The World of Stuff .com

Almost Christmas

I’m a webmaster. When I’m designing web pages, it’s often useful to see how they look in different browsers and on different operating systems. But at work, I’m just one guy with IE 7 and Firefox 3 on Windows XP. What am I to do? Browsershots is a great service if you want screenshots of your page in different browsers. But what if you need to interact with your pages on different platforms?

Enter CrossBrowserTesting.com. The site gives you access to various Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes so you can do your thing. It’s kind of slow because you’ve got this stuff going back and forth over a network, but it’s pretty indispensable if you need to see how your web pages behave, which is often the case. It’s free to create an account and use the service; unless you buy credits, you’re limited to 5 minutes at a time, and paying customers get to skip ahead of you. In spite of that, there usually isn’t much of a wait. Sometimes there’s none.

The site requires Java, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people. By default, you connect to their computers via a Java applet. They also let you use your own VNC client, in which case they just give you the IP address and a password. You’ll still need to have Java, though. I know, it’s kind of lame. (I should add that Vinagre, the default VNC client in Ubuntu, is pleasantly easy to use. I had never needed to use it before.)

So CrossBrowserTesting.com went swimmingly on Windows at work, but on Ubuntu at home, the Java applet would cause Firefox to use 100% of the CPU and hang. It turned out that many, but not all, Java applets were doing this. I found out that it was a problem with the Java plugin that Firefox was using. With the version of Sun Java in Ubuntu 8.10 (Java 6 Update 10), there are two browser plugins: the regular one and the “next-generation” one, which fixes some bugs. The regular one is used by default, but the next-gen one is supposed to work a lot better.

So how do you switch between them? Here’s what I did. Your mileage may vary. No warranty, etc.

First, I deleted the symbolic link I created about a year ago:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
rm libjavaplugin_oji.so

As per this comment on the bug, I created a symbolic link to the new plugin in the same folder:

ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.10/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

But it didn’t work; both the old and new plugins were listed in about:plugins. So I followed the instructions of another comment:

sudo rm /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.4/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xulrunner/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.4/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/xulrunner/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so

The author provides these commands as a shell script (I found it easier just to run them one by one) and notes, “Don’t worry if you get an error message saying that something can’t be deleted.” (Not all of the files to be deleted existed for me.) Anyway, I did all those things and sho’ ’nuff, Java was working fine on CrossBrowserTesting.com and other sites. Yay.

Okay, that was boring. Here’s something a little more exciting. I just found out my grades for this semester: three A’s and two B+’s. It’s better than last time, and it brings my GPA up ever so slightly (about one hundredth of a grade point). I had already found out (or could guess) the grades for several of my classes, but my Indian Ocean class I had no idea about: part of the grade was a paper, which of course would be graded subjectively. Fortunately, I got an A. Thanks, prof. I’ll give you a good rating on Gator Ratings, a new site that a computer science student recently started.

Also, Where’s George?, a site I used to be heavily involved with, turns 10 years old today. I can’t believe it. That means I’ve been a member for almost nine years, which is crazy nuts. I haven’t done much in the past few years, though. Hardly anything, in fact. Still, the site is an interesting idea: enter the serial numbers of your US currency to track them as they go. The idea just got boring for me after a while, but it’s still cool when I think about it. (Also, when the forums were changed from WWWBoard to vBulletin, things were never the same.)

Although World War II ended in 1945, several Japanese soldiers held out from surrendering for various reasons: either they were really, really convinced that they shouldn’t surrender, or they weren’t aware that the war had ended. The last ones surrendered in 1974.