 2 it looks a bit too crowded and excessively bold. Space between lines has been increased as well, so maybe people will have to reconsider their css if this is to be maintained in the final (and they are picky about it; in my opinion it looks better like that).

Unfortunately it still has those rendering bugs and none of the extensions were compatible. I could fix them to be compatible as I did with Firefox 2, but I’m not feeling like hacking today, so I’ll stay with Firefox 2 until they release something a bit more stable. But it looks very very promising!

I installed Bon Echo some weeks ago, and first thing I noticed was that some extensions weren’t working anymore. Like, for example, webdeveloper toolbar, view source chart, etc… I could find a version of webdeveloper toolbar which worked in Bon Echo but I wanted to know how to do it. And here is it:

Basically each extension developer decides under which versions the extension will be able to work, and they define a range. For example: 0.7 – 1.5.* means an extension will work if you use a firefox version between 0.7 and 1.5 (quite obvious, no?). This means that any extension with this value won’t work in Bon Echo, as Bon Echo’s version is 2.

To fix this, just save the extension you want to install in any place of your computer. You’ll get an xpi file which is actually a zip file. Let’s assume it is called extension.xpi. Rename it to extension.zip and uncompress it…  You’ll get several files; the important one is install.rdf.

Open install.rdf with any text editor. You’ll find an xml file with several configuration values, etc. Look for a pair of values called em:minVersion and em:maxVersion. Most of the extensions which do not work nowadays will have a em:maxVersion value like 1.5.*. Just change 1.5.* with 2, or 3, or whatever which is more than 1.5. Save the modified file.

Now we need to generate again an .xpi file for being able to install it in Firefox. So just compress back all the previous uncompressed files and rename the generated file.zip to file.xpi.

A way of installing this extension is just dragging file.xpi to firefox. The usual pop up warning you before installing an extension will appear; just follow the process as usual.

Some extensions which can be “fixed” like this and seem to work properly: Web Developer Toolbar and View Source chart. (I presume this trick may work in any platform)
Have fun!

It had to happen. When you’re all day long working with php and mysql, smarty and whatnot, the last thing you want to do when you have some free time is to continue fighting with the same issues once and once again.

I also had been testing some wordpress installations and I finally surrendered to WordPress. Specially since version 2.0 is very neat and attractive and offered me some features I wanted but didn’t feel motivated to code by myself (pinging, trackbacking, rss for comments of one entry, etc). I did know how to do them but sincerely it is not the same that when I started doing php stuff, back to 2002. Then most of the things were new and kind of a challenge, like “will i be able to create my own system to keep a log of my stuff without having a design as ugly as slashdot’s one?”.

But now -and specially after having minimumly guessed the possibilities of other methodologies like Ruby On Rail’s one- it is highly discouraging to do more simple stuff in php. So I said to myself:

1. do I want to keep reinventing the wheel forever and not adding new ideas or functionalities (i.e. continue with my self made blog), or
2. do I prefer to use something which sums the efforts of lots of people, and contribute with whatever I can to the community? (i.e. switch to wordpress)

Obviously I chose 2) as you can see!

I have set up a redirection for the old rss, so it still should work perfectly. If you find something wrong please tell me :)

Also, I haven’t applied any hack at all to the css and html so it is all valid but some things do not work as they should in The Cancer (i.e. Internet Explorer), although they look gorgeous in Firefox (both Mac and Windows) and Safari (and I am not going to break my clean css & html in order to fix it). It’s been funny to play with selectors and all of those advanced css techniques I can’t use normally “because it needs to work with explorer”.