Posted about Google Reader on Top of the Mountains:

Not dead, just hibernating. :)

So, I downloaded Firefox 2.0 beta 2 the other day, and this morning downloaded Firefox 2.0 RC 1. Impressions (from running it on OS X 10.4):

It feels a good deal faster than Firefox 1.5. Still not as fast as it could be, I suppose, but it’s more responsive. I’d forgotten that Firefox doesn’t have to be slow. :)

You can now subscribe to a blog in Bloglines via the RSS button in the location bar, which is sweet. It worked flawlessly for me.

Being able to close a tab from the tab itself is a nice addition which I’ve been missing (having used it in Camino and such). In the beta 2, the inactive tabs were faded out quite a bit so you could barely read the text; in the release candidate, though, they’ve pulled the text back into focus, so it’s a more legible dark grey. I think I like the tab overview button at the right, but it’ll take some training to get used to it (I keep thinking subconsciously that it’s the “close tab” button :)).

Another little gem is History->Recently Closed Tabs. I haven’t had to use it yet, but it’ll be quite handy, I’m sure.

Firebug (which I use for web development) already works with the new release, thank heavens. But it’ll only be a matter of time before the other extension developers catch up.

As far as the theme goes, it’s okay. The reload button wouldn’t be my first choice, but overall the look is tolerable — certainly much better than in 1.5.

Conclusion: it’s a keeper. I haven’t run into any stability problems, so unless I do (and I doubt it), I’m sticking with Firefox 2 from now on.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Bloglines, Camino

I’ve been porting the BYUFHLC to PHP, and it’s coming along pretty well in spite of a number of mini-setbacks. The only tricky part was figuring out how to parse the HTML from the screenscrape. At first I was going to use Troy Wolf’s class_http, but it didn’t seem to have any functions for actually doing anything with the HTML once it was fetched. Then I discovered the new DOM stuff in PHP 5.

Excitedly coding up a few lines to test it, I ran into function-not-found errors. Ten minutes later, I realized that Bluehost’s servers were running PHP 4. (Side note: I’d tried to get PHP running locally on my Mac, but it wasn’t serving the PHP; instead it would just display them as plain text.) I called them up and they said it’d take a 24-hour downtime to migrate my domains over to the PHP 5 server. That was unacceptable.

So, I went hunting around in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf again, and I found a line reading “<IfModule mod_php4.c>”. Changed the ‘4′ to a ‘5′ and it all started working perfectly.

After that, it only took twenty or thirty minutes to convert my Ruby code to PHP, and I’ve got the first set of results working perfectly. But now my stomach is grumbling because I haven’t eaten in a long time, so finishing this up is going to have to wait till tomorrow. I’m glad it’s going to be a fairly easy port. (From here on out it’s smooth sailing, since I’ve worked out all the DOM issues.) Expect another status report tomorrow.

And no, I’m not converting to PHP. :) I love Ruby and will continue to use it whenever possible.

Technorati Tags: PHP, Bluehost, Ruby

Last week on Top of the Mountains I mentioned my FHLC/UVRFHC mashup (which I’m now calling BYUFHLC). It’s written in Ruby on Rails and is 75% done (I just have to add support for the non-place searches, like surname and such). Here at the Center for Family History and Genealogy, my employer has gotten interested in it, especially with the possibility of packaging it up to deploy at other family history centers.

Which leads to the question: is Ruby on Rails good for that? I mean, I know it’s superior to something like PHP or Perl, and I much prefer it, but what are the chances that those family history centers are going to be able to support a Rails app? It seems like PHP would be a better choice, since it’s guaranteed to be installed and supported. I don’t really want to recode it in PHP, though. :)

Technorati Tags: Ruby on Rails, PHP, Perl