aving gathered statistics, I estimate that my Firefox theme adaptations had over 100 downloads from this domain. The more popular of the two themes is the Mac OS X clone (shown below). It can be downloaded or directly installed. Enjoy!

Note: this theme should be compatible with all platforms

Click image to see it full-sized

Caution Firefox enthusiasts

here is an alpha version of Firefox, codenamed Deer Park, which is used to test future releases of the Mozilla browser. The following page explains a little further about the purpose of the package. My advice is to avoid the use of Deer Park as it interacts badly with your Firefox profile and can conflict with your current settings, extensions and themes in particular. The Deer Park page clearly states:

Deer Park Alpha 1 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.x should not use Deer Park Alpha 1.

odern browsers are among the more complex pieces of software in existence. Because browsers are expected to treat similar data (the World Wide Web) and behave consistently, there is plenty of room for bugs to crop up. Big trouble lies ahead if a browser is re-released infrequently or no updates are made available, apart from the critical. This is probably the main catalyst to the “Don’t click on the blue E” campaign.

Web developers spend extra time trying to compensate for Internet Explorer bugs. In css-discuss, for example, almost half of all questions (if not more) concern browser compatibility, fixes and hacks. Internet Explorer is often the culprit. Rather than fixing/hacking around IE bugs, perhaps we should all upgrade to a browser that is actively maintained and released to the public. There is no doubt as to how fed up development communities have become with IE, which for most users ships by default.

t was only a few months ago that my colleague’s forum got hijacked and vandalised, never to come back on-line again. Over the weekend, my host came under a denial of service (DoS) attack because of outdated, non-secure installations of phpBB (not worthy linking to), which proved to be far from reliable. Several sites including mine were suspended for hours in order to avoid another such attack, which brought the server down and crippled it for 40 minutes. I was possibly among the culprits as my phpBB installation was not patched up properly.

WordPress 1.5 likewise. Security flaws are continuously discovered and about 4 fixes have been released in the past few months. If you install software, make sure it is secure, patched up and avoid installing it whenever unnecessary. More installations lead to more maintenance and potential loopholes.
 

Getting just the valuable data from pages

eeds have definitely revolutionised the way we use the Internet. We can efficiently seek and exploit content without having to undertake laborious navigations in sites. The content is delivered to the user so there is no need to actively obtain it or ever spend time re-reading segments of text.

I have just finished brushing up the script I developed for syndicating static pages that do not offer feeds. Windows users can use it under Cygwin; Mac and Linux user can use it at much great ease. All details and code are contained in the more comprehensive page.

OV-Ray, an Open Source 3-D rendering package that could compete with the commercial Maya, was mentioned a while back. Some months ago a competition was run which involved POV-Ray artists and a submissions gallery has been put up.

These images serve as excellent wallpapers. Several images are of very high resolution, which works well on dual-head displays.

Might be hard notice that the kitchen is computer-generated
Work by Jaime Vives Piqueres

Ever wondered how much you listened to a particular song?

XMMS possesses a great extent of flexibility. It provides facilities which, when customised appropriately, can dump complete song descriptions. XMMS can then progressively, accumulatively add song data to log files. Timestamps imply the duration of listening, which lead to possible future extensions, e.g.:

• Automatically parse (scan, hash, then analyse) the log file/s
• Compute an average listening time — that is before skipping to another track — for each individual song
• Erase music that is frequently skipped or just output a ‘prospective deletion list’ to another file

Input/output operations are made quite simple. These can be invoked as command-line strings whenever a new track begins. It is a built-in XMMS plug-in, which can be found under Preferences » Song Change » Configure (see illustration below)

Add the following line to the “Song change” Command field:

(date; echo %s) >> ~/My_playlists/playlist.log

I am providing an example log file, assembled naturally (not artificially. Honest!) over 20 minutes or so. I still need to get rid of the doubly appearances, apparently caused by xmms-kde in my dock (screenshot on the right). As well as giving a minimal user interface, xmms-kde enables control of the player with CTRL+SHIFT+keypad even if the player is neither visible nor in focus.

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.

UPDATE 26/06/2005: The following command, which can be set to become a nightly cron job, will slice the large log file so that it is composed of daily ‘chunks’:

mv ~/[Path]/playlist.log ~/[Path]/playlist-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.log

This can be extended to form an annual and monthly hierarchy of directories.

See the later extension: producing history spreadsheets