LinLog

I've discovered why Firefox hates me. Apparently it's not just me, but broken code in Firefox.

I found the solution in this Mozillazine thread. It contained no mention of the error I got in the console, or of external feed readers simply not launching, but the patch to FeedConverter.js did fix my problem.

All I had to do was change the indicated section of /usr/lib/firefox/components/FeedConverter.js, start Firefox, and add the strings browser.feeds.handlers.application.args and browser.feeds.handlers.application.uriPrefix in the about:config dialog.

So now external feed readers work. In fact, they work better than they're supposed to, because this patch adds support for setting arguments to the external command, so no wrapper script is required. For Akregator, I just set "--addfeed" as the browser.feeds.handlers.application.args and /usr/bin/akregator as the command. Bingo!

I just installed MonoDevelop for the first time and I have a question: why does the Ubuntu MonoDevelop package depend on Metacity and Lynx? It makes no sense.

The Lynx part really gets me. What possible use could a graphical IDE have for a text-mode browser? Especially given that it depends on Firefox as well.

And what's worse, I can't even see where Lynx is getting pulled in. I don't see it in MonoDevelop's list of dependencies, but Adept doesn't want to install MonoDevelop without it. What's the deal?

Weigh-in day again. I'm down two more pounds from last week (that's 15 total) to 218.6 today. Or 214.0, depending on whether I put the scale in the bathroon or the hall. What a pain. At least I know which number is more likely to be right.

Last time, I said I'd talk a little about the diet I'm on, the F-Factor diet. It's a high-fiber, carb-counting diet. The idea is that you limit your carbohydrate intake, because carbs are really easy to overeat, and increase your fiber intake. The extra fiber, combined with protein, keeps you feeling full longer, and limiting your carbs helps keep your calorie count down.

The actual implementation isn't that difficult. Basically, you write down everything you eat and keep track of the carbs and fiber in it. You don't have to count fats or proteins (the carbs in non-starchy vegetables don't count either), but you're supposed to stick mostly to lean protein and go easy on the fats. You're allowed a certain number of 15 gram servings of carbs, depending on what phase of the diet you're on, but you have to fit 30 to 35 grams of fiber into those.

So far, it's working quite well. The only time I've been hungry on this diet is when I miss a meal. And judging from the numbers, it's obviously working. In fact, this week I had to move to the fifth hole in my belt. I've been going back and forth between the the third and fourth holes for years, but I've never been able to get to the fifth.

Good news: Mono now has a working Visual Basic compiler. Oddly enough, it and the runtime are actually both implemented in VB.

Well, I guess that's not so odd actually. It would be odd if it were VB6, but VB.NET is really the bastard child of VB6 and C#. And it takes after C# more than VB6, so it's actually a pretty capable language. In fact, after moving to .NET after years of VB6, I'd say that the resembalence to VB6 is mostly superficial. Not that this is a bad thing - it's just that the guys who advocated calling VB.NETVisual Fred had a good point.

In other good news, I understand that these days, Mono also has support for Windows.Forms and a decent subset of .NET 2.0 now. It's really coming along! I guess it's time to download MonoDevelop and give .NET under Linux a try.

A few weeks ago, I installed Beagle, a desktop search tool written for Mono, and it's KDE front-end Kerry. This combination has just blown me away.

I guess desktop search is like the microwave oven, cell phones, and the internet - it's hard to realize how truly useful it is until you've gotten used to it. I know I didn't. But so far Kerry-Beagle has saved me lots of time searching through those hundred-odd PDF files I've been using for research. Now that I'm used to it, I don't think I'd want to do without it.

The user experience is probably the best thing about Kerry-Beagle. Once you have the software and all its dependencies installed (and there are a lot of them - Mono, like the .NET framework for Windows, isn't especially small), it's dead simple to use. There's basically no configuration required, as it will just go right ahead and index your entire home directory. You type in your search terms and wait for the results to come up. They're displayed is a nice, paginated list of files, complete with icons and matching portions of text and sorted by relevance. Easy to read, easy to browse, and just generally great. If you don't believe me, just look at the screenshot:

My only other desktop search experience is with the (apparently now defunct) Kat desktop search application for KDE, which never really worked very well for me. I guess now I'll have to try out some of the Windows offerings. Anyone have any suggestions on which are the best packages?

Apparently there's a new meme sweeping the blogosphere. Or, at least, Jason Calacanis's blog. Jason calls it fatblogging, and the idea is for sedentary, overweight techno-geeks to support eachother in their attempts to lose weight.

It's actually not a bad idea. Having a record of your progress is always a good way to provide motivation. And what with all this wonderful technology, why not use it to build support systems? So, seeing how I've been on a diet for the last month, I think I'll get in on this too. I was planning to blog about it anyway, so why not? (However, I'm not going to follow Jason's format exactly and blog about it every day. I'm only weighing myself once a week, and even if I wasn't, I just can't be bothered to write about my daily routine. "I lost another 4 ounces doing exactly what I did yesterday!" Not exactly compelling reading.)

When I started my diet on January 18, I weighed in at around 233.6 pounds. At my weekly weigh-in yesterday, I was down to 220.6, for a total of 13 lbs. in 4 weeks. My goal weight, which the BMI charts still say is overweight for my height, is 180 lbs. For reference, that's actually ten pounds less than I weighed when I started college.

My weight-loss method so far has adding an actual organized diet to my usual light exercise regimen of doing 20 or 30 minutes on the elliptical machine every morning before work. I picked up a copy of "The F-Factor Diet" by Tanya Zuckerbrot in Bares & Noble and have been following that. It's a carb-counting, high-fiber diet and it's actually not that difficult to follow. But that's a post for another day....

Nothing ever goes right when I try to use Firefox. I don't know why. I never do anything that exotic. But for some reason, it always falls short.

This time, it's the new RSS features in Firefox 2. You click on a feed link and you get a nice, readable display of the content with a "Subscribe Now" button at the top that lets you subscribe to it with several online services or allows you to pick a desktop application. However, in my case, it doesn't work.

And when I say "doesn't work" I don't mean it doesn't work as well as I'd like, or that it pops up an error message. I mean it does absolutely nothing. I open a feed, point Firefox to a script to add it to Akregator, click the "Subscribe Now" button and...nothing. Absolutely nothing happens.

I know it's not the script, because it works perfectly on the command line. I know it's not something in my profile because I already tried doing this from a blank profile. The only conclusion is that the Ubuntu Edgy Firefox package is broken.

There was one piece of feedback I turned up. After clicking the subscribe button, two instances of an extremely obscure error message show up in the error console. The exact text is:
Error: [Exception... "ServiceManager::GetService returned failure code:" nsresult: "0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///usr/lib/firefox/components/FeedConverter.js :: FRS_addToClientReader :: line 338" data: no]
Source File: file:///usr/lib/firefox/components/FeedConverter.js
Line: 338
The referenced line of code is this:
var ss = Cc["@mozilla.org/browser/shell-service;1"]
.getService(Ci.nsIShellService_MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH);
I have absolutely no idea why this is failing or how to fix it. That is particularly frustrating because it's the only thing I have to go on. Does anybody else have a clue?

I always have to look this up whenever I start with a fresh Firefox config on my main desktop.

In my xorg.conf I have XAxisMapping set to "6 7", which normally allows me to use a button to scroll horizontally. However, in Firefox, this moves back and forth through the brwoser history. Needless to say, this is endlessly annoying.

The quick fix is to open up a tab to about:config and change the following settings:
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action from 2 to 0
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines from -1 to 1
The first changes the right/left scrollwheel action to scroll by lines and the second makes the line scrolling normal, as opposed to reversed.

It's finally happened: on Tuesday, Steve Jobs came out against DMR-infested music. He basically blames the need for DRM entirely on the music studios and says that Apple would whole-heartedly support the distribution of unencumbered MP3 files.

This is great news, if it's true. But as Jon Lech Johansen, a.k.a. "DVD Jon", points out in several interesting blog entries, Steve's reasoning sounds a little fishy. The Gizmodo people are also a bit skeptical about Steve's sincerity on this.

I suspect they're probably right. Steve may blame DRM entirely on the studios, but as Jon points out, Apple never gave a second thought to putting DRM restrictions on all tracks, whether the studio demanded it or not. Maybe it's just me, but that makes Steve's "man of the people" schtik a little harder to swallow.

I guess time will tell. Good ole' Steve wasn't much concerned about empowering his customers when it came to the iPhone. Maybe he's actually serious about it this time.

Dealing with other IT organizations is always interesting. Not only is it fun to talk shop with the techs, but you can get some humor value out of the business and bureaucracy end.

Today, for example, I was at one of our public safety sites supporting a vendor tech installing a voice recording system. I say "supporting," but I actually spent half the time pacing around and playing sudoku on my cell phone, because the tech pretty much had everything under control. I was just there so nobody could complain that our IT department wasn't involved.

Anyway, while the on-site tech was pretty on the ball, the rest of his company was a little...off. My first indication was when they sent us the install files for the recorder's client access application. They e-mailed me their FTP server installation and the file name to download: "our_org clien installer.zip". No, that's not a typo, the file name actually had "clien" instead of "client." What really kills me is that not only did someone mistype the file name, but they sent us the misspelled file name rather than fixing it. That seemed just a tiny bit unprofessional.

The second sign was the contents of this ZIP archive. It contained one setup file and three pieces of documentation, none of which were even tangentially related to the client application. However, if I had been responsible for the ANI and ALI circuits coming into the PBX, it would have been very helpful. And it turns out they only sent me one of the three client apps we needed. Makes you wonder if the sales guy was even paying attention.