So after the Adobe Cancer experience yesterday I still had to install a bunch of other things for the helpless windows user.
After I was done with most of that (of course, the good stuff always comes too late) I ran into this tool: Ninite.
They call it “The easiest way to get apps”. Well, from the screenshots it certainly looks that way. No cruft like toolbars and updaters and junk installed, just the application.

On their page you simply select the application you want installed, including the obvious things as Firefox, OpenOffice, Cancerbat^WAdobe Reader, and even Avast antivirus. The only thing really missing from their list is Total Commander (yes, I stuffed it in their suggestions box ), which is pretty much the only application I really miss on linux.
After selecting all the rubbish the user might need you downloader their installer. When you run the installer it downloads and installs all the selected applications.
Easy huh?

The installer looks like this:

Ninite installing opera while downloading the rest

Ninite and Wine

Now for the fun part. Let’s see how it works under wine
Knowing Putty should work under wine, I selected that and winscp on the website.

Ninite download for putty and winscp

However, trying to run the installer fails after it shows the progressbar bouncing a few times with a useless error:

Ninite wine error

That was with wine version 1.1.40. I even tried installing wininet.dll through winetricks, but then it fails with a slightly different error about an invalid server response.
Oh well, too bad for that (it was just for fun anyway), but it’s a great tool for windows
Keep up the good work Ninite guys!

Well, apparently it’s almost impossible these days.
First I went to some site that needed flash, which I pretty much why I thought of it in the first place. Firefox asks “Hey man, you need a plugin for this page, want me to fix it?”.
So I told it “Amuse me”. Firefox responded with “I’m sorry, I automatically failed”. Nothing new there.
“Do you want to do a manual install?”. Sure thing.
So it sent me to the adobe flash installation page: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

The first big scary thing you see if the DEFAULT ENABLED Mcafee installation which most users will ignore.
So when you disable that checkbox and hit the “Agree to get abused and give all your children to Adobe as slaves” button, it gives you a big “THANK YOU!” page.
This gives you a nice pop-up in firefox, asking you to allow the installation of a an addon.
At first I was positive “Well, that’s easier than I expected”. How wrong I was.

The addon it tried to install was none other than “Adobe DLM”. Short for “Adobe Destroyer of Local Machine”. I DO NOT WANT THAT PIECE OF GARBAGE, I ONLY WANT THAT FSC!@#$(#4#%$
Needless to say I was very annoyed. Not only that, but on that page (including the previous) I couldn’t find a normal download link to the flash installer.
Fine fine, I’ll use the cancer DLM, after which I’ll uninstall it.

Next problem: the DLM can’t download files!
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but the only thing the DLM can get right is installing that fscking piece of rubbish from McafayeeEEEEEEE (never mind that I already have a decent FREE virus scanner). On the flash download it fails to check the integrity of the file. Repeatedly.

Adobe Cancer

For those of you in the same situation, there’s still a place to get the normal installer:
As described in this article from adobe, you can download it HERE (other browser flash installer for windows).

Now please die adobe. Take your habbrokrat reader with you, and your picture crap, and flash, and all the rubbish software you create these days. What’s next, Adobe Anti-virus? Just stick to photoshop, thanks.

Last time I explained in detail the steps needed to build it on slackware 64. So I’ll only summarize and tell you about the new problems I ran into.
First, install libnotify. The new xpcom stuff seems to require it.

How I love my slackbuild sometimes

Next, get the FF3.6 source and build the xpcom stuff:

Finally, symlink the newly built xpcom tools over the google provided ones and build gears. I assume you can check out the google gears sources yourself, otherwise see my previous rant on this.

If you’re wondering about the CPPFLAGS, if you skip this the thing will break down completely. THAT’s why intelligent people use a configure script for that shit. Too difficult for google I suppose.

Anyhow, now we still want a nice .xpi installer.

Which barfs because some slut thought it also needed ff3(1) junk. Which I don’t agree with. So note that this breaks the .xpi for firefox ancient edition.

Tada. Installer at bin-opt/installers/gears-linux-x86_64-opt-0.5.34.0.xpi.

So not wanting to give up immediately I decided to google for it a bit, and noticed that the Pokemon OS guys do have a gears version for their 64 bit Karmic and Lucid releases. Well, that must mean it’s possible! I took a quick look at their .deb file and didn’t see anything shocking, so I decided to try and build gears from svn.

Command not found? huh?

It’s right there…. ohhh, probably a 32 bit issue.

So maybe THAT’s why they’re incompetent (read: lazy). Let’s see if we can get xipdl in a way that doesn’t need ancient 32 bit rubbish
Mozilla has some stuff about that tool here. However, actually finding the download link for the source of that tool is challenging.
I’ll save you the trouble, you can get it here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/source/. Be aware, it’s a whopping 45MB download. That’s right, in the firefox sources.
Let’s see if it compiles:

After this we finally have a working xpidl executable that is actually 64 bits.

Back to GEARS! The easiest way I could determine to get it to work was replacing their xipdl with our new version. I’m sure there’s an easier way through setting an environment variable or something, but I got tired of their Makefile includes and third party libraries before I could work that out. The easy way:

Ghoooh, idiots. Maybe they should invest in a configure script or something. After messing with environment variables for a while, I decided that their Makefiles are about as kanker as their effort of giving us a 64 bit package in the first place. I would expect to be able to set CXXFLAGS="-include /usr/include/stdlib.h", but that was completely ignored. CPPFLAGS did seem to work however. Since another file missed another include, I added that as well.

RAAAH, this keeps getting better and better. This fix was simple enough, simply edit that header file and remove all occurances of ‘NS_OUTPARAM’, whatever the heck that might be:

Aha, they request warnings to be error by default. Seems like running it with MODE=opt fixes this issue.

GODQ@#($*@#*^%^& STUPID … *tries to contain the daemon within* … *RAAAGE*. Another missing include…. *sigh*

Needless to say building an optimized version goes to another directory, so now you need to do the above NS_OUTPARAM thing again on the interfaces.h file in the bin-opt dir.
Anyway, finally it compiled after messing with it for hours. Hopefully this log contains some useful info for you

Last but not least, we still need to make an installer for it:

Finally we end up with a bin-opt/installers/gears-linux-x86_64-opt-0.5.34.0.xpi that we can install in firefox. Phew.

Now what was I doing that needed gears anyway? … can’t remember. Feh.

Gears and Firefox 3.5.5 on Slackware 64

Javascript wtf in firebug

For reasons unknown to us, this piece of code acts very strange. First it evaluates selected == index which it considered to be false. (outlined in green in the image) So far so good. However, what it does next is a real WTF.
Can someone explain to us why this code runs INTO the if statement?
The if (false) { whatever } part?
Personally I’d expect the code to jump over the if block, since that’s what if statement are for. Skipping code unless the evaluation is true.
Or explained a lot better on wikipedia. However, what happens is that whatever is actually executed.

So after carefully inspecting this piece of code and saying obscene stuff, minds boggled, trying to find that hidden semicolon or whatever, we couldn’t find it. Maybe a browser bug? But both Opera (version 10.10) and Firefox (version 3.5.5) failed in the same way.
Maybe some magic with jQuery? Whatever it is, it remains a mystery to us.