Uninstalling the uninstallable -- old, dead Java Consoles in Firefox

There they are, every time. You say no to the Yahoo! toolbar, but each time you update your Java runtine, your extensions list accumulates another disabled Java Console 6.0.xx that won't uninstall through Firefox.

To get rid of an old 6.0.xx extension, go to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions and just delete the folder called {CAFEEFAC-0016-0000-00xx-ABCDEFFEDCBA}, and you're sorted.

You can use the same trick to get rid of other extensions that won't take a hint (e.g. the Skype extension). The folder is another {Guid} -- look in the chrome.manifest file inside the folder for one containing appropriate names; or check the date of the folder against the date you last installed/updated.

Javascript Airport weather decoder

While weatherpixie remains on extended hiatus, I have finally put together a simple in-browser replacement. It uses James Padolsey's cross-domain Ajax plug-in for jQuery (indirecting via YQL), a simple parsing script from Manuel Heras, here separated into a stand-alone script, and an iframe-based page to do the work.

The final piece of heavy lifting is to get the appropriate METAR report for the local airfield, and that's just a few lines of javascript --

Here, EGSC is the ICAO code for Cambridge Airport. And that's a lot closer to home than the Met. Office who give out current conditions at Bedford on the Cambridge forecast!

Links for 3-Aug

Concurrency

• Multithreading with asynchronous delegates.
• Software Transactional Memory in .net 4.0 beta 1 experimental.
• On effects and ubiquitous parallelism.

Closing your laptop in meetings.

Monads and the many language route to more functional programming.

Web

• CSS text rotation.
• Misunderstanding markup -- the XHTML future.

Just isolate it already -- for cleaner code.

Unit testing MSBuild extensions.

IronRuby 0.9 release.

Links for 27-Nov

Bumper DLR bundle -- IronRuby α2, IronPython2 RC2...

OO F# -- encapsulation & comparison with C#.

Unit Testing -- neat idea for GUIs, frameworks for JavaScript.

SAML tokens with Geneva.

Geolocation services.

Links for 28-Oct

PDC link collection -- tons of Azure links, including tools; C#4 preview, and more.

typeface.js -- font embedding via <canvas> and text replacement.

Geneva -- the new codename for the identity framework formerly known as Zermatt.

Links for 15-Apr

Rescuing off-screen dialogs.

Pattern Matching in C# Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

Embeddable C# web server that doesn't need admin privilege. 

ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpısdn - unɟ ɹoɟ ʇsnɾ 

Snow

The snow arrived overnight, and I woke up to something like this

The view from the bedroom window

So I decided not to go to the office.

Not inclined to drive

This meant that I ended up working an 11 hour day, with only a few interruptions, as a result of “eating our own dog-food”, with GotoMyPC, and related GotoMeeting and GoToWebinar (so I worked when had I been at the office I would just have been passively consuming an all-hands presentation). *sigh*

Web (server) logs

Image requests are interesting; a lot of requests come into my site for Oscar Wilde's tomb, and Jim Morrison's; as well as tree lined avenues and the Beast of the Gévaudan. I think my Velay walking page is the single most visited non-gallery page — of the galleries, the old family photos seem to be quite the magnet.

Not only do the latter have names, regiments and other organizations as keywords, there is a lot of interest in “Old London Town”, and WWII family or uniform shots, as well. Also commonly requested are falconry mews, hibiscus flowers, and the Monastery at El Deir by Petra.

In other requests, having an NGE based set of pages gets some interesting highlights as to which pairings people are interested in, from the lone Gendou/Misato shipper, to the level pegging of Shinji/Asuka and Rei/Asuka (tie broken if you add in the “Shinji strangles Asuka” search string). And I think I know what is going through peoples' minds when they visit a fanfic page with the chapter title of “Greater Love” — they don't recognise the blatant allusion to John 15:13.

I also keep getting random gerbil related hits on the Ranlyr campaign write-up page.

Web (server) logs

I detected a couple of new trends this month, adding to the Eva lemon enthusiasts, and the ones looking for people whose names appear in my genealogy. Both are driven by the wonderfully dumb “Ask Jeeves” engine.

The first looks like people trying to research their homework (questions about planets without moons or rings, or the land under the sea, or worker bee leg adaptations) — and may Eschaton preserve them if they use what they find on my pages.

The second is more of a shock, as my site gets amazingly high (often first place!) ratings on queries about girls' kecks or rainwear fetishism.

Though I was amused by the hit my old RPG pages got for Superhero 2044.

Web (server) log

Well the last few weeks have shown the usual people looking for names in the extended family, and the usual run of Eva related stuff — I suppose given I have an Eva fan-fic page that's Asuka-themed, it's not surprising that I get caught in searches by otaku looking for heartwarming fics where she falls into bed with the other female members of the cast, or occasionally Ikari-kun (the surprise of this bunch was the search for Kaji/Misato fics).

The oddities have been the "Ask Jeeves" results - questions about Andrews' Liver Salts; about gerbils learning mazes (Pete Windsor could never have expected that that would be an outcome of his 6^th form D&D) and, crazily enough, where a citizen of Massachusetts could take food aid for survivors of the recent natural disaster in the Indian Ocean. And I came top of the list for "how many graves can you fit in a graveyard?" with a page that contained no such information.

These show quite how mindless the pattern matching is for the search; and how misleading the natural language interface is. This is really one of the commandments - "thou shalt not give the user cause to needlessly anthropomorphize."

Sharpreader vs WordPress

I chose Sharpreader as an aggregator - but there are a number of blogs whose feeds verify but fail to load with a red

The underlying connection was closed: The server committed an HTTP protocol violation.

The problem — WordPress emits a maformed HTTP header "Last Modified:", which should be "Last-Modified:" and the default paranoid setting of .NET rejects this.

The workround — create a sharpreader.exe.config file alongside sharpreader.exe ; this is a plain text file containing:

<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <settings>
      <httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing="true" />
    </settings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

The fix — To fix this problem in Wordpress, search for the following line in your PHP and add the hyphen

@header('Last-Modified: '.$wp_last_modified);.

Web (server) log

More of the weird strings that pull people to my sites.

• Eden Project cornwall
• christopher gilham
• Gilham — twice
• "steve gilham" — On Google UK for UK sites. I've not pwnZ0rZed that to the same extent as unfettered Google.
• FRED WALTERS — My distant relative isn't the baseballer
• len walters
• crossbar & "her wrists" — Aargh! I'm caught in the middle of a search for John Norman's Gor. Unclean!
• architechnix — There appears actually to be a real company of this name, but my fictional one (Tuckerising some of my own past) gets the #1 slot
• cats at home — obligatory cat pix
• Mangatoetoe — been there
• Utena + Nerv Fanfiction — one of the strings leading to hits on the same page as the next few strings:
• neon in its purist state
• Evangelion "Story Boards"
• b-spline_eva
• fan interpretations of The End of Evangelion
• Rei & Asuka & shoujo-ai
• shinji and rei ayanami having sex pic — Somebody was disappointed ;)
• walking holidays in france — I write about mine
• pinewoods cemetary — yes, I do have a page with both those words on, but very far apart
• walking tour st. jacques of compostelle — another of the many hits on the same
• hotel de chanaleilles — and again
• Le Puy-en-Velay france photo — and again
• walking holidays france — and again
• french>church>st.Nectaire — and again
• "Le Puy" GR65 — and again

• GUI Toolkit Skinning Win32
• "Mr Tines"
• ravnaandtines — from Italy
• stand alone blowfish

Holiday - Woodbridge to Needham Market and home.

Only a short run in good weather, so late breakfast, potter about, take detours and still get back to base by 13:00. Fortunately, luggage is there too, so can head straight off. Stop in at my parents in Subdury to unsnarl their network. The "helpful" network setup wizard bridged the firewire and ethernet on one box by default, which squelched TCP/IP; and on the other, the connection sharing didn't proxy DNS, so I had to install Privoxy on the modem machine. But it all seemed to work. Then home to mow the lawn and shred more stuff to finish filling the green bin.

The Internet — A global source of practical uses

As Pete Abrams put it on the very first panel of Sluggy Freelance; at least as far as it is a repository of species memory. In these heady days before we regard Google as the new Microsoft, the ability to type in an error message and get a how-to-fix in moments is just amazing.

Like at the weekend, having acquired an old HP workstation with a pre-wiped disk to use as a server, I though I'd be daring and run up Mandrake 10 with a 2.6 kernel. And having installed, got a kernel panic during boot, trying to mount the file system. Yep, known problem, trying to mount a filesystem while the disk drivers are still on the unmounted filesystem. You can fix it with an intermediate RAM-disk stage, but I took the simple route and just backed off to a 2.4 kernel instead.

Slow start

Weekend was busy setting up the new home network - a shiny new router/modem/firewall/802.11g access point now that broadband has finally made it to the village. Not that the service will go live until next week...

Meanwhile it's just too darn hot and humid to do anything much, other than in small bursts. Which includes making the excuse that I can stop in the garden when I've filled up the green wheelie-bin with shredded bits of tree pruning.