therning.org/ magnus

I am very keen on keeping my private and work information separate. E.g. I would never read my personal and work email in the same MUA, instead I read work email in Thunderbird and the few times I read private email during working hours I do that using the web interface to GMail. At home it’s the other way around, Thunderbird for personal email, and a web interface to read work email. I used to have a similar setup for my browsing to keep bookmarks and saved passwords for the different areas of my life separate. Firefox was my work browser and Epiphany was my personal browser.

With the recent move to use webkit I noticed that there are a few bits with Epiphany that really bugs me though. Especially its inability to remember passwords; on my Eee it’s just a killer to not be able to do that. So, I decided to take a look at Firefox again, especially to see whether there are any add-ons that would help. And there are. These are the add-ons I found useful for this:

Profile Manager and Synchronizer

The most important piece of the setup is the addon Profile Manager and Synchronizer. It make sit easy to have more than one instance of Firefox running at the same time, with different profiles active in each one.

At first I tried synchronising profiles via dropbox, but that resulted in a lot of updates each time so I quickly stopped. I can recommend using it once though, to get the profiles to all the computers in the first place.

The plugin author says there will be a version that works with 3.6 soon. In the meantime I can report that I’ve had no issues with manually modifying the version range just to get it to install.

Xmarks

Since I don’t synchronise my profiles I do need to synchronise my bookmarks, and for that I use Xmarks.

Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking site. There seems to be about 13 to a dozen of those, but there are a couple of things that make Diigo different.

With the plugin I can easily store away pages for reading at some later date. In the past I’ve had a bookmark folder, or slightly more recently a tag, that I used to mark up pages that I’d like to take a closer look at. I’ve stopped that completely, and now I just mark pages as unread in Diigo. Just another way of reducing the clutter among my bookmarks.

The probably coolest feature is commenting on webpages. I mostly use that to add private comments to web pages, e.g. when I do some research into some topic (so far it’s mostly been for items I’m considering buying), but it’s also possible to make public comments. I’ve found it useful on more than one occasion to have a quick look through the public comments other people have put on pages.

I’d love to see the Gmail S/MIME plugin for Firefox gain support for PGP/MIME. I can’t imagine it’d be too hard to add for someone who’s familiar with JavaScript and Firefox plugins. Or maybe there’s some other plugin out there that offers PGP/MIME support in Gmail?

Oh, and no, FireGPG isn’t good enough, it doesn’t do PGP/MIME, it doesn’t automatically verify/decrypt received emails, and it requires too much mouse interaction!

I received a note about the new Firefox vulnerability yesterday. I ran the proof-of-concept on my Debian machine, using first Epiphany and then Iceweasel. Didn’t work on either. Then I fired up a VMWare image running Windows, with a stock Firefox from mozilla. The proof-of-concept worked just as advertised. So, are the reports missing something (not exploitable on all OSs), or am I just lucky that Debian decided to move to Iceweasel?

I’m not a Debian Developer, so the recent Firefox/Icedove debacle hasn’t caught my attention that much. Basically I trust Debian to do the right thing. It seems in this case they are, again, doing the right thing.

GNOME’s Dave Neary says it’s ill-advised of Mozilla to care more about practicality and usability than freedom. He’s right! I read a few of the comments, and as so often people (i.e. users) say that freedom only matters to developers. That is simply not true! Please think about it! How does the freedom in source empower you to do what you want to do?

I’ve heard a few stories of people who are switching from Windows to Linux, but who can’t make a total switch because of iTunes. Since iTunes is closed (and defective by design) they have no choice but to keep Windows around in order to access the music they’ve bought. (It’s also higly ironical that Apple has written a program that keeps people using Windows.)

Consider what might happen if the Linux kernel accepted closed-source drivers.

Also, if you do care about freedom, then read this. Maybe it’ll help you in making others understand why free is better for you.

I’ve just found foxylicious and AbstractMouse.com. Jippie! now let me tell you why I’m so happy about that!

I use computers at home and at work. For a long time I kept on sending mails from work to my private email address with non-work-related links to check out at home. It also happened that I sent similar mails in the other directions with work-related links I stumbled across when at home. I’m currently using Epilicious to make it easier to share bookmarks between home and work. However, I’m forced to use Windows (as well as Linux) at work, and Epiphany doesn’t run on Windows. Using foxylicious I can now get those bookmarks into FireFox as well

Lately I’ve started using several computers at work (well, really only two computers and a set of VirtualPC/VMWare images) and I want to share some pure-work bookmarks between them, here I’m talking about internal pages that are inaccessable from home–I don’t want them cluttering my bookmarks at home! This is where I’ve put AbstractMouse.com to work, using it I can share work-only bookmarks between all the machines/images

But all isn’t well. When on a Linux box, where Epiphany does run, I’m forced to use FireFox to get to the work-only bookmarks. I have two options for solving that:

1. Get both foxylicious and Epilicious to work with multiple delicious accounts, or
2. Make Epilicious work with the AbstractMouse.com server.

The former requires some lobbying of the foxylicious author (I’ve already posted a comment on his blog ). The latter would only involve getting some information from Eric of AbstractMouse (he’s interested in adding plugins for more browsers), then the rest is up to me. The problem there though is how to map between Epiphany’s topics and FireFox’s hierarchies… I prefer the former!

I simply can’t stand editing text in the text areas using the editor in Firefox (Mozilla). Apparently there is still no edit externally command in Mozilla yet. Luckily there’s Mozex, but don’t try installing that version, use this instead (the original won’t install anymore). The original site is still useful though, since it holds a link to the arguments the different commands take.