![[pho image viewer]](http://shallowsky.com/software/phoTT.jpg)
Pho 0.9.6-pre3 has been working great for me for about a month, and
I've been trying to find the time to do a release. I finally managed
it this weekend, after making a final tweak to change the default
PHO_REMOTE command from
gimp-remote to
gimp since
gimp-remote is obsolete and is no longer built by default.
The big changes from 0.9.5 are Keywords mode, slideshow mode,
the new PHO_REMOTE environment variable,
swapping -f and -F, and a bunch of performance work and
minor bug fixing.
I built deb packages for Ubuntu (Hardy, but they should work on
Intrepid too) and Debian (Etch), as well as the usual source tarball,
and they're available at the usual place:
http://shallowsky.com/software/pho.
Tags: software, hacking, pho, image viewer
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17:11 Nov 09, 2008
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This posting ended up being published as a Linux Planet Quick Tip.
You can read about my nifty word counting bookmarklet there:
Quick
Firefox Tip: Word Count Bookmarklet.
Tags: firefox, mozilla, bookmarklets, writing, software, hacking
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22:41 Nov 03, 2008
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I've released
Pho 0.9.6-pre3.
The only change is to fix a sporadic bug where
pho would sometimes jump back to the first image after deleting
the last one, rather than backing up to the next-to-last image.
I was never able to reproduce the bug reliably, but
I cleaned up the image list next/prev code quite a bit and
haven't seen the bug since then. I'd appreciate having a few
testers exercising this code as much as possible.
Otherwise pho is looking pretty solid for a 0.9.6 release.
Tags: software, hacking, pho, image viewer
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09:57 Oct 02, 2008
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For a
bit
over a year I've been running a patched version of Firefox,
which I call
Kitfox,
as my main browser. I patch it because there are a few really
important features that the old Mozilla suite had which Firefox
removed; for a long time this kept me from using Firefox
(and I'm
not
the only one who feels that way), but when the Mozilla Foundation
stopped supporting the suite and made Firefox the only supported
option, I knew my only choice was to make Firefox do what I needed.
The patches were pretty simple, but they meant that I've been building
my own Firefox all this time.
Since all my changes were in JavaScript code, not C++,
I knew this was probably all achievable with a Firefox extension.
But never around to it;
building the Mozilla source isn't that big a deal to me. I did it as
part of my job for quite a few years, and my desktop machine is fast
enough that it doesn't take that long to update and rebuild, then
copy the result to my laptop.
But when I installed the latest Debian, "Etch", on the laptop, things
got more complicated. It turns out Etch is about a year behind in
its libraries. Programs built on any other system won't run on Etch.
So I'd either have to build Mozilla on my laptop (a daunting prospect,
with builds probably in the 4-hour range) or keep another
system around for the purpose of building software for Etch.
Not worth it. It was time to learn to build an extension.
There are an amazing number of good tutorials on the web for writing
Firefox extensions (I won't even bother to link to any; just google
firefox extension and make your own choices).
They're all organized as step by step examples with sample code.
That's great (my favorite type of tutorial) but it left my real
question unanswered: what can you do in an extension?
The tutorial examples all do simple things like add a new menu or toolbar
button. None of them override existing Javascript, as I needed to do.
Canonical
URL to the rescue.
It's an extension that overrides one of the very behaviors I wanted to
override: that of adding "www." to the beginning and ".com" or ".org"
to the end of whatever's in the URLbar when you ctrl-click.
(The Mozilla suite behaved much more usefully: ctrl-click opened the
URL in a new tab, just like ctrl-clicking on a link. You never need
to add www. and .com or .org explicitly because the URL loading code
will do that for you if the initial name doesn't resolve by itself.)
Canonical URL showed me that all you need to do is make an overlay
containing your new version of the JavaScript method you want to
override. Easy!
So now I have a tiny Kitfox extension
that I can use on the laptop or anywhere else. Whee!
Since extensions are kind of a pain to unpack,
I also made a source tarball which includes a simple Makefile:
kitfox-0.1.tar.gz.
Tags: tech, web, mozilla, firefox, software
[
10:59 May 27, 2007
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