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 than editing them one by one. Luckily there is an easy way to do this since Firefox stores the bookmarks in an SQLite database file which can be opened and manipulated.

1. Install SQLite Database Browser (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install sqlitebrowser Windows: download and install from SourceForge).
2. IMPORTANT! Export your Firefox bookmarks to have a backup in case something goes wrong.
3. Close Firefox (you can’t edit the bookmarks file while Firefox is running).
4. Run SQLite Database Browser and open the places.sqlite file which is located in your profile folder.
5. Run the following SQL which will remove the description from all bookmarks.
   
delete from moz_items_annos where anno_attribute_id = 2  

    

6. Save and close, run Firefox.

Reference on the places.sqlite file can be found on mozillaZine and Mozilla Developer Network.

The main problem is that of human memory. It is of course not reasonable to expect the user to remember 100+ unique passwords. In most cases, the end result is that users will reuse the same password for multiple sites and systems. The issues with this are obvious: if a malicious third party gets hold of one password, it compromises all where the password was used; also, by piecing together the other bits of data entered at registration (such as date of birth, gender, physical address, mother’s maiden name etc.) for different sites, the attacker might be able to create a very accurate profile which could then be used to gain access to even those systems where a different password was used.

That’s why I use a password management program, in particular KeePass/KeePassX. It allows one to securely store credentials and is itself protected by strong encryption and can only be accessed using a password. In reality one finds that on a daily basis it is sufficient to remember 5-10 most frequently used passwords (computer login, email, Google, social network, internet banking and of course the password manager itself) and the rest can be referred to from KeePass. The program has a feature to generate random passwords, which is ideal to have strong passwords for infrequently accessed systems where one might not even realise the account was hacked for a long period of time. KeePass can even be installed in portable mode, which means you can carry the program and your encrypted passwords file on a USB stick.

I found that KeePass (version 1 for Windows) and KeePassX (Linux and Mac) suit my needs perfectly. There is also a version for Android and iPhone (refer to the Wikipedia article). Best of all? It’s free software licensed under GPL.

1. Edit > Preferences.
2. Select Security icon and “Web Content” tab.
3. Untick “Accept cookies from sites”.
4. While you’re there, also check “Show Cookies” and “Remove All Cookies” to get rid of whatever has been stored up until now.

1. Enter about:config in the browser’s address bar and accept a warning dialog if it appears.
2. In the filter box type in keyword.URL
3. 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 to the default Google search by right-clicking the entry and selecting the Reset menu option.

• Greasemonkey for beginners (Tuxradar)
• Greasespot
• Dive Into Greasemonkey (the definite reference)
• userscripts.org (a script repository)

1. First, install Java JDK. I am using Sun’s version mainly for stability and to avoid any compatibility issues.
   
   sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

2. Download Apache Tomcat and check for integrity.
   
   wget http://mirrors.sirium.net/pub/apache/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.27/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz
   wget http://mirrors.sirium.net/pub/apache/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.27/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz.md5
   md5sum -c apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz.md5

3. Unpack the archive file.
   
   tar xvzf apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz

4. Move the unpacked directory to its permanent location. I use /opt but this is only a personal preference.
   
   sudo mv apache-tomcat-5.5.27 /opt

5. Create a simple startup and shutdown script. Run sudo vi /etc/init.d/tomcat and save it with the following content:
   
   #!/bin/bash
   # Tomcat startup script

   export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

   case $1 in
   start)
   sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/startup.sh
   ;;
   stop)
   sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/shutdown.sh
   ;;
   restart)
   sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/shutdown.sh
   sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/startup.sh
   ;;
   *)
   echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/tomcat {start|stop|restart}"
   exit 1
   ;;
   esac
   exit 0

6. Don’t forget to make this script executable.
   
   sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat

7. Now we can finally start Tomcat.
   
   /etc/init.d/tomcat start

8. Finally, check that everything worked correctly by opening the Tomcat default page (http://<servername>:8080) in a web browser.

This has recently changed since the Hotmail team has come to its senses and now once again allows POP3 and SMTP access to the service. This means it is now straightforward to configure Thunderbird to use Hotmail, and no extensions are required.

As summarized by poster vtel57 on Google Groups:

incoming server: pop3.live.com – port 995 – SSL
outgoing server: smtp.live.com – port 587 – TLS
Be sure that Secure Password Authentication is NOT checked.
Works like a champ! :)

Indeed it does, and we will even forgive vtel57 the use of a smiley.

One more thing to note is that once configured to use POP, Thunderbird will download the entire contents of your Hotmail inbox. So it is a good idea to do a bit of a clean up by deleting old items or moving them to an archive folder.

]]> http://www.martinhammer.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/goodbye-webmail-hello-pop/feed/ 1 http://www.martinhammer.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/two-quick-changes-in-firefox-aboutconfig/ http://www.martinhammer.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/two-quick-changes-in-firefox-aboutconfig/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:41:54 +0000 martin http://www.martinhammer.com/blog/?p=160 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 button go back in history (this is default in Windows but not in Linux), change the value of browser.backspace_action to 0.
• To open the result of search from the search bar in a new tab change the value of browser.search.openintab to true.

A reference of these and other about:config parameters can be found in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Now, the SF Masterworks series page has a nice table with the books titles and authors as well as links to a more detailed page for each book. The table on the page can be nicely copied and pasted into a spreadsheet (Google Docs in my case) but the problem is that the ISBN numbers are not displayed on this over page, but on each book’s detailed page. Rather then having to click and copy & paste 70 times, I thought this would be a good opportunity to play with the GM_xmlhttpRequest functionality in Greasemonkey.

The script is uploaded on userscripts.org (together with a few of my other scripts), although being targetted for a one-off job I don’t think it will become a hit!

So, what are the learnings from this little exercice?

At a high level, the logic being the script is something along the lines:

1. Loop through the table
2. On each row get the link to the detailed page
3. Get the page via GM_xmlhttpRequest
4. Process the page to get the ISBN number
5. Display the ISBN number on the master page

Naively, I fell into the trap of calling GM_xmlhttpRequest from a for loop. This doesn’t work because GM_xmlhttpRequest works in an asynchronous fashion, meaning that the rest of the code will not wait for it to finish.

I then read up quite a bit on the related topic of closures and scope in JavaScript and ultimately decided that whilst it’s a very interesting topic, for getting things done I needed an quicker and (for me ) an easier solution.

The way I decided to go was good old recursion (“you can’t understand recursion unless you understand recursion”). So an array of links to the detailed pages is built up first, then we iterate over them – but rather than having GM_xmlhttpRequest in the loop itself, I let its callback function increment the loop counter and call the next iteration. The counter and the array of links are global variables, to get around this tricky problem with closures.

As far as processing the results of GM_xmlhttpRequest, it is a bit of a letdown that they come as a text and it is not possible to use DOM (it can be done for XML with DOMParser but there is nothing in Greasemonkey for parsing HTML text). So to retrieve the value of the ISBN number from the detailed page it is back to plain old string search.

It’s probably not the cleanest solution out there, but given that the objective was to save some time and effort with manual copy & paste for a one-off job, it works great. Following the KISS principle, I try not over-engineer something which is ultimately throwaway. At the same time, I got to play with GM_xmlhttpRequest for the first time, so the learning bonus is still there.

Now it’s off to the shop to get those books ordered – happy reading!