Coherent Blahs

I had some problems with the newer releases of Firefox. And Google just enabled extensions for Chrome browser. Time to switch. And boy, am I happy!! It renders the websites much MUCH faster than Firefox, imported all my bookmarks, and most importantly, search keywords, from Firefox.

I did face one problem though. On my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS laptop, it didn’t support Java out of the box. Flash worked fine, but no Java.

However, found the fix pretty easily on the web. You need to do the following if you are facing this problem:

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

I’ve been noticing Firefox using up a lot of CPU lately. At any given time, I normally have about 3 to 4 firefox windows with about 5-6 tabs in each open. But with no activity in them, there should not be much CPU usage. On a hunch, I installed flashblock, a firefox plugin to disable showing flash apps automatically. Instead, it shows a blank rectangle, with a play button in the middle to start the flash app. Installing this made a dramatic effect, and soon I realized this is due to the n number of flash advertisements in different websites. I probably had about 10-15 flash apps playing at the same time, none of them really useful to me. Would highly recomment this add-on. 

For some time now, the smarties at citicards.com have written some oh-so-cool javascript on their front page that stops it from loading well in Firefox or Konquerer , at least not without disabling Javascript. I can understand a mistake or two here and there, but the frontpage? That also for months? What are those folks thinking!!
Here is how it looks on Konquerer after loading.

There are two workarounds.
1. Disable Javascript while visiting citicards.com. Lame!!
2. Instead of citicards.com, use https://www.accountonline.com/. It’s the real site that’s used behind citicards.com. If you login to citicards.com, you will get forwarded to https://www.accountonline.com/. By going to that site directly, you bypass the front page, and the great browser-independent Javascript.

Also, call Citicards, and tell them you’ll close your account if they don’t fix it ASAP

    One of my major gripes after moving to full-time Linux was, I can’t read the Bengali newspaper Anandabazar online anymore. They, absolutely utterly moronically, use a proprietary font (I’m sure someone there paid for it), which does not offer ANY extra advantage over using Unicode Bengali!!
     I started working on a python script that can translate those fonts to Unicode, and it was going well. But halfway through, I realized someone has already done this, and it is already available as a Mozilla extension.
     The extension is named padma, and it’s targeting different Indian languages. Works great on Firefox. The download page is here. You’ll need to restart Firefox after installing the extension.