Archive for April, 2008

After a great deal of frustration with my update manifest, I’ve finally uploaded the latest builds of CoLT and Googlebar Lite. Here’s what’s new in each:

CoLT 2.4.0

• New rich-text copy option (for pasting rich text URLs) now available.
• Added support for Firefox 3.0pre (includes beta 5 support).
• Minimum version changed to 1.5. Beginning with this build, Firefox 1.0.x is no longer supported.
• CoLT now exclusively uses a chrome manifest.
• Added a new Persian (fa-IR) translation.
• Added a new Polish (pl-PL) translation.

Googlebar Lite 4.6.5

• Added support for Firefox 3.0pre (includes beta 5 support).
• Minimum version changed to 2.0. Beginning with this build, Firefox 1.x is no longer supported.
• Removed 1 unused global variable and 4 unused functions left over from older releases.
• Googlebar Lite now exclusively uses a chrome manifest.
• Bug Fix: Googlebar Lite no longer appears in certain popup windows when other chrome items are hidden.
• Bug Fix: URL anchor directives (using the # mark) no longer show up as search terms if the query string appears as the last part of the URL.
• Bug Fix: Search term buttons were not being separated correctly when a search phrase, surrounded with double quotes, was immediately followed by a search term with no space in between.
• Bug Fix: Search term highlighting is now automatically turned off when the user chooses to hide the highlighter toolbar button.
• New Czech (cs-CZ) localization.

As always, let me know if you encounter any problems. Stay tuned for a post or two addressing the frustrations I ran into. A tutorial might also appear as a result.

I hope to release the latest and greatest versions of Googlebar Lite and CoLT sometime tonight, if at all possible. As I have mentioned before, these releases will add Firefox 3.0pre compatibility, meaning that they should work in all of the Firefox 3 beta builds, as well as the current nightly builds.

A number of changes had to be made to Googlebar Lite, since it was using now deprecated API calls. Some of the new interfaces are not backwards compatible with older versions of Firefox. As a direct result, Firefox 1.x support is being dropped. This will apply to both Googlebar Lite and CoLT, so I can keep the build process consistent between the two. I will continue to offer Googlebar Lite 4.6.4 and CoLT 2.3.0, both of which support Firefox 1.x builds.

At work, I’m in charge of 20 individual build systems for one of our larger software project (18 Linux systems and 2 Windows systems). Every machine is connected to a private network that cannot see the outside world. As you might expect, the occasional “clock skew” warning would be thrown by gcc, since some of the source files had date stamps in the future. To fix this, I set out to learn about configuring NTP on a private network. As is typical of the Linux world, there was little useful documentation to be found. After gleaning little bits of information from a number of sources, I figured out how to do it, and I’m writing it down for everybody’s benefit.

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I have now migrated this website to WordPress 2.5. Better yet, my installs are now managed with Subversion, which will make future updates as easy as issuing a single command from my web-server command line. This all comes thanks to a handy article in the WordPress Codex that gives step-by-step instructions.

This new install was done in a virgin folder (for subversion’s sake), and I had to copy existing files over to the new location. If you spot any breakage, please let me know and I’ll fix it.