April 30th, 2004
Update: Well, the problem seems solved now, and thanks to everyone for your advice :). Rather than repeat what I said in my comment, do check it out if you’ve replied to my call for help. Thanks again!
This is a computer problem that has been bugging my desktop PC and me (me mostly - the machine seems pretty happy, and sometimes I think I hear sniggers). Well, the problem is, it boots up and then freezes irrevocably (resetting is the only recourse). Nothing out of the ordinary yet, considering I’m running Windows XP, but it freezes at any point from bootup to a fully logged in session in Windows XP. Sometimes it even fails to POST. Sometimes there is just a white line across the screen and the rest is black.
Here’s what I think could be causes:
1) The monitor (it’s a Phillips Brilliance 105 - circa 1996 I think) is too old. But does an old monitor cause the system not to boot or to freeze? Anyone had experience with old monitors? Will it blow up in my face?
2) The power supply’s dying. Possible. But it’s a new one and it should be way above requirements.
I don’t know how to debug (or perhaps I’m just too lazy), so I’m casting about hoping someone would bite and tell me that they have had this exact same problem and how to solve it.
PS. I’m ready for any suggestions that my monitor is truly dead or highly dangerous in its current state - gives me an excuse to get a new, bigger (it’s 15 inch) one.
April 30th, 2004
If you’ve been a good boy or girl, you would have been going to Mozillazine Forums now and then to check out those “The Official Win32 build … is out” threads posted daily by Peter(6) (for Firefox) and Ale (for Thunderbird). What exactly are in these threads? Well, they highlight the latest fixes, patches, bugs, regressions and related news (if any), among other things. A daily snapshot and report of the changes since the last official Win32 build, so to speak. Check out today’s (2004-04-29) Firefox thread and Thunderbird thread and you’ll see what I mean. Very, very useful, and all credit goes to Peter(6) for his hard work and also to Ale who followed in Peter(6)’s footsteps by doing the same for Thunderbird.
When Jacob XP asked yesterday in this thread whether an RSS feed for these official builds threads could be created, I had a feeling that tommorrow (which is today), there will be such an RSS feed. Such was my belief in the spirit of the community. And true enough, there is such an RSS feed for the official builds thread already in existence way before I logged into Mozillazine Forums today. This is possible thanks to Jay (aka Jayfromtaiwan), who’s going to manually update an RSS feed with summaries of these official build threads, you have another excellent source just to keep track of all these great forum posts that appear daily.
Now we have an alternative to the just as excellent The Burning Edge, and more importantly (to me), a quick way to find out the latest Thunderbird checkins, changes and regressions.
Jay is also a custom builder as well, so do check out his Mozilla build site for custom builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, and the occasional Mozilla suite. Custom builds are unofficial builds created by good people, and will include things like processor-specific optimizations (such as SSE2 support for Pentium 4), optional components (such as the DOM Inspector and SVG support), and patches that haven’t made (or may not make) it into the official builds.
April 26th, 2004
Just a note in case someone wonders why this site is down or looks kinda funky in the next 24 hours (or so), I’m changing servers yet again.
Update: after some problems with DNS (there wasn’t a SOA resource record), we’re finally at the new server. Write me if you notice something missing or just plain wrong.
April 23rd, 2004
This is a mini-article I wrote for the SitePoint Community Crier after a fellow staff member requested that I write some helpful tips for “next week’s Crier”. It’s just been published in Issue 64 and I’m simpy reproducing it here.
The SitePoint Community Crier is the newsletter of SitePoint Forums, and is put together by the Community Team lead by Saara Ord (Saz249). They do amazing work and I must say probably the most work among all the Teams (Programming, Design, Hosting, and Grow) just by producing the Crier alone. If you are not already subscribed, show them a bit of support by giving the Crier a go (subscribe at Newsletters page).
I’ll probably be writing more mini-articles for Firefox for the Crier, so if you have any suggestions on what I should cover, do write me or leave a comment. An even better idea would be to submit your own article to the Crier staff for publication - if you’re already a member of SitePoint Forums, just contact Saz249, or you can write me and I’ll set you up.
Now, on to the article…
Read the rest of this entry »
April 22nd, 2004
Actually, just the extension manager menu item has been turned on, and a non-working dialog for updating extensions (hence the “pre-preview” - it is not a mistake). This can be seen in today’s (2004-04-21) nightly builds - I was alerted to this by this CVS comment Ben Goodger gave on a checkin of his:
turn on extension manager menu item (testing only!)
Just a note before the screenshots: none of this really works yet! So don’t go around asking why the extension manager doesn’t work if you do get the 2004-04-21 nightly build.
An “Extensions” menu item has been added to the “Tools” menu:
Clicking on that menu item opens the extensions manager, which supposedly would list the installed extensions and allows you to uninstall or update your extensions. Clicking on “Update” brings up the update dialog, which of course doesn’t work at this point.
Also available in the options (Tools -> Options) is a new “Software Update” section in the “Advanced” section.
Firefox will check for updates to your installed extensions via a web service (Ben Goodger has a weblog entry on this). Good stuff that. Checking for updated extensions is a difficult task to keep up with when you’ve anything over 3 extensions installed (I have 9). And there’s going to be checking for new Firefox versions as well, judging from the options. Don’t suppose it will be too useful for those of us who are in tune with the developments (nightly build users included, of course), but I suppose something like this is so quite standard in most applications now, and probably trivial to implement. Good for “normal” users I guess. Nightly build followers and contributing developers will probably know by instinct that a milestone release has been released. If not news will probably spread like wildfire from sources like MozillaZine and, of course, weblogs. Not going to use that option, I guess.
Update: Ben has just posted several screenshots of the Extension Manager.
Computer problems (er, need help)
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