Screwed by Design

In 48 hours I’ll be getting up and preparing for my 6am flight back to D.C. It’s been a long time since I’ve been home and I’m really looking forward to it. All I’ve got left is an easy little 2-page paper and an mildly difficult exam. I’ve spent the weekend studying and preparing some Christmas gifts to bring with me. Unfortunately with all the running around I’ve done this weekend, I’ve somehow managed to lose my student ID (which also serves as our debit card) so I’ve had to suspend that until I either find it or go and get a new one. Buying food from the dining halls has really sucked since I now have to use cash and cash customers get their food prices marked up by 60% *sigh*
Just 48 more hours…

For the past few weeks I’ve been using XULRunner to create an easy (no need to constantly reinstall) environment to develop extensions under. But I haven’t really used it to run anything useful up until now, tonight I just packaged ChatZilla and I must say I’m really liking the abiltiy to run my favorite extensions without a browser open. ChatZilla also seems to be quite a bit more stable under XULRunner (under Firefox, CPU usage would skyrocket).

Once XULRunner is officially released, I think it’ll become a great platform for creating various applications (XUL and XPCOM can be used greatly reducing development time). For the time being, if you want to run a great IRC client without having to run Firefox or Mozilla in the background, give XULRunner+ChatZilla a try.

Lake Mendota froze last night. It’s not really a surprise considering it’s been about -2 for a week. On top of being really cold this week, we just got another 4 inches of snow. In some places it’s almost 2ft. deep due to previous snowfall and the high winds we’ve been having.
I can’t wait until I’m back home in the relatively warm weather.

I’ve noticed quite a few Google searches come in looking for things like ‘firefox errors myspace’ and other keywords lately that aren’t necessarily pointed at useful information. So here’s a little recap with some additional information.

Firefox crashes or hangs on Myspace
(keyphrase: running myspace in firefox, firefox randomly closes)
If Firefox crashes/hangs on Myspace or any other site, most of the time it’s simply due to poor code or an incomatible plugin on the page. But there are a few things you can do to remedy the problem:

• Upgrade to Firefox 1.5. A lot of changes have been made since the 1.0.x branch to make Firefox more stable when encountering poor code.
• Report the problem. If Firefox still crashes after installing 1.5 and you want to lend us a hand, just follow these steps:
  1. Make sure Talkback is installed
  2. Reproduce the crash and copy down the Talkback ID
  3. Report the problem to Bugzilla providing the Talkback ID and as much information as possible.

Details about the Internet Explorer 0-day Exploit
(keyphrase: internet explorer exploit)
Like the last entry, there’s still no patch available. Disabling JavaScript will effectively block this exploit, but will severely limit your browsing experience. Using a different browser is a great way to maintain functionality while keeping safe.

Firefox 1.5 Build Identifier
(keyphrase: build identifier firefox 1.5)
Firefox 1.5 and 1.5RC3 are the same build. So if you’re running RC3, there’s no need to upgrade.
These are 1.5’s user agent strings:

Windows

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Mac OS X

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Linux

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Come an’ get it!
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5

If you’ve got RC3, there is no need to update.

My Firefox extension (DSLR Notifier) for Dslreports has finally hit 1.0!
I sort of stopped working on it for a while, but I finally spent some time this weekend fixing some bugs and adding new features. If you’re a member of the site, check it out!
Take a look at the release announcement.

Second network card: $4.95
30 minutes spent figuring out how to send additional traffic over said NIC: $0
ourTunes: $0
‘Borrowing’ roommate’s network jack to create a theoretical total throughput of 200mbps: $0

Achieving nirvana on a level never before thought possible: Priceless

An exploit for all versions of Internet Explorer was discovered in the wild yesterday. The original exploit discovered and reported to Microsoft in May would only hang IE, but this new discovery allows an attacker to execute any program on your computer. Using a weakness in the way IE handles the JavaScript window() function, an attacker could for example open the command prompt with a command to delete the contents of your My Documents directory. The possibilities are almost endless to what this could be used for. No patch has been issued by Microsoft at this time, but running as a limited account under XP will reduce the ability of this to make drastic system-wide changes.

There is also another solution which works just as well

Even though this week is only going to last until Wednesday it’s already looking like it’s going to drag on forever. So far, since last Thursday I’ve:
- Taken 4 exams
- Written a 3 page research proposal
- Done two 10K erg tests (~35min. all out - ouch :P)
- Had practice twice a day, everyday except Sunday

And before Wednesday ends, I’ve got this to look forward to:
- Two more exams
- Four more practices
- Write the first draft of a 10 page research paper
- Pack all my crap

Thursday can’t come too soon