Tag Archives: firefox

Android Scripting Environment is heating up

The Android Scripting Environment is to the Android phone as Greasemonkey is to Firefox.   It’s a simple place to do quick hacks for your phone without having to build a full plugin or application.

Two cool scripts that just got released are Silent Night and Droid Track. Continue reading Android Scripting Environment is heating up

New article on how to set CGI:IRC as Firefox’s IRC protocol handler

I really like to overdo things.  In the overdoing spirit of the Thanksgiving season, I overdid something recently.

When I clicked on an irc link to a chatroom, it didn’t open in my preferred IRC client, which is on my webserver.   I like to run my applications off of my webserver because I don’t have to worry about carrying thumbdrives or dealing with install policies on strange computers.  If I’ve got a browser, my own private cloud just works.

A little digging, a little coding, and I wrote up a handler.  Yes, that was a bit more work than I expected, but this way I can give thanks to you by giving you this gift of a very small effort.

If you’ve followed my advice before about getting your own webserver, this could be a 15 minute task for you.  Install CGI:IRC, install my little handler, baboomp.  Then we can chat on IRC

Say hi!

Ramblings about add-art

Ignore this, it is just a braindump from the train.  Unless you want to help out.

I’ve started working on a project called add-art.   The idea is to turn advertisements into beauty.  It is based on the popular ad-block-plus firefox extension, but instead of leaving holes where advertisements are removed, it would insert art.  Curators could book shows on add-art.org for artists.  When you go to a website with tons of ads, they would be replaced by art images.

Great stuff!   Once we get the plugin working with add-art.org, we should look at decentralizing it.  Let the extension communicate with multiple ad block lists and multiple replacement image servers.  Then package the add-art.org server as an installable package so anyone can run it.  Let users pick up the url of other servers as a way to get art from the artists they like on their browser…

Deviantart might run something like this.
Maybe flickr/explore/interesting could be a provider.
Hell, why not use atom/rss as the provider and let any rss list of images be the provider?
Image sizing becomes an issue.  You need to stick in appropriate sized images.  If they aren’t the right size you’ll need to slice them up on the client side.  Is that cheap?  Does the browser give you a way to not only decently resize, but also slice from an image?

Firefox Speedup for Broadband users

If you’ve heeded my advice to get firefox for your browsing pleasure, then you may enjoy this little tidbit from devnulled, via forevergeek, via hack-a-day. Credit where credit is due, that’s my motto.

Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

Internet Explorer, Firefox Preview release and porn.

I’ve recommended to a number of my friends and coworkers that they get firefox for a nicer time browsing this here interweb.

If you are still using Internet Explorer, it’s important that you get it updated rightnow. There is a current vulnerability in IE that means simply looking at a .jpg can let bad guys do nasty stuff to you. Since the web seems to have a whole lotta images on it, it means that it’s impractical to browse with images turned off. So go get that fixed.

Firefox coincidentally has a similar issue for .bmp images in an older version. The current version is all good, but if you don’t have it, best go get it now. I looked into all the technical hoo ha and it comes down to a single library with an error in it.

Called libpr0n. What’s up with the name?

From their FAQ:

Why the name “libpr0n”?
The main goal of the library is to render pornographic images in an efficient way.