Released: Mailfrom 0.2.5 and Future Development
Mailfrom 0.2.5 was released today. This version fixed a defect to provide Firefox 3.6 compatibility and provides support for Windows Live Hotmail.
I've realised for some time that Firefox now provides limited out-of-the-box support for Yahoo Mail and GMail as the target for mailto links. So I'm going to change the purpose of mailfrom from replacing the built-in functionality to enhancing it.
As an experiment, I've moved the source code management to github. I've not used git before and I'm interested to see what the fuss is about!
Firefox 3.6 Compatibility
Quick update on Firefox 3.6. Modify Headers and XHTMLMP have both been successfully tested in beta 4. The max version for each has been bumped at AMO and both are now available for install into 3.6.
Initial Mailfrom testing has revealed a couple of defects. I'm going to work on those over the next week and hopefully have it done before GA release or Christmas (whichever comes first).
Running with Pineapples
I'm going to be running the Winter Pineapple Classic, a 5K (3 mile) 'fun' run over obstacles on Saturday November 14.
The event is to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Any and all donations are gratefully accepted and can be made up until December 4, 2009 at this special page.
Released: Modify Headers 0.6.6
Back in April I released Modify Headers 0.6.6. This version fixes a bug in the import function introduced in 0.6.5.
This last weekend, I tested Modify Headers, XHTML Mobile Profile and Mailfrom on Firefox 3.5b4 successfully. All the addons are now updated to work with the beta.
Release: Modify Headers 0.6.5
Modify Headers 0.6.5 was released over the weekend. This adds a new column on the list of headers to provide a comment for each entry. In addition an enhancement to float the admin window to the top if a user clicks on the Tools menu item was implemented.
The new release should update automatically for most users, or it can be downloaded At Mozilla Addons.
It’s good to be back
At long last I've been able to get the blog back up and running after almost a month of down time. At the end of June my webhost had a double disk failure on the server that hosts the virtual server and all the data was lost!
Thankfully I had setup a daily cron job to email a backup of all the databases. It's taken a few weeks to get everything back up and running. First I had to get some websites I host restored, second work has been incredibly busy (50 - 80 hrs a week) and on top of that I've been working on a new website for a charity here in Seattle. At long last I've had the time to get the blog back.
This should serve as a warning to anyone who has a virtual server: KEEP REGULAR BACKUPS.
Released: Modify Headers 0.6.4 and XHTML Mobile Profile 0.5.3
Both Modify Headers and XHTML Mobile Profile have been updated this week.
Version 0.6.4 of Modify Headers fixes a nsIObserver interface problem with the add-on working in Firefox 3 beta. XHTML Mobile Profile 0.5.3 adds support for the content type application/vnd.wap.multipart.mime.
Mailfrom 0.2 Released
Mailfrom 0.2 was released over the weekend. This adds support for AOL Mail and handling for subject lines in mailto links.
Download from Mozilla Addons.
Cygwin: died waiting for dll loading
Over the weekend I was trying to use mod_rewrite with apache 2 webserver for cygwin and kept getting the following error:
11086085 [main] httpd2 4492 fork: child 5492 - died waiting for dll loading, errno 11
It seemed obvious that cygwin was unable to load some dependency for mod_rewrite. After a little googling, I found a suggestion to rebase cygwin. The procedure is as follows:
- Shutdown cygserver (if running): net stop cygserver.
- Close all cygwin windows.
- Open Start->Run
- rebase has to be run from an ash shell, so type C:\path\to\cygwin\bin\ash.exe
- Once the shell window in open: $ cd /bin
- $ ./rebaseall
- $ exit to close the window
After this, I restarted the cygserver service and apache and mod_rewrite worked perfectly.
PHP and Cygwin
I've been having some problems with PHP and Apache 2 on windows recently. I would be doing some development work and refreshing the page to test progress and after some short time Apache would stall and require a restart. I tracked the problem down to using the binary module that comes with PHP. If that module was removed from the Apache configuration, the webserver would be just fine - but without PHP running.
So, I took a look at cygwin to see whether PHP could be made to work with it. I already had the Apache 2 webserver package installed, so all I needed was PHP. Looking at the official PHP packages, there is no support for PHP. After some searching around the net I found a blog called Cygwin Ports. This is linked to a sourceforge project and it has a PHP 5.2.5 package for cygwin.
Installing packages from Cygwin Ports was as easy as adding the URL ftp://sourceware.org/pub/cygwinports to the cygwin server list. So, I followed the instructions for including their package, installed PHP and wrote a quick test script using only phpinfo():
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
I typed http://localhost/index.php and Success!
The next step was to get something more complex working, specifically CMS Made Simple. But I'll leave that for next time.