Data Circle

Does such a thing exist, or am I still dreaming? Firefox is currently eating up 15% of my CPU and 20% of my RAM according to the top command, and I only have ten tabs open. I have just tried Dillo, but it doesn’t seem to support floating objects in CSS, rendering almost every 2 column stylesheet layout—such as the one I use on most of my hand-crafted sites—useless.

Perhaps once I have finished my thesis I will dedicate some time to hunting down memory leaks/usage in Firefox, or just write my own standards-enforcing browser from scratch…

If you’re still running Internet Explorer, you should probably be aware of a critical security update which Microsoft released yesterday, which you can get either via their website or through Windows Update. If you have automatic updates enabled, the patch may be downloaded and applied the next time you switch off your machine, though with something like this you might want to double-check anyway. All the cool kids are running a more secure browser now, but even if you don’t use IE but still run Windows I’d strongly recommend patching your browser.

Up until today, whenever I wanted to edit a file on my server under OS X I would open a terminal, ssh to my server and run vim. However, whilst this generally did the trick, copying and pasting code was tricky, and it just wasn’t the same experience as using a graphical editor (which is what I would usually do). Thankfully, I discovered that TextWrangler, a superb piece of freeware from Bare Bones software, will allow you to open remote files on a server and edit them as if they were stored locally (which effectively they are, as the software takes a local copy and then overwrites the server version when you save).

N.B. Technically TextWranger works over SFTP, which is included as part of the openssh package but might need to be enabled in order for this to work—just plain ssh access might not be enough.

For those of you who keep up to date with browser releases, Firefox 3.0.1 has recently been made available. If you’re currently running Firefox 3, you should be prompted to download the update at some point, or you can force an update by going to Help->Check for updates. Amongst other things, this release fixes three critical bugs, so updating as soon as possible is highly recommended.

If you’re still using Firefox 2, version 3 is now labelled as stable and so you might want to consider upgrading in the next couple of weeks. The third major version of the browser fixes lots of bugs and introduces a whole swathe of new features, and is well worth upgrading to. Unfortunately, the update function won’t allow you to update from version 2 to 3 automatically, so you’ll need to download the relevant binary for your system or wait for your package management tool to receive the update.

As always, the full 3.0.1 release notes are available (the link points to the European Mozilla site, but it contains the same information and remembers that I might want to download en-GB instead of en-US).

I recently upgraded to the latest release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) and one of the first things I noticed was that the fonts in Firefox looked very odd, particularly on sites using sans-serif fonts such as Verdana or Arial (and their equivalents). At first this didn’t bother me too much, but over the course of a few weeks it became a real bug bear, and I was beginning to use my Mac or boot into Windows XP just to look at websites, which obviously isn’t ideal.

Fortunately, there’s a quick and easy fix for this problem—simply install the package ‘msttcorefonts’. You can do this via the graphical package manager (System->???????? ????? ????????Administration->Synaptic Package Manager) or using the command line with ‘sudo aptitude install msttcorefonts’. You might need to reboot your system after doing this, but it all seems to be working again for me.

The latest release of the multi-protocol messenger client for OS X office furniture in Bulgaria
has been announced. This release includes a huge number of changes (see the version history for full details) with 188 tickets closed. Admittedly one or two of these tickets are not really improvements or bug fixes, such as Get Catfish_Man a Gerbil, but overall it seems as if a huge number of bugs have been quashed in the new version. There are some improvements to the user interface as well, including the ability to access your contacts list from the little duck icon which sits in your menu bar, although I’m not sure I’ll use any of these.

Needless to say, if you already have Adium then you should upgrade now—the process is as simple as Adium->Check for Updates (which may be run automatically each time you start Adium, depending on your preferences). If you don’t have Adium already, you should definitely give it a whirl. The only problem is that it only works on OS X, the rest of us have to use the ugly Pidgin instead.

Being the hardcore geek that I am, I use the mutt email client to check my main email account. Whilst mutt is by far and away the best client I’ve used—its threading support blows the competition out of the water for a start—one thing has always bugged me. I’m subscribed to lots of mailing lists, some of which set the Reply-To header to be that used by the original poster, rather than replacing it with the list address. There are sound reasons for doing this, but as a user I have then have two options:

1. Hit ‘r’ to reply, then remember to replace the sender’s email address with that of the list (assuming I want to reply on-list), which is a bit clumsy and easy to forget.
2. Hit ‘g’ to reply, and email the original sender whilst copying in the list address, which creates two copies of the mail for the original poster (assuming he is subscribed to the list). This annoys a lot of people, including myself.

Neither of these options is ideal—what I want is the ability to reply to the list address in all circumstances, simply by pressing a single key. Thankfully, today I found out that there is a simple way to do this, which is to add each mailing list to my ~/.muttrc like so:

subscribe man-lug@lists.manchester.ac.uk linux-users@lists.manchester.ac.uk

If you’ve got several lists on one domain, as I have, you can simply use:

subscribe @lists.manchester.ac.uk @lists.evolt.org

Now whenever a post comes in from one of these lists, it gets marked with an ‘L’ (which is not too important, as all of my lists are filtered into individual folders anyway). If I want to reply to any post, I can use ‘L’ and mutt will automatically put the list address in the To: field, and I can still use ‘r’ to reply off-list to the original poster if I so desire. Problem solved!

As some of you may already have heard, the Netscape web browser software will cease to be supported as of February 2008. For those of us who can remember a time before the dominance of Internet Explorer (yes, such a time did exist, and I’m not entirely sure if things have improved since then in many ways), Netscape Navigator was probably our first introduction to the Web in all its glory—well, text with a few animated GIFs anyway. I can remember first surfing the Web using Netscape Navigator Gold at the University of Bolton (or Bolton Institute of Higher Education as it was back then), mostly looking for information about the Games Workshop universe. I also built my first web site using the Composer software which came bundled with the browser, and I don’t think it’s pushing the point too far to say that without Netscape I might not have got involved with the Internet as early as I did, or as deeply as I have now.

However, the only surprise in the announcement is that it has taken so long for AOL to realise that Netscape is no longer a viable commodity on the Web. With traffic to Netscape.com dropping like a stone and the rise and rise of Firefox making Navigator somewhat obsolete, it was only a matter of time before Netscape was quietly taken out the back and put down for its own good. Netscape pioneered something which nowadays we all take for granted (web browsing), developed and implemented core technologies such as the Secure Sockets Layer (used in most online transactions) and stood its ground against the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft for many years. It’s a shame to see it finally fall, but all good things must come to an end one day.

I feel as if I’ve just written an obituary. Perhaps I have. Here lies Netscape, October 1994 – December 2007.

Further reading

• The end of an era as AOL officially retires Netscape
• Web icon set to be discontinued

The latest version of the Firefox web browser has been released. If you haven’t already upgraded, you should go to Help->Check for Updates or use your package management software to download the latest version as soon as possible, because there are a number of security fixes included in the update. The full release notes can, as always, be found on the official Mozilla website.

The long awaited version 1.0 of Adium, the popular multiple protocol instant messaging client for OS X, has finally been released. The official release announcement and full changelog have all the details if you want them – there are so many changes that I can’t even begin to summarise them here.

I’ve been using Adium as my primary instant messaging client for a long time now, if you haven’t tried it yourself yet then I definitely recommend giving the 1.0 release a whirl.