Older blog entries for noda (starting at number 24)

Birthday coming up. How fucking depressing.

Whee. There's now an Adblock extension for Epiphany. Simply takes a list of patterns (* and ? recognized, with g_pattern_match()) in a single text file, and prevents Mozilla from ever downloading the files. Works splendidly.

Possible enhancements: FAM monitoring of the file, to update blocks on-the-fly; a UI to edit blocks (I'm tempted to just make it open the text file); regular expressions support from libegg; UI enhancements ("block ads from [host]..." on right-click)...

However, as useful as Firefox's AdBlock extension is, it's a perfect example of utter bloatware. I don't want to go down that path; so besides FAM, I'm not sure if I want to put anything else in.

But I ought to port it back to Epiphany 1.4, so I can actually use it before another 6 months go by.

I shoulda coded that extension ages ago. 4-5 hours of work... I'm getting good at extension-writing! There's still improvement to be done on the system itself though.

I started porting Galeon's "Page Info" dialog to an Epiphany extension. Crispin (the Great Galeon Hacker) helped me understand a couple of details, and Christian (the Great Epiphany Hacker) persuaded me to make the "General" tab look nicer.

I used to hate Glade (its UI is pretty lousy), but I think I'm getting used to it now.

Anyway, Christian restructured it after I'd ported over "General" and "Images". Then I added "Links". So the extension has 3 of 5 tabs now. Not bad for about 10 man-hours of work.

The Page Info extension will most likely be in epiphany-extensions 1.4.0, which will be released in sync with Epiphany 1.4.0. Rockin'.

Even cooler, though, is the patch I've got which lets you load/unload extensions as Epiphany is running. There's no UI frontend (it uses GConf) and I coded it way too late for 1.4.0. But it's gonna be great: in 1.6.0, the user can specify which extensions to load. Now... if only Marco would review it!

If you hear this beep, I am alive.

*BEEEEEEP*

Following others:

The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions

Garp's face radiated pure peace.

The Habs won against the Bruins. The world is suddenly a brighter place.

I got fed up with the suckiness of my Link Checker Epiphany extension, so I fixed it. I hope. Well, at least if it makes any mistakes it'll still print semi-sane messages and it won't leave the busy cursor going on forever. Before it was at the point where I was considering removing the code altogether. Now I think it can stay :).

This person is currently certified at Journeyer level.

Wow. I feel like I'm growing up in the Free Software World. Master level, here I come! ...Except I suppose I have to learn how to program well first. Minor setback.

After exploring just about every possible UI design for my New and Improved Epiphany Popup Blocker Extension, I finally found The Perfect UI. It took dozens of hours of coding, elaborate mock-ups and countless discussions, but the final UI seems too simple for words.

It's simple and yet... deep. "View -> [ ] Popup Windows" is a per-site preference -- pretty much like my popup blocker already has been for ages. However, the COOL part is that selecting it brings up all the site's popups, and de-selecting it makes them all disappear. I think this is The Best Way To Do This, and it sure is intuitive. Do I want to see popup windows? Yes? Then I'll enable it. Otherwise, I'll disable it. Simple, and it Just Works.

Also, there's a little icon in the statusbar which represents all the poor popups which were blocked. It's got a tooltip saying how many there are.

At this point, with GNOME 2.6 right around the corner, I'm very keen to get Epiphany extensions more widely recognized and used. I think since their primary dependency (epiphany 1.2) will be widely installed there'll be a much lower barrier to entry for most people. Beyond that, though, I want to set up Debian packages. It's easy to do, but I'm not a Debian maintainer and it doesn't seem easy to become one.

Anyway, if you've got some minutes spare, check out my Popup Blocker extension. Oh, and of course, my Error Viewer extension, which is a killer app for web development. They're in epiphany-extensions on GNOME CVS. You'll need Epiphany >= 1.1.12 to compile them.

And if you like or dislike these extensions, please let me know! Besides fellow Epiphany/Galeon developers, I haven't heard from anyone who's used them.