Udo's Techblog

Here's the thing: for good reason, the Firefox team forced every plugin specify the exact version it is compatible with. So, for example, say FireFTP claims compatibility with Firefox versions 3.0 through to 3.5b2 (or whatever). Now, following this example, once you install Firefox 3.5b3, it's over. Firefox will disable the plugin and you'll have to wait until the developer of the plugin brings out an update that makes it work again.

The screwed-up mechanism here is in Firefox' add-on manager which refuses to let your plugin run, even if you really really want it to. For your own protection, of course. You're not allowed to override this decision, even if you're using an add-on that is no longer being maintained by its developer. I can only assume this fine piece of UI philosophy is - like so many bad ideas in the world - somehow inspired by Java, or possibly by one of its even more authoritarian frameworks, but I digress.

Anyway, here's how you can fix it yourself. But first consider yourself warned: your plugin may very well not work or if it does, there may be some hidden malfunction just waiting for the right moment to erase your hard drive, melt down your computer into a puddle of toxic waste and then implode the entire internet which could make you liable for billions of dollars in damages. Having said that, let's move on:

Finding the "extensions" directory
On OS X, Firefox add-ons are kept in your user directory, the path would be something along these lines:

/Users/(your username)/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/

Now, in this folder, you'll see a cryptic folder that's called something like "3245hjg.default". Open it.

Here you'll find a file called "extensions.rdf", open it with a text editor and keep it open for later. Inside the same folder you'll find another folder called "extensions", open it.

Find the appropriate add-on
You have now reached the stage where the fun really starts. See, most plugins don't use a human-readable folder name, but instead are called something ridiculous like

{a7c6cf7f-112c-4500-a7ea-39801a327e5f}

That's called a GUID, or globally unique identifier; if you're interested in this number, ask your local COM or Java developer for a more in-depth, undoubtedly fascinating diatribe, but let's move on for now. To see what GUID your favorite add-on has, go to the text editor window containing the "extensions.rdf" file from the previous paragraph. Do a text search for the name of your plugin. You should find something like this:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mozilla:item:{a7c6cf7f-112c-4500-a7ea-39801a327e5f}"
                   NS1:installLocation="app-profile"
                   NS1:version="1.0.4"
                   NS1:optionsURL="chrome://fireftp/content/preferences.xul"
                   NS1:iconURL="chrome://fireftp/skin/icons/logo32.png"
                   NS1:name="FireFTP"

I have marked the GUID associated with FireFTP in bold here, you'll just do a search on your own and find your add-on's GUID. Now go to the Finder window with the "extensions" folder and navigate to the directory of the same name as the GUID you found. Open it.

Cracking the version barrier
You should now be inside the extension's folder. There is a file in there called

install.rdf

Open it. Inside you'll find a passage that looks like this:

        <em:minVersion>3.0</em:minVersion>
        <em:maxVersion>3.5b2</em:maxVersion>

Change the value of maxVersion to (or beyond) your current Firefox version. Save the file, restart the Fox. You should now be able to open the add-on manager and re-enable the plugin.

I cannot go to bed yet, because someone on the internet is wrong. :-P

Even among Slashdot readers, there is still a tremendous amount of confusion as to what anonymizing onion-type P2P routers are actually doing (and not doing) to protect you. So here's a very short introduction to the technicalities of anonymized internet traffic, explained as non-technical as possible:

1) The usual way
When you (and your ISP) are not using any special software, data comes from the internet to your browser like this:

• you click on a link
• your browser creates a piece of data specifying the target address you are contacting as well as some additional context information
• your browser sends the piece of data to a router/gateway
• the router analyzes the piece of data and passes it along
• repeat the previous step, until the packet arrives at the target server
• server analyzes request, sends piece of data back along the chain of routers
• back to your browser

Pros:

• it's really fast

Cons:

• any node on the way can read (and manipulate) any piece of the data stream
• censorship software at the ISP level can block your access to certain sites by refusing to pass the packets along

2) The SSL way
SSL adds another layer to the whole process:

• you click on an SSL link
• your browser creates an encrypted piece of data that is completely opaque except for the target address
• routers pass the data along to the server but cannot read the content
• server passes encrypted data back to you the same way

Pros:

• nobody can read or manipulate your data stream

Cons:

• censorship software still works (because the destination address of both ends of this exchange is still readable)
• any node on the way can still see who you are contacting

3) Anonymizing P2P networks
P2P networks form a mesh of nodes that route encrypted traffic through several stations before (most of the time) exiting to the public internet:

• browser forms request
• local P2P software encrypts request, sends it to a P2P partner node
• P2P anonymizing node has no idea what data it is routing, but it passes it along to another P2P node
• repeat the above step several times, for good measure
• data reaches a P2P exit node, which decrypts the request
• P2P exit node makes the request to the destination server
• at which point the rest of the transmission either goes like 1) or 2) as described above

Pros:

• you can now circumvent censoring measures since your ISP only "sees" the connection to the first P2P node
• nobody knows where you are going (except the operator of the exit node)
• the webserver operator has no way of knowing where you actually are

Cons:

• if you're not using SSL, the traffic between the exit node and the server is still unprotected from the dangers as stated in the first paragraph, including the possibility of encountering a rogue exit node that protocols your entire data stream for nefarious purposes (e.g. to sniff your passwords)
• it's slow

If this looks familiar to you, here are some suggestions:

Have you installed Safari 4 (Beta) recently?
If so, that's probably what blew XCode's tiny little mind. Go to the Apple Dev website and download the latest XCode release (if in doubt, use the link I provided, because the "normal" way of getting to the package through the developer portal is almost always broken).

Have you sync'ed your hard drive from another Mac?
If so, this might be a permissions problem. Go to Disk Utility and run "Repair Permissions" or open a Terminal session and enter

diskutil repairPermissions /

to restore normal file permissions. That also works when other programs are not starting up.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Kinda silly, try re-installing the package. Clear out your user's Library/Application Support/Xcode/ directory and any other places where faulty configuration data may be stored. I know it sucks, but if the previous options didn't work out for you, it means your install is somehow hosed. In that case, let me close with some solid instructions from the Google Maps team:

> Turn left on Comstock.

> When you feel the blood chill in your veins, stop the van and get out. Stand very still. Exits are north, south, and east, but are blocked by a Spectral Wolf.

> The Spectral Wolf fears only fire. The Google Maps team can no longer help you, but if you master the Wolf, he will guide you. Godspeed.

Time to beef up my geek street cred: I've finally watched the Caprica pilot! It's out on DVD first, before it will be aired leading the rest of the series in 2010. By the way, don't watch the "Exclusive Clip" on Amazon, somehow they managed to find the most boring 3 minutes of the film and put it out there as promo material.

The Good
Despite its slow, deliberate pacing the movie was compelling. The actors, cinematography, dialogue - everything was done very nicely and competently. Caprica takes place about 60 years before the extinction of humankind, and we finally get a peek into the larger history that lead up to the holocaust. Apart from the fact that we get another set of tales from the BSG universe, Caprica interestingly also depicts a society very much like our own and offers a glimpse at some of the problems we may face in the next few decades. Wrapped inside a SciFi opera we witness the birth of the first true AI, which is always cool.

The Not-So-Good
I loved the fact that Caprican society is technologically pretty much like ours (maybe 10 years ahead at most and except for the space travel thing) and as such we get to see many familiar gadgets in a slightly different format. However, at times the producers and set designers took the easy way out. I know, it's so geeky of me, but: was it really necessary to have them use actual USB ports and other gadgets that are so specific to Earth? That was just not believable.

Another point: Some of the special effects were really bad, for example the robot fight at the end looked like it was screen-captured off an outdated FPS with very unconvincing graphics.

Downright Ugly
It annoys me that people in the movies never back up their hard drives. It's a dramatic plot device, but it's also really unrealistic that computer systems of the future can somehow just move and not copy data. In Caprica, it doesn't occur to Greystone to make a frakking backup of the hard drive where his dead daughter's brain is stored! It's like he's doing it to squeeze some drama out of the very predictable event when the only copy gets destroyed during an experiment ;-) Yawn. Not good.

Next: The religious angle has already been annoying me to no end in BSG, and the finale made it worse because it first verified the Cylons' absurd belief system, and then hammered it into the viewers' brains with a blunt instrument, just to make sure. Somehow they took it to a whole new level of badness in Caprica, because pretty much everything the characters do is somehow connected to religion. From the traditional hell-like V-Club at the opening (very American: sex, drugs and violence are apparently all the same thing), to the extremist suicide bombing at the center of the story, down to the very end when Adama and Greystone have their tired discussion about the divinity of the human soul. Like BSG, Caprica fails to acknowledge the existence of any kind of morality independent of a very literal concept of God(s). Double Yawn.

Now, buy it
Despite all that, I enjoyed Caprica. It's captivating and nicely paced, with at times stunning imagery. With the imminent cancellation of Dollhouse and Terminator SCC, I look forward to a new series about artificial intelligence and trans-humanism.

Related posts:
Battlestar Galactica goes out with a whimper AND a bang

Go ahead and grab the latest Firefox Beta (at least 3.5b3) and install the Canvas3D add-on which is hopefully going to be part of Firefox /trunk very soon.

There are already some pretty awesome demos out there, and there is no doubt in mind mind that we're going to see a lot of cool browser-based gaming content in the very near future. Between Canvas3D and other advances in JavaScript graphics, I hope Flash and Silverlight die the painful deaths they so richly deserve - rather sooner than later.

Today is, as you may know by now, Ada Lovelace day - commemorating the lifetime achievement of the world's first modern information technology theorist. Like many of today's geeks, Lovelace's biography shows a life that was heavily influenced by bodily limitations, which in turn may have contributed to an emphasis on mental accomplishments for compensation: the countess had been suffering from extreme migraine attacks and repeated, severe childhood illnesses that forced her to stay indoors and develop her mathematical skills. Also, a profound desire to overcome the insanity and irrationality that she saw in her father, the poet Lord Byron, may have helped Lovelace's fondness of analytical skills along.

Mary Somerville, one of the countess' many acquaintances on the international stage of early science, introduced her to the English inventor Charles Babbage in the year 1833. Babbage had been working on mechanical computing equipment such as difference engines and something called the Analytical Engine, which would have been the first Turing-complete device on the planet.

If Babbage was the first computer hardware designer, Ada Lovelace was the first software developer. The Analytical Engine's design did support machine language constructs such as loops and conditional branching. Though much of the exchanges between Lovelace and Babbage will forever remain a matter of speculation, it is fair to say that Lovelace was one of the very few people on earth who fully internalized the nature of this project - and she certainly was the only one who, by using its language, could breathe life into this concept that later changed the world beyond recognition.

Only 36 years old, Ada Lovelace died of cancer in the year 1852. She left behind numerous notes and algorithms on paper but ultimately her potential, her destiny, remained tragically unfullfilled. Decades later, time was running out for Babbage as well, who was still solving mechanical problems preventing the complete assembly of the Analytical Engine. In the end he died before it could be finished, the machine was never completed, Lovelace's program never ran on its mechanical registers.

It is difficult to say how the world would look like today if she had had, say, 30 more productive years left to fully execute her theoretical work. Certainly, there would have been no necessity for Turing to re-discover and formalize the groundwork of information processing as the building blocks of it were already being used by Lovelace a hundred years before that. Our civilization could have had electro-mechanical computing devices a lot sooner, which in turn would have accelerated science across the board just like it did in the mid-nineteenhundreds.

Maybe, our culture would have been different as well. Today, we are still fighting against the cultural bias that keeps the percentage of women in science at very low numbers. We've come this long way, and we still have not managed to overcome the man's image as a "creator of things" and the woman's role of a passive consumer, especially when it comes to computer science. Luckily, this is changing, but the pacing can only be described as glacial. If you don't believe that, head over to the next university and do a quick headcount of the student body in the CS department.

As we seem to gradually slip into a more conservative age (again), old gender roles are not abolished like we hoped but are receiving a new lease on life. I wish I could say something more optimistic, but the prevailing emotion here is frustration with our culture across the board. What a waste. Imagine what could have been had Ada Lovelace been given just 30 more years to make her contribution. But over 150 years later, we are still wasting so many lifetimes, so many opportunities, so unmentionable amounts of intelligence, creativity and brilliance over a reflexive adherence to a doctrine of what people should and should not contribute purely based on their gender.

Thus, the view into an average Computer Science classroom becomes symptomatic for our entire culture. People are often thinking about concrete steps to get more girls into informatics and that's laudable. But there is a larger problem to see here, and we can't just fix this small leak while we ignore the gaping hole right next to it. You cannot promote faith-based initiatives and expect advances in women's equality. You cannot teach "family values" and expect girls to show up for anything but traditional healthcare jobs. You cannot make "abstinence only" the cornerstone of your ideals and expect a new generation to become well-informed critical thinkers.

It's annoying that it actually had to be said again, but we still are in desperate need of equality. We are not there yet. We live in a society where a woman can become whatever she dreams of, but that is just the basic prerequisite on the way to a truly free society. Now we need to work just as hard to remove the centuries of corruption that still pollute our dreams.

I'm probably the last person on the planet to post about this, but BSG ended its run as scheduled last week. Throughout the series we have seen some very cool special effects, dialogue and drama - but there has also been a fair share of nonsense, boredom and inconsistency.

In some ways, the finale was what I expected: the biggest mystery of all, the death of Starbuck, was not explained. Instead we were fed some lame-ass story of her being some kind of revenant entity sent back by God to complete her mission. Even taking this plot abomination into account, it still doesn't begin to explain how her remains got from the gas giant to Old Earth, or how the frack she got the FTL coordinates for New Earth into her head just in the nick of time. Oh well.

The battle scenes were short but wonderful, as usual. It was all pretty dramatic, underscored with an epic soundtrack, but overall too few characters actually died during the final showdown:

Tory
Though Tory really had it coming, it was absolutely unconvincing that the Chief couldn't wait five seconds until the download was complete before he strangled her, when the fate of two civilizations depended on it. And in order to buy into this insane character motivation you have to discard the fact that he didn't love or even like Cally, so why does he have to kill off two entire species in retaliation for her death again?

Cavil
Aside from his eventual and completely out-of-character suicide, I loved every scene with Cavil. As usual, he had some of the best lines ("...I don't wanna rush you or anything BUT YOU'RE KEEPING TWO CIVILIZATIONS WAITING!") and he really kicked some ass in a very cool way when he invaded Galactica with that platoon of centurions.

President Roslin
She's been dying for four years now, this really wasn't a surprise. And it was one of the nicer moments, too. The goodbye scene with Adama was one of the few truly moving moments.

Boomer
Finally, someone just shot her and got it over with. This character has been going nowhere for too many episodes, but they still kept her around whenever they needed someone to do something really stupid and twisted. Sadly, her death wasn't as satisfying as it should have been, as she got shot for performing the frist and only selfless act of her entire life. The utterly needless flashback cut-scene (they all were totally useless filler material by the way) didn't help to conceal the fact that it absolutely made no sense for Athena to shoot her for actually returning Hera.

Anders
I never understood why they couldn't just let him die earlier. After that bullet to the head he was braindead for fuck sakes! Well, at least he was good enough for piloting the entire fleet into the sun, an act that actually had me screaming at the screen for its abysmal stupidity.

However, even more impressive were the plot holes the finale failed to stuff. In the end, nothing mattered. Nothing at all. The final stand of Galactica at the black hole was dramatic but it didn't have any impact on the plot. Starbuck already new the right coordinates, and Hera wasn't really that special after all. The ending is beyond bleak, but they sugar-coated it so much it's hard to notice: the Cylons as a species are all condemned to die within hundred years, because they are seemingly too stupid to rebuild the resurrection technology after their only copy of it blew up. And the humans? They dumped all their knowledge, destroyed all their technology, and eventually all died off on New Earth, completely failing to make any kind of impact or leave any kind of legacy behind from which the new civilization could have learned anything to avoid the mistakes their ancestors made.

It may have been a Hollywood ending with its classical moralistic overtones, but it only mildly disguises the fact that the writers didn't have any clue how to tie it all together. And, keeping this in mind, they actually didn't do such a bad job with the final episode...

The Cylons - they did not have a plan.

but they don't control this.


The WINGMEN from JSto on Vimeo.

I've known this since the time when they left me stranded at some god-forsaken airport in rural Italy with no further explanation or even so much as a kind word. I paid over 500 € extra that day just to get home at all, in addition to what I already gave Ryanair for my worthless ticket ("hey, come back in a few days, we might have a flight for you"). Anyway, you get what you pay for, and that includes friendliness and a basic level of customer care. So, no, the recent insight into the true Ryanair spirit didn't really surprise me.

The simple solution is to not buy tickets for Ryanair flights. They're not worth it anyway: if you're really lucky you get a ticket for less than the standard airfare of a real carrier, but don't forget to take into account that you have to spend extra time and money just to get to and from the provincial cattle-transport runways where Ryanair typically does its business. Also, they might cancel your flight without substitution and they won't tell you until you already spent a few hours crammed into one of those crowded, dirty hangars they outrageously label a "flight terminal". For just 99 you can get a decent Lufthansa flight to and from any major destination within Europe, and you'll travel actual airports, not some broken-down old army bases in the middle of nowhere.

Amidst the Pirate Bay show trial nonsense, you'd never expect this

Since I know that we the authors are affected by file-sharing, I think this is an excellent chance to take a stand. [...] I'll try to write something and would like to encourage members to do the same. [...] Furthermore, Monique would love to see us coming to the court in person. As things look now, the whole situation is dominated by the pirates.

...to come from the same person who also wrote this:

Because I want to watch movies that can neither be rented anymore nor bought on the Internet. I want to read books that are out of print and will cost you 750 British pounds on eBay. For that reason, I want The Pirate Bay to stay. At the moment, I'm trying to download John Schlesinger's 'The Day of the Locust'; it takes time and it's not even certain I'll get a copy that is watchable - but at the same time I have no idea how to get the damn flick any another way....

and this

The Pirate Bay is an invaluable source for content that publishers, record labels and movie studios for some reason can't or won't offer. If someone on The Pirate Bay chose to download the book I wrote in 1989 I would have no objection to that. That novel is practically impossible to get hold of and as an author I want to be read.

...so does that make Swedish novelist Carina Rydberg actually corrupt or just mentally incompetent? Personally I'll go for opportunistic and hypocritic. Ah... comedy gold. Kudos for digging this up, Techdirt.