Recently in Open Source Category

When I was playing around with Firefox 3 several months ago one of the biggest annoyances for me was the "autocomplete".

As you type a URL Firefox suggests links from your browser history.

While that might be useful the way they've implemented it is incredibly obtrusive and, therefore, really really annoying.

As I mentioned previously I couldn't upgrade to Firefox 3 as my main browser for a number of silly reasons. Since then those issues have been resolved, so I've started using FF3 on my home desktop.

So what about the annoying auto-complete?

Well it's easy enough to disable if you know how.

Luckily somebody out there did!

Like so many Firefox settings it can be configured via the advanced configuration menu, which now comes with a health warning!

In your location (address) bar simply type "about:config" (no quotes).
The variable / setting you need to change is found under:

browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

I've set mine to "1", as I really don't need more. I can always change it later if I really want to.

Restart Firefox and finally sanity is restored!

Over the past few years I've used several of the open source webmail solutions to access my mail when I've been on the move. Squirrelmail, for example, is quite functional, but the size of my personal mailbox has grown so big that it took forever for it to load.

A few months ago the Atmail team announced an open source version of their webmail solution. I was interested in trying it out, but I was expecting the install process to be awkward and complex.

It wasn't

A couple of minutes after downloading the software I had a fully functional webmail client up and running and it's able to handle my mailbox without any issues.

The open source version of Atmail is a lot faster than Squirrelmail ever was and has some pretty slick features. You can right click on a message to delete it, or mark it as read / unread. Of course if you just want to delete the mail you can do so, but dragging it into the "trash" is kind of fun too!

The only thing that it seems to be missing, based on playing with atmail for a few minutes, is a method of selecting multiple emails to delete at once.

It's the kind of software that I can see people making use of if they want a functional webmail client and are sick of some of the uglier alternatives.

What are the differences between the open source version and the commercial one?

For most people the differences probably won't make much difference, as they're more for larger organisations and businesses that want to integrate with other systems, but you can see a full comparison chart on the site.

I've always been a strong believer of using the products and services that we sell, so it's only apt that I'd start using Atmail now, as we've just rolled out the full commercial version as part of our new hosting solution. Though I think our clients are getting a lot more features than I am!

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Whoever is behind XKCD is a genius.

Today's gem is pure geek, but linux zealots will appreciate it (click to enlarge):

If you want to check which version of Ubuntu is installed on a machine run the following command:

lsb_release -a

On Debian the command is:

cat /etc/debian_version

The redhat equivalent, which would work on redhat derivatives as well, is:

cat /etc/redhat-release

If, like me, you use pidgin as your IM client on Ubuntu, you may have been experiencing issues connecting to ICQ today.

There's a patch available here, as well as a discussion of the issue.

As I don't use ICQ too heavily I may just wait until a new version is released

Although I only upgraded my Mac's browser to Firefox 3 this morning I will be downgrading it shortly

Why?

Practicalities.

Several web applications I use on a regular basis break badly in Firefox 3, which renders them unusable (typo3) or not as usable as I would like (Movable Type).

I know the guys in Movable Type will fix the issues, though they were waiting on a stable Firefox release before they made any crazy changes.

I've no idea how long it will be before the Typo3 team fix the UI issues on their end.

Unfortunately in both cases the issues arise from Javascript rendering issues ie. the browser engine has changed how it handles it

Ah well!

Today sees the official release of Firefox 3

Ubuntu users seem to have been granted the privilege of downloading the new release since this morning for some odd reason!

The guys behind Firefox are also trying for a Guinness record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period.

Inevitably their web servers have crashed under the load and are now displaying an error message:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

I guess that was to be expected, however their FTP servers are still working fine!

If you want to grab the new version of Firefox via FTP you can get it here

The guys at XKCD have done it again!

I took delivery of some of their tshirts this morning, as well as my Top Gun tshirt