Web development on chuso.net

Collapse all diff blocks in Github or GitLab

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 15:39:54 +0200

How to collapse all diff blocks in Github or GitLab while seeing changes between versions

No, don't blame the user

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 22:09:02 +0000

It is unusual to see a computer engineer defending users. Even more if the engineer is a system administrator. It is known that the relationship between system administrators and users is tense. But when somebody tries to fool me, I get even more tense.
Let's go over the facts.

The registrar

I'm updating the administrative contact of some domain names registered with a well-known Spanish registrar. The company listed as the administrative contact no longer exists and now the domain names belong to another company, so I have to update all the data, but that's another story. Now I will transfer the domain to another registrar, so I only need to change the e-mail address to get the auth code to transfer the domain name to another registrar. I will correct the rest of the contact details at the new registrar.
I leave all data as is and just change the e-mail address, then I submit the form and it does nothing. It does not send the data, shows no message, no action, nothing. I try with different browsers and the result is always the same. Since I know a little bit about this, I go to the browser error console and this is what I found there:

Anyone can make a web page

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:37:08 +0000

The title of this post is ambiguous, since it can be interpreted as "making web pages is something easy for everyone" or as "even the most inept is allowed to make a web page".
This ambiguity is intentional, since experience has shown me that both interpretations are correct, in fact often the first implies the second.

'Cause although anyone can make a website, not everyone can make any web page. It is not the same to make a blog on Blogger than to develop the Facebook website.

Fighting Firefox password reminder

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:15:06 +0000

The situation is as follows: a website which, after logging in with a username and a password, allows you to register new users and a Mozilla Firefox user with the option to remember passwords enabled.

The case: the user adds a new account or logs in with an account and then edits this account from another account.

The problem: When the user is adding the new account Firefox will fill the fields with the user and password of the current account. When the user is editing an existing account Firefox will fill the fields with the username and password from the account being edited —which is also in the password reminder— if the user is not editing the account with the intent to change its password will not notice that only the first of the two fields "Password" and "Repeat password" is filled, so when the user tries to save it will display "Passwords don't match" error.

RapidShare premium download with Opera

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:42:12 +0000

I must blame Fonso again, because he asks me about something like FlashGot but for Opera in Linux, i.e., a way to be able to select a block of RapidShare URLs to download them with a premium account with a download manager. So when I didn't find anything, I started with it.

I finally got a bash script that receives a list of links as parameters and adds them to Aria with a RapidShare premium account. Using aria was not a choice, since it was the only one, apart from wget, that supports RapidShare premium accounts (i.e., HTTP authentication) without problems.

New Google Docs and Opera

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:15:50 +0000

Update: This workaround is no longer needed with Opera 9.50 which seems to solve this problem. Check your version and update if needed.

Google has recently developed a new Google Docs version and if you thought they took the chance to improve (at least a little) the compatibility with other browsers, you couldn't be more mistaken. Actually, it went worse with Opera.

If previously it was enough by adding ?browserok=true in order to enter Google Docs with Opera and mask it as Internet Explorer to use Spreadsheets, now it gets constantly reloading with Google Docs and Spreadsheets is only usable with a poor read-only interface (masking Opera as IE throws errors).

IE 8 doesn't pass Acid 2 test

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:40:21 +0000

Fragment of IEBlog

The news spread on the specialized media: finally, almost two years later than the first browser doing it (which wasn't either iCab, Safari or Konqueror but Opera), Internet Explorer 8 will pass Acid 2 test. The title of the only proof offered by Microsoft (since the browser is not yet available) is conclusive: «Acid 2 test pass complete». The corresponding post on IEBlog doesn't either left any doubt: «IE8 now renders the "Acid2 Face" correctly».

Coming back

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:09:21 +0000

Those that usually visit my page (yes, there are such people) would notice that it had an irregular behavior being inaccessible the most of the time. It was due to two reasons:

The abusive frequency of the new search engine Cuill indexing web pages squeezing the bandwidth with 1,000 daily requests, most of them referring to inexistent URLs that seem to be randomly generated by the robot combining different URLs, until it gets my hosting server to block my web page because of exceeding the daily bandwidth.

Bypass Canalmail

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 08:08:29 +0000

If you usually visit community portals in the PHPNuke style and similar you may find that some webpages say that you need to register with Canalmail to be able to access to any section (for example, download links). Canalmail is a very annoying commercial mass mail service and since one of the webpages I usually visit now uses Canalmail I finally made this script with JavaScript that replaces intermediate Canalmail URLs by the effective URL avoiding registering with Canalmail.

Safari and MSIE on Linux

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:02:08 +0000

As soon as I knew about Safari for Windows I knew what I wanted to do: after being able to run Internet Explorer on Linux it's time to do the same with Safari.
It's not easy, but when you know what you have to do it isn't difficult. And if you see how it works on Windows:

you can't expect great things with Wine either

These are the steps needed to be able to run Safari on Linux using Wine.

Jëkýll & Hyde toolbar for Opera 9.2

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:44:46 +0000

Jëkýll & Hyde is a powerful and useful toolbar and menu set for Opera, but its last version was designed over Opera 8, so it doesn't include support for some features introduced in version 9, such as Create search or Content Blocking, so when you install this toolbar yo lose this options.

I've made a modified version of Jëkýll & Hyde toolbar to include support to those features and some other improvements and fixes. Some of the changes included:

I really love Internet Explorer

Thu, 24 May 2007 13:14:20 +0000

I know I've already criticized Internet Explorer because of its distinctive way to interpret standards. But then I found the bug-of-the-day issue which means that Internet Explorer will give you an unexpected behavior failing where other browsers get success, so you must waste even hours or sometimes days to guess that what's going wrong this time with Microsoft's most (in)famous product may be:

If a JavaScript function modifies the src attribute in a <img> tag, but it doesn't do it at the end of the function, the loading of the image may be canceled.
An <IMG> tag with id and name but without src (common case of an image that will be manipulated through JavaScript) causes to loss session variables unexpectedly.
If you change a <div> visibility style from hidden to visible, sometimes this change is not applied to the child objects which should inherit this property.
IE doesn't support position: fixed;.
PNGs using an alpha channel for transparency show black background instead of transparency in IE.
If you create an object with document.createElement() and then append it to content with appendChild() it won't be initialized, you should use innerHTML property or insertBefore() or similar.
onmouseover event doesn't work over transparent backgrounds.

These are the most recent that I can't remember now, but any web developer can surely apport much more. Many of these bugs have been solved in Internet Explorer 7, but 5.5 and 6.0 are still the most used.

How to fix flash player to work on any browser

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:33:57 +0000

Update: Opera 9.50 seems to solve this problem. Check your version and update if needed.

After a serious vulnerability had been discovered in Acrobat Reader for PDF, one of the leading products from Adobe now becoming a standard, which affected all browsers now the online video format they are also trying to introduce as a standard doesn't work with some browsers. You can check that Flash plugin for Linux (it seems that also affects Windows) doesn't play FLV video with Opera (you can also find cases with Firefox or Konqueror). You can find many reports of many users with this problem, I also had my fight with it. Finally, Gentoo Bugzilla gave me the answer:

Opera web browser with usage report tool for Gentoo

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:56:36 +0000

Opera has just announced through its desktop team the releasing of a new developing version for betatesting that includes a tool that makes reports about browser usage and configuration and without private information to send it anonymously to the company to improve the browser. Someone named this Opera 'Spyware', though it's a feature not present in official releases, which can be deactivated, you can read reports before sending it and the browser warns you about this the first time it's run.

Browsers and standards

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:03:15 +0000

Opera 9

Safari 2.0

Konqueror 3.5

Firefox 2

Internet Explorer 7

Those are the results of running the Acid2 test against the most popular browsers.

The results are eloquent, but just in case, I'm going to clarify it: it should be a yellow smiley face over a white background that when you pass the mouse over or near the nose, it becomes blue.