Jan-Piet Mens

Mission Control is what Netscape used to have for deployment of Navigator and Communicator: the possibility of having corporate browser and e-mail client preconfigured and locked down for end-users. I used this very successfully in the late ninetees for locking down preferences in both those tools. It saves huge amounts of time on end-user support, when vital settings (e.g. name of HTTP proxy, e-mail address, etc.) are locked and cannot be modified by a user.

When the Mozilla foundation took over the Netscape code, major parts of the code seem to have gone down the drain. Although there are very many references to the MCD a.k.a. autoconfiguration throughout the web (also Mozilla's web), it would appear as if certain parts of Firefox support autoconfiguration, but large parts of Thunderbird don't. It depends on how the individual package has been built and which components where included during the build. That, in itself, is obvious. But why leave out the code? Just to save on a few kilobytes?

The latest Firefox 1.5 for example, taken from the Portable Firefox site, supports loading a Javascript configuration from a URL (the MCD setting for that is called autoadmin.global_config_url) and actually does so, but simple settings like locking the browser's startup page don't work, although others do. It is driving me crazy.

There being so many pre-built binaries for both Firefox and Thunderbird, I really don't want to go building my own.

I'd already written about how your del.icio.us bookmarks could be backed up, but after the total blackout at the del.icio.us site a few days ago, I decided to do this more carefully.

First of all, the one-liner presented in the first installment, doesn't back up all the bookmarks. The del.icio.us API forsees logging in with your username and password for that. Use an invocation such as


curl -sf -u username:password -o all.delicious.xml http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all


to retrieve the posts, which can be checked in to the Revision Control System with a simple


ci -l -q -m"`date`" all.delicious.xml


After the change over I was afraid we'd lost the electronic answering machine that we'd been using whilst connected to T-elekom, but I was wrong.

Arcor has unified messaging including an answering machine with its own telephone number. I'm not quite sure how reliable it is: during the first five tests I get an voice message telling me that the call isn't possible at this moment ( die von Ihnen gewünschte Verbindung mit diesem Dienst oder Dienstmerkmal ist nicht möglich)

But the hyper-cool bit about it, when it does work? I get the call relayed to my e-mail account with the voice recording attached as a .wav file.

The main clients or MUA for our e-mail cluster will be Mozilla Thunderbird and a web based program. I am currently in the process of creating an automated setup for Thunderbird which will allow an end-user to run a small program, enter some credentials and get a user.js file generated and set up in Thunderbird's Profile directory. It is a bit tricky as there may be more than one profile per user, but it ought to be possible.

The profiler (as I'll call it for now) will access a secure HTTP server, submit credentials and retrieve a ready-made user.js with all settings for the IMAP, SMTP and LDAP servers. Unfortunately, the Windows Thunderbird installers don't include required code to use lockPref() in either prefs.js or user.js, but I don't really feel like building my own Thunderbird from source…

I often hold down the meta key while scrolling with a mouse wheel in Firefox. In the default setting, the font-sizes of the page are increased respectively decreased depending on the down or up direction respectively. To disable that handling, enter about:config in the URL bar of Firefox, search for the mousewheel.withmetakey.action which is an integer with a default value of 3 and set that to 0.

Obwohl einige Schrekensmeldungen über den Umschwung zu Arcor kursieren, habe ich absolut keinen Grund zur Beschwerde. Die Bestellung habe ich online am 30.11 abgegeben, die Auftragsbestätigung am 11.12 verschickt (war im Urlaub) und alsbald kam dann die Ankündigung der Aufschaltung für den 28.12.

Heute war es soweit: um Punkt 12:02 waren DSL und ISDN betriebsbereit. Ich kann wieder telefonieren und surfen. Letzteres sogar bei 6mbit

I've been using the Safari browser ever since I started using a Mac, and I like it. But it just isn't good enough.

I visit a number of sites which require SSL client certificates for authentication and Safari supports but one: it simply sends off the first one it finds in the keystore, withought checking the issuer of the site's certificate; that sucks.

I'm going back to Firefox (which I use on Windows anyway) as the best choice for me.