Gareth Hunt

It’s good to be back

Gareth — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:35:40 +0000

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

Gareth — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:17:17 +0000

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

Gareth — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:04:07 +0000

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

Gareth — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 02:18:58 +0000

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

Gareth — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 04:00:08 +0000

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://sunsite.dk/projects/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():

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.

Must-have Security Tools

Gareth — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:38:04 +0000

Computer security is never too important. There are people out there trying to find out your passwords, account details and other personal information.

Don’t panic! itsecurity.com has a great article recommending The 10 Best Free Security Tools. Some of these are for system and network administrators. But others, such as AVG Anti-Virus Free and Ad-Aware Free are suitable for home users.

Announcing Mailfrom v0.1: compose mailto links in webmail

Gareth — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 05:53:08 +0000

I’m pleased to announce a new Firefox addon, Mailfrom, that enables mailto links to be composed in your favourite webmail service.

Version 0.1 is an early access release and provides support for GMail and Yahoo Mail only. If you wish to have a service added, request an enhancement or encounter a problem, please file a bug report.

Mailfrom is available for download from the Mozilla Addons Sandbox (login required).

To make the addon available in the public repository, it requires reviews. If you like the addon, please post a review here.

Released: Modify Headers 0.6.3

Gareth — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 19:34:34 +0000

Happy New Year to you all.

Before Christmas I released version 0.6.3 of Modify Headers. This version adds support for the Firefox 3 beta 2. For current users this will automatically update, otherwise, please download from Mozilla Addons.

Update: XHTML Mobile Profile 0.5.2 has been updated to support Firefox 3 beta 2.

Announcing: XHTML Mobile Profile v0.5.2 for Firefox

Gareth — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:35:47 +0000

Yesterday, version 0.5.2 of the XHTML Mobile Profile add-on for Firefox was released. Please install from Mozilla Add-ons.

This is the second bugfix release of version 0.5, (which was not announced when released last month, oops). Version 0.5 adds support for rendering multipart mixed content in Firefox.

Please report any defects or enhancement requests in Mozdev Bugzilla.

Released: Modify Headers 0.6.0

Gareth — Sun, 06 May 2007 01:26:02 +0000

Version 0.6.0 of Modify Headers is now available. The main new feature for version 0.6.0 is the ability to export and import headers. The wizard can be found on the configuration tab.

Please post any bugs to bugzilla.mozdev.org.