Spring cleaning

If you ever had to clean up your drives of all the junk that accumulates there over the years, you know this can be a time consuming, less-than-fun task to go through. But if you are using Windows OS, there is a very simple and effective (and open source) tool to help make this into less of a chore. Its called WinDirStat and it provides you with a meaningful visual representation of whats taking up space on your machine.

This is what my drive looks like after getting rid of the biggest space offenders:



The big gray block on the left (highlighted in white) is the post cleaning free space I have gained (approx. 65GB freed).

Get all the info here!

UPDATE:

I am not a MAC user but was made aware of a similar program for OSX called Disk Inventory X. You can find out about it here!

Hat tip: Lukas Blakk.

And of course we can't leave the Linux community behind... so if you are using a Linux distribution you can use a similar application called KDirStat, find out about it here!

Hat tip: James Boston.

Linux minefield and plugins

If you are as unfortunate as me and need to work with plugins (like Flash) running on a fresh build in Linux, this post could save you hours of frustrations. The problem is that the automatic plugin installer that comes with Minefield doesn't realize that it was built as opposed to being installed, and so when it fetches the required plugin it ends up installing it in the default location -- "/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins". Unfortunately this is not the location where Minefield looks for the plugin .so files. In order to actually install a plugin on Minefield you will need to first locate and then copy the .so file to Minefield's plugin directory -- "/mozilla/?ObjDir?/dist/bin/plugins". Then restart Minefield and you should be in business!

The story of one Hotmail and a Blackberry

If you are the owner of a Hotmail email account and a Blackberry (I own neither, but my uncle had the former for years and acquired the latter a couple of weeks ago to get his emails faster) you may have already tried forwarding your mail from one to the other, perhaps because the person at the store told you it works with *all* web mail services (as was the case with my uncle), merely to discover the sad truth: it doesn't!

Open source to the rescue. After a bit of looking around I found this great little POP3 server proxy called FreePOPs. What this great little program does, is it allows you to retrieve your free web mail messages with any application or device that supports the POP protocol (including a Blackberry). The best part is that it works with most popular free web mail providers out of the box (and some less popular ones too) and it is extensible, so in theory support could be easily added for almost any service. It's also very light and very much in the background.

While this is an easy way to get your Hotmail messages on your Blackberry, it can also be used to get them in your Gmail inbox. Gmail's options include retrieving emails from a different account that supports POP3 access. The only downside with Gmail's POP retrieval is that you don't get to control how often it checks - which at times could mean as long as an hour between checks. Still, it sure beats paying for Hotmail Plus just to be able to forward your mail.

Pesky email problems like these are all too common, which is also why I'm posting this up in the hopes that this might be of some use to people out there looking for a similar solution.

You can find a download link for the program as well as more info right here.

PW Core/Extension Docs Up

So PW Core is finally in the tree and is available in nightly builds as of April 24th, 2008. The extension is also up and running on Mozilla's addons website and can be downloaded here.

I have also created draft support documents for both PW Core and the extension:

PW Core

PW Extension

As always, your feedback is appreciated!

UPDATE:

The article on PW Core has been generalized and moved to MDC. Find it here.

Also, thanks to Cesar, my extension went public on AMO. See link above for download page.

PW v1.0 and Final OSD700 note

Well this certainly feels a little strange. I am now technically a CPA graduate - but its not really sinking in yet. PW v1.0 is done and I must admit I'm very happy with the end result. It has certainly come a long way since last September. You can find all the info on this new release on my wiki as always.

Now I would like to thank the many people who have been a part of my journey and helped me along (in no particular order):

Dave (humph), Chris (ctyler), Robert (roc), Mark (mfinkle), Mike (shaver), Gijs, Armen (armenzg), Cesar, Andrew, Lukas (lsblakk) and Ted (for his extension making script -- really useful!!).

Thank you all and I hope I'm not forgetting anyone!

PW Extension v0.91 is out

A new extension is now available. Here are the changes that occurred since the last update (v0.9):

- The extension can now be enabled/disabled directly from the status bar icon.

- A new popup notification appears above the status bar meter if a consistent high run time is detected.

- The extension now listens for the new "experimental-notify-plugin-call" topic name

Please note: the latest extension only works with the latest PW Core patch (v0.91).

Find the download link and installation instructions on the project wiki.

PATCH going "experimental"

There has been some discussion surrounding my patch among the more senior developers at Mozilla today and as a result I have been commissioned to change a small part of the code. The part in question is the topic with which a plugin's run time value is broadcast through the observer service.

Formerly known as 'notify-plugin-call', it is now named 'experimental-notify-plugin-call'. This change may seem small or insignificant but it actually makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that the way the run time is currently determined and communicated is almost certain to change in future releases. This change will also mean a new version of the PW extension as it needs to be adjusted to the new topic, but the new version will also incorporate some improvements to the UI as well.

A number of people have also noted that in the performance test charts I have posted recently, the y-axis does not start at 0. Admittedly this was a bit of an oversight on my part, especially since when you do have the y-axis start at 0 my case for PW becomes much easier to make. I have therefore recreated the chart for the two tests I posted earlier - this time with the y-axis properly labeled:

Test 1

Test 2