AJAXed Twitter Plugin for WordPress

January 28th, 20101

Ricardo González wrote a nice plugin for WordPress that displays the public timeline of a twitter account in your WordPress theme.

Though the plugin works I found two major problems:

  • Sometimes Twitter doesn’t provide the timeline at first request.
  • Embedding it in your theme significantly slows down loading of the blog.

I came up with a solution to both of them (featuring MooTools or jQuery support) using XMLHttpRequest.

Basically all it does is wait until the page is loaded and then request the tweets. If Twitter decides not to provide the timeline, the request is sent again until a configurable number of retries is reached.

There are two ways to use this plugin:

  1. Configure it manually (see how-to below)
  2. Use it as a widget (version two and above)

If you use it as widget, simply use the management functionality for widgets provided by WordPress. Otherwise (if your theme doesn’t support widgets for example) you can set also it up manually as I did on this blog (because I use MooTools here).
Continue reading

Your own 64-Bit-build of Firefox

January 21st, 20100

With all that Firefox 3.6 news lately, you might have asked yourself where to get it for your 64 Bit system, because though the nightly builds also include x86_64 (to make sure developers don’t break anything), official releases – like latest 3.6 release – don’t.

Here’s what I do: Continue reading

Time-tracking Hamsters

January 18th, 20100

I’m following the development of a great time-tracking software since mid 2008. Project Hamster, an applet for Gnome’s panel, has constantly evolved from a nice tool to something I could not do without any more.

It’s easy to use, fast and for someone like me (I always forget to write down start and stop times) it comes with a few handy reminding features.

The new interface they are planning for Gnome 2.30 is cleaner and better arranged than ever before, but I’ll let the screenshots (excuse the German labels) speak for themselves.

Xorg and HAL

January 15th, 20101

A few things have been brewing in Linux-world concerning the replacement of HAL for some time now: Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx (10.04) for example will ship without it.

Xorg 1.7.4 was uploaded to Debian/unstable three days ago and comes with udev support, which also means that support for configuration of input devices via HAL was dropped (at least for Linux).

So, in case you might wonder how to configure your input devices, here’s an example for my Synaptics touchpad. Similar to HAL, put your .fdi-files into “/etc/udev/rules.d/”.

ACTION!="add|change", GOTO="xorg_synaptics_end"
KERNEL!="event*", GOTO="xorg_synaptics_end"
ENV{ID_INPUT_TOUCHPAD}!="1", GOTO="xorg_synaptics_end"

ENV{x11_options.MinSpeed}="0.50"
ENV{x11_options.MaxSpeed}="1.3"
ENV{x11_options.AccelFactor}="0.025"

LABEL="xorg_synaptics_end"

Although you can get rid of HAL completely, some (Gnome-) packages are still built with HAL support and dependencies. I for example had to rebuild gnome-power-manager and sound-juicer but after that I was able to disable HALs start-script. Another problem you might face is the dependency of bluez (the bluetooth implementation) on HAL.

If you’re interested: Xorg developer about udev-directions

Finally done

January 15th, 20101

After intensive redesign of derHofbauer.at and the decision to drop dasSchandblatt (my old blog) in the near future, my new website goes on-line today. I still have to test and complete the layout for Internet Explorer though.

This blog will be about OpenSource, web-development and computer stuff mostly.

Have fun!

Update: IE8 was no problem at all, IE7 a little bit and, no, for a private “fun”-page I’ll never do IE6-support again. Even if it was easy. This website “needs” transparent .png-graphics because it’s much easier for me to use the alpha-channel instead of fixed graphics.