Resources for writing Firefox Plugins

I’ve got a evil plan to write a Firefox/Thunderbird plug-in to store passwords in the GnomeKeyring or some other desktop-wide place instead of the build-in Password Manager.

My particular itch to scratch here is that I’m tired of having to type my master password every time I open up Firefox or Thunderbird. Thunderbird in particular has a bug where I have to type the password multiple times.

Another Idea that I have is to wrote some kind of a desktop service that will automatically go to various sites like Facebook and WordPress and automatically change my password while storing an updated copy in the keyring.

So here are several useful resources to help me accomplish the task:

• The XUL School Tutorial – A sea of information about how to write old-style Mozilla plug-ins.
• The Mozilla Addon Builder and SDK – The new way to write Mozilla add-ons, this may or may not be a sufficient API for my needs.
• The Mozilla Password Manager source code – I need to read this to understand how to tap into it.

Tab Candy – New Firefox 4.0 Innovation

Tab Candy – New Firefox 4.0 Innovation

This has a nice look to it, but I can’t help  but be reminded of Activities feature of the Gnome 3.0 shell.

It seems to me more and more of the things that naturally should be done by the OS are moved into the browser, with window management being the particular example here.

I really think that browser tabs, while being a good feature and workaround for the OS problems we had back when they were invented, should have been surpassed long ago by general OS-level window tabs (And the recent trend to move them to the top f the window proves it, I think).

RabbitVCS : Easy version control for Linux

RabbitVCS is a plug-in for Nautilus, The Gnome file manager, that implements a GUI for the Subversion Code Version Control system similar to the way TortoiseSVN does this for Windows Explorer.

As one can see from the comments on the site, this is a much sought-after feature.

The system is written in Python, and the authors indicate intentions to support more version control systems in the future with support for Git already in the works.  I will be very happy to see it support my personal favorite VCS, Bazaar, one day.

Rabbit VCS is very programmer oriented, and probably not suitable for common users, one thing I would like to see in Nautilus one day, is a tool that would deliver the benefits of file version tracking to common users, such a tool would need to support not only  developer oriented VCS, but also other OS and infrastructure-level facilities such as LVM and Storage snapshots and Backup systems.

Fixing the Nautilus garbage bin again

Usability bugs are nasty, they tend to be a major point of frustration for novice users, yet their importance is sometimes hard to explain to developers.

An even worse situation occurs when such bugs, once worked around, come back to bite you in a later software release because of a lack of developer foresight.

I am going to discuss a work around for a bug I’ve already discussed in the past. I’m going to skip going into the details of how this bug arises, please read the previous post for those.

Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” upgrade notes

As experienced computer users know, the fresh-released versions of products are typically not very stable and reliable. It takes a few months (Typically until the x.1 version is released) for the product to really stabilize and become production-ready. This also seems to be true for Free and Open-Source software, though the maturing rate seems to be faster.

Knowing that, I typically wait a couple of months after an Ubuntu release before I take the time to upgrade. When it comes to Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, a further reason not to upgrade was provided by the fact that up until now it didn’t include a stable version of Firefox.

I finally decided to take the time and upgrade the Ubuntu version on my personal home computer yesterday. The upgrade didn’t went as smoothly as I hoped it would. Most of the issues can be blamed on the manual tweaks I’ve made to my system. Not all, however.

Below is a list of the issues I’ve encountered during and after the upgrade, and the solutions I came up with (when applicable).

Some long-awaited features in GNOME 2.22

I’ve been reading the GNOME 2.22 Release Notes which generally contain a laundry-list of nice-to-have features and improvements, when I stumbled across the following 2 lines in section 5.2 discussng improvement to administration tools:

The Shared Folders tool now allows you to edit the SMB user database (smbpasswd).

The Network tool can now set up PPPoE and GPRS connections.

I cannot stress enough how important I perceive those improvements to be.

Fixing Thumbnails in Nautilus

If you are like me and many other internet users, you’ve probably downloaded movies with one P2P program or another.

If you did that downloading while using Nautilus and Gnome, you might have noticed that Nautilus fails to produce Thumbnails for downloaded movies, presenting the film-roll Icon instead.

What happens here, is that Nautilus attempts to generate thumbnails for files as soon as you enter the directory that contains them, when it comes to files that are only halfway-downloaded it fails for obvious reasons.

The problem is that when Nautilus fails to generate a thumbnail, that failure is noted down somewhere, and therefore Nautilus does not attempt to regenerate the thumbnail once the file is fully downloaded.

Viewing Nautilus script parameter values

I’ve been working on some Nautilus scripts recently, and I’ve found that it would be easier if I could inspect the values that Nautilus passes to the scripts, so I wrote a little script to achieve just that, I hope you’ll find it useful if you ever set out to write a Nautilus script.

Deleting files as root in Nautilus

I’ve just seen the title of this post in my blog stats as search-term hit to my blog, and while they guy searching didn’t find his answer here (He got directed to my Nautilus Garbage Bin post), I decided to make sure the next one searching for that will find a decent answer.

I must admit that I firmly believe that root’s work should be done from the command-line, however, if a guy insists on doing it this way, well so be it, this is, after all, Linux, the OS of the free…

So basically I can see 2 ways of going about deleting files as root with Nautilus:

Fixing the Nautilus Garbage bin

I’ve recently bought a new 500GB hard drive and installed it on my home machine which is currently running Ubuntu 7.10, once installed, I’ve setup the new hard drive to be mounted under “/usr/local”, made a directory in there for my day-to-day regular user, and moved key large folders, such as my “incoming” folder, from my home directory to the new drive, placing symlinks in the home directory instead.

So far so good, I’ve been enjoying my new drive space without having to change my habits and place files in new locations, but this morning I encountered a weird problem: attempting to move a file in Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, from my “incoming” folder to the Garbage bin, yielded the following friendly but not very helpful error message: