Using the GMail Greasemonkey API and Succeeding: My Workaround

The new GMail interface is a giant mass of frames and obfuscated JavaScript.  Knowing this, Google released an API for Greasemonkey authors to use, called the GmailGreasemonkey10API.  Isn’t that nice of them? Well, don’t get too excited.  First, it is fairly limited in what it can do.  Its greatest advantage for you is that it [...]

A Quick Note on Float: Right

Frankly I never thought I’d blog about this, but over the last several days I have had this question posed twice and found this issue in a released product. When you want to wrap text around an element and position that element on the right, you do the obvious and float that element right using [...]

Getting Katapult to Reindex Your Installed Programs

If you use Katapult (which is a fantastic feature of KDE) then you may wonder how to get it to find newly installed software in Kubuntu.  Simply press Alt-Space to pull up the Katapult screen and imediately press Ctrl-C to launch the config menu.  Simply exit the config menu and your Katapult will reindex it’s [...]

Having Problems With Pandora Not Playing Whole Songs On Vista?

I’ve been having problems using Pandora Internet radio on Windows Vista.  Frequently a song will begin playing, then after ten to twenty seconds it will stop and skip to the next track.  I started my troubleshooting by watching the HTTP traffic using HttpFox and discovered there were several transmission errors (including NS_ERROR_FAILURE) communicating to the [...]

Far Future Expiration and File Versioning: Change the File Name or Add a Query String?

If you’re wondering what far future expiration is then odds are you haven’t spent much time looking into web delivery best practices.  Take a moment and read up.  I promise it won’t hurt and it will probably do you a lot of good. We’ll use this blog as an example.  It has a total of [...]

My Hard Drive Is Clicking Again So I’m Stopping It Cold When Ubuntu Boots

Earlier I wrote an article discussing the hyperactive APM modes that some drive manufacturers use and how that leads to excessive head parking and severly reduced drive life.  It seems newer versions of Ubuntu and Kubuntu are coming with APM on the drives completely disabled (a setting of 255 using the -B option of the [...]

Switching Display Mangers In Ubuntu

I recently installed the KDE 4 packages for Kubuntu, just to give it a whirl.  Since I’m not really much of an eye-candy guy I lost interest pretty quickly.  I’ll get to know it more as time permits, but right now isn’t that time.  So I jumped back over to KDE 3.5. One problem (and [...]

Updating the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar To Use Your Own W3C Validator

This is a follow-up of sorts to my post on Installing the W3C Validator on Ubuntu 8.04.  One of the tools I use for web development is the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox written by Chris Pederick.  This toolbar gives you dozens of shortcuts to options that are invaluable to creating quality web sites and [...]

Adding Bash Aliases In Ubuntu, Including System-Wide

I have some alias commands that I’m quite used to having around, the most prominent being “ll”, which I alias to “ls -l”.  Ubuntu and it’s various flavors, however, don’t send that preloaded.  The fix is really quite simple for a single user.  Simply edit your ~/.bashrc file and add the aliases you want to [...]

Installing the W3C Validator on Ubuntu 8.04

I recently installed the W3C validator on an Ubuntu 8.04 server, a task I had performed with little trouble in the past.  The new version of the package, however, behaves differently and left me wondering “now what”?  Here’s a quick little howto on getting it up and running using the apt-get repositories. First we need [...]