A changelog by Daniel Mettler

Here’s the second, completed part of my list about Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird extensions and hints I find very useful for my daily work (and yours too, possibly ;):

Essential Mozilla Firefox extensions

Web Developer
ScrapBook
Flat Bookmark Editing
savegenpage
DictionarySearch
Duplicate Tab
Bookmarks Synchronizer
miniT (drag+indicator)
Copy Plain Text
undoclosetab (undoclosetab.xpi for FF 1.0.6)
Chinese-English-Japanese Character Hint Bar
Digger

Other hints for Mozilla Firefox:

• Click with the middle mouse button to open a link on a new tab
• Click with the middle mouse button on a tab to close it
• Hit CTRL-p to print a page which is loaded in a new window without any menu or toolbar displayed
• How to make Firefox silently display error pages (like in IE) instead of the error dialog boxes: Enter “about:config” in the URL field and change “browser.xul.error_pages.enabled” from “false” to “true” (just click on the entry to switch it)

Essential Mozilla Thunderbird extensions

Enigmail
MinimizeToTray
Virtual Identity
Quote Colors
MessageFaces

Other hints for Mozilla Thunderbird:

• How to make Thunderbird check all IMAP folders for new mail
• Courier-IMAP and “Server XY has disconnected” error messages
• Mozilla Thunderbird and line wrapping

A useful Firefox extension for people who would like to share cached “bookmarks” between several workstations:

ScrapBook – Firefox Extension
ScrapBook @ Mozilla Update

BTW I had a similar idea for a long time. My architecture would be more flexible though, allowing any client (not only Firefox), not require any client-side configuration and provide even more useful features. I intend to implement it as soon as time permits as I really miss such a power app. In the meantime, ScrapBook serves as an interim solution.

If you encounter a message like

grep: /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.4/libstdc++.la: No such file or directory.

when emerging php, mod_php or elfutils, take a look at the following page for the solution:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-279020.html

After having read about Gizmo in today’s issue of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger (article not (yet?) online, unfortunately), I wanted to check it out myself. Downloaded it, installed it, did some echoing tests. Everything fine – Gizmo seems to be a pretty useful VoIP client, even in its early stage (v0.8 beta). It offers full SIP/VoIP compatibility (something Skype doesn’t offer), built-in call recording capability (dito), call in and out as a gateway to the POTS (as usual). As a first impression, Gizmo seems to be equal to or even better than Skype.

Now comes the funny side note: As most other software vendors entering a market where success heavily depends on network effects, Gizmo has a so-called tell-a-friend page. I usually ignore such pages as if, I prefer notifying friends myself (in order to not give someone else’s e-mail address to a potentially sneaky service provider) instead of sending an invitation through a web form. However, by clicking on a GUI element I just happened to be forwarded to this page.
The funny (or strange) thing about that page now is that if you take a close look at the bottom of the page, you can actually spot a picture of the former (and IMHO one of the best ever) president/mayor of the City of Zurich, Josef Estermann! The Gizmo guys were even unknowing or impudent enough to take his picture as a representative for the tell-a-friend message “Blind Date” (note that as far as I know, Mr. Josef Estermann is happily married to Mrs. Maggy Estermann):

I bet there are many ladies (and gentlemen, for equality) who’d like to have a blind date with Mr. Estermann (though it probably wouldn’t be a blind date anymore). I seriously doubt, however, that Josef Estermann agreed to have his picture taken for this advertisement. It might be just an unconscious mistake by Gizmo’s marketing department or the work of careless copy-cats. I guess it’s rather a funny coincidence/mishap than maliciousness, though ;)

A pointer by Tobias Klauser on the debian-unizh ml just reminded me of this great (and free! :) book:

LWN: Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition

Citing the authors:

This is the web site for the Third Edition of Linux Device Drivers, by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. For the moment, only the finished PDF files are available; we do intend to make an HTML version and the DocBook source available as well.

This book is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. That means that you are free to download and redistribute it. The development of the book was made possible, however, by those who purchase a copy from O’Reilly or elsewhere.

LDD3 is current as of the 2.6.10 kernel. See the LWN 2.6 API changes page for information on subsequent changes.

Looks like MT will catch up with its competitors again :) Let’s hope there will be some performance improvements too ;)

Movable Type – News – Movable Type 3.2 is coming