Technology Tales

Ridding the Google Toolbar dictionary of erroneously added words

Butterfingeredness can happen to anyone and it’s always nice to know to remove words added to custom dictionaries in error. Many of my blog postings have had their spellings checked using a button on the Google Toolbar so I have a vested interest in knowing how to remove any bloomers. Thankfully, they have a useful page telling you exactly what you need to do for Firefox and Internet Explorer. As is often said, you can never be too careful…

Take a great leap forward, then consolidate…

While I have been a user of WordPress since late 2006, I only began to start keeping tabs on its development following my hearing news of dramatic changes coming in what became 2.5. Since a pattern developing with bigger changes coming in 2.5 and 2.7 while both 2.6 and 2.8 didn’t add too much in the way of upheaval but rather evolved what was already there. With 2.8, theme and widget management got the once over while there were plenty of other tweaks that polished a well received forbear. The differences between 2.7 and 2.8 are discernible without breaking anything that shouldn’t be broken. In short, I rather like the result.

The reaction to 2.5 was mixed, to say the least, and that in part led to the dramatic changes in 2.7, especially with regard to the administration interface. I admit to having had doubts about these when I first saw them development and there was so much chopping and changing during development that stepping back until things settled down became a necessity. Even adding a ticket to the TRAC was problematical unless you had sight of what was happening behind the scenes because it became too easy to add an invalid ticket.

With the release of 2.8 into the wild, 2.9 is now on the horizon and I am inclined to suspect that we might see bigger changes again. For one thing, there was that interface poll a little while ago and who knows what impact that may have on what comes next. The structure of the administration screens may not alter that much but that still leaves changes to colours and icons with the aim of separating navigation from what else is on there, something that doesn’t trouble me at all. In fact, I don’t see very much wrong with how how things are right now and wonder if there’s any point in making too many changes at all. The forecasted incorporation of WPMU functionality is a bigger change that would mean the end of WordPress MU as a separate entity and would concern me more with the amount of under the bonnet re-engineering that would be needed. Add Google Summer of Code projects to this mix and 2.9 looks as if it could be a step change in the spirit of 2.5 and 2.7, if not in feel. Summer 2009 could be very interesting for WordPress and I only hope that it continues to work for me in the way that it does as we move from version to version.

A late “advance” sighting?

Somewhat infuriatingly, Google released its own browser, Chrome, into the wild near the end of last year but only for Windows. My experiences with it on that platform are that it works smoothly, albeit without many of the bells and whistles that can be got for Firefox. While an unofficial partial port was achieved using Crossover Chromium and there is the Chromium project with all its warnings and the possibility to add a repository for its wares to Ubuntu’s software sources, we have been tantalised rather than served so far. However, that was recently bettered by the release of early access versions. In reality, these can be said to be alpha versions so not everything works but it’s still Chrome and without the need for Windows or WINE. The rendering engine most importantly seems to be the equal of what you get on Windows while ancillary functions like bookmark handling seem incomplete. In summary, the currently available deb packages are a work in progress but that’s better than not having having anything at all.

64-bit Firefox plugins?

My laptop has both Windows Vista and Ubuntu on there with WUBI being the facilitator of the peaceful coexistence. However, what I either forgot or never realised was that it was the 64-bit variant of Ubuntu 9.04 that has found its way onto the thing. For the most part, it works well but there is one catch that I recently encountered: not every Firefox plugin or add-on is 64-bit compatible. Google Gears is one such example but other very useful and pervasive helpers have the same affliction. RealPlayer is one and Adobe’s Flash is another. Apparently, you can still download the 32-bit release versions and use nspluginwrapper to get them going. That worked for RealPlayer but seemingly not for Flash; more investigation may be needed on that one. Other remedies like using 32-bit Firefox (if it runs, of course) or alpha versions of what Adobe offers can be tried too. It almost goes without saying that I’d wish that there was more awareness of the 64-bit Linux world but I remain glad to have met this rough edge before taking the plunge with my main system.

Update 2014-01-24: It looks as if this problem has gone away now with the growth in maturity of 64-bit computing. Certainly, it does not rear its head on any 64-bit Linux distro that I have used or even Windows, apart perhaps from ensuring that you are using the right JRE for a browser (32-bit or 64-bit).

Getting Fedora working in VirtualBox

After a hiatus induced by disk errors seen on start up, I have gone having a go with Fedora again. In the world of real PC’s, its place has been taken by Debian so virtualisation was brought into play for my most recent explorations. I could have gone with 10, the current stable version, but curiosity got the better of me and I downloaded a pre-release version of 11 instead.

On my way to getting that instated, I encountered two issues. The first of these was boot failure with the message like this:

FATAL: INT18: BOOT FAILURE

As it turned out, that was easily sorted. I was performing the installation from a DVD image mounted as if it were a real DVD and laziness or some other similar reason had me rebooting with still mounted. There is an option to load the hard disk variant but it wasn’t happening, resulting in the message that’s above. A complete shut down and replacement of the virtual DVD with a real one set matters to rights.

The next trick was to get Guest Additions added but Fedora’s 2.6.29 was not what VirtualBox was expecting and it demanded the same ransom as Debian: gcc, make and kernel header files. Unfamiliarity had me firing up Fedora’s software installation software only to find that Synaptic seems to  beat it hands down in the search department. Turning to Google dredged up the following command to be executed and that got me further:

yum install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel

However, the installed kernel headers didn’t match the kernel but a reboot fixed that once the kernel was updated. Then, the Guest Additions installed themselves as intended with necessary compilations to match the installed kernel.

The procedures that I have described here would, it seems, work for Fedora 10 and they certainly have bequeathed me  a working system. I have had a little poke and a beta of Firefox 3.5 is included and I saw sign of OpenOffice 3.1 too. So, it looks very cutting edge, easily so in comparison with Ubuntu and Debian. Apart from one or niggles, it seems to run smoothly too. Firstly, don’t use the command shutdown -h now to close the thing down or you’ll cause VirtualBox to choke. Using the usual means ensures that all goes well, though. The other irritation is that it doesn’t connect to the network without a poke from me. Whether SELinux is to blame for this or not, I cannot tell but it might be something for consideration by the powers than be. That these are the sorts of things that I have noticed should itself be telling you that I have no major cause for complaint. I have mulled over a move to Fedora in the past and that option remains as strong as ever but Ubuntu is not forcing me to look at an alternative and the fact that I know how to achieve what I need is resulting in inertia anyway.

Self-hosted web analytics tracking

It amazes me now to think how little tracking I used to do on my various web “experiments” only a few short years ago. However, there was a time when a mere web counter, perhaps displayed on web pages themselves, was enough to yield some level of satisfaction, or dissatisfaction in many a case. Things have come a long way since then and we now seem to have analytics packages all around us. In fact, we don’t even have to dig into our pockets to get our hands on the means to peruse this sort of information either.

At this point, I need to admit that I am known to make use of a few simultaneously but thoughts about reducing their number are coming to mind but there’ll be more on that later. Given that this site is hosted using WordPress software, it should come as no surprise that Automattic’s own plugin has been set into action to see how things are going. The main focus is on the total number of visits by day, week and month with a breakdown showing what pages are doing well as well as an indication of how people came to the site and what links they followed while there. Don’t go expecting details of your visitors like the software that they are using and the country where they are accessing the site with this minimalist option and satisfaction should head your way.

There is next to no way of discussing the subject of website analytics without mentioning Google’s comprehensive offering in the area. You have to admit that it’s comprehensive with perhaps the only bugbear being the lack of live tracking. That need has been addressed very effectively by Woopra, even if its WordPress plugin will not work with IE6. Otherwise, you need the desktop application (being written in Java, it’s a cross-platform affair and I have had it going in both Windows and Linux) but that works well too. Apart maybe from the lack of campaigns, Woopra supplies as good as all of the information that its main competitor provides. It certainly doe what I would need from it.

However, while they can be free as in beer, there are a some costs associated with using using external services like Google Analytics and Woopra. Their means of tracking your web pages for you is by executing a piece of JavaScript that needs to be added to every page. If you have everything set to use a common header or footer page, that shouldn’t be too laborious and there are plugins for publishing platforms like WordPress too. This way of working means that if anyone has JavaScript disabled or decides not to enable JavaScript for the requisite hosts while using the NoScript extension with Firefox, then your numbers are scuppered. Saying that, the same concerns probably any JavaScript code that you may want to execute but there’s another cost again: the calls to external websites can, even with the best attention in the world, slow down the loading of your own pages. Not only is additional JavaScript being run but there also is the latency caused by servers having to communicate across the web.

A self-hosted analytics package would avoid the latter and I found one recently through Lifehacker. Amazingly, it has been around for a while and I hadn’t known about it but I can’t say that I was actively looking for it either. Piwik, formerly known as PHPMyVisites, is the name of my discovery and it seems not too immature either. In fact, I’d venture that it does next to everything that Google Analytics does. While I’d prefer that it used PHP, JavaScript is its means of tracking web pages too. Nevertheless, page loading is still faster than with Google Analytics and/or Woopra and Firefox/NoScript users would only have to allow JavaScript for one site too. If you have had experience with installing PHP/MySQL powered publishing platforms like WordPress, Textpattern and such like, then putting Piwik in place is no ordeal. You may find yourself changing folder access but uploading of the required files, the specification of database credentials and adding an administration user is all fairly standard stuff. I have the thing tracking this edifice as well as my outdoor activities (hillwalking/cycling/photography) web presence and I cannot say that I have any complaints so we’ll see how it goes from here.

Suffering from neglect?

There have been several recorded instances of Google acquiring something and then not developing it to its full potential. FeedBurner is yet another acquisition where this sort of thing has been suspected. Changeovers by monolithic edict and lack of responsiveness from support fora are the sorts of things that breed resentment in some that share opinions on the web. Within the last month, I found that my FeedBurner feeds were not being updated as they should have been and it would not accept a new blog feed when I tried adding it. The result of both these was that I got to deactivating the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin to take FeedBurner out of the way for my feed subscribers; those regulars on my hillwalking blog were greeted by a splurge of activity following something of a hiatus. There are alternatives such as RapidFeed and Pheedo but I will stay away from the likes of these for a little while and take advantage of the newly added FeedStats plugin to keep tabs on how many come to see the feeds. The downside to this is that IE6 users will see the pure XML rather than a version with a more friendly formatting.

An alternative use for Woopra

Google Analytics is all very fine with its once a day reporting cycle but the availability of real time data dose have its advantages. WordPress.com’s Stats plugin goes some way to serving the need but Woopra trumps it in every way apart from a possible overkill in the amount of information that it makes available. The software may be in the beta phase and it does crash from time to time but its usefulness remains more than apparent.

One of its uses is seeing if there are people visiting your website at a time when you might be thinking of making a change like upgrading WordPress. Timing such activities to avoid a clash is a win-win situation: a better experience from your visitors and more reliable updates for you. After all, it’s very easy to make a poor impression and an unreliable site will do that faster than anything else so it’s paramount that your visitors do not get on the receiving end of updates, even if they are all for the better.

Better font display in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu

Now that all bar one of the Firefox plugins that I use have been updated to work with it, I have finally jumped ship to 3 from 2.0.x. The move wasn’t without its travails, though. For one thing, Google Toolbar stopped working and I resorted to Googlebar Lite instead for my needs. Apart from that, the only other irritation has been the appearance of fonts in the new version.

In Firefox 2, it would seem that I was geting away without tweaking my system settings to be their most optimum. With 3, I could do that no longer because of an irritating and pervasive fuzziness that particularly afflicted k’s and w’s. The way out of this turned out to involve changing my Appearance Preferences (Preferences > Appearance from the System menu). The required attention was focussed on the Fonts tab whereupon the Details button was brought into use.

In the resulting dialogue box, smoothing was set to "Subpixel (LCDs)" and hinting to "Slight". Closing down everything after making the required selections and a restart of Firefox was all that was needed to improve matters and more completely make myself at home with Firefox 3.

Some nice things coming through…

While everyone is making good use of WordPress 2.5.x, development continues apace for future releases of the popular blogging platform and there are some goodies coming through on the functionality front. Google Gears are being brought into play for speeding up the administration dashboard; this started out being more prominent before being made more unobtrusive. The other big change has been an overhaul of the theme gallery and, if the theme is compatible, an overview facility has been added too. So WordPress is being tweaked and improved in the background to make 2.6 an interesting release.