HOWTO: make old Firefox extensions install in 3.0 betas

Posted by & filed under geek, howto.

If you’re like me you’re already running one of the Firefox 3 betas and loving the new features and stability lacking in the earlier series. The only issue now is that it’s taking extension writers time to update their extension to be compatible with the new Betas. Some of these extensions can almost hold me back to the 2.x series since they’re so useful, but 3 is just so much better in many ways. So, to install an old (2.x) extension into a new (3.x) Firefox just takes a little tweak to the install file. By default the extensions are hardcoded to something like 2.0.12 or the like, and *generally* nothing else needs to change to make it work with the 3.x series. (please re-read the *generally* part…done? ok). To do this, just right click on the extension (I’ll use the Gspace one for this example) and choose ‘Save as…’ Once you have it, open up the commandline (or force WinZip to open it, unsure of how to do that) with unzip (the extensions end with .xpi, but are really a kind zipfile):

unzip gspace-0.5.92-fx+fl.xpi

After it unpacks things, you’ll have an install.rdf file in your current directory, it’s just an XML structure file so you can open it in vi:

vi install.rdf

Search for the following block for targetApplication and find the variable for maxVersion:

2.0.0.*

Then simply modify the maxVersion variable to something like:

3.*

Then save that file. Next rebuild the xpi file with all the same files it had before, but this time with the modified install.rdf (NOTE: I renamed the file from .xpi to -edited.xpi so I could tell it apart)

zip -r -D gspace-0.5.92-fx+fl-edited.xpi chrome defaults license.txt install.rdf gpl.txt chrome_jar.manifest chrome.manifest

And lastly open the newly created xpi with Firefox – it should now install no problem. If there’s an issue bail out by manually deleting the .jar (and any other chrome or default files you saw when you unpacked). Worse case you’ll need to build a new profile, but that’s hardly a price to pay for the thrill of the adventure! (blah, that sounds pretty geeky, eh?)

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The biggest pool in the world

Posted by & filed under environment, news, O'RLY?.

Ok, it covers 20 acres (eight hectares), is more than 1,000 yards long, is 115 feet deep at the deep end and holds 66 million gallons of water, so it’s no surprise that this pool in Chile has been named the biggest in the world by the Guinness Book of Records.  The previous champ is in Morocco, but it’s a mere 150 yards long and 100 yards wide.  For reference, an Olympicsize pool measures 50 yards by 25 yards.  I don’t know what to say besides, how much are tickets to Chile?

This man-made saltwater lagoon, “…has been attracting huge crowds to the San Alfonso del Mar resort at Algarrobo, on Chile’s southern coast, since it opened last month. Its turquoise waters are so crystal clear that you can see the bottom even in the deep end.” Read more »

HOWTO: determine optimal fastcgi settings for Lighttpd

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PHP Fast-cgiAnyone building a server with a LAMP stack today has tons of options, mine have evolved to using Varnish -> Lighttpd -> Xcache -> PHP5 -> MySQL. Once I had Lighttpd (aka Lighty) installed and running PHP pages I looked to optimize the configuration and push it as hard as possible for more speed. Of course lately I’ve been getting unexplained slowdowns, with many instances of php5-cgi appearing to be taking up almost all of my available CPU on `top`. Reading up on things it appears that I had max_procs, along with PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN, set far too high for the load I’m getting. When you start lighty it gives you the number of processes you’ve define, and then those in turn spawn the number of children you’ve specified. While my settings were too high, they were really overshooting things when you take into account that I’m using Xcache (which provides PHP pre-caching) and Varnish (for HTTP acceleration). So even though one of my dynamic sites that I’m working on to ‘monetize’ things is getting 700-800 hits each day, my caching strategy is taking the load away from the ever available Lighty. Because of this, lighty has much less to do, so giving it a ton of processes to just sit there and eat memory until they’re zombified is a waste. After reading the lighty FAQ and other posts specific to this, I’ve settled on the this for my fastcgi config block within my lighttpd.conf file. Read more »

Man stabs brother-in-law over political argument

Posted by & filed under politics.

Jose Antonio OrtizI’m all for having opinions, but if a simple disagreement turns to violence, someone must be watching too much tv.  The apparent argument was over a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama argument! “…Jose Antonio Ortiz, a Clinton supporter, allegedly stabbed his brother-in-law Sean Shurelds in the stomach after they argued over the race for nomination. Shurelds, 41, an Obama supporter, told Ortiz his candidate was “trashing” Clinton, in reference to a string of recent victories by the Illinois senator in preliminary voting in various states. According to the police report, Ortiz replied that “Obama was not a realist” before the argument, in the kitchen of a Pennsylvania home, turned physical. After some mutual choking and punching, the 28-year-old allegedly stabbed Shurelds in the stomach. He has been charged with aggravated assault, among other charges, while Shurelds was flown to a nearby hospital, where he was admitted in critical condition.“  Uggg…so I assume Jose will be voting by ‘absentee’ ballot this year.