the empty quarter

I have just installed the Crayon Syntax Highlighter plugin on this blog. Obviously a lot of the posts that I put here contain code snippets, so this great plugin will make that a little neater with feauters such as line numbers toggle, syntax highlight, copy into clipboard and many more. Over time I hope to […]

Here’s an article on Lego’s Land on how to reorder accounts in the left pane of Thunderbird.

By default Firefox populates the Description field of a bookmark with the content of the page’s <meta name=”Description” content=”…” /> tag. I find is a little annoying and was looking for a way to remove these descriptions. Since I have a lot of bookmarks I wanted to clean them all up in one go rather […]

Password proliferation is a serious problem on the web today. Most websites require users to register and create a username/password combination for future authentication. Unfortunately not many websites support reusable logins such as OpenID. The main problem is that of human memory. It is of course not reasonable to expect the user to remember 100+ […]

Recently I discovered that by default Thunderbird accepts cookies from web content (version 3.0.4 in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid). I am a bit baffled by what would be a valid use case for storing cookies in an email client, and so here are steps for disabling this option. Edit > Preferences. Select Security icon and “Web […]

Follow these steps to change the search engine used by Firefox 3 address bar: Enter about:config in the browser’s address bar and accept a warning dialog if it appears. In the filter box type in keyword.URL Double click the entry and paste in your prefered search engine URL (e.g. http://www.bing.com/search?q=) You can always revert back […]

Tuxradar, a site worth keeping an eye on, published a basic Greasemonkey for beginners tutorial a little while back. Greasemonkey is a Firefox plugin which allows you to add little scripts which are executed when you browse to a particular page. The script can manipulate the page itself, e.g. to show additional content or to […]

Here’s how to install Apache Tomcat version 5.5 on an Ubuntu machine (note that there is nothing Ubutu specific in these steps). This will form one of the foundation steps for a series of posts in which we will build a fully open-source business intelligence platform. First, install Java JDK. I am using Sun’s version […]

For a long time the only way to access and use a Hotmail account from Thunderbird was the WebMail extension. All in all, this is a great solution but it always seemed a bit of a workaround since in the background it “pretends” to be a browser, downloads the Hotmail HTML and parses it to […]

Here are two quick and simple changes which I always make on a fresh Firefox install. They are both accessed through the about:config URI. Simply type about:config to the Firefox address bar and accept the disclaimer. This reveals a lot of “hidden” settings which cannot be changed directly through the preferences dialogs. To make backspace […]