Okay, this is my ultra brief list of essential Firefox addons. This is part 1 of more to come. Many of these addons are web development centric.

Here we go..

Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is the ultimate solution to blocking unwanted, annoying banner ads. It supports configurable rulesets allowing you to block everything from absolute url’s to entire domains.  Once installed, be sure to subscribe to a ruleset (Doctor Von Evil’s is the one I always choose!). I like to modify the default options so that it doesn’t display a “block” tab on flash and java objects - if you too find the “block” tab annoying then seek out this option!

WebDeveloper Toolbar

Obviously, this one must get a mention; no web developer should be without it.

ColorZilla

An embedded, advanced eyedropper and colour selection tool for Firefox - no web developer should be without it! Be sure to enable to automatic clipboard copy features from within the Options context menu once you have it installed!  Get Colorzilla here..

MeasureIt

Yet another must have web development addon - this small addon adds a ruler button to your firefox statusbar. Once clicked, it allows you to measure distances/objects on a webpage, ideal for creating pixel perfect web pages!

Screenshot Capturing

Now, my first choice here would probably be Fireshot, since it’s extremely feature rich. Unfortunately thou, it doesn’t work with Firefox 3.5 or Linux.  Instead,  Iimmgg.com tools for Firefox does the job. Iimmgg allows you to quickly take screenshots of webpage; it supports capturing the full page,  visible area, or select (user defined) area.

ReloadEvery

This small little extension is a great timesaver when it comes to building webpages. Put simply, it allows you to reload a page every few seconds. This saves me lots of time - I can just kick this thing off and have it refreshing automatically, while I code up my pages or adjust stylesheets etc.

I just read on mashable.com that Tom from myspace is paid $500,000 a year to NOT work:

According to The Business Insider, Tom is getting a $500,000 year contract to take an “ambassador’s role” and “stop coming to the office.” In other words, half a million dollars a year to not do much of anything other than remain the official face of the site.

What a lucky, lucky man!

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said. Read the rest over at the NY Times website…

Jokes aside, this is pretty worrying, although I suppose it doesn’t come as a surprise.  I feel somewhat more comfortable given that I live in Europe but the day will come (or maybe it has already?) when this kind of policy will be commonplace.

I like to collect various things, from music to dark chocolates to different types of mustards. Recently a friend sent me a link to a kinda weird looking T-Shirt which had apparently become an ”internet phenomenon”.

It looks like this:

Initially, when the T-Shirt first went on sale it received a few joke reviews and for reasons which I still haven’t got my head around, this sparked off massive sales. Countless rave reviews followed as the item rocketed to the top sellers list on Amazon:

“When I put this T-shirt on for the first time, my wife left me! Thank you, Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt,” wrote one wag, while another said that “the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt gave me a +10 resistance to energy attacks, +8 Strength… and I have successfully solved 7 crimes in my city”.

I felt impulsed (is that even a word?) to buy it, probably because it kinda looked “different”. I ordered it shortly after I read the article (must be two weeks ago now) and it arrived today. Shortly after its arrival I pronounced it my favourite T-Shirt, ha ha!

Maybe this marks the start of my, unusual T-Shirt collection? :D

Philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno defined schadenfreude as “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

I’m really starting to like the freedom from windows that debian is giving me. Tonight I needed to do some quick en masse directory manipulation via the shell, only I was browsing the directory via nautilus.

As Apple would say, “there’s an app for that”, simply install the following package:

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sudo aptitude install nautilus-open-terminal

Once I’d done this I needed to restart nautilus, I did this by simply issuing a

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killall -1 nautilus

And voila, I now have a right click “open in terminal” option: [caption id=”attachment_245” align=”aligncenter” width=”630” caption=”Very handy!”][/caption] Just what I was looking for!

So today everything seemed to just work like a charm. I awoke my Debian system from its weekend standby and ran an aptitude update. Now, it’s been awhile since I’ve been working on this machine, so there was quite a few updates available. Over 170MB of updates were found, downloaded and installed.

So now that my headless Windows install is working I decided to tackle the issues of running the fglrx proprietary driver from ATI on the 2.6.29 kernel again. This time I followed this guide from debian.org and combined with the recent aptitude updates everything looked good! The kernel modules were compiled and installed without any issues..

X started up, a mouse pointer appeared and fgl_glxgears reports framerates of over 1000 fps!  Although I thought I was maybe chancing my luck, this success led me to try and get compiz working.  I executed compiz –replace and amazingly.. it worked without a hitch!

The only issue I encountered was that my desktop cube wasn’t a cube at all! Instead it was more like a flat panel with two desktops. I managed to fix this via the compiz configuration manager “general” option, changing the “horizontal virtual size” from 2 to 4:

After that, a little configuring of the background on my cube and at last.. I’m in an environment I’m comfortable to work in. Here’s a few screen shots, notice the Windows taskbar from the headless virtualized copy of Windows XP:

[caption id=”attachment_237” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”My new Compiz Fusion & Gnome Desktop - Wohoo!”][/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_238” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Desktop Cube in Mid Rotation”][/caption]

A recent laptop upgrade has finally given me the chance to escape the evil grasp of Microsoft Windows and move to something which I can consider “my operating system”. An operating system which works exactly the way I want it to.

I still need Windows for a number of things but the majority of what I do (terminal based stuff) is better suited to Linux/UNIX anyway.   I figure the extra horsepower the Thinkpad T400 provides me with will allow me to run Windows XP in a virtualized environment along side Linux.  I chose Linux over FreeBSD because FreeBSD is more a server/desktop orientated operating system and isn’t really all that suited to a laptop setup, especially on something as new as this machine. So why Debian? Ubuntu seems too much like “n00b” linux to me and I’d rather have more control over things than giving it up for the sake of it being “easier to use”.  Gentoo looked attractive, primarily because of  “portage” but it seems Gentoo’s direction is uncertain and a declining user base doesn’t sound too healthy.

I downloaded a fresh copy of the Debian Lenny CD 1 ISO from debian.org and installed it as a dual boot setup using grub as a boot loader.  The T400 features some shiny new gizmos and so I was forced to upgrade to the 2.6.29 kernel in order to gain support for the new Intel Wifi Link 3500 card. Running such a new kernel introduced some additional complications, mainly around getting the proprietary graphics card drivers for the ATI Mobility Radeon. I’ve yet to get that issue resolved and have fallen back to the open source radeon drivers for the time being.  I don’t think I will tackle Compiz until I get a decent framerate from my graphics card.. otherwise it just won’t be worth the hassle.

I used Virtualbox to virtualize Windows XP. Originally I had planned to virtualize the copy of Windows which resided on the physical partition but in the end decided it’s just all too messy(hardware profiles etc.). Instead, I just created a new instance of Windows using a virtualbox dynamic disk.  The windows install is surprisingly usable. Once I had that installed, I followed some instructions from the ubuntu forums on getting a headless copy of Windows up and running.   I did however, skip all the bridging stuff described in the guide as it seems very flaky when your system would not always have a static IP. Since this is a laptop, my IP would be changing to all sorts of things as I move from one network to another.  Instead, I enabled a second network adapter using the “Host only network” option and communicate using RDP to the VM via the IP assigned to this adapter.  Internet connectivity is then provided via the other, primary NAT’d interface. This approach removes the need for bridging, static IP complications and any IP masquerading which would be required by other methods.

I feel that running headless windows within X is really going to work out well for me - now I have the freedom of Linux without loosing out on any mandatory applications provided by Windows.

I will attach some screenshots shortly..