Monthly Archives: May 2003

Mozilla Firebird – more

These forums are full of useful information about Mozilla Firebird. Here’s info about a tab extension. I don’t think it lets you move the location of tabs around, sorry Tim!
Here’s my pet peevs about Moz Firebird:

  1. Tabs open at the end of the tab list. I like when they open next to the open tab.
  2. When you drag a link to the “Personal Toolbar”, there’s no indication you can drop it there (no arrow, indented button space..)
  3. I don’t like the image resizing, but that can be disabled.
  4. No “Exit with Session” or even session support!
  5. No “Up” button to go up a directory/filename.

Still, I think it’ll replace Galeon as my primary browser now that I have nice fonts again 🙂

b2login, b2comments and cookies

The original b2 had a few bugs with regards to setting cookies – it would set cookies for authentication and comment author information, but without setting a url. This caused problems for Safari users who couldn’t login to their blogs!
I’ve modified the setcookies commands so that:

  1. Auth information is set only for the blog address – ie. /xeer/ for this blog
  2. Comment author information is set for the whole b2 site. You won’t have to keep entering your personal details to comment on other blogs once you’ve commented once on any particular site.

That’s the idea anyway. Leave a comment here if you discover any bugs with that.

More Benchmarks: FastCGI is faster than ISAPI/CGI on IIS

John conducted benchmarks the other day and found that IIS/WinXP can be faster than Apache /Linux. His initial results show a huge difference, but later he found the difference was only 10%.
What difference would running a PHP accelerator make to the test? That may very well swing the results back in favour. In my own tests, adding a PHP accelerator makes an undeniable difference in speed tests. The acccelerator makers would have you believe the speed up is 10 times, but it’s at least 5-6 times.
How stable is IIS these days? I’ve heard it’s much better than it was, but is it more stable than Apache (1.3 or 2?) on Windows?

Maybe we’re missing an important point here though. Many managers want to use Microsoft in their shops. If they have IIS, this is one very good way of running PHP in that environment without being penalised by cgi performance. Bravo John for doing the tests, I’m certain your site will popup in a Google search when some MSCE is desperately trying to figure out what technology to use! We’re get them to use PHP first, and then when they’re comfortable with this open source lark, move their Win32 servers to Linux or some other Free Unix! *grin*

Mozilla Firebird redux

I’ve used Mozilla Firebird all day today. The fonts do suck, but there’s an xft build out there that I’ll try tonight on Red Hat 9. The xft build doesn’t work on Red Hat 7.2 however.
The browser is quick and light. It’s even lighter and more responsive than Galeon although that could be explained by the fact that this machine has a lot more RAM than my desktop machine.

Chkrootkit

Worried about the security of your Unix box? Chkrootkit will check your machine for many common rootkits. Even if you’re confident your machine hasn’t ever been compromised this might be a good app to keep in mind just in case.. Not worried are you? Take a look at the readme for one such rootkit. It’s simple to run.
(thanks to Colm for those.)

b2 and Netscape 4.X

I know, I know. Netscape 4 isn’t used by many people these days but I had to use it this morning. I couldn’t login to edit this blog and the error log didn’t report any error. Then I tried “Mozilla Firebird” and it worked fine. *shrug*
I’ve got reports that “Logout” is broken, so I should look into both over the next few days.

Background tasks in PHP: pinging weblogs.com

A long time ago, Ivan looked at executing background tasks in PHP after the actual request by the browser was over. He explained that it disappeared in PHP 4.1, but should be (and is) part of PHP 4.3.1.
I modified b2edit.php to use the register_shutdown_function to call the pingWeblogs, and pingBlogs functions:
From (line 100 of b2edit.php):

rss_update($blog_ID);
pingWeblogs($blog_ID);
pingCafelog($cafelogID, $post_title, $post_ID);
pingBlogs($blog_ID);

to

//rss_update($blog_ID);
pingCafelog($cafelogID, $post_title, $post_ID);
register_shutdown_function( "pingWeblogs" );
register_shutdown_function( "pingBlogs" );

This probably won’t work if you’re using PHP 4.1, so test it after you make the change! Does it make posting to b2 faster? I’m not sure. I don’t think those functions “disconnect” from the browser completely. Of course, I could be mistaken and the delay could be in another part of the code! I don’t honestly know.
Final note – I made a quick optimization by removing the call to rss_update(). That function creates the b2rss.xml file. Since we don’t use that file (use b2rss2.php or b2rdf.php instead!), the function call isn’t required!

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.