BenV's notes

If Opera continues living the way it does right now it’ll die within a few years. At least, that’s what I expect. Every new release there are more and more little nuisances. New features? Yeah, they have plenty of new garbage slowing the browser down.
Soon they’ll dump their rendering engine for Webkit. Who knows, it might even improve the browser, but then again… soon I might jump to Chrome or another piece of garbage.
I wonder why browser vendors have determined they all have to inject cancer into them. Must be contageous or something.

Anyhow, my Opera issue for today: Webfonts.
Ever seen a page rendered like this?

Opera with weird webfont

After messing around with JQuery and friends for quite a while at work and sometimes even for hobby stuff more and more pages turn into the AJAX jungle.
Fine for the user, but there’s one little thing that always annoys me: it becomes very hard to make sure you’re still creating valid (x)html.
Especially when you start using dynamic tabs!

Opera has this nice feature that when you hit CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-u it will upload your current webpage to the W3 Validator. (w3, w3c… what’s up with that…). However, when AJAX molests the entire page (and I’m not talking about soccer fans ;))… or worse, the entire page is loaded through AJAX this method of validation falls flat on its face. Don’t ask me why opera is so stupid, but it will upload the original html, and not the AJAX molested version. An option would be nice there.

So today I was fed up with html errors and made myself a nice little bookmarklet to validate your page. With verbose output. And stuff.
This is the current version, it will probably get shorter / better soon.

(function(){var h=document;var b=h.doctype;var e="\n';var g=h.documentElement.outerHTML;var f="http://validator.w3.org/check";var i={prefill_doctype:"html401",prefill:0,doctype:"inline",group:0,ss:1,st:1,outline:1,verbose:1,fragment:e+g};var a=h.createElement("form");a.setAttribute("method","post");a.setAttribute("target","_blank");a.setAttribute("action",f);for(var j in i){var c=h.createElement("input");c.setAttribute("type","hidden");c.setAttribute("name",j);c.setAttribute("value",i[j]);a.appendChild(c)}if(navigator.appCodeName=="Mozilla"){h.body.appendChild(a)}a.submit()})();

Or right click here and select “Bookmark Link” to put it in a bookmark.
Or left click it if you want to find out how terribly wordpress fails at it 🙂

* Tested a bit on Opera 11, Firefox might also work.
* Note2: work in progress. Bookmarklet last updated at 14-12-2010.
* Known bugs: Opera seems to post some tags without the closing tags.

This tiny issue showed up a while ago, and I’m not quite sure when exactly it started. It sure was very annoying.

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.

Since I was in another update mood I decided to take a quick look at my notes.
The admin page mentioned something about the new 3.0 version.
Obviously I immediately became very excited and ran to the bathroom.
After screaming for half an hour I made a backup of the wordpress dir and sql and wondered if the auto-upgrade button would work.
Always a surprise…. but it worked! It actually worked! (continue reading…)

Another note in case I forget.
Since allowing flash by default slows browsing (and my PC) to a crawl, this nifty little script converts all flash content on a page to a flash icon.
Download it, stash it in your opera UserJS dir. (See Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> Javascript Options -> User JavaScript Folder). (continue reading…)

Windows and Ninite

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. (continue reading…)

Last week at work we ran into this gem (click on the image to get it full screen):

Javascript wtf in firebug

Especially force, that’s what we need.
Because somehow Opera still hasn’t bothered to implement SOCKS proxy support. And if you would like to use… oh I don’t know… tor… or maybe simple ssh proxying support to test stuff from an external IP instead of from inside your local network, or for whatever your reason might be (working around your corperate firewall? ;))…. you have to use Firefox. Because they DO have SOCKS support. Strange. A case to bash Opera 🙂 (continue reading…)

In case I forget it again, the !@#$()*@$%*#$ product called “flash” has a 64 bit plugin at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

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.