At the Mozilla Summit a week and a half ago, I gave a 30-minute talk on some of the challenges the IT groups that support us face with deploying Firefox. It’s not a new discussion by any means, but it’s something I’d like to raise awareness on within the community and actively contribute to addressing. I wanted to get people thinking about all the bits outside the product at a high level, and called out what I think are the important parts along with what we’ll need to do. It’s not exhaustive, but I think it got the point across, and there were some great follow-on conversations that are on-going.

Our mission is to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the web. Making it easier for organizations to use our products in their workplace is a great opportunity to take that message to them. There’s a lot of people who use us at home, but who’d also love to use us at work. I want to help make that happen and, thankfully, I’m not alone.

The end game is to improve support for groups that are looking to get Firefox into the hands of their organization’s users, and to get the working group that addresses these problems spun back up to share how they do it with everyone else. There’s interest from organizations that want to use Firefox in their workplace, and a need for information on how to do it repeatably. The latter part is the tricksy bit, and I’m hoping to work on this with some like-minded individuals in the short and long term.

A few people have asked for the slides, so I figured I’d post them here. My presentation slides can be viewed using Google Docs, and if you want them in an editable format all you have to do is ask. I’d love to hear what you think, and would also love for you to get involved. If you’re interested in participating, add your name to the Working Group’s Participants section; I hope to reboot the group at the end of the summer, and will be in touch.

I had disabled the usual culprits, namely noise reduction and Panasonic’s “Frame Creation” (used to make moving images less after-imagy), but was still getting stutter. Searching various forums didn’t really help, so I went back to the manual, and eventually found the culprit.

The projector has a setting in the “Options” menu for “Frame Response”, which is described in the manual as “You can minimise the time delay of image displayed for the progressive signals.” This feature has two settings:

• NORMAL Prioritise the image quality
• FAST Prioritise the frame response

Setting it to “FAST” cleared up the problem, and I didn’t notice any discernible difference to image quality in-game.

If you’re trying to use the PowerLinc 2412U on OSX 10.5 with the latest beta (4.1) of the Indigo home-automation and control server, you’ll need to install USB serial drivers first. It would have been nice if this was a little more apparent with either the Indigo software or the PLM’s documentation, but it’s not (or, if it is, it’s buried).

Get the USB serial drivers from here, install them, and now you should be able to see the interface and the proper port in the preferences panel. Hopefully this will save you a bit of the aggravation I went through trying to figure out why the hell I couldn’t initialize the interface between Indigo and the PLM.

Submitted for your entertainment. :)

My subscription ran out a couple days ago, so I upgraded to NIS 2008. NIS 2008 includes anti-phishing protection, which I already have. NIS wants me to use its anti-phishing, so helpfully installs a toolbar in Firefox. It doesn’t tell me it’s going to do this, nor does it give me a choice, and there’s no way I can see to remove it from within NIS, only disable fishing protection. This pisses me off, so…

DO NOT WANT.

If this kind of behaviour pisses you off as well, and you want to stick with the built-in protection Firefox offers, you can remove the toolbar. Fire up your trusty file mangler, and head on over to the Firefox installation directory (usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox). Under that directory is a subdirectory called “components”. In the “components” directory is a file called “coFFPlgn.dll”; move it somewhere safe and restart Firefox.

Toolbar gone!

Thanks Symantec, next time try providing it as an uninstallable plugin or, even better, an extension. Fucktards.

Update: Toolbar back! Every time you reboot, it “helpfully” restores the file. I have asked Symantec how I turn it off permanently. I think I know the answer already.

Update 2: Johan has a good workaround, as follows: After playing about for a bit I tried an old trick, close all instances of firefox, go to the components folder as mentioned above, and remove the coFFPlgn.dll file. Create a new empty file, name it the very same, coFFPlgn.dll and set it to be read only.

the null file is ignored by ffox, and marking it read-only will prevent Norton from over-writing it. works nicely for me. recommended. thanks, Johan!

Larry Lessig: Why kids need better copyright laws, from the awesome TEDTalks podcast.

have you ever closed a tab in firefox and immediately wished you hadn’t? did you know you can get it back? didn’t think so.

if you accidentally close a tab, you can restore it by pressing <ctrl><shift><t> (mac users: <command><shift><t>) simultaneously. voila! closed tab magically restored. try it and see!

“A Wrinkle…” got me hooked on SciFi and all the wonderful thinking that comes with wondering what’s possible and what it would be like to experience those possibilities. It also gave me nightmares of the Man with Red Eyes for years. I haven’t read it in a very long time, which is something I should probably rectify.

Rest in peace.

So I flipped the switch, and as mail started to filter in after the switchover I tested the training app and, well… telling dspam that a mail it had flagged as spam wasn’t actually spam didn’t work. It’s a long, sordid story, so I’ll cut right to the chase.

This problem only appears if you are using postfix as the MTA, and running dspam in daemon mode via LMTP using the configuration outlined in ./doc/postfix.txt

Here’s the symptoms:

• Attempting to retrain false positives in the quarantine fails. You can select the message for retraining, but when you submit the form the page simply reloads with the message still in quarantine.
• Attempting to retrain false postives from the history page are reported as successful (message is marked as retrained in the history), but the message remains in the quarantine list and is not delivered to the mailbox.
• Attempting to view the message in quarantine results in a blank screen
• ^M characters are in the user’s .mbox file (this is the root cause of the problem)

The problem with 3.8.0 is that it adds <CR><LF> as an EOL to the user’s .mbox file instead of just <CR>. This breaks how dspam.cgi parses things. John Peacock came up with a fix for dspam.cgi that enables it to parse the messages properly, but that addresses the symptom, not the root cause, which is dspam itself. If you’ve had any messages delivered to your users without the dspam fix, you’ll probably want to modify dspam.cgi with the John’s patch until it’s reasonable to think the users have dumped their quarantines (or care about the messages in them).

There is a patch for dspam that corrects the problem, but it is unfortunately not in CVS, nor in the release tarball. The patch was only posted to the dspam dev list, and was a little hard to find until John sent it to me. For reference, this information is available at the mail-archive for dspam-dev under “Patch for ^M in Quarantine / Blank Quarantines”. The patch file is also at the bottom of this post, and you’ll need to patch dspam.c in your source and recompile. This will correct the linefeeds being inserted into the quarantine, and everything will play nice moving forward.

Huge, huge thanks to John Peacock for providing the trail, and for answering mail on a holiday pointing me at the fix. I was kind of banging my head over this from 2am through 8am. Good times.

Patch after the jump:

765c765,770
< copyback = _ds_assemble_message (CTX->message, (USE_LMTP || USE_SMTP) ? "\r\n" : "\n");
---
>   if (CTX->result == DSR_ISSPAM && (!(ATX->flags & DAF_DELIVER_SPAM))) {
>       copyback = _ds_assemble_message (CTX->message, "\n");
>   } else {
>       copyback = _ds_assemble_message (CTX->message,
>             (USE_LMTP || USE_SMTP) ? "\r\n" : "\n");
>   }

The link goes to Strobist, which is one of the coolest photography blogs out there. The post itself was from back in April, but appeared in this quarter’s Make: Magazine. Make: is quite possibly the best serial publication (offline and online) I’ve ever subscribed to.

See that video window? It is supposed to be covered by the links page. Obviously, it’s not.

Apparently this is a fairly common problem with IE. Embedded flash applets that like to peek through CSS divs that should be resting nicely over top of the flash app, obscuring the content in the overlay (the links page, in this case).

I’m reasonably sure it has something to do with MS’s DirectX video overlay, but that is pure speculation and I’m way too lazy to find out for sure.

In any event, if you run into this, here’s some more info along with fixes:

Flash content and z-index

and

Experimenting with Flash content and z-index

Good to know!

Also, Firefox doesn’t have this problem, and you really should use that, anyways. Yes, it’s a shameless plug. Deal. :)

Also, also, the site pictured is amalah.com (pronounced AIM-a-lah (bitches)). If you haven’t heard of her or read her stuff, you should. She’s wickedly funny, sarcastic, and cool. Go read. Now!

So, before I forget to mention her, head on over to Jule’s food blog at the stone soup. She claims to have a tiny kitchen, but holy crap does the stuff that comes out of it look amazing. She photographs everything, gives a good overview of the meal and its component dishes, and then gives the recipes and prep tips. I’ll be trying a few of the dishes she shares, for sure.

Well worth the read.

If you are, check out the new trailer for The Golden Compass, the first of what I hope will be an awesome trilogy. I saw the trailer on Thursday night when we saw the new “Pirates” movie, and I’m chuffed for the release in December. After watching the trailer, I can’t help but think half the cast walked over from Casino Royale and started filming.

I installed the software on my XP box, and created a bootdisk. I took the bootdisk and used it in the machine I wanted to perform the disk copy on. The PC-DOS environment loaded nicely, and then Norton Ghost started to load. It asked me for a serial number. Wait, what? When you create a boot floppy for Ghost 2002, you must enter your license number every time, and it’s keyed to the install on your PC. Hooray!

I looked on the install CD and the manual – no number. I normally don’t throw that stuff away, so was confused. I read through the manual and was told that the license number would appear in the splash screen every time I started GhostPE.exe on the machine I installed the software on. Simple enough, so I opened a command window and tried to run the program.

I was greeted with “you can’t run this under windows NT, boot to DOS”. Tried running it in Win98 compatibility mode; same nonsense. I didn’t really want to create another boot disk and boot my PC into DOS, mainly because I had already endured the reboot process on my XP box twice from installing the floppy (who uses floppies anymore), creating the norton bootdisk, removing the floppy, and re-installing it in the machine I was ghosting the partitions in. I wondered if the serial number might be accessible elsewhere…

Sure enough, it is.

If you run into this problem, change into the directory Norton Ghost 2002 was installed into. In it you’ll find a file called “ghost.env”. Look at the line labeled “Keycode”. The 12-digit alpha-numeric value is what you need.

Apparently this was only done with Norton Ghost 2002. Hopefully it’s because the users tracked down the product manager or business wonk who thought it was a great idea to put that little hook in to prevent piracy, and disemboweled them with a rusty spoon.

Today I did something I haven’t been able to do in a very long time – I went for lunch with co-workers who live in the same city as I do. We hit Feleena’s, but couldn’t get a spot on the patio because it was so unbelievably gorgeous outside. The gorgeousness called out after lunch, so coop, robcee, and I went over to Jacques Cartier to play a little disc golf. I had some great drives (including a couple that actually went where I wanted them to), a couple birdies, and maybe a single digit above par score (maybe). ’twas glorious.

Of course, when I came back, all the things I had wanted to do this morning but were bumped by a mini crisis were still there. So, I got caught up, and am just finishing now. That’s why no there will be no update. What’s important to note is that I didn’t resent spending any time getting caught up – the job is that good, and the trade-off of an evening catching up against a nice lunch and a round of disc golf in near-perfect conditions was well worth it.

Life is good. The only other thing I have to say is I hit 10k views on Flickr today, and that’s without being much of a group whore. I will be getting out with the camera this weekend because I have been craptastic in getting out of late. Ok, it’s time for bed.