see ya later ... Netscape

All around the web candles are being lit for the once great browser we call Netscape. As sad as it sounds, we all take comfort that its legacy will live on thru Mozilla Firefox.

My earliest memory of Netscape was in college queuing up at the university library waiting for my turn to use the internet in 1994. On a 486 PC running Windows 3.1, I used Netscape and browsed the internet for the first time. My first ever download was Star Trek TNG icons and wallpapers from a gopher site I can no longer remember. Geeky huh ?

Here's a quick round up of the news, "obituaries" and "eulogies" around the web ....

• Yugatech : Netscape Navigator: RIP, 1994 - 2008"">Netscape Navigator: RIP, 1994 - 2008
  
• Engadget : Netscape finally bows out, browsers no longer supported
• Slashdot : AOL to Shut Down Netscape Support/Development
• Web Worker Daily : End of a Browser Era
  
• Netscape : End of Support for Netscape Browsers
  

Check your Gmail filters .... and I mean NOW !!!!

Before anything else, login to Gmail now and check your filters and POP Forwarding settings and make sure there aren't any strange filters or e-mail address you don't recognize.

I read an incredibly alarming item from digg today about how an unscrupulous hacker stole someone's domain name by hacking into the person's gmail account.

David Airey, the victim, tells his story and the on-going saga to get his domain back in this blog post. If you're a freelancer, your website is your life, I can just imagine the emotional distress he is in.

According to the blog post, Google has already fixed this but the fix will NOT remove filters or settings that have been added or changed by the exploit, so I say again, check your Gmail account now.

Details of the hack can be found in http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/google-gmail-e-mail-hijack-technique/

Holiday greetings and how Starbucks saved a man's life

I found this touching story from digg about how Starbucks saved Michael Gill's life.

Who is Michael Gill, you ask ? Go ahead, click the link and find out.

I think it's a fitting story to share this Christmas because it's about hope in time of great tribulations and finding happiness in the simplest things.

Happy Holidays everyone !!!!

NVIDIA Driver 169.07, Compiz and OpenSUSE 10.3

I left my PC to update overnight and I was surprised this morning after a reboot that Compiz isn't working anymore.

It seems the OpenSUSE updater upgraded the Nvidia drivers to version 169.07 but it broke Compiz in the process.

After some exhaustive googling I found the solution in this blog. It's in Italian and it seems meant for Ubuntu users but the code snippets were easy enough to follow and they worked for me on OpenSUSE 10.3

After installing the updates and rebooting, I noticed that compiz wasn't working anymore so I manually executed compiz from a gnome terminal and got this error ....

“No GLXFBConfig for default depth”

The solution according to M0rF3uS’ Ubuntu Blog is to execute the following in your terminal

LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 compiz -–no-libgl-fallback -–replace ccp &

Alternatively, if you use fusion-icon to launch compiz, open the file

/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/FusionIcon/data.py

and locate the line with compiz_args.

edit it so that it looks like

compiz_args = [’–replace’, ‘–sm-disable’, ‘–ignore-desktop-hints’, ‘ccp’, ‘–no-libgl-fallback’]

Then, open a terminal and execute

LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 fusion-icon

UPDATE: This latest version of the NVIDIA drivers fixed the function keys that control the brightness on my T61. This means that I don't have to exit X windows anymore to adjust the brightness.

Microsoft Philippines sued for Piracy!

I dugg the story on one of the earlier Inquirer.net news breaks ...

http://digg.com/microsoft/Another_Lawsuit_against_Microsoft_2

At the time I thought that it was probably an honest mistake on Microsoft Philippine's part.

Well, apparently, it wasn't.

From reading the most recent Inquirer article it seems that Microsoft was fully aware and even "tried to resolve the copyright dispute" as the title says.

It's also apparent that whatever Microsoft was offering to the university to resolve the dispute must have been unacceptable (to put it mildly) for it to actually go so far as to sue Microsoft Philippines and to name Microsoft Corp. in the US as a respondent.

Out of curiosity, I visited the university's website at http://www.southeastern.com.ph/. While it's not as famous as it's neighbor from a few blocks away (DeLa Salle University) the university has been around since 1946.

The article says that "Microsoft Philippines Inc. is disappointed", I think and believe the proper term is stunned that a little known university would challenge them in court and sue them for something that they are, ironically, staunch advocates.

I would dare say that if Microsoft Philippines was dealing with DLSU, UP or Ateneo, the story would be very different.

On the other hand, it could be a huge malicious publicity stunt but an incredibly risky one at that, even if they have Estelito Mendoza as their lawyer, because, all things considered, they're not suing just any company, they're suing the company that made the Internet Explorer browser, the spreadsheet application (MS Excel) and word processor (MS Word) that you and many people around the world use, and a company that has been known to exert "influence" on governments and entities.

I'm rooting for the underdog here.

Any person or organization should think twice, thrice and ten times before thinking of challenging a giant with vast resources such as Microsoft. To step forward and sue is either incredibly foolish or admirably principled. I hope they are the latter.

As a final note ...

The article also quotes a statement from Microsoft Philippines ...

" .... For all intents and purposes, this is a purely local matter which does not involve Microsoft Corporation, ... ”

I seriously beg to differ because if Microsoft loses this case, they will also lose the "moral pedestal" to demand companies to abide by intellectual property and copyright laws.

So the world will be watching, reading and listening in anticipation of what "Goliath" will do to "David" and if "David" can slay the giant or whether he will just give up in the end.

The Why Not Forums : Our local version of TED

They could probably do a better job with the website, nevertheless, I can only describe this forum as the local, proudly Filipino, version of TED.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's patterned after it. Their tag line "Think New Thoughts, Share Big Dreams, Do Brave Things" isn't that far away from "Ideas worth sharing" , if not a bolder, stronger more inspiring statement.

It's the 2nd time for this forum, the first having been held last Sept 27. Our Awesome Planet's Anton attended and wrote a review of that event. Apparently he wasn't all that thrilled with the line up of speakers. Nevertheless, I got wind of Why Not Forums 2.0 from his most recent blog entry to date and the line up seems much better this time around.

Pulse Audio the "Compiz for Audio" on OpenSUSE

Fedora 8 made waves with Pulse Audio when it was released. It was such a hit that other linux distributions are following suite. OpenSUSE 10.3 users (yours truly included) can now install Pulse Audio using the one click install.

So what's the big deal over Pulse Audio ?

1. With Pulse Audio, you can run multiple applications (e.g. skype, pidgin, flash video on firefox, Banshee) that use sound and you can hear them all at the same time, even go so far as to control the volume for each application.
2. Works with or over existing audio systems like ESD for Gnome and aRTS for KDE.
   
3. From Linux.com : "PulseAudio can route audio from multiple sources to multiple sinks, both locally and over the network. You can use it to combine multiple soundcards into a single virtual device, to forward music from one PC to another, or to share a single microphone as an input between multiple PCs." Cool !!!

It was an easy installation, the one click install did most of the work for me, although I still had to do a couple of additional things to get it to work. If you happen to have OpenSUSE 10.3 with GNOME, use the one click install and try the following to get Pulse Audio up and running :

1. After the one click install completes, login as root and edit /etc/group and add all the users who will use Pulse Audio on your system to the pulse group.
2. Reboot your system
3. Login as a desktop user, in the Gnome Control Center click Sessions.
4. In the Startup Programs tab click Add
5. Type PulseAudio Server on the name field.
6. Type pulseaudio & on the command field.
7. Locate and run the PulseAudio Device Chooser from your Application Browser
8. Logut and then login again.
   

YUI 2.4.0

On the heels of the release of ExtJs 2.0 comes YUI 2.4.0 and it comes packed with some interesting (at least to me) stuff like :

• charting control/widget
• it's own css selector engine (about time !)
• json utility

Is it me or is YUI starting to look more and more like dojo ? I hope Yahoo doesn't do a "dojo" and separate the widgets into their own code base with it's own branding, frankly "Yijits" or "Yuidgets" sounds ridiculous :-)

Ext 2.0 stable release is out

A pleasant surprise today.

Ext 2.0 has graduated from RC1. The "stable release" is already available for download at http://extjs.com/download

There's a new file called CHANGES.txt which outlines the changes between 2.0RC1 and 2.0 stable.

VMware Server 2.0 Beta : Tempted ? Don't !!!

If you're tempted to give VMware 2.0 BETA for a spin, take my advice and wait.
Here are 2 compelling reasons why NOT ....

• The VMware server console desktop application is gone. The only 2 ways to access your virtual machine is (a) thru the web browser by installing a plugin to view and control the console and (b) remote desktop access (e.g. vnc or rdp)

• It installs tomcat and friends. It's possible that memory management on virtual machines may have improved on 2.0 but whatever memory you save will no doubt be consumed by the web server that serves up the web interface.

I for one am extremely disappointed that the server console is gone. It seems I am not alone. VMware server 2.0 would be great if I have a dedicated server to run all my virtual machines, problem is I and many others don't and VMware is forgetting about us by not including a desktop client like VMware server 1.0 has.

Are we doomed to VMware player instead ? Or maybe it's time to try VirtualBox :-)

multiple TinyMCE 3 instances on one page

Two of my favorite javascript libraries, YUI and ExtJS, both have WYSIWYG editors. While the editor for ExtJS , in my opinion, has some more ways to go, I've heard raves about YUI's implementation at least from one other developer.

However, there is one WYSIWYG editor that trumps them both and all the others I've seen, it's called TinyMCE.

So it's no wonder that many a developer would like to use it and/or integrate it into their javascript library of choice, including myself.

If you visit the TinyMCE wiki, you'll probably learn to initialize TinyMCE like this

tinyMCE.init({
theme : "advanced",
mode : "textarea",
language : "en",
theme_advanced_layout_manager : "SimpleLayout",
theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,strikethrough"
});

This works great if :

1. you want the editor to appear immediately after the page has loaded
2. all the editors on your page share the same configuration
   

In one of my recent projects with ExtJS 2.0 I needed to instantiate two different TinyMCE instances in different layout panels so the method above won't work, so here's how I did it.

Store the configuration objects in an array.

var configArray = [{
theme : "advanced",
mode : "none",
language : "en",
height:"200",
width:"100%",
theme_advanced_layout_manager : "SimpleLayout",
theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull",
theme_advanced_buttons2 : "",
theme_advanced_buttons3 : ""
},{
theme : "advanced",
mode : "none",
language : "en",
width:"100%",
theme_advanced_layout_manager : "SimpleLayout",
theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left"
}]

In a DOM event, like click or expand that reveals one of my TinyMCE instances (textarea1), I do ..

tinyMCE.settings = configArray[0];
tinyMCE.execCommand('mceAddControl', true, "textarea1");

When I want to reveal my second TinyMCE instance (textarea2), I do ..

tinyMCE.settings = configArray[1];
tinyMCE.execCommand('mceAddControl', true, "textarea2");

To clear the contents of the TinyMCE editor on textarea1, I do ...

tinyMCE.editors.textarea1.setContent(" ");

Here is an html page with the above in action. Remember to change the src of the tinymce javascript.

<html>

<head>
<title>TinyMCE </title>

<script type="text/javascript" src="tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
<script>

var tinymceConfigs = [ {theme : "advanced",
        mode : "none",
        language : "en",
        height:"200",
        width:"100%",
        theme_advanced_layout_manager : "SimpleLayout",
        theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
        theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
        theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull",
        theme_advanced_buttons2 : "",
        theme_advanced_buttons3 : "" },{ theme : "advanced",
        mode : "none",
        language : "en",
        height:"200",
        width:"100%",
        theme_advanced_layout_manager : "SimpleLayout",
        theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
        theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left"}];

function tinyfy(settingid,el_id) {
    tinyMCE.settings = tinymceConfigs[settingid];
    tinyMCE.execCommand('mceAddControl', true, el_id);
}

</script>

</head>

<body>

<h2>Editor 1</h2>
<a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="tinyfy(0,'ed1')">show editor 1</a>

<br><textarea id="ed1"></textarea>

<h2>Editor 2</h2>
<a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="tinyfy(1,'ed2')">show editor 2</a>

<br><textarea id="ed2"></textarea>

</body>

</html>

Friend Webs on Facebook

Got a facebook account ?

Why don't you login to facebook and head on over to http://apps.facebook.com/friendwebs/ and see Solutiongrove's first ever Facebook app.

It's a neat interactive visualization of your friends on Facebook. If you're curious as to why we called it Friend Webs, take a look at the screen shot below, it's obvious.

We used Jsviz to generate the cool force directed graph and Extjs for the toolbar, popup and effects.

Dave wrote an openacs facebook-api package that made it really easy to talk to facebook from OpenACS.

It's currently in beta and we would really appreciate comments and suggestions on how to improve it and make it even cooler.

UC Berkeley first to post full lectures to YouTube

You need to have a lot of money, a lot of discipline and a lot of smarts to be able to get into and graduate from an ivy league school like MIT or UC Berkeley.

If you happen to have a lot of discipline and just enough smarts but don't have a lot of money, you could settle for the online courses and videos that these institutions are generously making available online and for FREE.

While MIT has quite a head start with their MITOpenCourseware, UC Berkley has just recently decided to utilize YouTube to distribute videos of its courses.

Don't you just love the internet :-)

Compiz on a Thinkpad T61

It's always a chore installing linux on a new computer but it has never been this gratifying.
I recently had the chance to install OpenSUSE 10.2 on a brand new Thinkpad T61. I'll write a review on my next post about my experiences, but for now allow me to indulge you with a few pics of the latest Compiz-Fusion in action on this sweet machine.

Now we can sync with Google Calendar

Hot off the Ajaxian presses, Google now allows you to write back using the GData API. In the past, all developers have been able to do is to consume data from services like Google Calendar, however, with this development, it won't be long before we see web apps or even desktop apps that sync with Google Calendar.

Making Sense of the NBN Project

I think having close to all the cabinet secretaries and resource persons who had a hand or are directly or indirectly related to the NBN Broadband project in that room was decisive and well played in the part of the Executive.

It sends a strong message to the Filipino people, at least it did to me, that the government is executing this project in good faith, that it is above board, that they have nothing to hide and that it is in the interest of the nation.

Whether or not you or I believe it is a totally different matter, of course :-)

However, sticking to the TECH side of things, Yuga enumerates exactly what that contract will get us if it ever pushes thru.

Web Page Development ala Opera

I love the Opera Web Browser. It's the browser I use to check mail, read feeds and chat (yup Opera comes with an IRC chat client).

It's the one browser I can keep on for almost forever on my linux desktop without crashing or using up a ton of resources. If it does crash, it's intuitive enough to resume and launch the pages prior to it crashing. Firefox has that same feature now but I do recall Opera was first to introduce it (please correct me if I am wrong). In fact, tabbed browsing has been an Opera mainstay way before Firefox or IE had it.

What's interesting and maybe laudable about Opera (the company) is that they're not out to conquer your desktop. It seems they're taking aim on consumer devices like mobile phones and game consoles. I was rather intrigued to find out that Opera developed a web browser for the Nintendo Wii. They even have a javascript API for the Wiimote. Too bad I don't have a wii yet and the browser (aka the Internet Channel) isn't free anymore.

If any geeks out there happen to have a Wii and would like to develop web pages on Opera, they might find this page helpful. I've always raved about the firebug on firefox combination for developers.

It seems Opera has a couple of nifty developer tools to challenge the dynamic duo of web development with its Developer Console and DOM Snapshot tools.

On the Other Hand: The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship by Glenn Kelman

If you're like me, I'm sure you were elated after watching this video. For a split second I'm sure you thought that you too could create a site like or even better than Plenty of Fish that gets twelve billion page views, 380 hits per second, $5-6 million a year in ad revenue and with only two hours of work a day.

The elation gradually wears away though after reality bites and you realize how hard starting a Web 2.0 company really is and that Markus Frind is probably in sane to believe that his site is up and running getting that many hits with ASP.Net on just one IIS server.

Well, after the let down, I encourage you to read this article, also from Guy Kawasaki's blog on Glen Kelman's counterpoint.

He makes interesting, encouraging and comforting points about the flip side of entrepreneurship. He cites very interesting and relevant anecdotes and quotes while presenting his points in a free flowing train of easy to comprehend text. If he wasn't introduced as CEO of Redfin I'd say he's a professional writer/blogger and a good one too.

Ajax powered File Manager demo

The revolution started a few short years ago with Google's Gmail.

It's the web application that put WOW back into WWW.

It is truly the first web application that I would trade in my trusty e-mail client for. The decision to switch was a no brainer. Yahoo Mail didn't have POP. At that time, no free email hosting provider offered more than a measely 5MB of email storage. Outlook Express crashes at the sheer volume of e-mail I get everyday. Finally, searching thru hundreds to thousands of messages wasn't such a chore because it actually works !

Suddenly, more and more people were turning to their browsers to read mail, gradually weaning away from the desktop e-mail clients that they have become so use to.

After the e-mail client, is the file manager not too far away from the same fate ?

Probably not in the near future. As I have mentioned before, browsers need a little catching up before we can actually see that happening. Right now, for instance, if you want seamless dragging and dropping of files from your desktop to a web page, you have to rely on a java applet.

Click the title link above to see a demo I wrote of an ajax powered file manager (username:coa,password:123) that works on top of the robust OpenACS File Storage package.

I wouldn't call it innovative, in fact, it copies a lot of things from Windows Explorer but it has to start somewhere :-)

Yahoo! Announces YSlow, Firebug based performance tool

Just a few weeks ago I posted my lessons learned from trying to get an ajax powered web application to run better and faster.

No doubt many developers are constantly trying to find ways to do just that and it looks like Yahoo! has answered the call with this plug-in.