Firefox and the New Blogger Interface

Blogger has a (relatively) new interface, to which I switched a while back. The one major annoyance I found was that clicking the "Preview" button while editing a post did not actually generate a preview. I got a notification (lower left) that the preview was being prepared, and then ... nothing. To get a preview, I had to save my work, exit the edit screen (going back to the Blogger control panel), and do the preview there.

It wasn't just me, either. Checking the Blogger help community, I found a ton of posts about this, on pretty much all operating systems and browsers, with some dated this month. A tip about fixing the problem on Safari worked for me. The key (somewhat obvious in hindsight) is that Blogger needs permission to open a pop-up. This was not entirely obvious to me, since I don't consider opening a tab the same as opening a pop-up, but so be it. In Firefox, with any Blogger screen displayed, click the padlock icon in the URL bar, and under "Permissions" allow the site to open pop-ups.

Other users said they had the same problem with Chrome, which is interesting in that preview works fine for me on Chrome, and I don't recall giving explicit permission there. At any rate, I seem to be back in business.

And yes, I previewed this entry before posting it.

Firefox Ate My Bookmarks

This morning, I "upgraded" Firefox 60.0.2 to 61.0.0 on my desktop computer (Linux Mint). When I started the new version, it came to life with the correct default tabs and pages, no menu bar (my reference), and with the bookmark tool bar visible ... but completely empty. Toggling the menu option to display it was unproductive. I restored the most recent backup of the bookmarks, but the tool bar remained empty.

So I killed Firefox, started it in safe mode (no change), then killed it again and restarted it normally. This time the bookmark tool bar was populated with the correct bookmarks and folders. (I don't know if passing through safe mode was necessary. Maybe it just needed another restart after the restoration operation.) Unfortunately, my problems were not yet over. Although I had the correct top-level stuff in the bookmark tool bar, the various folders only had about three items each, regardless of how many were supposed to be in each folder (and, trust me, it was typically more than three).

When you go to restore bookmarks in Firefox, it will show you a list of backup files (I think it keeps the fifteen most recent) and how many items each contains. My recent backups were all listed with 18 to 21 items. Fortunately, I also have Firefox (not yet upgraded) on my laptop (running the same version of Linux Mint), with the same bookmarks. On the laptop, recent backups have 444 items. So either the upgrade messed up the backup files or Firefox 61.0.0 has trouble reading backups from version 60. Heck, maybe Firefox 60 screwed up making the automatic backups on my desktop (but, somehow, not on my laptop).

The laptop proved my savior. I manually backed up the bookmarks on it to a file, parked that file on Dropbox just in case, copied it to the desktop and manually restored it. For the moment, at least, I have all my bookmarks back.

In case you're reading this because you're in the same boat, here are the steps to do manual backups. Of course, this will only help if you have your bookmarks intact somewhere. If you're thinking of upgrading Firefox but haven't pulled the trigger yet, you might want to make a manual backup for insurance.

Start with the "hamburger menu" (the button three horizontal parallel lines). From there, click the "Library" option, then "Bookmarks", then "Show All Bookmarks" (at the very bottom). That opens up a window titled "Library". Click the "Import and Backup" drop-down menu, then either "Backup" or "Restore" depending on your intent. Backup will give you a typical file saving dialog. Restore will give you a list of your recent backups and an option at the bottom to select a file. Use that option to navigate to a manual backup.

Once again, software saves me from having a productive morning. :-(

By the way, this bug has already been reported: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1472127.

Getting Videos to Play in Firefox

I think I've solved a lingering problem I've had playing certain videos in Firefox, and I'm posting the details here mostly so I don't forget them and partly in case anybody else is tripping over this.

I will periodically land on a web page with a video at the top. Usually I don't want to play the video, but sometimes I do ... in which case I have mixed results getting the video to play in Firefox. Typically Chrome has no such problem with the page, which makes sense given that the issue in Firefox relates to a couple of browser extensions I use. What made diagnosing the problem tricky was that (a) results were inconsistent (some videos played, some didn't) and (b) the problem resulted from a combination of two extensions, not just one particular one.

They symptom was that, when I clicked the play button on a video, the player box would turn into a black screen with a spinner that would spin indefinitely, until an error message popped up saying that the video player had hit a time limit waiting for the video to load. Again, this happened on some videos but not others. In particular, I never had a problem with a YouTube video. It was at least consistent in that a video that triggered the error would always trigger the error, regardless of page reloads etc.

The two Firefox extensions involved are HTTPS Everywhere (which tries to force page contents to load using the more secure HTTPS protocol than the ordinary HTTP protocol) and Disable HTML5 Autoplay (which prevents videos from automatically starting to play). The first extension is a security enhancement. (For an opinion piece on why HTTPS is important, read "Why HTTPS Matters".) Unfortunately, many web sites either do not deploy HTTPS for some content or screw up their site configuration. Regarding the second extension, I find video autoplay to be rather annoying, since it frequently involves ads or other videos that I have no interest in, and forces me to play whack-a-mole to shut them the bleep up.

I'm loathe to give up either extension, and fortunately I don't have to. What works for me is a combination of two tweaks. On a site where I get problem videos (time.com is the main source, in my case), I click the toolbar button for the autoplay extension, leave "Disable Autoplay" selected, but deselect "Disable Preloading". That only needs to be done once per site. With a page open containing a problem video, I then disable HTTPS Everywhere (again, by clicking its toolbar button and deselecting the first option). That should automatically cause the page to reload, and the video will play properly. After I'm done watching, I just reenable HTTPS Everywhere. This part has to be repeated for each page containing a video that will not load via HTTPS, but it's a price I'm willing to pay to preserve security.

MathJax Whiplash

Technology is continuously evolving, and for the most part that's good. Every now and then, though, the evolution starts to look like a random mutation ... the kind that results in an apocalyptic virus, or mutants with superpowers, or something else that is much more appealing as a plot device in a movie or TV show than in real life.

Back in 2010 I switched math rendering in this blog to MathJax, and things went swimmingly ... for a while. Then rendering got glitchy in Firefox (I forget exactly when), and I ended up installing a trio of Firefox extensions (MathML-Fonts, MathML Font Settings, and Native MathML), which fixed things ... for a while.

Last December things got goofy again. Math formulas were causing excess vertical space to appear between lines. Google Chrome was unaffected; I only saw this in Firefox. (I never use Internet Exploder, Safari or Opera, and don't use Chromium very often, so I have no idea if any of them were affected.) As I noted in an otherwise unrelated post, the problem seemed to cure itself while I was busy searching for help, so I never knew what caused it or, for that matter, what cured it. No matter; rendering once again worked properly ... for a while.

A week or so ago, I noticed that the vertical spacing issue had returned. Today I finally took the time to go looking for help. The closest I came to a fix was finding information in a MathJax FAQ that the configuration I was using in the blog had been deprecated as of MathJax v2.6. In particular, I had been using a configuration that defaulted to native MathML where possible, given that Firefox supports MathML. One sentence in the FAQ caught my eye:

While MathJax’s NativeMML output processor works around various limitations of Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit, the results using the NativeMML output processor may have spacing or other rendering problems that are outside of MathJax’s control.

So I changed the blog configuration to the option now "preferred" by MathJax ("CommonHTML"), but that did not help. Screwing around with the font choices provided by the MathML Font Settings extension, I found exactly one font that displayed correctly. (I forget now which it was, but it was not what I would call an obvious choice.)

I'm not sure what inspired me to try it, but I disabled all three extensions on my desktop machine ... and, lo and behold, the problem disappeared. Apparently some change either in MathJax (circa version 2.6?) or Firefox made the font overrides done by the extensions an enemy rather than an ally. I confirmed that disabling the extensions on my laptop also fixed the problem there.

So rendering of math in Firefox is once again working properly ... for a while. But I'm leaving those extensions installed, just in case.

Oracle Java 8 Update

For quite a while, I was getting security nags from Firefox every time a web site wanted to run a Java applet. Firefox would tell me I needed to upgrade to the latest version of Java. That would have been fine, except that I was already running the latest Java (1.8.0_66 as of this writing). I manually downloaded and installed the SDK (which includes the JRE). So apparently there was something about the installation that was confusing Firefox into using an earlier version (?).

Anyway, long story short, I found a PPA from the ever helpful folks at Web Upd8 that makes it easy to get the installation correct, at least on Ubuntu and derivatives (including Mint). The PPA installs a package that downloads the binaries from Oracle, installs them, makes them the defaults etc.

On an unrelated note, this was not the post I started to write. I enter the math notation in this blog in LaTeX and rely on MathJax to translate it to MathML for browsers that understand MathML (Firefox being one). I noticed a week or so ago when viewing an old post that Firefox was inserting copious unnecessary (and unwanted) vertical space on either side of any line containing math, whether the math was "inline" or "display mode". Horizontal spacing was fine; only vertical spacing was munged. Checking around, I found that (a) it was happening on every page with MathJax content, not just on my blog, (b) it depended to some extent on which font was being used (with the XITS font, no extra space was inserted), and (c) Google Chrome was unaffected. So it appeared to be something involving the combination of Firefox and specific fonts. I did some research on Firefox extensions and was literally half way through typing up a post with a solution when, by chance, I discovered that the problem apparently went away. I don't know what changed, but suddenly Firefox is getting the vertical spacing correct again.

So my new tool for all technical problems is to write half a blog post about them and then see if that is enough to cure the problems. :-)

Updating Adobe Flash

Within the past week, give or take, Firefox started blocking the Adobe Shockwave plugin from running in web pages, due to a security problem with it. I could (and did, when I trusted the site) override the warning, but in general bypassing security is a bad idea. Even when the site is trusted, you have to consider the possibility that someone managed to sneak a malicious Flash application onto it.

I was initially happy to upgrade the bugger (to version 11.2.202.425, which I think is the first one Firefox will allow), but the universe conspired to make that ridiculously difficult. I'm running Linux Mint 16 Petra, which is plumbing-compatible with Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander. Shockwave is packaged for Ubuntu, not for Mint.

The "Plugins" tab of the Firefox Add-ons Manager flagged Shockwave and gave me a link for updating. That link took me to an Adobe page where I selected which Linux release of the latest version I wanted. I was hoping it would then download a .deb package file, but nooo, it gave me an "APT link", to which I needed to associate an application. Fortunately, I had AptURL installed, so I just had to point to it (in /usr/bin/apturl). Unfortunately, it did not work; I got a message about an unknown channel. So I was stymied there.

The Synaptic package manager was no help; it thought (incorrectly) that the version I had was the most recent. I added the Ubuntu Mozilla Security PPA, which has the latest version, as a source, but I still could not update.

I think I finally figured out what was causing all this wasted effort. As best I can tell, Adobe skipped Ubuntu 13.10 when they released 11.2.202.425. The version they released for Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) also apparently works on 13.10 ... but the package manager either can't see it or won't use it, because it's for an earlier version of the operating system than what I have. At least I'm guessing that's the problem. The "unknown channel" error I got trying to update via the Adobe site named "Precise" as the channel, so apparently it was looking for the "Precise" version but the package manager wasn't having any of that.

I did eventually succeed, though, and I'll document it here in case any weary pilgrim stumbles on this page. You can find the AMD64 version of the installer package on the Ubuntu packages site. (If you need a different version, backtrack along the bread crumbs -- and good hunting!) The link on that page will download the installer .deb file. Right-click that file, open it with GDebi, click "Install", give the necessary password, and it will download and install the actual Flash player. Restart Firefox and check on the plugins page to verify that you have the up-to-date version.

This was a rather remarkable time-suck compared to most upgrades on Mint or Ubuntu. :-(

The Definition of "Open"

Before I climb up on my soapbox, I probably should make a couple of disclaimers to put what follows in perspective.

• I am a heavy user of open source software, and in particular of products from the Mozilla Project. My primary email client is Thunderbird. My first web browser was Netscape Navigator (which predates the Mozilla Project), which eventually morphed into Mozilla and, most recently, Firefox. I've used other browsers, depending on the platform, but Firefox remains my primary choice (although I may have to rethink that based on what follows). In fact, I'm typing this entry into Firefox.
• I am in favor of the legalization of gay marriage. For that matter, I'm in favor of legalizing polygyny and polyandry. I'm not saying that I want to try any of them; I just don't see any reason that the government (at any level) has a compelling interest in forbidding any of them, and doing so clearly creates inequality in the treatment of citizens. (Actually, while I don't want to get into the subject in detail, my personal preference would be to take the government out of the marriage business entirely. Religions should be free to define "marriage" any way they want; the government should let any adults of legal age file paperwork somewhere designating individuals to fill the "marital" roles for which the government has a legitimate interest, such as parenting, advanced health care decisions, mingling and division of assets, etc.)

Wondering what brought all that up? I was sitting in a coffee shop this afternoon, catching up on some reading, when I came across a story that nearly caused me to do a spit take: Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigns amid controversy. Here's a short summary of the events it describes:

1. The Mozilla Foundation, in need of a new CEO, hires Brendan Eich (their CTO).
2. The fact that Eich donated $1,000 (presumably of his own money) in 2008 to support California's Proposition 8 (a bill to ban gay marriage) resurfaces.
3. Mozilla's corner of the universe reacts (sample here), or possibly overreacts, to the hiring. As best I can tell from reading a few articles, the reaction is largely if not entirely negative.
4. Three members of the Mozilla Foundation board resign, but allegedly due to a disagreement on hiring an internal candidate and not due to the donation. (This is reported to be half the board, raising the question of how Eich got hired if half the board was so opposed to him that they would resign in protest.)
5. Eich resigns (possibly under pressure) and Mozilla issues a statement about it (which reads like a mea culpa for having hired him in the first place).

I have never met Mr. Eich, I have no idea whether he was a good pick for the CEO position, and I'm massively confused about how he would be selected with so much apparent board opposition. As noted above, I don't agree with Eich's position on Prop. 8. What caused me to choke on my coffee, though, is nicely illustrated by this line from the Mozilla blog post:

Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.

So I think they've figured the "hard" part out. You start out by appointing yourself the arbiter of "equality", and then you define "free speech" to mean "you're free to make speeches agreeing with us". Somewhere on the AfterLifeNet, Voltaire and Evelyn B. Hall are probably installing new browsers. I may need to join them (with the browsers, not the after life, just to be clear).

Postscript: For a list of some choice quotes from Voltaire (or at least attributed to him), you might like "Famous Quotations From Voltaire That Still Apply to the Modern World".

Updating Linux Mint: Nemo v. Nautilus v. Baobab

I'm in the process of updating to Linux Mint 16 (Petra, Cinnamon-flavor), and I've already run into one bit of minor insanity.  Mint 16 switched its file manager from Nautilus to Nemo, a fork of Nautilus. That's fine with me. There are minor adjustments to make, but no big deal.

Except ... after installing Petra and then downloading a file using Firefox, I right-clicked the file's entry in Firefox's download list and clicked "Open Containing Folder", expecting to, well, open the Downloads folder. Instead, Firefox launched the Disk Usage Analyzer (?!).

A web search found a small number of reports of this with no fixes posted. It took a lot of digging before I finally put together the facts that (a) Firefox uses MIME types to decide what applications to launch and (b) the name of the disk usage analyzer is "Baobab", not "Disk Usage Analyzer". Armed with that, I found a line in /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache (line 368 in my copy; your mileage may vary) that read:

inode/directory=baobab.desktop;nemo.desktop;

So I ran sudo gedit  /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache, changed that line to

inode/directory=nemo.desktop;baobab.desktop;

and saved the file. Immediately (without having to restart it), Firefox sobered up and starting opening the Downloads folder in Nemo. I guess Firefox uses the first available program in a list of applications for a given MIME type, and for whatever reason someone thought Baobab should have precedence over Nemo.

Update: As soon as I posted this, I went back to fiddling with my installation, and installed the nemo-dropbox package from Synaptic, which integrates Dropbox with Nemo. It also downloaded Dropbox, regardless of the fact that Dropbox was already installed. :-( Not only that, it apparently modified mimeinfo.cache, because mimeinfo.cache reverted to its original self. I had to edit it again. Looks like this may be the gift that keeps on giving. :-(

One other note to self: the annotations on the Dropbox folder (up-to-date, being synched, ...) that are the whole point of the nemo-dropbox package only show up after you stop Nemo (nemo -q) and then restart it.

Update #2: I think it's solved now. After noting that /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache had reverted yet again, I added the line

inode/directory=nemo.desktop;baobab.desktop;

to  ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list. That should override the entry in /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache.

Updating Java on Mint (and Ubuntu)

For various reasons, including compatibility issues with some third-party programs and a need to generate cross-platform code on occasions, I routinely use Sun (now Oracle) Java on Linux systems, rather than GCJ (which is frequently included in Linux distributions). Following a suggestion in a recent email from the folks at Mozilla, I checked my Firefox plugins and discovered a security warning for the Java 6 plugin. I'm not sure if I could upgrade just the plugin, using the Java 7 browser plugin while still using the Java 6 JRE (runtime environment) and the Java 6 JDK (development kit); so I decided to upgrade everything to Java 7. Small problem: the Ubuntu repositories still contain version 6 and not version 7.

A quick search turned up a blog post at Web Upd8 which explains why the official repositories lag behind:

Oracle JDK7 itself is not hosted in the PPA because that's not allowed by the new Java license (which is also the reason why it has been removed from the official Ubuntu repositories); the package in the PPA automatically downloads (and installs) Oracle Java JDK 7 from its official website and installs it on your computer, just like the flashplugin-installer package does.

The PPA (personal package archive) repository to which they refer contains a package that automatically downloads and installs the current version of the Oracle Java 7 JDK. (Note that there is no comparable package to install just the JRE; you have to install the full JDK, which contains the JRE as a subset. That's fine with me, since I need the JDK for program development.)

The instructions are straightforward and worked fine for me. Once I had confirmed that Java 7 was installed and was the default choice, there was one more step. I use the Netbeans IDE for writing Java code. I could have installed the latest version with Java 7 bundled, but that's a hefty download, and my current version of Netbeans is recent enough. In Netbeans, I clicked Help > About and discovered that Netbeans was still launching with Java 6. The solution is to edit the configuration file <netbeans>/etc/netbeans.conf (where <netbeans> is the top directory of the Netbeans installation) and change the setting for netbeans_jdkhome to point to the Java 7 directory. When I restarted Netbeans, it launched with Java 7 and also changed the default Java platform for compiled code to Java 7.

Big thanks to the PPA maintainers for simplifying the process.

Java Plugin for Firefox 10

Today marked yet another upgrade in Firefox, from version 10.0 to 10.0.1.  Whether it was this upgrade or the previous one I cannot be sure, but I discovered (the hard way) that one of them broke the use of Java applets on my office PC.  Specifically, the Java plugin (which I use infrequently, but which had worked a while back) was simply gone.

Well, the plugin itself (which comes from the portion of Oracle that once was Sun) couldn't be gone -- Firefox can't delete chunks of my JRE.  Only the link to it was gone.  There is a handy Synaptic meta-package (sun-java6-plugin) in one of the Ubuntu repositories, intended (I think) to make the connection between plugin and browser.  I reinstalled it, to no avail. I'll skip the full litany of web search results (many out of date) and failed attempts, and cut to the chase scene.  Besides having a recent Oracle/Sun Java JRE installed (and, of course, Firefox), you need to do something to tell Firefox where to find the Java browser plugin.  The rest of this is specific to Linux; Windows and Mac users will have a somewhat different task.

1. You need to find a Firefox plugins directory, in which to place a symbolic link to the plugin.  There are multiple choices, and more than one of them may be suitable. Some documents refer to a plugins folder under ~/.mozilla (although I suspect this now should be ~/.mozilla/firefox/<your configuration>).  I didn't have such a folder, so I created one (although I ended up not using it). Another possibility is /usr/lib/firefox/plugins. I'm not sure if that one is scanned, or if it's just vestigial from some earlier version. I ended up using /usr/lib/firefox-10.0.1/plugins ... which I may regret if I have to go through this again with the next upgrade.
2. You need to find the right plugin file. This is where I wasted most of my time. Older documentation refers to libjavaplugin_oji.so, which I found in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7. It's in a folder named "plugin", so it must be the right file, mustn't it? Oops, no. It turns out there's a "next generation" plugin named libnpjp2.so, and apparently FF 10 will only recognize the new plugin. Oracle's installation docs refer to it, but I could not find it in the plugin directory. That's because it's not in the plugin directory. I guess they thought that would be too obvious. It's in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386.
3. Once the targets are in sight, shut down Firefox, go to the directory you selected in step 1 (in a terminal), delete any symlinks to older plugins, then  execute sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386libnpjp2.so, adjusting the path as needed if your JVM is installed elsewhere. (The sudo is unnecessary if you chose a folder in your home partition in step 1.) Restart Firefox and check the plugins tab (or enter about:plugins in the URL bar) and make sure Firefox acknowledges the plugin.

Update: I just checked my home PC (same configuration as the office PC, other than being 64 bit rather than 32 bit). There's no problem with the Java plugin at home. So perhaps I was wrong in blaming a FF update at the office for zapping the connection to the plugin ... but if not an update, then what?

Slaying a Zombie Browser Extension

I just finished a marathon session (on Linux Mint Katya) trying to uninstall Stylish, a zombie extension for the Firefox web browser. I have nothing against Stylish, and I don't think it was the culprit in this story, but I'm recording my methods here both to preserve them for myself and in case anyone else is locked in this battle.

Somewhere along the line, I must have installed a version of Stylish, although I don't recall when or why.  As Firefox went to its current whirlwind upgrade cycle, the installed version of Stylish (1.0.7) became incompatible.  With each upgrade, I would instruct Firefox to look for a compatible version, and it would either report failure or find one, attempt to install it, and report that the upgrade attempt had failed (with no explanation why).  Either way, the browser would open with Stylish 1.0.7 installed and disabled.

This dance got boring after a while, and I could not think of a reason for keeping Stylish, so when Firefox upgraded itself to version 10.0 today I decided to uninstall Stylish ... which is when I discovered it was now a zombie.  If you know anything about zombies, you know that they are difficult to kill.  The instructions for uninstalling an extension are simple: open the extensions tab, find the one you no longer want, and click the uninstall link ... if there is an uninstall link ... and with Stylish, there was not.  Further searching revealed the helpful suggestion that one boot Firefox in safe mode and then click the previously disabled uninstall link ... except there was no uninstall link, disabled or otherwise (nor did one magically appear when I switched to safe mode).

One can invoke Help > Troubleshooting Information in Firefox and find the file or directory name of the extension, then track the file or directory down in the Firefox extensions folder and nuke it manually.  I was able to find the folder name this way (a hex string inside braces), but no folder or file of that name existed in my profile's extensions folder.  This may mean it is installed globally, and sure enough, I found a folder of the correct name in /opt/firefox/extensions.  I nuked it (as root) and restarted Firefox.  The zombie still lived (still listed as disabled).

Upon further searching, I found an SQLite database belonging to Stylish:  /opt/firefox/defaults/profile/stylish.sqlite.  I nuked it (as root) and restarted Firefox.  The zombie persisted.

Well, perhaps I was overthinking this.  With Firefox in safe mode, I installed the latest version of Stylish (1.2.5), then restarted Firefox.  Although Firefox had failed to do the upgrade on its own, this worked.  The new version was installed and not disabled ... which meant it had a functioning uninstall link ... and there was no mention of version 1.0.7.  So I clicked the uninstall link.  After restarting Firefox, I found that Stylish 1.2.5 had successfully uninstalled ... and the 1.0.7 zombie had reappeared.

So I closed Firefox and opened the extensions.sqlite database (in my Firefox profile folder) using the SQLite database browser.  Here I was able to find an entry for Stylish 1.0.7.  It pointed to a directory (with the same hex string name as the one I'd nuked from /opt/firefox/extensions), this time located in /usr/lib/firefox-10.0/extensions.  Nothing I'd turned up in any of my Google searches pointed to /usr/lib (other than perhaps references to "globally installed" extensions, with no indication of where that would be -- hence my earlier search of /opt/firefox).  I deleted the newly found subdirectory (as root), restarted Firefox, and woo-hoo!  No sign of the zombie.

Twitter and Firefox

In the beginning, I completely ignored Twitter.  Recently, I started following a few Twitter feeds (from OR people) in Google Reader, mainly because they tended to post links to things I actually found interesting (i.e., not what the tweeter had for lunch, nor where said lunch occurred).  Finally, I bit the bullet and opened a Twitter account, largely so that I could respond to the occasional provocative tweet.  (I think I'm up to three tweets so far, which should hold me for a while.)

The next step was to look for an extension to either Thunderbird or Firefox (both of which I keep open when being abused by a computer), so that I could tweet, retweet or ___ (is there a term for responding to a tweet?  tweeply?) easily.  Of course, I could just open Twitter in a Firefox tab, but that would be too low tech, right?  I found one Tbird extension, but it was an alpha version.  I found several promising looking Firefox extensions, of which the most complete and polished seemed to be Echofon.  So yesterday I installed in on my office PC (Linux Mint Isadora), where it worked well, and this morning I installed it on my home PC (Win XP), where it also worked well.

Unfortunately, in between I installed it on my laptop (also Mint Isadora), where it proceeded to spew authentication errors in an alarmingly OCD way.  In fact, short of killing Firefox from a terminal, the only way I could stop the error messages (which popped up an average of about two seconds apart) was to turn off my WiFi connection.  (I couldn't log out of Twitter, nor exit Firefox gracefully, because the incessant error dialogs were modal.)

Fortunately, I could diff my settings between the laptop and the (working) office PC.  It turns out there was a conflict with another Firefox extension, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS-Everywhere.  This extension automatically converts insecure HTTP connections to many sites to secure HTTPS connections.  I installed it on my laptop (which likes to go out for a cup of coffee pretty often) but not my office PC (which hides behind a firewall) (although I may eventually install it there as well).  It works fine with Twitter when I surf to my Twitter account, but apparently it does not get along at all well with Echofon.  Fortunately, HTTPS-Everywhere allows you to configure which sites it will try to seduce into secure connections; by deselecting Twitter.com, I got Echofon to work properly (if perhaps not entirely securely).

Backing Up My Blog

I just spent an hour or so searching for options to print Blogger entries (printing just the blog entry itself, not all the widgets and other clutter) and/or back up the content.  Ideally, I'd hoped to add a "print this" widget, but apparently none exists, and the best solution I found (which involved adding custom code to the template) didn't work for me because I couldn't figure out the right IDs to use for the bits I wanted to make vanish.  There's still the browser print feature, but that gets you all sorts of things you probably don't want.

On the backup issue, I had better luck.  There are various options for (essentially) spidering the site and storing pages, including the ScrapBook extension for Firefox (which I already use for other purposes).  In my case, I found a simpler option.  The key is that I already have source documents for any images I use (because I have to create them myself).  For lengthier posts, particularly those with lots of math, I sometimes compose the post in LyX and transfer it to Blogger, which means the LyX document serves as a backup.  So my main need is to back up just the text itself (with or without all the extra clutter), primarily for the posts that I create directly in Blogger's editor (such as this one).

Enter the DownThemAll! extension for Firefox.  Once you've installed it, the process is pretty simple:

1. In the Blogger dashboard, select Posting > Edit Posts and list all your posts (or all your recent posts if you've backed up the older ones).  There's a limit of something like 300 posts on any one page, so if you're very prolific, you'll need to iterate a few times.  (Then again, if you're that prolific, you obviously have no shortage of idle time.)
2. While staring at the list of your posts (each post title being a link to view the corresponding entry), click Tools > DownThemAll! Tools > DownThemAll! in Firefox to open the a dialog in which you can select the files to download.  Highlight the ones that say "View" in the description field. A quick filter on "*.html" selects them all without (so far at least) grabbing anything else.
3. Select where to save them, futz with other settings if you wish, then click Start! and watch DownThemAll! suck down all your postings.

Need to back up images (or other media files) as well?  So far, the best way I've found is to open the actual blog post and download them (by right-clicking individual images or using DownThemAll! again).  Note that the links in your downloaded copies of the HTML file still point to the Blogger server, so you can open the downloaded copy to get to media files; you do not need to actually navigate to it on Blogger.

If there's a better way to do this (and particularly if there's a simply way to print just what's in the actual post), I'd love to hear it.

Updating Firefox/Thunderbird (Ubuntu & Mint)

I really like both Firefox and Thunderbird, and I like using the latest stable versions (plus it makes sense from a security standpoint). Unfortunately, the official Ubuntu software repositories lag behind, so if you stick to them you don't get the latest versions. In my case, that's an extra headache because I also use Firefox and Thunderbird on Windows XP, and I'd like to have the same user interface on all machines. Fortunately, there's a simple solution: the Ubuntuzilla project.

The first step is to add Ubuntuzilla to the list of repositories used by the Synaptic package manager. The Ubuntuzilla wiki gives good instructions, although they seem to omit what I would consider the most intuitive approach for GUI-oriented users: start the package manager (giving an administrator password); click Settings | Repositories; go to the Other Software tab; click Add... and paste in the command shown on the wiki page ("deb ... main"). Then click the Reload button. (Ignore any complaint about not finding the public key for the new repository.) You can now install the firefox-mozilla-build and thunderbird-mozilla-build packages to update them to the latest versions, and also do future updates through Synaptic the same as with other packages.

Before updating them, though, it's recommended that you back up your existing configuration information, mailboxes etc. They'll most likely be saved in folders named .mozilla and .mozilla-thunderbird under your home folder. If you're using the default Nautilus file manager, you can see hidden folders (those starting with ".") by hitting ctrl-h. Just copy those two folders anywhere safe (I use the desktop) before upgrading.

Today's update took Firefox from 3.5 to 3.6.2 and Thunderbird from 2.0.something to 3.0.3. Firefox found and used the old settings with no effort, but Thunderbird did not. (The same upgrade on Windows did automatically convert all the old settings, archives etc.) The problem with Thunderbird is that version 2 stored its stuff in .mozilla-thunderbird but version 3 stores it in .thunderbird. So the fix is trivial. The first step is to create a .thunderbird folder under the home folder. If you've already started Thunderbird and bailed out when it asked you to create new accounts, just find the .thunderbird folder and delete its contents (but leave the folder itself). Then all that remains is to copy the contents of .mozilla-thunderbird into .thunderbird, and Tbird 3 aborbs it all when next it is started. I'll hang onto the .mozilla-thunderbird folder a bit just to be on the safe side, but I should be able to delete it safely.

[UPDATE 5 March 2011: The latest updates to Firefox and Thunderbird have made their way into the Canonical repositories but not into Ubuntuzilla, as best I can tell.  Message traffic on the Ubuntuzilla forum (from outsiders, not from project managers) suggests that Ubuntuzilla may have become inactive.  So I've switched back to the "official" ports for Ubuntu.  The process was easy -- just uninstall the old, install the new in Synaptic.  I backed up my profile folders (~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird), but the backups were not needed in the end.  Rumor has it Canonical has adopted a policy of sanctioning updates, at least for the Mozilla programs, more quickly.  So thanks to the Ubuntuzilla folks for the service they provided while it was needed.]