blogipity

Mozilla rich text editing for Movable Type

A couple quick modifications can get rich Text Editing in Movable Type working for Mozilla (and Firefox).

The Web Credibility Project

Want to create a more credible site?

Check out the The Web Credibility Project's Guidelines.

View pages in Safari without a Mac

iCapture, a new site, allows you to see how any page looks in Safari.

Speed up Firefox

The mozillazine forums have a nice thread about tuning Firefox for optimal performance.

While I find the default configuration of Firefox quite fast, some of these tweaks can significantly help those with unusual connections (slow dialup, satellite, etc.).

Bayesian spam filters

Got too much spam? Don't like you present anti-spam measures?

Check out this list of spam filters.

Yahlurp

A new sign of yahoo's impeding switch away from using Google for search results appeared today with the appearance of a Yahoo-branded Slurp spider with the following UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

I think I'll call this one yahlurp ;)

Yahoo's continued use of the Inktomi spider name of "Slurp" can be seen as a sign that they will be using Inktomi-based results when they switch away from Google instead of using Altavista or AllTheWeb (two other spidering engines that were acquired along with Inktomi when Yahoo purchased Overture).

Will security by mystery be a thing of the past?

This week it was reported that a Windows code leak made a portion of Windows Nt/2000 source code publically available.

While there have a been a number of spins on this incident, and I'm sure that a number of people in Redmond have gotten red-faced over this development, I'm not so sure that this will end up being a bay thing for Microsoft. I've often rolled my eyes when hearing that microsoft's hidden OS code is a security feature, because I think that this deters skilled, benevolent people from reviewing the code. It also disallows these same people from quickly developing and distributing a fix for for any holes found.

While I'm pondering this subject, I have to ask myself wouldn't it be great if the Internet Explorer source code got leaked so people could work on fixing some of IE's more painful rendering bugs?

Librarians' Strategies for Keeping Current

In the Library Journal article, Strategies for Keeping Current, Roy Tennant offers some nuggets of advice to librarians for keeping up to date with technology.

Perhaps the most important nugget is this one:

Be responsible: You are accountable for your own learning. No one is more responsible for your professional development than you. Don't expect the organization that hired you to make sure you are developing as a professional.

Commonly misspelled words

Until I got the Firefox spell checker to work a couple days ago, I thought that I might start having to consult this list before each post.

Getting textarea spell checking to work with Firefox 0.8

Update 2004.07.13:

For all of you who are having problems installing Torisugari's spell check extension working should check out SpellBound. I just installed this new spell checker extension on a machine with Firefox 0.9.2, and the installation was flawless.

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Update: 2004.06.18

I've posted a note on how to get the spell check extension working in Firefox 0.9.

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For the past couple months, I've been enjoying Torisugari's textarea spell checker extension that I talked about late last year.

A number of people have reported difficulties getting this extension to work in the new Firefox 0.8 release. I've gotten the extension up and running on my Windows XP machine by doing the following:

- Make a copy of the composer.xpt file in the Firebird components directory
- Uninstall Firebird
- Grab the stuff I want from my old profile (bookmarks, etc), which is still labeled Phoenix, and then delete the profile
- Install Firefox, but not starting the program immediately after the install
- Place a copy composer.xpt into the Firefox components directory
- Start Firefox
- Install spellcheck.xpi from:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6/windows-xpi/
- Shut down Firefox
- Install fromspellcheckerfe0_4_0.xpi :
http://cgi29.plala.or.jp/~mozzarel/addon/firebird/spellchecker/
(You can also get the composer.xpt file here as well in case you've deleted it)
- Shut down Firefox again
- Start Firefox

I'm thinking that the majority of people's problems getting the spell checker to work for Firefox stems from the installer defaulting to a new program directory than the Firebird installer. This new components directory will not have the composer.xpt file in it (it was dropped from Firebird/Firefox builds a while ago. I can't remember exactly when.). Since I believe that this is the problem you could probably get by without having to wipe your old profile before.

Hope this helps.

Update: 2004.02.12

Two things:

1. I noticed that the a thread on the Mozillaziine forums covered this issue, and it looks like you can install the composer.xpt file after running Firefox and, at least from what I read, that there is no need to wipe your old profile.

2. I read on the same forum version 0.3.5 of the spellcheck xpi is actually the most current version, and that 0.4 version was more of an experiment that has been abandoned (although it still works fine).

TiVo users like breasts

It has been reported that Janet Jackson's "accident" during this weekend's SuperBowl was the most replayed bt TiVo moment ever.

I wonder if Janet owns any stock? :)

Elastic Design

I came across this nice example of an elastic page layout, where the page layout shrinks or expands based on the users font size choice.