From the monthly archives:

March 2005

Messy Firefox installation

March 28, 2005

Last week, Mozilla released Firefox version 1.0.2 which includes some security fixes.

While Firefox is a great browser, and continues to be the one I use above any other, where the developers fall down with Firefox is with what happens when you install it.

If you’re using Firefox version 1.0 or 1.0.1, you’ll see a little red icon at the top right of your browser. Clicking on this displays a window that tells you that critical updates are available. This is a great feature in any software and I wish more developers would include something simple like this.

So with Firefox, you’d tell it to go and get an update which it does and installs it. The trouble is, if the update is a program update, what this doesn’t include is the advice that’s buried in the release notes on the Firefox website not to install an updated version on top of a current installation:

Prior to installing Firefox 1.0.2, please ensure that the directory you’ve chosen to install into is clean and doesn’t contain any previous Firefox installations.

Great to learn this after you’ve already installed the update on top of your existing installation!

A few days ago, I installed version 1.0.2 on my IBM ThinkPad T30, a machine that’s not my day-to-day PC, by clicking on the update icon within Firefox. In looking in Add/Remove Programs in Windows a few days after the installation, I noticed the multiple installations of different versions you can see in this little snapshot image.

So I have three Firefox installations on this PC. Apart from the disk space each one takes up, I wondered whether these multiple installations might be the reason why Firefox 1.0.2 was behaving a little oddly and crashing a little too frequently.

So what I did was uninstall version 1.0.2 using Add/Remove Programs. This removed remnants of the two other versions and, after the uninstall, no Firefox information showed in that listing. During the uninstall, I did not remove all the Firefox directories thus preserving my Firefox configuration info. I then downloaded the 1.0.2. setup file from the Firefox website and ran then. Now I have an installation of just version 1.0.2 complete with all my settings. And no more crashes.

The auto-updating feature of Firefox is great, but what I’d like to see is this:

  1. Auto-update tells you that you either a) need to uninstall the previous version before updating, or b) install the updated version into a different directory.
  2. If you choose to uninstall, the updating feature will do it for you and then install the update.

It does something sort of similar with themes and extensions that a particular Firefox version doesn’t support - it disables those themes and extensions so you can go and see if updated ones are available. At the very least, the Firefox updater should warn you re an existing installation before you install an update.

Simple, surely?

CeBIT kicks off to great expectations

March 12, 2005

The CeBIT technology trade show opened this week in Hanover, Germany, running until the 16th.

Keeping up with what’s going on isn’t too difficult.

There’s CeBIT News, the show’s official daily newspaper. Gizmodo is a good place to frequently check on new gadgets, mostly mobile devices. They are blogging commentaries from the show. Plenty of ongoing media reporting.

There’s a great pre-show summary from eWeek on some of the product announcements expected at the show. Some highlights (see the eWeek story for additional show commentary):

  • Three new DVD recorders from Hitachi with up to 250GB capacity and circuitry that can recognize (and skip) commercials.
  • From Intel, “the world’s smallest PC,” designed to fit into a car radio slot, able to function as your car’s navigation, communication, entertainment and switching center
  • NEC is bringing the first HD-DVD drive, with capacities of up to 60GB, and a prototype of “the world’s first PC drive for playing back HD-DVDs, DVDs and CDs.”
  • Panasonic will show what it says is the world’s largest mass-produced plasma display (about 65-inches diagonally) and a compact digital camcorder with 30x optical zoom. Sharp will have an LCD TV of similar size, which Sharp says is the world’s biggest LCD television, along with its BD-HD100, the first Blu-ray disc recorder with hard drive and DVD.
  • In the headset arena, Plantronics’s new CS60-USB is, according to Plantronics, the world’s first wireless USB headset; the DECT technology has a roaming range of up to 300 feet from the user’s computer, and the rechargeable battery should be good for up to nine hours of talk time. Siemens says it’s got the first VOIP cordless DECT telephone; using Skype software, it supports several of the latest Siemens Gigaset cordless phones, and you can even listen to Internet radio using it.
  • A wireless mobile hard drive, with battery, from Data Storage Institute.
  • A combo VOIP phone and USB flash drive (64MB-4GB) from Inter-Active Media Pte. Ltd.
  • The PCMCIA (trade association for PC cards) has a new tech standard “designed to be faster and cheaper than its predecessors,” intended as a replacement for CardBus, to become the preferred solution for users of add-ins.
  • Burn DVDs at 16x-two hours of video written in six minutes-with Must Tech Co’s new 16x DVD+/-R.
  • Watch (and record) broadcast TV on your notebook, using the TV-DVB USB stick, an external TV tuner from Avermedia Technologies

Domain mapping now active

March 5, 2005

Finally, it all works!

Domain mapping is now active for my blogs (and photo albums):

The underlying TypePad addresses that you may have in your blogroll or favorites still work. Any links to specific posts in my blogs that use those addresses will also still work and reach those pages. The RSS feed will continue to work as it is, as well as those feeds via services like Feedburner and NewsGator.

So you don’t really need to change anything if you prefer not to.

It was a painful two-week journey to get here. And, as I learned, the various difficulties I had were all of my own making and related to an incorrect setting I’d made in the DNS entries at my domain host, GoDaddy.

If it hadn’t been for that error, this whole switchover would have been wholly painless and as simple and straightforward as following TypePad’s domain mapping help. Special thanks to Melissa at TypePad Support for helping me finally get here.

So what did I do wrong? Well, it was a simple error but with terminal consequences.

In GoDaddy’s DNS manager settings, I had set the alias in one of the CNAME entries like this:

What the alias should have been was this:

As Melissa explained it to me:

Alias: Weblog
Points to: nevon.typepad.com

That will point to:
weblog.nevon.net

Typically we recommend people point the Alias to www.

Seeing the explanation that simple way made it easier to understand what this CNAME setting means. So I deleted the incorrect alias and edited the setting to be ‘www.’

Waited 24 hours for the DNS to take into account the change and then tried it today. Voila!

The other good news is that I don’t need to change anything either in how ecto or BlogJet - the offline editing apps I use - connect to my blogs. The existing settings still work, so nothing to change or re-configure there.

It all could have been such a painless experience ;)