Jeremy Visser

Are you frustrated by how long Firefox takes to start up, when you’re opening the first browser window?

I am. It’s actually a bit annoying, when people ask me things like Is Firefox faster?, I have to say Once you’re in the browser, it’s much faster but it takes about twice as long to load before it’s started up.

Well, I found a cool program called Firefox Preloader. It’s similar to the “preload” option in Mozilla which I sorely missed when I switched to Firefox. It will sit in your notification area and will load a copy of firefox.exe into memory when you start your computer up.

I can really tell the difference when running this program. The only problem is, this is a Windows program. No word yet on Linux support.

I’ve decided to start porting my YBSC theme to WordPress. I really like WordPress and its theme architecture, so I thought I’d give it a go. Also, WordPress isn’t a bad CMS for the type of website I’m thinking of building.

I’ve mainly duplicated the Kubrick template files and applied my existing stylesheet to that. Basically what I’m doing now is getting everything styled in my custom stylesheet. I haven’t even started on the sidebar, but I’m thinking of doing a Hemingway style bottombar.

Also, the most annoying thing about this is all the IE6 bugs. Just silly things that you shouldn’t have to think about while you’re coding CSS. At the moment, for no apparent reason at all, the static About section on the main page will appear entirely blank on the first load of the page. Pressing CTRL-A and deselecting the text will fix it. Dragging a window over the IE window will also fix it. I haven’t yet tested it in IE7 but I sure hope it won’t do that.

I’d been trying to get my USB wi-fi device (GN-WB01GS) working in Linux. I wish I asked Dad for help a bit sooner.

I installed ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers off my CD the normal way. Just by typing ndiswrapper -i rt73.inf or whatever it was.

The trouble was, I could never get ndiswrapper -l to report the hardware as being detected as present. It always spat out a something like so:

Installed ndis drivers:
rt73 driver present

What it didn’t have was a “hardware present” at the end of the rt73 line. I spent ages trying to figure out what was wrong, but given my limited knowledge in that area I was unsuccessful.

I asked Dad for some help and in about fifteen minutes, we worked out that in the /etc/ndiswrapper/rt73 directory, there were some .conf files that corresponded to the device IDs printed out by lsusb with the format 0000:0000.F.conf. We noticed that the ID didn’t match the ID of my wireless device spat out by lsusb, so we made a copy of one of the files and renamed it to match my wi-fi and it worked!

Dad suggested I should post about my experience here, so here’s some help for you. If you’re having trouble with ndiswrapper, check the device IDs of the .conf files in the /etc/ndiswrapper/[driver] directory!

I forgot to mention I got a new hard drive to replace my other dead one. It’s exactly the same size as before – 80GB. It seems a bit quieter now. Well, I’ve been wanting to reinstall for months, so my opportunity has come at last .

Well, seeing as thought I have spent my last two days almost entirely in WordPress I may as well create a post!

I installed WP-SlimStat a day or two ago. At first, when I downloaded it, it didn’t support PHP 5.x. This was quickly fixed upon request.

Then the PHP 5 compliant version broke my WordPress dashboard. Or so I thought. Well, after a few hours of debugging the WordPress scripts and querying the plugin author, I finally came to the Snoopy object.

I eventually found, by placing print() statements throughout the code (and now I have to clean them all up — groan), that the script was terminating on the call to fopen() when it was reading from a network stream retrieving the RSS feeds for the WordPress development news on the dashboard. This was weird because it wasn’t returning any errors or any feedback at all. Even weirder was that it only did that while the wp-slimstat plugin was activated, leading me to think that wp-slimstat was the problem.

Well, I showed Dad the problem just about an hour ago and he commented that he didn’t like the look of the coding in the infinite loop contained in the _httprequest function. After studying it for a few moments, he asked me what the value of $maxlength was. I went and checked where all the constants were said and it had a value of 500000. 500000 bytes. That’s a whole half megabyte. Even hairier was that according to the PHP documentation, fread() only returns up to 8192 bytes anyway.

After changing the $maxlength value to 8192 bytes, everything worked fine.

Well, I’ve filed a bug report with Snoopy, asking them to change the default value of $maxlength so it doesn’t happen in the future.