NoScript and AdBlock Plus – Dramas!

Maybe you’ve already read a bit about the big stink around NoScript? Well, here is my take on it.

Firefox Google Search

Something happened a couple of weeks ago that was most odd: in Firefox, the Google search (in the top right drop-down) kept opening up Japanese search results.

Japanese Language Tools

I ran across a couple of nice Japanese language-learning tools today. The first is Anki, a flashcarding system that comes with Kanji flashcards. The second is a Firefox add-on, kanjilish, which lets you practice reading Kanji while you read English. 

Firefox and Intrepid Ibex: Problems ahead

So, I guess the Mozilla legal team was bored and decided that Ubuntu must show the Firefox EULA when it starts up in Intrepid Ibex (the upcoming version of Ubuntu).

I briefly commented in that bug report, but I wanted to put out a more detailed response here, and try to establish my position and address some of the arguments I’ve been hearing:

UMUC WebTycho, Ubuntu, Firefox and Javascript

No. No, you do not know what you are doing.

As I am living in the future (Japan), I attend classes over the internets and use WebTycho to attend the University of Maryland University College (I’ve always loved that name!)

Now, Web Tycho has a couple of different “browser capability detection” scripts:

1: http://tychousa11.umuc.edu/sys/browserinfo.html
2: http://tychousa11.umuc.edu/js/browsercheck.js

If you care enough to actually look, I’m sure you can see that they will not always return the same information!

This is a bug already on Launchpad, and although following the advice there allowed me to “pass” the outer check, I still continued to fail the inner check.

The problem is ALWAYS at the distant end.

Of course, when I sent an email to the WebTycho support – including a link to the Launchpad discussion, this was (the meat of) the response I got:

As long as you are meeting the technical requirements for using WebTycho you will not receive that error message.
Here is a link that will give you more information:
http://tychousa6.umuc.edu/wtdocs/wthelp/html/technicalrequirements.html

I guess that’s true if by “meeting the technical requirements” you really mean “using one of the 4 browsers on the 4 operating systems” listed in the “Recommended” listing. Of course, it’s false if by “meeting the technical requirements” you really mean “meeting the technical requirements”.

At least the responded quickly … very quickly … like in under 30 minutes! That way you know they actually read my email and considered the bug report I linked to, and contacted someone who could actually read the JavaScript and determine that it is error-free, even though I didn’t specify what error message I saw, and only told them to fix the broken script!

Oh wait. Nevermind.

Going to the Opera

There are other places talking about this (and similar) problems with having browser capabilities mis-detected, especially on the amd64 version of Gutsy, and the advice is often to install the 32-bit version of Firefox instead.

However, I didn’t want to do that – because the only site I am having a problem with is WebTycho – so I figured why not try Opera? If you look a bit, you can even find a 64-bit build of the 9.5 beta.

Downloaded, installed, and connected straight away to WebTycho. Although a couple of warning pop-ups popped up, everything seems to be displaying correctly. Since it’s just for one site, I’ll probably just use Opera and not bother with tweaking Firefox.

Converting the wife from XP to Ubuntu

If I can do it…

So far, my move to Ubuntu has been a great success and I like it more as I learn more. There’s one more box in the household here – the wife’s. Now, all she does is a few casual games (spider solitaire, othello and the like), surf, blog and email – and some minor related tasks like very simple image editing. I’m getting more comfortable with Ubuntu, so I figure it’s time to move her over as well. Her computer is my old desktop, a P4 1.7GHz with 1GB of RAM and 2 80G drives – not worthless, but certainly not “peppy” under WinXP.

She doesn’t know or care about a computer outside of those uses, and gets bored to death if I have to explain something to her. The box is not virus/spyware or otherwise crippled, it’s a WinXP SP2 install that I kept up-to-date with anti-virus and anti-spyware checks.

Using Firefox to view HTML man pages

The problem

One of the things I face as a newcomer to Ubuntu is new commands and new syntaxes. How do I copy/move/rename files? What are the options to list directory contents? And so on…you all know the deal.

The first stop (so far as I know) is the man pages. These are reference pages that come with just about every program and are very informative. Usually, you can figure out what you need to do if you carefully read the man pages.

However,  the man command by default invokes a text-based viewer that is not the most attractive thing to read, so…

The Solution

I want to view the man pages as HTML, and from Firefox (my web browser). I want to be able to type in something like man ls into the Firefox address bar and see the results.

This is how I did it:

1. Install a local web server.

sudo apt-get install apache2

2. Install the documentation for that web server (this probably isn’t necessary, but I like to install documentation packages when available.)

sudo apt-get install apache2-doc

3. Install the man2html package, which converts man pages to HTML format

sudo apt-get install man2html

4. Create a Custom Keyword in Firefox:

Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks…

Go to “Custom Keywords”, and create a new bookmark in whatever category you like.

Use this for the “Location”: http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html?query=%s

Use this for the “Keyword”: man

The Results

Now, just type man ls into the Firefox address bar, and you should see the man HTML for the ls command. If you type man man, you can choose which page to reference.

Hey hey! I figured out how to do something all by myself!