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Firefox and Search Engines

Tuesday 9th January 2007 (viewed 8464 times)

If you’re using Firefox you know there’s a Search Bar, by default located to the right of your URL-window, and that there are a number of search engines to choose from.

Well, when I was visiting my friend David I noticed he used the little Search Bar to search for music at AllMusic. I was impressed by this and realised that the list of search engines in the Search Bar must be customizable!

Lo and behold, it is! I might be the last person on earth to discover this, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the ‘New’ feature! I just clicked the arrow next to the Google G and chose ‘Manage Search Engines…‘!

I quickly removed every search engine except Google. Then I used the nifty little function in the Search Bar to search for more search engines.

In ‘Manage Search Engines…’ there’s a link that says ‘Get more search engines…‘. Here I found Search Bar add-ons for IMDb and WikiPedia, which I quickly included. It’s really easy, just click and it’s installed!

I then realised that I wanted to use the Search Bar to search the Swedish-English dictionary called Lexin at Språkrådet. And also search for English-Swedish translations.

There’s a site called MyCroft with many Search Bar add-ons, and they have a bunch of add-ons for the dictionaries at Språkrådets website, but the ones I found there were broken.

So I read up on how to make my own add-on… It was astonishingly easy. I just followed the instructions at Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox.

If you wish to use them, just open your Search Bar and choose “Add Svenskt-Engelskt lexikon” and/or “Add Engelskt-Svenskt lexikon“, while visiting my site. I made them accessible by adding some header-lines to my site 8)

You can also find the files here:

Svenskt-Engelskt lexikon
Engelskt-Svenskt lexikon

Hope you have some use for them!

Modified: Tuesday 9th January 2007

Adventures of the web

Sunday 7th January 2007 (viewed 7205 times)

There are some amusing aspects of coding, or system administration, that I’ve come to know through the years. One of them is:

When you set out to fix a problem, you end up doing a lot more than what you originally intended.

This is what happened to me today. I was aware that my blog looked like it had been put through Liberaces wardrobe, on a bad hair day, when viewed with Internet Explorer. So now that I just had won $160 on blackjack bonus hunting, I thought that lady luck might be on my side. I might give this seemingly strange task a go.

I started IE and took a look at the page. The sidebar elements somehow bleeded into the main page area and all the texts ended up beneath the place where the footer was supposed to be, and all the fonts were screwed up in size. I thought that this might be a problem with the stylesheet. So I started checking it for anything that might cause this strange behaviour. I checked all the places where I had put code to avoid IE breaking, but none of them could cause the things I had seen. I took the opportunity to clean out some old code in the CSS-file and polish it up a little.

Okay then, time to figure out exactly where the sidebar went nuts. I was going to remove some of the sidebar widgets and see what happened. When I accessed the widget manipulation menu I discovered that they weren’t working! What the !#¤%¤¤%? How long had it been like this? Could something have been misplaced when I updated wordpress last time?

I went to my blogs dashboard and saw that 2 days earlier there was an upgrade to Wordpress. I though that it might be a good idea to upgrade and see if that solved my problem. So I started upgrading my wordpress, from 2.0.5 to 2.0.6. It was pretty straightforward, I had just to delete some catalouges and upload the new inform…. wait a minute. Delete some catalouges? Like the wp-includes? Hmm… I had a nagging suspicion that the culprit could be found here, so I checked the information for installing the Widget plugin, and lo and behold if there wasn’t a catalouge there that could reside in the wp-includes catalouge!

I had to find the Widget plugin source, extract the right catalouge and put it back. Said and done. Now I could manipulate my sidebar widgets again! Success! Now then, for the IE problem.

I removed some of my sidebar widgets and it gave very strange effects. Sometimes the sidebar text appeared in the main text area, and sometimes the sidebar text wasn’t even visible at the bottom of the screen. It was as if it disappeared beneath another CSS element. Weird. I messed around little with HTML-code and CSS-code with no success.

Then I thought that I might aswell see if the HTML-code was valid. It might be that something was broken in it that caused IE to behave as it did. So I went to the W3 Validator and input my blogs URL. The horror! The horror! The errors! The errors! There were so many of them! I was reminded of a quote from the movie 2010: “My God, it’s full of stars!”. In my case it would be “My buddha, it’s full of errors!“.

Bleah. I started fixing the errors, one by one. Seeking out the HTML-code, sometimes in .html-pages and sometimes in the sidebar widgets themselves. An arduous task! Took me 30 minutes to complete, but finally the W3 Validator gave me the green lights.

To my utter astonishment my blog suddenly looked okay in IE! Amazing! I was prepared for more error pruning and search for anomalous code! But no need. There it was, bright and shiny and sticking it’s nose out at me! Jeepers!

I started out trying to fix my blog so IE displayed it as it was supposed to be displayed and in that attempt I managed to polish and clean up my CSS-file, upgrade Wordpress, fix my Widget plugin and clean up a lot of HTML-errors! The work I ended up doing was a lot more than I originally intended.

But all is well that ends well. It’s all in a days work for… Mr System Administrator Man!

Modified: Sunday 7th January 2007

Knurf tegel by yragti teresklp?

Tuesday 2nd January 2007 (viewed 4470 times)

You might be looking at the headline of this post and wonder what it says. I can assure you that you’re not the only one! It’s one of the by products of the new year celebrations!

Something happened to me. I either drank very, very much or someone spiked one of my drinks at the last party we went to…

Okay, from the beginning of a story I’ve puzzled together from memory fragments and other peoples tales.

The evening on 31:th of december 2006 started with a 30-year party for a good friend of mine, Johannes. Everything went super and it was a very nice party! I brought 3 bottles of wine with me, not intending to drink them all myself. I think I might have atleast drank 2 bottles of wine myself. Others drank from them too, but I have no way of knowing how much.

At around 1.30 am (I think) we wandered off into town to a collective of students (in Centralpalatset) where we were waiting for a person to come and pick us up and guide us to another collective (above Bosses Glassbar) where the real party was taking place. Here somewhere I begin to have serious memory lapses. I remember parking my bike outside of the first collective and then we collectively wandered on foot to the next place.

SocietyThe things I remember was that I was somehow associating the place we were at to a movie called Society, about a upper class place where people melt into one another. Very very strange movie. I have vague recollections that I thought that there would be some serious, nonsexual, very icky melting to be done later and they wanted me in on it.

Then I remember I tried to leave, but forgot my shoes. I went back for them telling the people I went down with to go on without me, that this was a sacrifice I was ready to make. The next thing I remember is waking up. In my bed. How I got there is an utter mystery to me. There are some fragments of memory popping up now and then.

Some of them is of me standing on a balcony and chatting with someone. I have a nagging feeling that I might have insinuated something about melting and icky stuff and how upper class society members are cannibals and that if the person I was talking to was a cannibal, it was okay, as long as they didn’t expect me to be one. Then I remember standing on another balcony, talking to someone else, about how upper class citizens probably stood on balconies and spit on the people walking beneath them. I know, I know, this is really weird! I’ve also got this recollection of myself walking home, and shouting and screaming that I was not afraid anymore, that they might try and come and get me, but I was ready to defend myself… I think I was shouting atleast.

The next day I looked in my phone book and saw that I had sent some strange text messages (I’ll translate them to english):

1. Jag år på en fest om jag inte kan cdskiva?
I’m year at a party if I can not cdrecord?

2. Jag är knufr tegel by yragti teresklp?
I am knufr tegel by yragti teresklp?

3. A
A

4. Jag har blivit vi exos vi syns om några år ) avslanstis
I have become we exos see you in a couple of years ) avslanstis

5. Jag är inte död ) unsch jag önskar att alla visse om de,
I’m not dead ) unsch I wish everyone kew about i

6. Jag ah i problem
I ah i problem

If you can figure out what I tried to write when I wrote the knufr-message, I would be very happy! Because I have relly really no clue to what I tried to communicate! It is possible that I tried to emulate the language of the Ancients from Stargate and Stargate Atlantis, but I’m not sure about that.

I also called my friends Jens, Modin and Ville. Jens told me that I apparently thought I was beeing followed. Modin said I had called him when he received the knufr-message. He answered with “Good morning!” and I had said “Yeah, good morning, isn’t it?” and hang up! Ville told me I had said something like “You’re the only one who can understand me. It’s much more disgusting than I thought!”; probably all this was in line with my thoughts about the Society movie and people wanting to melt me.

Oh well. When I got up I also noticed that my backpack was missing and my bicycle was probably standing where I left it. So I took a walk for my bike, the backpack I assumed I had either hid (to keep it safe from whoever I thought was following me) or left at the last place we went to. When I got to the bike I discovered that I had somehow managed to take off the bicycle key from my keyring!!! For heavens sake!

I thought about walking home to get my reserve key and then coming back, but decided on carrying my bike back home instead of walking the same distance twice more. It’s fantastic what you can do if you look like you have the right to do it. Noone stopped me and asked about the bike. I even walked right past a police car!

All in all it was a very nice party, but the paranoia bit was very new to me! Don’t think I’ve ever been paranoid when drunk before. That’s why there’s a nagging suspicion of drugs involved. I don’t do drugs, not voluntarily, oh except alcohol that is!

I also got a SMS 30 min ago telling me that they had found my backpack, at the collective above Bosses. The only thing that is bothering me right now is… why did I take off my bike key from my keyring, and where did I put it?