Extensions – Tech Stuff

Tip: Multiproxy Switch : Easily use multiple proxies in Firefox

Kulbir Saini — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:53:46 +0000

A lot of people (especially working people with mobile devices like notebook/netbooks) need to use different proxy servers at home and office. There are several Firefox extensions available to achieve the required functionality but IMHO Multiproxy Switch(Mozilla Addon Page) is the best because

Its simple and easy to use. It does what it should. No fancy/extra terrestrial stuff. Just switch proxies
Easy and Firefox like interface to specify different proxies. Many extensions add their own fancy interfaces for specifying proxies which eventually suck big time.
I am a fan of this one. The No-Proxy list. I could never understand those regular expression based no-proxy lists in FoxyProxy. Multiproxy Switch has Firefox like No-Proxy list which rocks and understandable

If you happen to come across a better proxy switcher for Firefox, do let us know

Info: Padma Version 0.4.13 Released

Kulbir Saini — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:39:00 +0000

From Padma’s official website,

Padma is a system for transforming Indic text between various public and proprietary formats. This extension applies the technology to Mozilla based applications. Padma is available as an extension for Firefox, Thunderbird, Netscape, Mozilla suite and SeaMonkey platforms. Padma currently supports Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, and Gurmukhi scripts

This particular version includes support for Marathi TrueType Font – Shree-Dev-0714, which I wrote last summer. I am happy that it is finally Padma core. A big credit goes to Radhika Thammishetty and Harshita Vani for guiding and helping me out in writing the mappings.

Review: Firefox 3 Beta 1

Kulbir Saini — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:07:15 +0000

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is available now. I downloaded the package yesterday morning and started using it right away. While using, I figured out some of the good things and at the same time there are some bad things about this test release. Here is what I feel about Firefox 3 Beta 1.

BTW, you can get beta 1 for Firefox 3 here. I am not going to tell, how to install firefox

Positives:

1.Nice Default Font:

Well someone may argue that you can configure any font in any version of Firefox, so whats the good thing about this default font in Firefox 3 Beta1. Well, I’ll say that configuration is always available but nobody gives a damn to configure the font in browser. I am liking this default font in FF3 Beta1 and everything now seems interesting to read. I have Read more than 40 wiki pages since last two days.

2.New FTP Listing Style:

The FTP listings in Firefox 3 Beta 1 has got new stylesheet. Its not dirty any more. It feels good while browsing ftp now. See the screen-shot below.

3.Website Identity:

This is new feature, but I couldn’t find it useful. When you click on favicon in the location bar, a pop-up kinda thing comes up, which tells about the identity of the site you are visiting. Check out the snapshot below.

4.Drag n Drop:

You can now hold any thing in Firefox 3 Beta 1 and drag it anywhere you want. Though I could not drop the images to gimp or anywhere else, it looks good. I think its in the development stage right now.

5.Bookmarks:

Bookmarking a website or editing your bookmarks is far easier now. You can edit a bookmarked site while its loading or can bookmark the site by just clicking a button. A new star-shaped button has been added in the location bar before the go button. If a site is not bookmarked, clicking the button will just bookmark it without asking for anything. If you again click on the button, now you can edit or delete the site you just bookmarked.

6.Adding Search Engine:

In firefox 3 beta 1, you can add the site you are browsing in you search engine list just like google, imdb, wikipedia, yahoo or whatever. But this is not valid for every website. Every website in this world can’t be a search engine Checkout the snapshot or KDE.

7.Link sorting/searching in location bar:

Firefox 3 beta 1 implements a new searching/sorting mechanism for links in location bar. As you type some letters, those are now searched in the link as well as the title of the page and then the links are sorted and displayed as list. In drop down list, you can also see the sites on your bookmarks.

8.Places Folder:

A new bookmark folder named ‘Places’ has been added. It has 6 sub-folders which contains links to different site based on a particular criterion. Some of them are ‘Recently Starred Pages’, ‘Recently Visited Starred Pages’, ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ etc. I was looking for something like this since a long time. Because every time I login into my PC and fire up my firefox, first of all, I visit 8-10 sites (students mail, slashdot, iiit blogroll, yahoo mail, gmail, forum, orkut etc.). Now, I can open all of them in just one click. I click on ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ and done.

9.Low Memory:

Well, a review of Firefox 3 Beta 1 on zdnet, say that Firefox 3 beta 1 is consuming low memory than Firefox 2 and IE 7. That review is for Firefox in windows. But in Fedora 7, I didn’t experience any reduction in memory usage.

10.Faster:

I don’t know how to justify this, but Firefox 3 Beta 1 seems to load pages faster. What I could think was that, when you click go, it loads the page in the background for some-time and then suddenly flushes the page to the screen and it appears that the entire page has been loaded in one go. I may be wrong though.

11.Improved GUI:

The rendering of buttons, input fields, images in the pages have improved a lot and buttons and drop down menus look better now.

Negatives:

1.Extensions:

Life is a bit or I should say a byte difficult with Firefox extensions. Now, I am too much used to use these extensions that I can’t live without them. I’ll crash if I don’t have ‘Undo Closed Tab’ extension. I keep making stupid mistakes. All the extensions are not yet available for Firefox 3, so its a problem.

2.Multiple Tabs:

Firefox 3 Beta 1 immediately dies if I open more than 20 tabs. I opened my wiki saved session (39 tabs) and after sometime I was searching for Firefox. Where the hell firefox window has gone?

3.Crashes:

I don’t know what exactly is the problem, but I think Firefox 3 revolts against Yahoo Mail and GMail. Whenever I open Yahoo Mail or GMail, Firefox 3 Beta 1 crashes. Either there is some problem with the heavily loaded mail pages or it doesn’t want me to use GMail or Yahoo.

Well, there may be lot more positives and negatives. These are the things I noticed about Firefox 3 Beta 1 in last two days. As the positives list is ruling the negatives, I am using Firefox 3 Beta 1 full time these days.

PS : @Paresh I think FF3 is better than FF2 in many ways. But you may want to wait for all the extensions to be compatible with FF3.

How To: Install Eclipse in Fedora 7

Kulbir Saini — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:04:32 +0000

I have decided to stick with Fedora 7 due to the bad experience with Fedora 8 last night and also the difficulties in moving the servers to new os that I am running on Fedora 7. As I wanted to work with Padma in my spare time, so need a good IDE that can handle project in a nice way and can help me to import the cvs from repos online. So, is there any choice I have. There is one and only one – The Eclipse. Some people call it – programming paradise. Some may disagree to that and some other may say that Vim is best to program. I also use Vim quite often and in fact 90% of the time I do so. But using Vim looks confusing when the size of the project is beyond certain extent.

Anyway, here I am going to discuss how to install Eclipse in Fedora 7 because its not there by default. There are two approaches. One is extremely simple and other is extremely difficult.

Approach 1

Use yum do install eclipse. Just issue ‘yum install eclipse-*’ and it’ll be done automatically. But this method takes a very long time as yum will sequentially download the packages and dependencies and its very slow.

Approach 2

If I have a good bandwidth, then I’ll download all the packages and resolve the dependencies myself. But resolving dependencies will be frustrating enough that anyone will switch back to slow yum. But due to certain reasons which I suspect to be memory leaks by Firefox and other apps, my system was damn slow and yum could not do anything even after 10 minutes. It was not even able to download the package list.

So, I decided to download all the packages and install them. I download all the eclipse packages and their dependencies manually and installed it successfully. Here is the list of packages and dependencies so that you need not do rpm -ivh a 100 times All these dependencies are available on rpmfind.net and packages can be fetched from any fedora mirror. These are tested on Fedora 7.

Packages

eclipse-cdt-3.1.2-8.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-cdt-sdk-3.1.2-8.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-checkstyle-4.0.1-6.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-ecj-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-jdt-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-jdt-sdk-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-pde-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-pde-runtime-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-pde-sdk-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-platform-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-platform-sdk-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-rcp-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-rcp-sdk-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-sdk-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-subclipse-1.2.4-2.fc7.i386.rpm
eclipse-subclipse-book-1.2.4-2.fc7.i386.rpm

Dependencies

ant-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-antlr-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-apache-bcel-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-apache-log4j-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-apache-oro-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-apache-regexp-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-apache-resolver-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-commons-logging-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-javadoc-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-javamail-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-jdepend-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-jsch-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-junit-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
antlr-2.7.7-1jpp.2.i386.rpm
antlr-javadoc-2.7.7-1jpp.2.i386.rpm
ant-nodeps-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-swing-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
ant-trax-1.6.5-4jpp.2.fc7.i386.rpm
avalon-logkit-1.2-4jpp.5.fc7.i386.rpm
checkstyle-4.1-4jpp.1.fc7.noarch.rpm
checkstyle-optional-4.1-4jpp.1.fc7.noarch.rpm
ganymed-ssh2-210-5.fc7.i386.rpm
jakarta-commons-beanutils-javadoc-1.7.0-5jpp.1.i386.rpm
jakarta-commons-cli-1.0-6jpp_10.fc6.i386.rpm
jakarta-commons-dbcp-1.2.1-10jpp.1.fc7.i386.rpm
jakarta-commons-lang-2.1-6jpp.1.fc7.i386.rpm
jakarta-commons-pool-1.3-9jpp.2.fc7.1.i386.rpm
java-1.5.0-gcj-javadoc-1.5.0.0-14.fc7.i386.rpm
jdepend-2.6-6jpp.1.i386.rpm
jdom-1.0-4jpp.1.i386.rpm
jsch-0.1.28-1jpp.6.i386.rpm
junit-3.8.2-3jpp.1.fc7.i386.rpm
jzlib-1.0.7-4jpp.1.i386.rpm
libswt3-gtk2-3.2.2-15.fc7.i386.rpm
lucene-1.4.3-1jpp.18.i386.rpm
lucene-devel-1.4.3-1jpp.18.i386.rpm
subversion-1.4.4-1.fc7.i386.rpm
subversion-javahl-1.4.4-1.fc7.i386.rpm
svnkit-1.1.4-2.fc7.i386.rpm
velocity-1.4-6jpp.1.i386.rpm
werken.xpath-0.9.4-0.beta.8jpp.noarch.rpm
xml-commons-apis-javadoc-1.3.03-0jpp.1.fc7.i386.rpm

So, be sure to fetch the dependencies first. Hope that helps.