two week mark | firefox 3

two weeks smoke free-ness. i think it’s longest i’ve been without a single puff of the straight tube of tobacco. i have to say that its been a little easier this time round, through i have to thank loads of junk food that helped keep away the urge. that equates to a two kilo weight gain in two weeks…damn now i need to start running again.

meanwhile….

better firefox web form widgets in mac os x

looking around linux write-up sites, i stumbled upon oleg’s blog outlining the steps for a more pleasing web form widgets on firefox. having applied it to my linux box, i set out to install it to my mac since the *nix backend is similar (somewhat easier to relate the guide to).

download this, save it to your desktop.

fire up your terminal and do the following (each “$” denotes a new line | copying & pasting would be wise | you’ll be prompted for your sudo password)

$ cd ./Desktop
$ tar zxf firefox-form-widgets.tar.gz
$ cd ./firefox-form-widgets
$ sudo cp /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/res/forms.css /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/res/forms.css.backup
$ cat ./firefox-form-widgets/res/forms-extra.css | sudo tee -a /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/res/forms.css >/dev/null
$ sudo cp -r ./firefox-form-widgets/res/form-widgets /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/res/

that’s it! quit firefox, re-launch it, navigate to a forms site and enjoy a more refined look. for any reason that you do not fancy the change and would like to revert, fire up terminal again and do this :-

$ sudo cp /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/res/forms.css.backup /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/res/forms.css

and the change will be reverted (this is why its always wise to have a backup before changing anything).

customary screenshots to compare your change to:-

before:

after:

last but not least, many thanks to oleg smetanin for the instructions this was based upon.

the zesty ape

the excitement of ubuntu’s next release was at fever pitch when i caught up with my linux os news updates of late (i kinda found out that i only have six months to squeeze the most out of my ubuntu installs before a new one gets released and i yearn an upgrade) – gusty gibbon was released amongst much fanfare (from the fans at least – heh). i fired the wget in the office box and drove down hours later to cut it into a dvd.

installation was preety much standard easy, not much changed since the last. did have an issue with updating packages though, possibly due to the large number of users accessing the same server or starhub was very stingy with their bandwidth (in which i pay 80 bloody dollars per month – gawddammed rip off). first impressions were very positive with new eye candy and what-nots, but digging deeper i found some things that were a deal breaker for me. restarting the machine or starting up took longer – like minutes longer. never had that problem on my x31 with feisty but somehow starting up gusty took yonks to get to its login prompt. then there was the oversized fonts on the console that were so big that you’d only see only the first few letters of a line. even the prompt is hidden somewhere off screen. desktop effects (via compiz) were supposedly turned on by default with the gibbon, i can’t even turn it on manually without getting an error (was working fine in feisty – which was still in its “experimental” stage).

i tried find the fixes to listed gripes (and a lot more) but since the official release was only a few days old, its kinda tough to come by.

(update)since this has been sitting in my “drafts” section for about a month:-

i gave ubuntu’s gusty gibbon another go when i got back from vietnam (all the issues with windows that i faced in vietnam left a very bad taste so much so that i didn’t want to see another windows machine for a while. besides, running vista on the x31 would be the equivalent of asking a bi-plane to go supersonic). yup the listed gripes were all there but this time there were numerous forum threads on them.

with increased user base numbers, a community driven operating system benefits from its users as more and more people eyeball every detail of the release. moving along the same lines as the community, loads of developers and powerusers are also getting on board with helping out others with issues on their installs. its amazing to see a free operating system getting this much attention as compared to multi-million dollar closed sourced OS release.

almost all of my gripes have been solved though it does take a little technical massaging to coax my aging machine to run the gibbon to its full glory. imagine taking all of vista’s eye candy (transparent windows, glassy window frames and animated transitions), add the ability to customise every aspect of the system (from the design and type of the login window to splash screens to even the size of window frames), then include multiple virtual windows and also a good dollop of speed to keep everything running harmoniously to the user. all these on a tiny notebook with 1.4ghz mobile processor and 768mb of ram (as compared to vista which needs a more “gusty” processor and at least 2gb to get its eye candy working properly)

i see grim everyday

 

icing on the cake fact : i got photoshop 9 and elements to work on the gusty…woot!

discovering autopackage

i came home one day to find a fedora 7 cd in the mail – from a mate who got me started with linux a long while back. obviously burnt from an iso, the “bootleg” nature of the media is preety much how linux heads (him being a true fanboy) spreads the “love” of the community driven operating system.

i fed the disc into backup ‘puter, waved goodbye to my ubuntu “warty” (memories of the pain of installing cisco vpn client flashed before me), guided “anaconda” to slither all across the hard disks and hit the showers wondering what drives these developers to come up with these names to call their creation (maybe one of them actually hit the showers, looked down and thought “…hmm, anaconda!”)

fedora got up and running a little after the shower and meal. dived into working on installing the necessary extras to get it running to my likings. i was having dependencies issues when i was trying to install qtpfsgui with yum and naturally hit the web to find a solution. i kinda got side-tracked for abit and looked around to install inkscape when i chanced upon “autopackage“.

a pure linux fanboy would say that compiling your software installs is the only way to go. fanboy i am not, neither am i a programmer who has “c” on his fingertips – i’ll take any pre-compiled or pre-packaged installs over manual compiling any day. “autopackage” boasts software installs across different linux flavors along with automatically solving dependencies to support the software install. having relied on yum and apt for a bit, i was wondering … why another?

the same questions hit the linux heads as well and camps started to appear – some for, and most against. from what is reported, development was slow and support was lacking but once it hits stable release some actually liked the idea.

i for one am very impressed that i dont need to search the web for a specific distro version of the application i need – let alone worry about dependacies. all one has to do is download the “autopackaged” application file, set it to executable and double click it – thats it (you can also nod along with the quick text scrolls of the verbose output if that rocks your boat)!

sure its a very “micro$oft” way of doing things but competing in a global market where the standards have been established for years (minus security standards of course), wouldn’t it better to go with the flow instead of against it?

discovering qtpfsgui

qtpfsgui is an open source application for hdr generation. presenting a simple gui, it seems to work off the bat with default settings, though, outputs are a lil too surreal for my liking – especially at larger sizes. with a number of options to tweaking its effects (sections that are somewhat names of persons who i think are possibly very important in math circles), i think this is a preety powerful piece of software with loads of potential.

available for windows, osx & linux (..very neat!)