RasterWeb!

Dave, meet Brent. Brent, this is Dave… Talk amongst yourselves…

Reasonably intelligent but non-tech-savvy housewife, meet Unix…

…I am a reasonably intelligent but non-tech-savvy housewife who was able to get plucker to work on my Mac OS X machine… I have absolutely no working knowledge of Unix or command line entry.

Interesting look at Mac OS X users who don’t aren’t really *nix savvy, and their experiences installing Plucker.

Slowly… slowly, but surely… my plan is is working… Soon all the geeks in the office will prefer to use *nix based operating systems over Windows based operating systems… And as an added bonus, they’ll choose open and open-source solutions over closed and proprietary solutions…

There’s hope for us all yet!

There’s Trackback, Pingback, and others, and there are even people who say they just don’t care.

So far I’ve implemented ‘Get Back!’ which is short for ‘Get back to me…’ which is a form you can fill out. This form will send an email to me, and I’ll read it. If it’s interesting enough I’ll Get Back! to you, or even post something about it here.

It doesn’t use some fancy new format that takes weeks to understand. Maybe version 2.0 will implement such complexities…

To respond to this post, just use our ‘Get Back!’ interface… (Warning: Human involvement required!)

I run Mozilla nightly builds quite a bit, which means I end up installing a new Mozilla on top of an old Mozilla pretty often. I thought I should write up some tips so I remember how to do it properly. Or at least how I do it, and what works for me.

Ok, the first thing I do is grab a nightly build from mozilla.org. If you don’t want to figure out which one you need, the home page should have a section labelled Nightly Builds.

After I download a nightly build I delete my old Mozilla app, and make a backup of my profile. On Mac OS X you’ll find that at: ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/[name]/[randomstring.slt]

Where [name] is the profile name (might be default or your username…) and the
[randomstring.slt] is a bunch of random characters. I just dupe the [name] folder for safe keeping.

I then install the new version of Mozilla. Now, most of the time if I try to launch the app, it gets stuck on the splash screen with ‘Creating first window’ – if this happens – there is a file to delete. It’s at: ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/[name]/ [randomstring.slt]/chrome/chrome.rdf. Deleting that file should allow Mozilla to launch properly.

Once Mozilla is running I have to re-install any add-ons, so it’s off to mozdev to grab what I need. (You can also download the XPI files you need, but don’t forget to check for updates now and then.) I like uabar and EasySearch. Oh, don’t forget any themes you might want.

What if it all blows up? Occasionally I get a nightly build that just doesn’t work. That’s to be expected. I then do one of two things. I check if I have an older nightly build that is stable. (I keep a few around just in case.) If that doesn’t work, I just grab the latest Alpha release, which is usually not too terribly different from the nightly builds.

That’s it… Happy browsing!