Archive for October 2005

FireFox 1.5 to Provide Better Web Experience

October 29, 2005 Add Comment

FireFox 1.5 to Provide Better Web Experience


The new version of Firefox has been released by open source group Mozilla Foundation, the not-for-profit organisation that rose from the ashes of Netscape after it lost out in the market to Microsoft in the late 1990s, promising a number of performance enhancements to the world’s second most popular internet browser, including speedier browsing, swifter updates and better pop-up blocking.

Firefox 1.0 was introduced just over one year ago, and Firefox 1.5 is the browser’s first major update. Since then, Firefox has emerged as one of the most popular alternatives to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with more than 100 million copies downloaded in the first year, more than 40 million active users and about 8 percent of the browser market.

New features in Firefox 1.5 include:

Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
Improvements to popup blocking.
Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
Many security enhancements.

Disable Auto Go To (Jump) To Read More Tag

October 14, 2005 Add Comment

Disable Auto Go To (Jump) To Read More Tag


In WordPress, it’s possible to a WordPress blog site to display post excerpts on the front or home page, and the visitors have to click on the title or a link to continue reading your post or article.

One way of achieving this technique is by using the quicktag called “more”. The quicktag “more” is inserted into the post at the desired break-off (or cut-off) point so that everything above it become an excerpted content of the post and everything below it will only be readable when the visitors click on the title or a link to view the whole post.

The quicktag “more” is implemented by inserting the following line of code into the post:

However, by default, when a visitor click on the Read More link, the web page loads and then automatically forwards or jumps to the spot where the tag is set in the post. If you do not want this kind of positioning, you can change the default function of how this works by editing the following line in wp-includes/template-functions-post.php:

$output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\">$more_link_text</a>";

to

$output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink() ."\">$more_link_text</a>";

or

$output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink() ."”>$more_link_text</a>’;

After the change, the Read More link will load the blog post and stop at the top of page instead of position where the quicktag “more” were.

NOTE: When upgrading WordPress, this file will be replaced so make a note of the change so you can change it again after upgrading.

ppStream Connection Limit in Configuration Settings

October 14, 2005 Add Comment

ppStream Connection Limit in Configuration Settings


Note: The newer version of ppSteream has integrated the configuration into the program’s menu.

ppStream comes with a configuration file named setting.ini at the installation folder. It’s possible to tweak the connection limit settings in the configuration file to achieve optimum bandwidth speed for best viewing experience. It’s a good answer to solve some problem when viewing channel with ppStream such as streaming lagging, frequent disconnection, slow buffering etc.

The available configuration settings are as below:

remotepeerlimit = 41
localpeerlimit = 35
totalpeerlimit = 51
simulconnectingpeer = 30

The value of above is the default setting. All of the settings are quite self-explanatory as its name. You may not see the above lines in setting.ini configuration file. If it’s not in the setting.ini, add it in.

It’s hard to determine the best setting for all as each user’s computer and network configuration is different. So the best way is to try it out yourself and determine for yourself. I set all my 4 settings to 100, and able to achieve a very smooth streaming and almost without disconnection.

Some people has even set the limit to even higher than 100. But note that it’s not almost works. As currently ppStream has no ability to limit upload bandwidth speed, if you set connection limit too high, it’s good to have a lot of source peer to download. But remember that your workstation is a peer too that will upload to other peers. If upload takes up too much bandwidth, it will adversely affect the download speed, especially on ADSL broadband.

Easy Way to Upgrade FreeBSD’s Ports

October 09, 2005 Add Comment

Easy Way to Upgrade FreeBSD’s Ports


Before you can update and upgrade the FreeBSD’s ports, the Ports Collection needs to be updated. Follow step here to update the Ports Collection.

Once you updated your Ports Collection, before attempting a port upgrade, you should check the /usr/ports/UPDATING file. This file describes various issues and additional steps users may encounter and need to perform when updating a port.

Keeping the ports up to date can be a tedious job. Just for example, to upgrade a port you need to go to the ports directory, build the port, deinstall the old port, install the new port, and then clean up after the build. If there are numerous ports that need to be upgrade, it will be very troublesome. This was a large problem for system administrators to deal with, and FreeBSD have utilities which do this automatically, and that’s sysutils/portupgrade utility.

To install sysutils/portupgrade utility, use the command just as to install any other port: make install clean.

Create a database with the following command: pkgdb -F

The command will read the list of installed ports and create a database file in the /var/db/pkg directory.

Run portupgrade -a to start to update the ports.

The portupgrade will read the database file created by pkgdb -F and the ports INDEX file. Finally, portupgrade will begin to download, build, backup, install, and clean the ports which have been updated.

Portupgrade utility has a lot of options for different uses, the most important ones listed below.

If you want to upgrade only a certain application, not the complete database, use portupgrade pkgname, include the flags -r if portupgrade should act on all those packages depending on the given package as well, and -R to act on all packages required by the given packages.

To use packages instead of ports for installation, provide -P. With this option portupgrade searches the local directories listed in PKG_PATH, or fetches packages from remote site if it is not found locally. If packages can not be found locally or fetched remotely, portupgrade will use ports. To avoid using ports, specify -PP.

To just fetch distfiles (or packages, if -P is specified) without building or installing anything, use -F.

Note: It is important to regularly update the package database using pkgdb -F to fix inconsistencies, especially when portupgrade asks you to. Do not abort portupgrade while it is updating the package database, this will leave you an inconsistent database.
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