I stumbled upon the Tab Mix Plus extension for Firefox yesterday and I fell in love with it on the spot. Finally there's someone who understands tabbed browsing and realizes what's missing in Firefox' default implementation. I urge the devs to incorporate this extension into head. This is not an extension, it's crucial! If you use tabs, go get it! If you understand the difference between Ctrl-Tab Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Tab-Tab, run and get it!

Some of the features:

• Session saver (When starting Firefox, it restores all tabs that were open when you quit Firefox)
• Undo closing a tab
• Open new tabs next to existing ones instead of at the end of the list.
• Ctrl-Tab moves to the previously active one instead of the next one in the tab list.
• Organizes tabs in multiple rows if you have many tabs open.
• Ctrl-W'ing the last tab doesn't close Firefox anymore.
• Customize mouse and keyboard events, tab font and color.

All of these are optional. If you don't like one, you can switch it off.

If you are a user of Urchin 4 or 5 you might have noticed that Urchin’s “Countries” report does not match the standards that Urchin has set for professional website statistics.  It seems to be Urchin’s weak spot.  It might be ok for you but I was certainly disappointed when I discovered that Urchin determines (or should I rather say: attempts to determine) a visitor’s location from a database that is derived from reverse DNS lookups. This type of location reporting can hardly be considered state-of-the-art, even less so for a commercial website log file analytics application. This article is about how Urchin 5 can be fooled into using true Geo IP mappings for its Countries report.

Urchin is a professional web log analysis and statistics application. It was recently acquired by Google and what used to be called Urchin 6 On Demand is now being integrated into Google Analytics. I don’t know for how long the stand-alone Urchin 5 will be around but right now it is still used by many individuals and corporations. I was not happy with the way Urchin deals with dynamic URLs, i.e. URLs that have query parameters in them. After playing around with Urchin 5's advanced filters for a while, I came to the conclusion that they can be employed to improve Urchin's dynamic URL handling.

One might think that it wouldn't be so difficult to setup Visual SourceSafe 2005 on Windows Server 2003 with IIS such that users can access the SourceSafe database using the Visual SourceSafe 2005 Internet plugin. But dude, I was so wrong! I managed to get it working in the end but it took me an etire day. Anyway, this isn't a complete HowTo. I would just like to point out a few not so obvious caveats.

The other day I decided that I wanted to switch my laptop's German language version of Windows XP to the English language version. I could have reinstalled Windows XP from scratch but that would have meant losing all my settings and configurations and, since I have fine-tuned my system, many hours of work would have gone down the drain. Furthermore, I wanted to maintain the German version for certain tasks. What to do?

Let's skip the introduction. You probably googled this article anyway, so you'll know what I'm talking about. This is the scenario: You use group policies to publish or assign software packages (usually Windows Installer MSI) to your Windows workstations. At some point it would be convenient to move a package from one group policy to another, without triggering a complete reinstallation.

USB storage - a possible security risk?

Decent IT administrators secure their networks behind firewalls. They install mail filters on their SMTP servers and deploy anti-virus software on all client workstations. But securing the network is not sufficient -- what happens if the users bring their own USB memory sticks and connect them to the computers at their office? A 1 Gb USB stick can sometimes hold an entire company's vital data. Within minutes or even seconds an employee has all the files they need in order to start up their own business and take all the customers with them. Alternatively, what happens if a careless user accidentally compromises the network with an infected USB stick?

If you look at all the pages of a particular site, you will notice that most pages share common parts. These common parts typically include navigation, header, footer, styles and so on. Of course, you can duplicate the common part in every html file on that site. But as the site grows, making a change to one of the common parts ends up in a lot of tedious work: you need to apply the change to every single HTML file on the site. Now imagine your site has 1000 pages! You don't want to do that.

I post this for people who have had the same experience so they do not panic like I did.

The Symptoms

Yesterday one of my Windows Domain Controllers became inaccessible. Users were not able to login to their workstations and I even couldn't log into the server using my admin credentials. The server would not recognize the admin account so I guessed Active Directory must have been down. I had to shutdown the box completely and impolitely using the reset button. After that I did the usual routine checks in order to verify that things were running smoothly. But things weren't at all ok. After the restart, the File Replication Service could not play back its JET database logs and it started an non-authoritative restore (although it didn't say that).

I'm currently struggling to get Gentoo to install from a Live CD on a new Dell Lattitude X300. It boots the kernel just fine but the init script can't mount the live CD because it doesn't find the cdrom drive. The X300 comes with a docking station which holds the CD drive which is connected internally via USB.

[continued from Typo3: Including the Home Page (Site Root) in Navigation]

The Problem

For months, my client's site was running fine using the above simple solution. Over time though, I noticed several oddities. These oddities were caused by the fact that the home page is accessible under two URLs, the canonical root http://www.domain.com/ and the non-canonical root http://www.domain.com/home.0.html as shown in the figure below.

In modern web design, it is considered good practice to have a "Back To Home" link on every page so that users can easily return to the root of the site, i.e. the home page. Because of that I wanted a Home button on every page of my client's Typo3-based website. Although this seems like a very simple thing to do, it turned out to be quite a challenge in Typo3, especially when trying to avoid duplicate content penalties induced by major search engines.

It's often considered convenient to decorate external links in order to indicate the distinction between links that go to a page on the same site and links that leave the site. On one of my sites I use CSS to set a background bitmap for all links. Until today the bitmap was the same for internal as for external links. I used a little hack in order to set the class attribute of internal links to some value while leaving external links untouched.

One of my clients runs his own intranet for his employees. The intranet currently consists of a bunch of static HTML pages which are written and maintained by a single editor. This approach might have been sufficient five years ago but as the intranet grew it became apparent that the static HTML would become unmanageable in the near future. I therefore suggested replacing the existing solution with a community-oriented CMS. Due to certain requirements the set of contestants was cut down to two: Drupal and Plone. I favored Plone because a) I am slightly disappointed with the direction and pace that Drupal’s development has recently taken and b) I wanted to learn Zope and Plone anyway.

Problem: Your web site uses the Typo3 CMS. Your typoscript templates contains TMENU objects for navigation menus. You want to use the page alias somewhere in the A tags of these TMENU menus. For example, you want to set the id of a menu item's A tag to the alias field of the page that the menu item stands for.

<a id="widgets" href="...">Buy Widgets</a>

Buy Widgets is the title of the page and widgets is its alias.

25.07.2006: Fixed typos (RIPrep and RISetup confusion in section Putting a driver into a RIS image).

The other day, a new machine arrived at the office. Although it was a fast and sexy Dell Optiplex SX280, I dreaded going through the setup and installation procedure; maybe because I live in a dream world. In my personal administrators’ dream world, when a new desktop computer arrives the hardest task is trying to get your signature right on that funny brown handheld computer that the UPS dude hands you after dropping the box. That’s because in my dream world I use a fleet of tools and technologies that MS refers to as IntelliMirror. In a nutshell, IntelliMirror equals RIS plus AD plus Windows Installer. I won't tell you all the gory details about these; rather, for the remainder of this article I'll assume that you have used RIS before.

Problem 1: The Site Title Is Global

Your site supports multiple languages using the "modern" single-tree aproach where one page has one or more translations in alternative languages. In Typo3 every page's title usually starts with the site title and the page title is appended to it. The page title can easily be translated by customizing the language-specific header fields. The site title, however, can only be set globally. Consider yourself lucky if your site title is universal across languages. Mine isn't. Furthermore, I like my site's title to contain main search engine keywords, i.e. the words I want my site to be found under in Google, Yahoo and so on.

In this patent assigned to Google, the number of slashes in URLs is used to score the documents to which the URLs point. The existence of this patent led some webmasters to believe that they need to optimize the number of slashes in their URLs in order rank well in Google, especially for hierarchical sites like directories.

My research on a small data set did not give any evidence to support this hypothesis.

The other day I was asked by a client of mine to create a convenient macro for adding watermarks or letterheads to Word documents. The first thought that came to my mind was putting a graphics object (the letterhead) into the header or footer of the document. This is exactly what Word does automatically, when the user clicks the Format | Background menu item. Sounds simple.

Have you ever seen a word processor other than Microsoft's own office suite member Word that can import an RTF (Rich Text Format) file properly? I have not. The reason for this lies in RTF's inherent complexity and its strong dependency on Microsoft's internal Word document implementation. The RTF format is basically a 7-bit-safe, serialized version of a Word document's in-memory representation plus some tweaks that ensure backward compatibility with older programs that read RTF files.

For my web comps I usually use Adobe Illustrator CS and I am quite pleased with it. Recently, I had the chance to review CorelDraw 11. The first time I ever used CorelDraw was more than 10 years ago and it must have been ancient version 2. The most recent version is 12. I reviewed version 11. For a client, I had to update a document created in CorelDraw 7, import it into version 11, apply a few modifications to it and do some streamlining. I was able to do the job, but it wasn't a very pleasant experience. Here's a list of nuisances.

For the impatient: Download thesis as PDF or view as HTML.

During my Masters program in Computer Science I had to write a thesis. Instead of simply writing on a subject determined by one of my professors I picked a subject on my own. Unsurprisingly, my professor had his own research interests so we had to find a compromise. The result of our negotiations was that I would write on two separate subjects, trying to link them with each other. As each of these subjects was worth a thesis of its own, I ended up writing two theses in one. In addition to that, I implemented a software engineering tool and the core of a graphical user interface (GUI) framework. In retrospect, I don’t regret doing it that way because although it was quite labor intensive it was also very interesting. The only drawback was that I wasn’t able to exhaust either subject even remotely.