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When I first got a customized Firefox install demonstrated to me I was immediately awestruck by the functionality offered by extensions. Sure, Firefox isn't the fastest nor the most standard-compliant browser around, but the extensions really got me hooked (thanks, HHJ)! So I did the conversion after having used Opera for 5-6 years. And now, after half a year I find it a real pain to install all extensions every time I install a new computer. So as much for the benefit of myself as well as a public service, I thought I'd list all my extensions together with links.

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I finally did the last import job from the old blog. I inserted all poems from my old poem page as blog entries. Since they weren't dated, I dated them once a month beginning from the first one. Feel free to select the "Lyrics and poetry" category from the left menu to browse through them!

I'm now the proud owner of a Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard. And yes, it's just as cool as it looks, even though I use the display more for sysinfo and calendar than actual gaming. Having to move your eyes from your screen to the LCD display during gaming just doesn't work out that well in real life. Thanks to LCDStudio you can customize your own displays, with all the info you'll ever need!

A big catch is that the keyboard for some reason isn't available with norwegian layout. It is, however, available in swedish. But because of this, the swedish versions are extremely difficult to come by. I guess Logitech didn't anticipate that norwegians would throw themselves over the swedish version aswell. Well, it's so cool, you can't help it!

But since the swedish version was so hard to find I ended up buying an english version together with some keyboard stickers from WorldLanguage.com with norwegian characters. But after using the keyboard for a couple of hours I did a horrible discovery! The difference between 101 and 102 keys keyboards... Since scandinavian languages have 3 letters more than english (and these must be available both as upper- and lower-case), these keyboards have an extra key. Thanks to some reorganizing the key is located between the left shift key and the Z key. This extra key contains the < and > symbols. As a webdeveloper, I was not amused. After trying desperately to program the macro keys to provide me with the missing key I figured out that the macro keys can only emulate keypresses from other keys on the keyboard, so that plan clearly did not work.

And the solution? Well, by downloading Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creater (no link, because MS requires WGA validation for the download) and using the accessibility on-screen keyboard in Windows (which let me switch to a 102 keys virtual keyboard) I managed to create my own layout! Since I had both curly and square braces on altgr 7 through 0 I decided to "outline" them with the missing symbols. So they're located at altgr - 6 (less than) and altgr - (greater than). This also made it possible to add them to the macro keys easily. So here you go, a 101-key keyboard layout in norwegian called N-101.msi!

After installing it, you can go to control panel, regional and language options, languages, text services and input languages, details, add the new layout and set it as default. While you're there, it's always a good tip to remove any languages you don't use. And voila!

Today I stumbled upon an article by Lachlan Hunt which lists some of the problems with using XHTML for webpages. After having read through it, I was nearly ready to reimplement my XHTML pages in HTML... The main cause for this was IE's lack of support for application/xhtml+xml content. It won't render it, but instead provides you with a standard download dialog. Serving XHTML as text/html, like most people do nowadays is actually fooling older user agents (like IE) to treat the page as good ole' HTML. But there were a lot of other issues with XHTML I didn't like the sound of either.

This would actually make my employer have to use HTML Transitional, since some of the ad serving is done using <iframe>, which isn't allowed in the strict doctypes. You can read more on the differences between strict and transitional markup here. I might be arrogant, but HTML4 Transitional sounds a bit too nineties for me to accept, even if it is an acknowledged standard.

Luckily, the XHTML specs states that text/html is ok to use for XHTML documents, and they even included a thorough appendix on how to make sure your XHTML document renders correctly in browsers that treat it like HTML. Very good reading, and it contained several implications I weren't aware of!

Edit 1: There's an article over at workingwith.me.uk about sending mime headers depending on what the user agent supports. Highly recommended reading. Works like a charm here. Though I was a bit shocked to notice that W3C's validator doesn't send the correct ACCEPT-headers.

Edit 2: W3C has a table with the definitive overview of contenttypes for the differenct specs.

Edit 3: The code from www.workingwith.me.uk har some bugs if a browser explicitly states it does NOT want application/xhtml+xml. I rewrote my handling using some code from www.autisticcuckoo.net which seems to work more reliably (setting Q to 1 as default).

Lately I've done some research for free (as in beer) development environments, both for web and Java. The result was, to put it blunt, a huge disappointment. What actually disappointed me more, was the horrible pricing for commercial solutions with no "personal use only" licenses available.

The "can do everything known to man but is like removing a lash in the eye with a shovel"-approach would ofcourse be Eclipse or Netbeans, but after using them for a couple of days you loose all faith in using Java for creating large desktop applications. They're essentially large and fancy texteditors with the possibility of launching external compilers. Why this task should need to require the good half of my 1 GB RAM is totally beyond me... Add to this a startup-time that matches that of the OS itself, and your productivity probably needs to be picked up from the floor by the time you're ready to do some actual programming.

For smaller things I've found myself using Notepad++ lately, and while it lacks a lot of automation it's still the best Notepad replacement I've seen, so I advice you to give it a try none the less. But I was stilling missing some things in order to use it as a full IDE so I set out to test the competition. My wishlist went something like this:

• Extendable
• Open-source and actively developed
• Syntax highlighting
• Project- or filebrowser panel
• Some sort of context-sensitive lookup
• FTP support for web development
• Shortcuts for build/run/preview
• Should support the languages I use most (XML, Java, JSP (this one's surprisingly rare!), PHP, HTML, CSS, JS and ideally Python)
• Subversion support

I don't think I'm particularily picky, so why were there so few programs that managed to fill half of these? I have no idea myself, but the only one that fitted the bill for me was PSpad. It supports a ton of languages, but lets you define compilators, run commands and preview commands for each one yourself. The only things missing from my list are opensource (it's closed but still freeware) and SVN support. But SVN updating isn't something you do continously anyway, so TortoiseSVN does the job fine for now. In addition you get macro support, chm-file help integration, class browser for several languages, integration against TopStyle CSS editor, direct FTP edit, template library, hex edit, export with highlight to RTF or HTML, HTML processor (tidy up or just compress), internal webbrowser and more. This one is truly my recommended download of the day!

I've tried several programs to help diagnose diskspace usage. All of them were stand-alone apps that scanned a specied folder and it's subfolders, giving you various views over disk usage (folder trees, piecharts and in some cases weird block-diagrams). But today I stumbled upon Folder Size, a superb solution. What it basically does is add a system service that keeps track of folder sizes on request (with caching and change notifications) together with a new column in Explorer called "Folder Size", which behaves like the normal size column except that it also adds the total size of folders (instead of the blank space the normal size column displays). This explanation might look a bit messy, but just click the link and look at the screenshot!

After Microsoft pushed the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification (hereafter refered to as WGAN) tool out using Windows Update a lot of people cried out in despair. While I actually sympathize with Microsoft for trying to protect their intellectual property, there were several things that didn't quite sound right:

• Microsoft originally assured the press that the tool could easily be uninstalled, but this was clearly not the case.
• Without mentioning it in any documentation WGAN send information about you and your computer to Microsoft once a day.
• Microsoft itself states in the user-agreement that WGAN is beta software. Forcing users to install beta software doesn't sound like anything a qualityminded software company would do. The fact that many people has received false notifications underscores this fact.
• The description of Automatic Update clearly states that it only installs high-priority updates crucial for the security of your computer, but this is clearly not how anyone would describe WGAN.

Luckily, I have set Automatic Update to notify me before installing any updates, and I always select custom install so I can review the updates prior to installing them. This made me able to unselect WGAN for installation. Therefore my laptop is still free from spyware and beta software. I strongly advice everyone to do the same.

If however, you were one of the unlucky ones to get this piece of deceitful software on your system, I have the cure for you. Firewallleaktester.com has made a utility called RemoveWGA which helps you remove the update from your system.