The problem:
Start opera, then load a ton of stuff at the same time. (your 25 tabs that have to be restored for instance). What happened was that after loading a few pages
partially, the rest would completely stall.

After some cursing I found out that it only happened when I used my squid proxy. (you know, to filter out ads because they slow the stuff down).
First I figured it must be squid. Then I realized that it would be weird, since nothing really changed. Maybe the blocklist? Nope, all looked fine.

Apparently Opera only uses a limited amount of connections to the proxy, so when a few of those requests are slow (you know, because google analytics takes 6 years to get through) the requests stack up and completely halt the process. Brilliant.

Finally I found the solution in some obscure configuration panel. Look for Enable HTTP 1.1 for proxy and make sure it’s enabled. Thanks for messing that up for me opera!
Oh well, now it’s fast again. phew.

Suddenly the admin page looked slightly different (round corners in opera, that kind of rubbish), yet still exactly the same.
Oh well. They have a better updates overview now though. So I also decided to update the theme. Which restored a stupid
“swear at wordpress” box that I molested in the previous version. “Oh yeah, now I remember…”. (note that this is simply the theme
that has that stupid box there).

WordPress 3.0 Pixel Theme v2.0.2 with stupid welcome box

… when trying to insert an image here I found out that the new wordpress actually destroyed the image upload dialog.
Obviously it’s only broken in the Opera version I’m using, so it’s probably them… but still… *rage*…

In other words, a good time to try out what they call Child Themes.
If done correctly this supposedly prevents further updates to the theme from reintroducing this box. Unless they do something
silly of course, like adding a new box in a different template.
Here goes!

First we create a dir for the theme, it can be named whatever you like.
Then we create a style.css file.

The style file can be very empty, basically it imports the parent theme and optionally overrides things:

Make sure to correctly name the template (case sensitive) that you base the theme on, in our case pixel.

Well, so far so good, but this doesn’t actually change anything. What we want to get rid of is a stupid box that apparently is in the
welcome.php file of the pixel theme. In fact, welcome.php pretty much is the entire thing that annoys me.
So let’s create our own welcome.php file:

Easy huh?

Now you can go to the Admin panel -> themes and then you’ll see your child theme right there.

BenV's WordPress Pixel Child Theme

However, things never work as intended, so this fails. *sigh*. Nice try WordPress.
When we look into this matter, we notice that the pixel theme doesn’t really have a welcome.php template.
What it does have is a sidebar.php template, which includes the welcome.php from its own template path.
In order words: we can’t override welcome.php (until they fix the Pixel theme), but we have to override the sidebar.php file.

Here goes:

Yay! It works!

Youtube before:

Youtube Before Flashblock.js

Youtube After Flashblock.js

Simply click on it if you are sure you want to load it, and it’ll look like “Youtube Before” again
Did I mention this kill most flash ads?

P.S. The userjs dir can also be used to put GreaseMonkey scripts in. You might have to rename them because the script must end with .user.js for this to work.

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!

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.

So Opera doesn’t suck^Wsocks, huh.
However, since I personally don’t like Firefox enough to recommend people using it over Opera, we’ll have to get socks support using an external program. There are several options for doing this. Bascially what we need is some method to catch the calls to the socket system call and converts them to go through the socks proxy. My expert google skills have found me 3 solutions:

• Tsocks
• Proxychains
• Kernel Socks Bouncer

From this list TSocks sounds like the easiest one, even though it hasn’t been updated in _years_. Means either it works or it’s impossible to get to work these days . Anyway, slackbuild didn’t have any issues building me a tsocks package. Let’s see if it works!
First we create a little tsocks.conf file:

This tells tsocks that we want to access the proxy for everything that isn’t in our LAN (192.168.1.0/24) using a server on 127.0.0.1 on port 1234. It’s picky about the whitespace around the ‘=’ in the config though, don’t forget them. Now we have to enable tsocks, either by running the application by using the tsocks wrapper script, or by letting tsocks put itself in the LD_PRELOAD environment variable. I chose the latter:

*BZZZT* WRONG! That’s strike 1 for being an ancient (not updated for more than 5 years) piece of junk. I’m running a 64 bit OS, that means the library is inside /usr/lib64. Fine, we patch it:

If you’re getting errors about that /usr/lib/libtsocks.so not being found, unset your LD_PRELOAD variable
Good, time for a test!

It works! In order to make Opera use it simply start it like that:

NEXT! ProxyChains
“Q: Why use it in the first place? Tsocks works!”
A: Because it’s always good to have more than 1 tool available to use. Because its latest version is not 7 years old (only 2 *cough*). Because it has other features. Because it’s fun to test shit

Chalk down another success for slackbuild. Next, the configuration file. /etc/proxychains.conf is automagically installed, so we only have to adapt it if we choose to. The default config should work for tor, but we want it for my SSH proxy. I changed the default proxy at the end of the file to be ‘socks5 127.0.0.1 1234′. Note that it has the cool features to use several proxies (hence the name I suppose) in a chain (randomly if wanted) and also to proxy DNS. Anyway, the test (after unsettings the LD_PRELOAD variable!):

Cool, another working solution. Note how it proxied the DNS request for us. Also I find this one easier to use than tsocks.

Finally there’s this Kernel Socks Bouncer module, but it’s too much of a hassle for me to run kernel modules for a simple socks proxy. Let me know if it’s great if you used it
Thanks for reading folks!

Works in opera, just trash it into /usr/lib/opera/plugins…. why is that /usr/lib and not lib64? It’ll also use it from the mozilla dir, /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins.