I can Stumble again!

Somewhere between Firefox 3 RCs and the official release my StumbleUpon decided to break. I’m not sure what happened, and I even tried the latest beta, but whenever I tried to submit a new page I’d get an error dialog that auto-closed so quickly I still don’t know what it said. But thanks to the SU Help Forums I found something that did the job for me.

First off, uninstall the StumbleUpon extension. Don’t just disable it, completely remove it. Then go to Edit > Preferences > Privacy > Show Cookies and delete any cookie from stumbleupon.com. Don’t worry, you won’t have to remember how you logged in all those months ago, that part of StumbleUpon’s settings will be kept. Now close (not restart) Firefox.

Start Firefox again and install StumbleUpon (if you’re using Firefox 3 you can just use the first tab in the Add-ons Manager and install it from there). Of course if you’re an Ubuntu user StumbleUpon is in the Universe repository so it’s even easier to install.

Restart Firefox again, and you should be able to once again stumble like you should be able to, seeing pages others have found and submitting new pages for others to enjoy.

Peng’s links for Monday, 30 June

• Christer Edwards: View A Package Changelog Entry With Aptitude or Synaptic. After spending too many years in WindowsLand and testing beta software on both WinXP and Linux, I’ve gotten to like reading changelogs, those wonderful lists of what makes up the newness of a particular update. In Update Manager there’s a section that shows the changelog, but did you know you could get that information in Synaptic or Aptitude? I didn’t, but you can. Now if only the PPA’s would have such an easy to obtain changelogs.
• SciFi Wire: Horrible Gets July Air Date. Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy and Firefly, has a musical series coming to the Wild Wild World of Web this month. But you’ll have to act fast if you want to see them for free, as they’re only going to be on the web for one week before getting pulled in favor of getting it available for a cost. I can’t wait to see Mal as yet another hero.
• Leo Iannacone: Wallpaper: The death of Knowledge. A great wallpaper for proponents of open source projects.
• Sense Hofstede: Goodbye Evolution. Almost two weeks ago Sense helped inspire me to ditch Thunderbird and move to Evolution, where I can happily sync the calendar I carry around on my PDA with the one on my computer. I’ve had some issues with RSS feeds from the LA Times crashing Evolution (I need to report that to someone) and yesterday the Time’s Blue Notes blog crashed Evolution while downloading my Gmail and I needed to re-import all of my Gmail just to download two emails that Evolution didn’t have. (If I used IMAP it probably would have been easier, but I still need to see how my using email clients will change with IMAP before it can come up too far on my todo list.) Sense, on the other hand, has had emails completely disappear on him as he tried to read them and is looking for a new email client. His post today has some very good questions that he needs answered in his search for a replacement for Thunderbird/Evolution.

Ditching the default walk in SecondLife

One thing that bugs the daylights out of a lot or people in SecondLife is the way avatars move. Many of us use Animation Overrides (AO’s) to get a better way of walking, sitting, swimming, flying and even falling. I’ve seen AO’s costing several hundreds of Lindens but there are also a number of AO’s that are either free or cost just L$1. If you want you can also get your own animations and add them to your AO. I’ve put together my own custom AO with animations from a few sources and it’s actually pretty easy to customize one.

Yesterday’s tutorial on the New Citizens Inc. blog shows how you use an Animation Override. If you all would like I can see about writing a tutorial on how to customize your AO with animations you can get from around SecondLife.

I do want to recommend that you be careful when accepting an AO from a stranger. They may include scripts that steal your Lindens and can also cause other problems. You can get reputable AO’s from enough stores and freebie sims in SecondLife so you shouldn’t need to take an AO from a stranger unless you intend on trying to pull a single animation out of it to put in your own AO.

[UPDATED] Dodgers beat the Angels with zarro hits

[Updated to include additional links. -Peng]

I’m trying to keep my blogging about the Dodgers to a bit of a minimum, but after last night’s game I have to post something. In only the fifth time since 1900 a major league team won without a single hit, Chad Billingsly and the Angel’s Jared Weaver were locked in a pitching duel with Weaver keeping the Dodgers off the base path and Bills allowing three Angels to get on base, but the 5th inning made this a game for the history books.

Matt Kemp hit what Dodgers’ announcer Vin Scully called a “little squirt job [with] English all over it” and Weaver picked up an error as he missed the ball, keeping his no-hitter alive. With Blake DeWitt at bat Kemp took off for second, but Angels’ catcher Jeff Mathis threw the ball past both shortstop Erick Aybar and his backup, second baseman Howie Kendrick, and Kemp knew a good thing when he saw it. He kept rolling on to third, where he was looking for a scoring opportunity just to get the Dodgers on the scoreboard. DeWitt hit the 1-1 pitch deep into right field but Vladimir Guerrero was ready for it. As soon as the ball hit Guerrero’s glove Kemp took off for home, but Guerrero’s throw was just a little late and the Dodgers got their only run of the night.

For more info on last night’s game, which clinched this Freeway Series for the Dodgers after Friday night’s 6-0 shutout of the Angels, you can read the Dodger’s recap. You’ll also want to check out the highlight reel from the game, as well as the LA Times’ coverage of the game and Bill Plaschke’s rather dumbfounded column about the nahhh-hitter. Do we dare hope for a sweep, or would that tempt the whatever from high atop the thing?

Updated 3:48pm: I found two other stories about this I wanted to pass along. The first is from the Dodger’s blog and it lists the other hitless wins, as well as a list of ho-hitters since 1950. And if you like Alyssa Milano’s work in Who’s the Boss?, Charmed and My Name is Earl, as well as the other things she’s done, you’ll love her post THIS IS WHY I LOVE BASEBALL. The lucky woman was at Chavez Ravine for the entire game, and I love her excitement over the game. Yes, I’m jealous that I couldn’t be there for it myself.

SecondLife gets yet another Release Candidate and Crystal Gadgets gets a new site

I’m getting the idea that SecondLife doesn’t quite understand the concept behind Release Candidates, because the other day they released RC11 for SecondLife 1.20. From what I’m hearing, both from Peng and form others, the idea is to get a version of software close to being ready, meaning most of the bugs are fixed, and then you release a Release Candidate to make sure you’ve caught the most important bugs. Eleven release candidates? C’mon, LindenLabs! Either release SL 1.20 or put it back into beta. Please.

It is an optional update, and if you want the most stability you should use the official viewer. (Yeah, I know, the RCs can be more stable than the official releases.) I haven’t had a chance to see if they’ve managed to finally fix bug VWR-2778 System skirt textures turn invisible on wearing, but hopefully those of us who like skirts can finally go back to wearing non-prim skirts again.

The devs have finally listened to users who hate the new Dazzle look of the current round of Release Candidates and are working on what they’re calling the skinning project.The announcement for this RC says they wanted to concentrate on stability before addressing skinning, but I really wish they had gotten it stable, put out 1.20, and then let skinning be 1.21 or something. As always you can get the new RC on the testing viewers download page, and you can get more information on this release from the announcement on the SL blog.

In better news, Crystal Gadgets has launched a brand new website with product information, an RSS feed to get updates through, and a comment system that’s integrated with the in-world store so you don’t have to worry about passwords or Captcha requirements.I love what they’ve done with their store, and they have some of the best gadgets available in SL. Several of their gadgets are free and their Free Radar HUD is so handy I recommend it to all of my avatar friends.

UPDATED 9:39 am: I’m afraid the Crystal Gadgets website’s store doesn’t actually sell you the items, instead it launches a SLURL to their store. Also I found that when I clicked their in store sign to log in it opened up the wrong browser rather than opening in the browser that had been open before I launched SL. Granted, that may be a SL issue rather than a Crystal Gadgets issue, but I’ve let the CG owner know about it.

Also the skirt issue seems fixed!!!! Although turning still seems to want to continue after I release my turn keys.In fact it keeps turning so much it’s becoming a real pain in my simulated bottom.

/me fires up Walking on Sunshine and does her Dance of Joy for the ability to wear skirts again

Peng’s links for Thursday, 26 June

Sorry about not posting more the last few days. A good friend of mine had surgery on his Achilles tendon Monday and the docs kept him an extra day, making a busy week that much busier.

• Christer Edwards: Install Google Earth on Ubuntu 8.04. The latest version of Google Earth has made an already fantastic program even better. Christer makes getting it installed easy and even gives a tip for those with slow performance.
• Ubuntu Forums: HOW TO: watch MLBtv on Ubuntu. Major League Baseball has some great media options for baseball fans including the ability to watch games right on your computer. Unfortunately they don’t support Linux (of course), but dwdarkstar has put together a basic tutorial to let Linux loving baseball fans get their money’s worth for subscribing to MLB’s streaming media service.
• Mike Basinger: Using Dark Themes in Ubuntu (Gnome 2.2x). Many people love a nice dark theme for their computer but GNOME has always had some issues with it that affect usability. Mike has some great tips that can let you have both the dark theme and usability, too.
• Michael Garrido: Welcome Ghanima – My Own, precious… Notebook. Michael got a very nice little notebook from Compaq and he has some pics to show it off. It’s one of my pics for the day thanks to a link to some very nice wallpaper. As soon as I saw it I had to get it for my wallpaper rotation.
• Christer Edwards: A Reminder About Upgrading Ubuntu… Many people haven’t upgraded Ubuntu to Hardy yet, and with Ubuntu 8.04.1 coming down the pike soon Christer has a great post on some things you need to do when upgrading Ubuntu or any other operating system. I kind of wish he’d written this before Hardy was released a couple of months ago.
• SciFi Wire: Cast Endorses Jericho Movie. Rumors of a possible movie to carry on the twice-canceled CBS show are swirling around, and the actors who played Stanley Richmond and Emily Sullivan have said they’d love to portray those characters again.
• Chris Dufresne/LA Times: Dodgers’ 50th anniversary isn’t golden to all. I was sure I had blogged this but it turns out I only Stumbled it. Chris Dufresne writes a great look back at the Dodgers’ first fifty years in the City of Angels (no, not those Angels, they don’t even play in LA County). I especially love this

Hold it . . .

This isn’t one of those syrupy retrospectives about a boy’s love for his dog and the hometown Blue Crew, is it?

No.

This is actually man-bites-Dodger dog, an ode to ambivalence and the odd lack of a connection.

How do you explain it, occupying a half-century in the same area and barely exchanging glances?

• Britt Allcroft/LA Times: The George Carlin I knew. With the death of George Carlin on Sunday it’s to be expected that every news organization in the free world would write something the man that not only took free speech and comedy to the Supreme Court, he also changed stand up comedy forever. But Allcroft knows a different George Carlin than everyone seems to be writing about. He knew the Carlin who took over for Ringo Starr on PBS’ Shining Time Station, and he wrote a beautiful tribute for his friend George.

Big thanks to Susannah Clary for sharing a very funny (and rather timely) comic with Nanci and I. Nanci has some things to blog this afternoon but asked me to share it with you in case I get on before she does. I’d swear her schedule is crazier than mine is.

A call for open source programmers

Now that Firefox 3 is out and so many of us dislike some of the new default behaviors I thought of a way that a number of us could be made very happy, but it requires the services of programmers within the open source community.

With Firefox being an open source project I’m thinking that someone much smarter than me could take the code for Firefox 3 and the code for Firefox 2 and combine them in a way that could give us the speed of Firefox 3 but the look, feel and UI behaviors of Firefox 2. It should also accept either Firefox 2 or Firefox 3 extensions and themes, although I’m not sure which. Mainly I’m thinking about losing most of the Smart Location Bar and reverting it to a Firefox 2 address bar and ditching the new zoom system in favor of Firefox 2’s text zooming. If someone wants full page zoom with it they should be able to easily add the existing extension that does the job.

I’ll admit I have no idea how doable this is, although I know that Shawn Wilsher on Planet Mozilla said giving us both the old and new UIs is simply impossible. Perhaps what I’m hoping for is similarly impossible, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about coding to have a clue about how hard what I’m asking for would be, other than what Shawn is telling us.

I don’t have a clue what this browser would be called, although it certainly wouldn’t be called Firefox since Mozilla isn’t making it. One thing I do know is that if someone could do it, even just for Linux, it would make a lot of people very happy. (Sorry, but if it’s a Windows or an OSX app it would be completely useless for me.) So what do you open source programmers think? Would you be willing to take on this project, or at least look at it to see if it may even be possible?

Correcting WINE and a pair of Firefox notes

As I was going through Planet Ubuntu this morning I found a nice post from Scott Ritchie that resolves something that was bugging me about WINE. Bug 235593 – Wine Desktop Entry erroneously calls wine an “Emulator”! addresses what some may call a picked nit but I think of it as an annoying error. The issue is a rather simple one. When you right click on a Windows executable (.exe) file with WINE installed it gives you an option to “Open with Wine Windows Emulator” which is simply wrong because WINE stands for “Wine is Not an Emulator.” This bugged Scott for long enough that he was able to hunt down a fix for the issue. You can wait for the fix to make it’s way to you in an update or you can visit Scott’s blog and get the info you need to fix the bug on your system yourself. Also, if you’d like to help with translating the fix Scott would love to hear from you.

Christer Edwards found himself without a mouse and has discovered a number of Firefox keyboard navigation shortcuts that you may not be aware of. There’s also a complete list in the Firefox Support area you may want to bookmark for later reference.

I was also able to discover a fix for a really annoying Firefox bug this morning. You can middle click on a link to get it to open in a new tab, and I remember having missed clicking on a link or even just clicking in the content area and getting a pop-up telling me that I hadn’t clicked on a link. But since starting to test Firefox 3 I’ve found that if I accidentally middle click on something that isn’t a link it opens a page in that same tab using whatever is in your system clipboard as the URI. To me that is not only a pain in the butt but it should at least open the site in a new tab, which is what happens when you middle click a link. I ended up filing Bug 440707 – Center clicking on a non-link treats clipboard contents as a link in the current tab, but I was informed that a similar bug already exists, Bug 135884 – Middleclick on browser content area loads clipboard as URL. I also found out that the behavior that bugged me so much in fact wasn’t a bug, but a “feature.”

/me coughs into his hand as you hear “bullshit”

If this bugs you as well I have a fix for you, thanks to Boris Zbarsky on Bug 135884. Simply go into your about:config and see if you have a preference labeled “middlemouse.contentLoadURL” (without the quotes, of course). If you have that preference you need to set it to FALSE. If you don’t have that preference right click in about:config and add a new Boolean entry called “middlemouse.contentLoadURL” with a setting of FALSE. Now if you accidentally middle click anything other than a link nothing will happen.

NCI announces unofficial educational project

New Citizens International, that wonderful resource for noobies and oldbies alike, has announced that there is now a non-commercial area to the east of their sandbox in Kuula. You can work on your building and scripting there and if you have a question you can put it in a notecard and drop it into a nearby gadget.

Visit their blog for additional information.

Want new default avatars? SecondLife can do that

Two weeks ago I posted a note about the new possible default avatars SecondLife was considering, and Wednesday Katt Linden took great pleasure in announcing that there are a number of new avatar possibilities available not only during the registration process but also in the Library section of your avatar’s inventory Library. You can also get a glimpse at the new avatars in the SL wiki.

Torley Linden also comes to the rescue by making a video tutorial on how to switch avatars (don’t forget to backup your current avatar’s settings so you can get back to it if you decide you ever want to switch back. Jeremy Linden wrote this week’s Knowledge Base Article of the Week on saving outfits.

I may have to find an  hour or so to pop into SecondLife and check out teh new avatars. I’m suddenly getting an urge to fly.