FireFTP – Click image for the full-sized version
Firefox is Mac OSX-themed (Download/install)

ver a thousand people have reached this site when looking for an FTP client for Firefox. As my previous post on the topic was succinct and vague, I decided to elaborate, capture some screenshots, report on my experiences, conduct some comparisons and make recommendations.

I have run FireFTP beta (version 0.88) on two separate computers with different operating systems since late April/early May when it was released to the public. The time and content of my previous post indicates that I got notified via RSS feeds so FireFTP must still be very new and ‘fresh’. Bugs are rare, but they appear recurrent for instance, when recursive, deep downloads/uploads are pushed to the extreme. Nonetheless, in this particular problem domain which is file transfer, nothing is mission-critical by nature. The data never gets corrupted, only the flow of control in the application lacks reliability. Overall, I would happily assign a rating of 7/10 to FireFTP.

As my essays tend to (knowingly) drift away to separate, yet related topics, I shall survey a few alternatives which also make good FTP clients. My experience with FTP clients goes back to age of 15 or 16. Among the applications I have continuously used for the task are:

• CuteFTP
• SmartFTP
• WSFTP
• CrystalFTP
• Hummingbird
• IE
• …and surely a few more Windows applications, which go back too far for me to recall

I ordered the list above by frequency or duration of use; it is not chronological. Although most of the above were shareware (especially the former), there were many UI ‘nags’ involved. Around the year 2000 I began to drift to Linux, which by nature, offered nag-free applications that were solid workhorses. My favourite FTP client, which is most valuable for the majority of tasks, is GFTP. I run it remotely from RedHat Fedora Code II clusters. GFTP achieves extremely high transfer rates, perhaps by pipelining (the site corrected me by saying that GFTP is multi-threaded. I believe that in the Windows-oriented list above, only IE supports multi-threading). That powerful feature allows me to download and upload 1,000 files in a matter of seconds. This is useful, for example, whenever I want to apply a massive search-and-replace to a comprehensive site section.

GFTP screenshot – Click image to see it full-sized

Linux users are encouraged to use GFTP for any traffic where latency becomes a hindering factor, in particular where a large number of files is involved. Unfortunately, one lost advantage is that GFTP cannot be integrated with the browser. FireFTP gets close to it (it gets embedded in a tab), but KDE‘s Konqueror (father of Safari) is another alternative, which is an HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and file management ‘platform’. It competes in terms of speed with GFTP. It is much superior in terms of usability too. Finally, worth adding is the observation that aforementioned applications are separate from the browser at one level or another. That is something that Microsoft have addressed, may it be good or bad. When the filesystem tool (explorer.exe) is hard-coded into the browser (or vice versa), there is not much room to ‘dance’ from one browser to another (and retain good use of resources).

Screenshot of Konqueror as an FTP client
click image to see it full-sized

udovic Drolez has just reached out for nntp://comp.sys.palmtops.pilot and informed everyone that the Linux on Palm Tungsten E Project is now a success. Put in his own words:

Great news ! Some folks have managed to boot Linux on the Palm T|E.

A screenshot is available at http://palmtelinux.sourceforge.net/

This project might be confusing to some folks. Palm are committed to build upon the Linux kernel, whereas the project mentioned above is an exploitation of Palm hardware as to obtain a pure Linux device. It is rather encouraging to know that Palm handhelds are flexible enough to adapt to different environments.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Getting data more quickly using a CLI

ome time ago I came across YubNub – YubNub.org which is a command-line interface for the Web. It allows you to operate in and on the Web much more efficiently than by using the traditional GUI‘s. You can, for example, query Google for ‘saturn’ by typing in

g saturn

YubNub provides a very quick way of navigation the Web as chaining of commands is possible too and nearly 100 commands exist. The site was a great find, but I do not believe it can replace a keyboard-navigable portal (see example). Maybe I can embed the YubNub command-line in portals at some stage, which would make it ever more flexible. While on the issue of portals, Google have extended features offered by their Portal (personalised homepage) service. Among the new features:

• Adding your own bookmarks
• Selecting from more news feeds
• Adding your own RSS news feeds

30 frames, 63 colours, 200 KB in total

The GIMP is an excellent Open Source program, which among its many functionalities, caters for composition of animations. To demonstrate this powerful feature in action, I generated a spinning globe of the site’s visual identity.

Generation of video sequence is not trivial in the GIMP, so below is a ‘recipe’ which corresponds to menu layouts in GIMP 1.2.3.

• Open the image of choice
• Hold down the right-hand mouse button (right-handed mouse) over the image to open the image menu
• Follow through to Script-Fu » Animators » Spinning globe...
• Select the number of frames to generate as well as the number of colours for an indexed palette if the default values do not suit you.
• Once generated (a potentially time-consuming process), Save the image as GIF. Ensure you make it a video output (“Save as Animation“), which is not the default choice.

Manipulation and navigation between frames (actually image layers) is non-trivial in the version that I currently use (I use versions 2.x as well, though not sufficiently often to comment about it). Nonetheless, the outputs can be impressive. As another set of examples, my photo gets subjected to ripples, then waves.

The bits shown above come from an excellent Linux screenshots gallery which bound the following caption to the original image.

Gentoo GNU/Linux, KDE 3.3, xorg 6.8. Demonstrating the new shadow and translucently window features. Consider the new stuff a proof of concept, it’s far from usable, but it works.

Months ago I discovered several Mac OSX lookalikes in KDE-Look, for example White Acqua, which is a nice (yet fragile) window decoration.

Related pages: local gallery of KDE screenshots.

Spreadsheet representation of music history (click to enlarge)

ome weeks ago I wrote about an XMMS extension that I had devised. This collection of steps which I described could make XMMS store simple log files for music (music ‘history’). That work has now been thoroughly extended to produce spreadsheets (comma-separated values (CSV) to be precise) rather than flat log files.

In brief, what is obtained using this trick are music history logs, one file for each day. Each file contains full, detailed history of the tracks listened to. Interesting information can be derived from these, e.g. most frequently played tracks, tracks quickly skipped (implying the possibility of deletion or removal from playlist). As already said in last entry:

A music log file results in even more redundant data to store. According to a rough calculations, I will see it growing by 1 megabyte every month or so. Compression, however, should make it only 10-20% of its original size.

You can find all the details on this work (installation instructions included) in my Linux Utilities page.

Dr. Irving from the University reported a ‘critical’ issue with the Linux distribution that had been installed in student clusters. The following message was posted yesterday afternoon to the Linux-users mailing list. I believe it is worth quoting:

Several of our students have been complaining about a pornographic screensaver on Redhat Fedora Core 3 desktops. After a bit of rooting around I’ve tracked this down to the webcollage.desktop screensaver which picks random images off the internet and displays them within the screensaver. Not a very responsible inclusion in a desktop environment but it can be found in /usr/share/applnk/System/ScreenSavers should anyone receive similar complaints.