Christian Huff

Well, thank you, Opera, Mozilla, Apple and Google

Saturday, 1. August 2009, 12:02:16

In the past, Microsoft has happily abused its monopoly on the PC operating system market to push Internet Explorer onto each and every computer on the planet. When Opera Software first complained at the EU to act against the bundling of Windows and IE, I was enthusiastic. The European Union had previously severly punished MS for monopoly abuse, and forced it to ship Windows versions without the latest Media Player.

Seeing how Microsoft would lose any argument with the EU, the company agreed to ship Windows 7 without a browser in the EU. The choice of a browser would be delegated to the OEM vendors (that usually already install quite a number of additional programs on retail PCs) or the end-user. But that didn't seem to appeal the folks at Opera. Instead of nobody being allowed to make use of the Windows monopoly, a number of bigger vendors should be able to do so. Yay for the EU for turning a monopoly into an oligopoly. What qualifies you to be on that list? Market share (if that can be measured objectively)? The money to hire an attorney? This is really not improving anything...

Thanks to Opera, Mozilla, Apple and Google, there will be no Windows version without IE, but a Windows version with the IE homepage set to a page with links to (ironically) IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

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Silly code of the week

Wednesday, 6. February 2008, 15:32:18

scripting, web, rant

Some web programmers really think they're funny. This one is from a bigger commercial MMORPG gaming website that presents user contributed valentine pictures using popups. The code in the popups is:

<html><head>title here</head>
<body onBlur="self.close()" background="/link/to/some/image.jpg">
</body></html>

This closes the window when you select another picture to display - in theory. I also found the following events trigger the onBlur event:

in Opera:

tabbing to another page (obviously)
enabling the adress bar and clicking the adress or the history pulldown(!!)
the "detach" feature
disabling the sidebar via mouse click (F4 works)
right click:
-> site specific settings
-> content blocking
-> printing(!!)
and many more...

in Firefox:

alt-tabbing through all windows and returning to the popup (releasing the alt key while on the popup again, this possible causes onBlur first and onFocus next)
moving the popup window (!!)
left- or right-clicking the window decorations(!!)
viewing the source code of the popup

IMHO very user-unfriendly scripting...

Note: This is under Gnome 2.20.1 (metacity) using the latest versions of these browsers.

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Lord of the Rings Episode 1: The Hobbit

Wednesday, 19. December 2007, 12:45:31

, two movies, hobbit, lotr

Today, The Hobbit movie by LotR maker Peter Jackson has finally evolved from a rumor to a real announcement:

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSN1850603620
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Director Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc said on Tuesday they have agreed to make two movies based on the book "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien, ending months of legal wrangling.
[..]
Jackson and Walsh envisioned the first film covering the events of "The Hobbit" and the second bridging the 80-year gap between that novel and the first "Lord of the Rings" book.

Wait, TWO movies?!

While I can imagine the first movie to become a good one, it seems strange to me to fill the 60 (not 80) years gap between The Hobbit and the first chapters of LotR without bending the story. I already see Gandalf being with the dwarves and Mr. Baggins all the time so Jackson can use the White Council vs. The Necromancer (Sauron) substory for the second movie. There is of course stuff happening between The Hobbit and LotR, but that's more relevant to the LotR storyline than to The Hobbit. There are details often told in the LotR books and of course left out of the LotR movies. Why would that level of detail return as a separate movie? Or is it gonna be Lord of the Rings Episode 2: The Quiet Life of Mr. Bilbo Baggins?

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Howto: Opera 9.50 with native Qt4 interface

Tuesday, 18. December 2007, 00:36:17

Unix, skinning, testing, Qt4 ...

The upcoming Opera 9.50 will include a native Qt4 interface, which will allow the UI elements to be drawn using any Qt4 style installed on your system. This is how to test that particular feature on Ubuntu Linux 7.10.

0. Preparations
Install a tool to configure the Qt4 style, run:

sudo aptitude install qt4-qtconfig

Which will also install Qt4 if you have not installed it previously. Now you can type:

qtconfig-qt4

to run the Qt4 config tool and select a style.

1. Download Qt4-enabled Opera 9.50 for Unix
There are a lot of different versions in one of the snapshot directories. The one you'll want is <YOUR_PLATFORM>/opera-9.50-<TIMESTAMP>.9-static-qt.<PLATFORM>-<BUILD_NUMBER>.tar.bz2 (or tar.gz, they're identical). The shared-qt builds are currently still linked against Qt3, while the static-qt (NOT opera-static) builds are statically compiled against Qt4.

2. Unpack & install
for the bz2 archive use:

tar xfj opera-9.50-<TIMESTAMP>.9-static-qt.<PLATFORM>-<BUILD_NUMBER>.tar.bz2

for the gz archive use:

tar xfz opera-9.50-<TIMESTAMP>.9-static-qt.<PLATFORM>-<BUILD_NUMBER>.tar.bz2

a directory will be created, cd to that:

cd opera-9.50-<TIMESTAMP>.9-static-qt.<PLATFORM>-<BUILD_NUMBER>

Install Opera using:

sudo ./install.sh

you should now be asked where to install Opera. I chose /opt/opera-beta in order not to mess with the stable 9.2x version I installed using package management! This is a good idea as the 9.50 unix snapshots are far from stable at the moment!

Files shall be installed as follows:
-----------------------------------------------------------
 Wrapper Script : /usr/bin
 Binaries       : /usr/lib/opera/9.50-20071213.9
 Plugins        : /usr/lib/opera/plugins
 Shared files   : /usr/share/opera
 Documentation  : /usr/share/doc/opera
 Manual page    : /usr/share/man
-----------------------------------------------------------
Is this correct [ y,n,c | yes,no,cancel ] ?
no <---- enter "n" or "no" here
Enter installation prefix [/usr]
/opt/opera-beta <---- enter installation path!

Confirm the following questions by pressing enter, you will again be presented a summary:

Files shall be installed as follows:
-----------------------------------------------------------
 Wrapper Script : /opt/opera-beta/bin
 Binaries       : /opt/opera-beta/lib/opera/9.50-20071213.9
 Plugins        : /opt/opera-beta/lib/opera/plugins
 Shared files   : /opt/opera-beta/share/opera
 Documentation  : /opt/opera-beta/share/doc/opera
 Manual page    : /opt/opera-beta/share/man
-----------------------------------------------------------
Is this correct [ y,n,c | yes,no,cancel ] ?
yes

Opera will then be installed. I answered the following question with "no" as I thought it would possibly mess with the regular Opera installation:

System wide configuration files:
  /etc/opera6rc
  /etc/opera6rc.fixed
 would be ignored if installed with the prefix "/opt/opera-beta".
Do you want to install them in /etc [ y,n | yes,no ] ?
no

Now, installation is finished!

3. Running Opera
Running Opera now is as easy as typing /opt/opera-beta/bin/opera into your terminal (or creating a panel shortcut with that command). BEWARE that running Opera that way will load your default profile (~/.opera) and irreversibly try to convert your mail and other stuff to new formats! Use the -personaldir argument. Also, I found the -style argument useful while testing:

/opt/opera-beta/bin/opera -personaldir .opera-beta -style

4. Native Qt4 skinning
Under Tools -> Appearance -> Skin, you should see three skins, "Qt native", "windows skin" and "Opera standard". Select the Qt native skin. You may have to restart Opera for changes to have an effect. Now, try the Qt4 native skin with Tango Icons I uploaded here, or try one of the skins I uploaded to my webspace: http://opera.dragonriders.de

Have fun!

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Some more information about this blog

Wednesday, 12. December 2007, 19:59:13

intro

I'll explain a little what you can expect from this blog in the future: Some posts, like this one, will be in english and targeted at the general reader from anywhere, like IT stuff, and some posts will be in german and will contain more personal things like football.

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Too lazy to host my own blog

Wednesday, 12. December 2007, 18:36:46

updates, web applications, intro

I have plenty of webspace that I pay for and could host my own blog there without any problems. So why am I here? First of all, to make things convenient, my webspace provider has created a so-called "MultiInstaller" that allows you to install (copy files, create database tables) a wide range of web applications automatically to your webspace, making things very easy. However, they are often somewhat behind the current version of that app, and the installer does not take care of updates. With an unstable FTP connection, uploading an update into your webspace can be a hassle. That's why I'm here. I'm too lazy for manual updates of yet another web application everytime a vulnerability has been found. There should be a way to handle web apps in shared host environments using something like a package management system (apt and friends).

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