I moved to Firefox 3 and so can you

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:

I’ve been trying the newest Firefox betas for some time and I love its incredible speed and cleaner looks, but not having my extensions with me because they were incompatible with FF3 was a showstopper for me. Now however I have found a workaround:

extensions.checkCompatibility

With this value set to true in the about:config screen you can use extensions on FF3 that have not yet been enabled like the awesome Gmail Manager, All in one Sidebar and Download Statusbar. Be careful though that these have not been tested and you’ll probably run into some problems (like I did with FireBug).
If I conviced you to try Firefox 3 then there’s a super easy way to install it with one command:

wget -P ~ ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0b3/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 && tar xjf ~/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 -C ~

Fixing Installer.app on iPod Touch 1.1.3

Christian Decker wrote this late at night:
I just got my iPod Touch (or as some call it iTouch) back from my friend who was so nice and put the 1.1.3 Firmware on it, which I really like. What I didn’t like was that the installer no longer works or at least it only works sporadically. This seems to be a problem with some scripting bindings missing in the installer and therefore returning the infamous “Error in Script command 1: InstallApp” Message. It took me quite some time to find a fix for this and it’s working again so I decided to share it with all the people who ran into the same issues:
  1. Install BossTool to free up space. Just tell it to move the Fonts and Ringtones and you shoudl have enough free space for a lot more applications.
  2. Reinstall Installer.app. As I said the Installer.app is somehow corrupted while jailbreaking and needs to be re-installed:
  3. Open Installer.app
  4. Go to Uninstall
  5. Select Installer.app
  6. Choose Reinstall in the upper right corner
  7. Exit the Installer.app by pressing Home
  • Restart the iTouch or go back to Installer.app and kill it by holding the Home button until the Springboard comes back.
  • That’s it :D
  • After starting the Installer.app again you should be able to install all the applications that gave errors previously like MobileScrobbler, Funambol, iShare, …

    Commentluv: my way of saying thanks for your comments

    Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
    Today I stumbled across the CommentLuv Plugin and I love it. It is my way of saying thanks for all of your comments: all users that add their blog address will have a link to their last blog entries added at the bottom of their comment. Or as the plugins author puts it:
    Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog, adding the dofollow plugin is one way to reward but why not place a link to their last post under their comment, with CommentLuv, you can do that automatically! This is an excellent way to promote comments from your readers.
    it’s a really good addition to every blog and I hope it makes an impact on the comments ^^

    BTW: sadly only new comments are counted, so people comment, comment, comment :D

    Back up script

    Christian Decker wrote this mid-afternoon:
    Earlier this week the Disk of Nex died. While it is back up with a bigger and faster disk (not everything’s bad about a failure :D) I was lucky it “warned” me before actually dying totally so I could create a backup. Here I want to share the simple, yet powerful backup script I use for this:
    #!/bin/sh
    
    # Simple rsync "driver" script.  (Uses SSH as the transport layer.)
    # http://www.scrounge.org/linux/rsync.html
    
    # Demonstrates how to use rsync to back up a directory tree from a local
    # machine to a remote machine.  Then re-run the script, as needed, to keep
    # the two machines "in sync."  It only copies new or changed files and ignores
    # identical files.
    
    # Destination host machine name
    DEST="192.168.0.91"
    
    # User that rsync will connect as
    # Are you sure that you want to run as root, though?
    USER="cxd"
    
    # Directory to copy from on the source machine.
    BACKDIR="/home/cxd/"
    
    # Directory to copy to on the destination machine.
    DESTDIR=/storage/`hostname`
    
    # excludes file - Contains wildcard patterns of files to exclude.
    # i.e., *~, *.bak, etc.  One "pattern" per line.
    # You must create this file.
    EXCLUDES=/home/cxd/bin/backup-excludes
    
    # Options.
    # -n Don't do any copying, but display what rsync *would* copy. For testing.
    # -a Archive. Mainly propogate file permissions, ownership, timestamp, etc.
    # -u Update. Don't copy file if file on destination is newer.
    # -v Verbose -vv More verbose. -vvv Even more verbose.
    # See man rsync for other options.
    
    # For testing.  Only displays what rsync *would* do and does no actual copying.
    #OPTS="-n -vv -u -a --rsh=ssh --exclude-from=$EXCLUDES --stats --progress"
    # Does copy, but still gives a verbose display of what it is doing
    OPTS="-v -u -a --rsh=ssh --exclude-from=$EXCLUDES --stats"
    # Copies and does no display at all.
    #OPTS="--archive --update --rsh=ssh --exclude-from=$EXCLUDES --quiet"
    
    # May be needed if run by cron?
    #export PATH=$PATH:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
    
    # Only run rsync if $DEST responds.
    VAR=`ping -s 1 -c 1 $DEST > /dev/null; echo $?`
    if [ $VAR -eq 0 ]; then
    rsync $OPTS $BACKDIR $USER@$DEST:$DESTDIR
    else
    echo "Cannot connect to $DEST."
    fi
    As you may have noticed, I’m not the author, but it’s distributed under the GPL and it makes backing up really easy. From now on I’ll run it on a daily basis with a cron-job. Thanks Wayne for this great help :)

    Nex is dead!

    Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:

    You may be wondering who Nex is. Well it’s m notebook, a Dell Latitude D600 I bought about 3 years ago, when starting my studies at ETH Zurich. It’s dead…

    It all started a week ago when all the sudden the disk started to spins uncontrollably (much higher than the 5′400 RPM it’s supposed to do), so I shut it off with a hard reset, when booting again it complained that it couldn’t find the primary disk, so I let it turned off for a while, and miracle, it started again. It scared me so much that I decided to start making backups, and not a day to soon. I set up a simple rsync script that would sync my homefolder to another box, so I could at least go back if all went snafu.

    Today it did. After some clicking noises, the notebook started not reacting properly and I decided to shut it down… it never came up again…

    Well, hopefully I can get hold on a disk soon because it’s my main working machine. Until then: Rest in Peace Nex :D