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The Gecko engine is the second most popular layout engine after Trident used by Microsoft’s IE. However, Gecko is open source, and used in all Mozilla software, most notable of which is of course Firefox. Many web browsers use this engine including Firefox, Camino, Flock, SeaMonkey, Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon, Kazehakase, Skipstone, and the newly discontinued Netscape. It runs on most operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BSD based OSes, Linux, Solaris, OpenVMS, OS/2 and AIX.

Gecko’s CSS layout of the page is done using rendering objects known as frames — not to be confused with HTML frames or iframes — that closely parallel the DOM tree. Three main operatoions are performed on frames:

• frame construction (building the tree of objects)
• reflow (determining their positions; should perhaps have been called Layout instead), and
• painting (drawing them on the screen) (the code to determine targets for events is closely connected to the painting code, so it can be considered part of this area).

More Info on Reflow:

Reflow Refactoring
Table reflow optimization

These awesome videos deal with the last two steps, I think, since the first step is behind the scenes.

Gecko Reflow of Wikipedia.org

Google Video link: Gecko Reflow of Wikipedia.org

Gecko Reflow of Mozilla.org

Google Video link: Gecko Reflow of Mozilla.org

Gecko Reflow of Google.co.jp

Google Video link: Gecko Reflow of Google.co.jp

It is interesting to note that it reflows the page twice for wikipedia.org and mozilla.org but not for Google. I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure it contributes to page load time. Perhaps this happens because Google doesn’t use CSS nor JS, or perhaps it is because Google doesn’t have a scrollbar, and the other two do? Now, if only someone made a Firefox extension of this!

I came across these videos on Google Video, but after more googling I’m inclined to think Shibuya is the guy who made these videos but because the page is in Japanese, I can’t be sure. Please, if someone can read it leave a comment to confirm.

VIA: gyu.que.jp

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Ok, you just installed a new Firefox extension and it didn’t go well. After restart you notice a grey bar bellow the status bar with sort of a prompt looking like this: ^. The caret (^) may or may not be followed by an error. Since it’s not the first time I hate when that happens.

The official fix found at mozillazine tells you to disable your extensions one by one, and after each disable to restart Firefox. This is fine if you have a handful of extensions, but if you’re like me, you got so many that you forgot what some of them do. It would take ages to do that, not to mention the session restore thing loading all your open tabs each time.

If the last extension you installed was at fault, then it’s easy, just disable it, reinstall it, or uninstall it, your choice. If you did some dirty profile work, like dumping one profile over another, or some such then it’s gonna be harder to fix. First look around and find something out of place, and extension that doesn’t work, an icon or menu that suddenly disapeared, or something like that. If there is more then one apparent problem make a list with the bad extensions.

Start by going to Firefox Add-ons and get the Add to Search Bar extension. Install, restart. This extension will allow you to search for other extension right from the Firefox search bar. Well, I use it to search for Wordpress plugins as well, and many other things. My Firefox search engine bar scrolls off the screen!

To use "Add to Search Bar" go back to Firefox Add-ons, right click in the search field, then in the pop-up menu chose "Add to Search Bar". Simple! Next choose the Firefox Add-ons search engine and search for the plugins you found malfunctioning earlier. Search and install each and every one of them. Restart and it should work.

If the above did not fix your problem, then it is time to reinstall them all. You also might want to look at the problematic extensions on MozillaZine.

While searching to a firefox logo to put up there, I came across this image:

and also this weird site maybe[...]world.cn and seeing that I’m sure that "maybe this is the biggest logo of firefox in the world" indeed! It is notable because it has 44 characters in the domain name, not a record by any means, since the maximum length of a domain name that can be registered is 63 (excluding the extension).

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The reason why I haven’t posted in a while is that I have upgraded to WP 2.5.1, and lots of things are broken, the most important of which is the TinyMCE editor, which I partially fixed. I know… I’m one of the many.

After a wait of nearly 4 years since the last service pack update, Windows XP x86 Service Pack 3 is finally here, and is for the 32 bit processor editions of Windows XP only. SP3 is cumulative, so it can be installed on top of Windows XP SP1 or SP2. All other flavors of XP can be upgraded as well, including the Windows XP Media Center Edition.

The last Windows XP x86 Service Pack, SP2, was released in August 2004. Service Pack 2 upgraded the security of the original XP, adding Windows Firewall among other security improvements.

Windows XP x64 can be updated by using the Windows Server 2003 SP2. The Windows XP 64 bit version of SP3 won’t be available until Windows Server 2003 hits SP3, since they share the same code base. So, if you are running XP x64, my sugestion is to upgrade to Windows 2003.

System administrator tools have not fundamentally changed from Windows XP SP2. SP3 can deployed using Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, or third-party solutions. The deployment process is essentially the same.

Features and Improvements:

• Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0
• Microsoft Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
• Microsoft Windows Installer 3.1 v2 (3.1.4000.2435)
• It improves compatibility with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 security credential providers.
• Various other security improvements
• Wi-Fi Protected Access 2
• “Black Hole” Router Detection
• Network Access Protection (NAP)
• Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP) 2.1
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 2.5

SP3 seems to also fix many of the performance issues introduced as part of Service Pack 2. For some benchmarks read the zdnet blog post, however I don’t buy the claims that Vista is faster than XP, and it certainly doesn’t feel that way. I have Vista as one option on my multiboot Windows box, and it is faster than XP, but this is caused by the fact that I don’t have that many things running on it, and indeed not many run anyway.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Download Links:

The Service Pack 3 white paper.

Service Pack 3 direct download.

Service Pack 3 via Windows Update.

However I would wait at least a week before downloading it to see how many issues surface.

UPDATE:

Well, it didn’t take long at all.

About an hour ago Microsoft announced in a written statement that there is a "compatibility issue" between the XP Service Pack 3 and Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, a retail chain management program for small and midsize businesses. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has the same bug and it was temporarily withdrawn from Windows update as well.

In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center.

To help protect our customers, we plan to put filtering in place shortly to prevent Windows Update from offering both service packs to systems running Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Once filtering is in place, we expect to release Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Download Center."

Makes you wonder what other software will break that they didn’t test yet.

The above download links are still good, and I will update them when and if the fixed pack comes out, so I advise caution downloading it till the dust settles.

In Unrelated News:

In the last quarter Microsoft’s earnings dropped by 6% from the previous year. Revenue from Windows alone also dropped by 24%.

A little back story first.

Quake III Arena is a multiplayer first-person shooter released in December 1999 which was developed by id Software. On August 19, 2005, id Software released the complete source code for Quake 3 under the GNU General Public License, however the game data, such as models, textures, sounds, shaders, and other scripts, is still proprietary. The game immediately became very popular in the open source community and numerous mods are released as self standing games. The main project is at ioquake3 (or ioq3 for short) and introduced many state of the art enhancements. The subversion is at icculus.

iTouch

The SDK, and a TIFF exploit jailbreak, allowed Scot from HermitWorks to compile the icculus source and with a few modifications, he made it run on the iTouch. Multiplayer no less! The accelerometers controls movement, and a touch fires your favorite weapon. The only drawback I see, is that you can not control the view. Still fun nonetheless. I only wished they released it! Here is the video:

Nice to see that games like Quake 3 are hitting the iPhone/iTouch platform. First person shooters are the only games worth playing in my opinion, and besides I still play Q3 once in a while. If you never played Quake 3, then go grab a copy, it’s heavily discounted, and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and it’s loads of fun. Well worth it.

Source: HermitWorks.

That was white rice. Did I mention you should turn your sound down? Watch the pets as well.

Cymatics is the study of sound waves in a medium. One of the earliest to mention this phenomena in writing was Galileo Galilei in his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" published in 1632, but some of the patterns can be seen in ancient art. However the term cymatics was not coined until much later, in the 1967 book titled Kymatik by the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny, who was inspired by the earlier work of Ernst Chladni.

So how is it done? A plate of glass or metal covered with lycopodium, flour, sand or rice is vibrated by stroking the edge with a violin bow, a speaker placed underneath, a piezoelectric amplifier, a mechanical wave driver or other methods.

Here are some of the best videos of cymatics in action.

One of Dr.Hans Jenny’s rare old movies:

Weather cocks? NVM that, here is a newer one:

A liquid medium:

A compilation of several set to music:

Enough of that, I think I got a headache now!

Today, Google and Virgin Group announced that the two companies would join forces to establish a permanent Mars base by April 1st, 2108, a hundred years from today. Virgle as the new joint venture is called, has selected the Martian Lunae planum as the site of the future human settlement on Mars.

If you would like to apply to be considered for the Mars mission go here. Many people have already left applications.

Ok, it’s an April’s fools hoax, but remember that real products like Gmail were announced on April 1st (2004) as well, and everyone was sure that it was a joke because the huge disk space of 1 GB was unheard off back then in a free service.

As for me, I’d like to believe, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be disappointed, as I was when the Google TiSP turned out to be a joke. OMG, did they mention you can use a septic tank? Yeah, right! The tyranny of Verizon shall continue.

For a full list of Google April 1st hoaxes visit Wikipedia. I am sure that by now Virgle found its way there.

MoneyQuake

MoneyQuake is a powerful Firefox extension from the same folks who gave us the amazing SeoQuake and the Serp EasySurf. MoneyQuake displays your real-time earnings statistics, after a quick configuration, from most popular PPC and other advertisment systems.

It also seems secure and the login/password information is encrypted and stored only in the FireFox browser. It also received the Softpedia seal as being free all malicious code or malware. Authorization is handled via POST method, and the configuration file is in XML format and can be easily extended by editing in any other ad provider that is not currently included.

A short sampling of the ad services it supports:

• Google Adsense
• Bidvertizer
• TraficCashGold
• StreamRay
• UmaxSearch
• PeakClick
• Buckster
• SoftwareProfit
• AdultAdsCash
• KlikVip
• AdultFriendFinderrn
• Begun
• Yandex.Direct
• Glavmed
• WildCash

Download it from here.
The official site is here, and don’t forget to grab the other cool extensions!

So you were curious and downloaded Firefox 3.0 or the newer Minefield nightly build, but each time you atart it, it conflicts with your firefox 2.0 profile?

Not many extensions will work with the new version, Firebug works though, so it should be installed using a separate profile. This is ideal since it will prevent many issues that might arise out of running both firefox 2 and Firefox 3 with the same profile. Did I mention Firefox 4?

First identify you profile location. The default locations are these:

• Windows Vista/XP/2000 - %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• Windows 98/Me - C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• MacOS - ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
• Linux - ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/

The xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.

Next make a copy of the profile an move it wherever is convenient. Doing a backup at this point will prevent loss of settings, boomkarks, and passwords, and should be done on a regular basis anyway.

On Windows create a shortcut of Firefox, copy it on the desktop, then right click it and chose properties. Chose the second tab named Shortcut. In the target field add this at the end: -no-remote -profile “path_to_your_new_profile”. Now each time you start Firefox with this shortcut it will use the new profile you created.

On the other operating systems running it with the -no-remote -profile “path_to_your_new_profile” argument will do the trick.

Having more than one profile is also the right thing to do if you have more than one member of your family using the same computer. Name the new shortcut created whatever you want, but make sure it reflects the profile, or user.

As for me, I’m running four Firefox 2, one Firefox 3, and also the Minefield build. In case you haven’t tried Firefox 3 yet, you should, since it’s pretty stable and has many features that make it worthwhile.

Get Firefox 3 from here.

While browsing the Mozilla FTP, I came across a nightly of Firefox 4.0. This seemed odd since Firefox 3.0 hasn’t reached RC1 yet, but this is not unusual. After doing some research, I came across a post by Ben Hearsum, saying that this is not actually Firefox-4.0a1pre, but actionmonkey and mozilla-central basic Mozilla rev 2 infrastructure builds. The latest Firefox 2 is rev 1.8.1.12, and Firefox 3 is rev 1.9b4, while the Firefox 4.0a1pre is rev 2.0a1pre.

Firefox 3.0 is not even out of beta, latest nightly is Firefox-3.0b5, and the devs at Mozilla are well on their way to giving us Firefox 4.0, the first in what is sure to become a long series of releases.

Firefox-4.0a1pre Minefield can be downloaded from:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-actionmonkey/

So is this firefox 4.0? Who cares, it’s the latest nightly build, so grab it, and check out how your sites get rendered. Oh, and if you wonder why it is called Minefield, it is because it’s not stable enough to earn the Firefox logo yet. You’ll notice that the “bomb” icon is just the earth globe, but without the “fire fox” encircling it.