siansiew.com

After trying it out for the past 24 hours, I must say I’m very impressed by the improvements over version 2. For starters, it has not hogged up to 500+MB of memory after a couple of hours, no crashes thus far too. Besides that, the new location bar (a.k.a. AwesomeBar) is simply fantastic. Most extensions have been updated to work with the latest version but you may have to switch to different ones if they aren’t updated anymore (or do some workarounds). Go get your copy of Firefox 3 here.

While on the subject of Firefox 3, BBspot has an article on it here. And before you go about saying ‘about time!’, BBspot is a satire news site. :P

      

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Just posted a write up on YamiPod (Yet another iPod manager) which is an alternative iPod management software to iTunes here.

      

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If you have already upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and have the syndication feeds options set to ‘full text’, you might’ve noticed that the RSS feed for your blog post gets truncated after the use of the <!––more––> tag. This is a change in behaviour as compared to previous version of WordPress (2.0 and below) which would show the whole post in an RSS feed if the feed option was set to full text.

Without going into the debate of full vs. partial feeds (I’m on the full feeds side though ;)), there’s a WordPress plugin which does not require any additional configuration apart from just dropping it into your WordPress’s plugins directory and activating it. Get it from here.

      

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After the major upgrade by my webhost, there was a sudden surge in spam on the blogs on spherebox, with a lot bypassing Akismet’s filtering. Apparently he did not configure the ModSecurity Apache module (which did an excellent job previously) and was too lazy to do so as the new version he had installed had supposedly different configuration settings. :(

Since I got sick of getting the incessant email notifications of spam held in moderation queue, I decided to go looking around for fixes and came across this at WordPress’s Codex which helped cut down the crazy amount of spam that kept going through by heaps. Basically it adds rules to the .htaccess file which will check that any comments being submitted to wp-comments-post.php come from the comments page of the WordPress installation and not directly injected by spam bots.

Note that this did not stop the spam completely, but managed to reduce the volume enough so that Akismet could block it off appropriately.

If you’re encountering the same issue as I did, try it out. The instructions are fairly simple and requires few modifications. :)

      

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It’s been a while since my last post, unfortunately have been extremely busy with all kinds of things lately. :( Had some time this weekend, so WordPress 2.1 has been deployed to all hosted sites. Unfortunately, there are some plugins which still have not been fixed to work with 2.1 (e.g. video embedding).

      

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Have just upgraded all WordPress installs across spherebox sites with the latest version. :)

Get the latest zip or tar.gz from here, or if you want just the changes files and/or diff, have a look here.

      

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You probably would’ve noticed the dotted underlined red lines under misspelt words which are typed into text boxes/forms/fields. To me, it’s a rather welcomed feature since I use web applications and services quite a fair bit (I don’t misspell a lot, but automated checking is a bonus I guess ;)), but by default, the bundled dictionary is for the US locale which would complain when you spell ‘favour‘ instead of ‘favor‘.

Fortunately, it’s a rather easy to get around this, which is just to select and install the appropriate dictionary from here. Once that’s done, just right-click on any text box/field/form and you should be able to select the dictionary you want to use (screenshot below):

Once that’s done, you’re all set! :)

      

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Apparently it’s now officially called Firefox 2 and not two-point-o (2.0), so I’ve dropped the .0 from the title. :P

I usually use the shortcut keys ALT+I, ALT+B rather frequently at a forum I visit to get highlighted text in the post box to be italicised or bolded, but in Firefox 2, this shortcut keys no longer work by default. You now have to add the SHIFT key into the mix, so it goes ALT+SHIFT+I instead. If you don’t want to use the SHIFT key, you can edit two values in about:config (like for the close tab button previously):

Change:
ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
ui.key.contentAccess to 4

Taken from MozillaZine forum.

As for other about:config tweaks, head over to this page and for other Firefox tweaks, check this guide out. ;)

      

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This upgrade was released a day or 2 ago, and I thought I’ll give it a shot at upgrading using apt-get’s distupgrade. The steps I used:

1. sudo sed -e ’s/\sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
4. sudo apt-get -f install
5. sudo dpkg –configure -a
6. Reboot.

Steps taken from Debian Admin.

The first step replaces all occurrences of ‘dapper’ with ‘edgy’ in the sources.list which has the list of repositories apt-get will use (e.g. I have mine pointed to my ISP’s FTP mirror instead), the next step updates the sources.list which is then followed by the upgrade. 5th and 6th step is to check that the process completes properly and the last step is pretty self explanatory.

Only issue I had with the upgrade was VMware Server stopped working, which I’ll probably have to reconfigure/reinstall it as I think some configuration stuff probably got overwritten.

Ubuntu’s documentation wiki has probably more comprehensive explanations on the upgrade steps as well as alternative upgrade choices.

      

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Was released earlier today, and have just upgraded all spherebox hosted blogs. :) You can get the changed files zip only here.

      

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