Chrome.

I mean, there it is for anyone who has ever installed Firefox from archive to see. It’s right in the root directory of the package, for heaven’s sake!

[your top level directory here]/firefox/chrome.

In case you haven’t ever looked in there, its the one with all the .jar files, and icons, that Firefox uses in rendering its “look and feel”. In fact, chrome isn’t just a directory, it’s what developers call the browser’s UI window. There’s even a bunch of articles detailing chrome URLs and what you can do with them.

Funny how none of the tech-clueless non tech press has mentioned this.

Or, for that matter, the supposedly tech-saavy (but in actuality similarly tech-clueless) tech press.

So you read it here first.

Too bad I don’t get paid to sit around all day and think about this kind of stuff.

Back to the salt mines.

P.S. Oh yeah. As far as I’m concerned its about time we had a new combatant in the browser war. If poor (OK, system debilitating) performance and crashing windows actually improved with each new version from the other two I might feel differently — but the pain I experienced in the last transition from Firefox 2 to 3 was no illusion, and neither is the churn to a standstill behavior of IE 7. I’m ready to try something different. Real ready. Of course someone needs to go tell the guy who develops the Flash plugin for Linux that he now has more to worry about than porting to 64-bit Firefox…

P.P.S. Google’s comic-book style explanation of its new browser technology is something you’ll want to take the time to read through. Here is a direct link.

Anyway, I decided to see how hard it would be to extract an .mp3 audio file from the .flv (Flash Video) source.

First, I downloaded the .flv using the free Fast Video Download add-on for Firefox.

Next, I fired up ffmpeg in a terminal window, using the following syntax:

ffmpeg -title "Weird Al Ebay" -i '"Ebay" by Weird Al Yankovic.flv' -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 -vn -y weirdal_ebay.mp3

(this should be entered all on one line)

That’s all there is to it! Just point an mp3 player, like xmms, at the output file and enjoy.

Oh, and here’s the original ‘tube embed for my little guy:

Anyone who still isn’t using Linux as their primary desktop should really think again.

Now I just have to figure out how to run my kids latest favorite game on ‘nix. Wait! That would be Runescape, which does run on Linux — in any browser that can load the Java plugin. Thanks Dr. Gosling, again.

A lot of folks moved to PHP5 some time ago. My ISP made the big push (yes, it was after the stated 12/31/2007 EOL), without any problems that I could see. Of course careful planning helps. At the same time they upgraded to PHP5, they also rolled out upgrades for any PHP applications they supply to their customers.

Not that this is any comfort to the multitudes of web developers who still have a ton of legacy code to maintain. As usual it’s going to be a bear for them to get buy in for major rewrites — meaning that they’re basically doomed to continue forward “without a net”. No pun intended.

My weapon of choice has been chosen. The two volume Core Java series by Cay Horstmann and Gary Cornell.

Just started with the first of these, Core Java. Volume 1, Fundamentals (8th ed., 2008), which covers object oriented programming and other basic concepts of the language. The second, Core Java. Volume 2, Advanced Features (8th ed., 2008) covers more complex topics, like network and database access.

Of course one of the first things I had to do on the machine where I’m running the labs (the O/S being 64-bit CentOS 5.2 Linux) was rip out the Red Hat (er… the upstream “prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor”) supplied openjdk and eclipse packages, because the compiler wasn’t producing the expected results (I think the issue is with the version info returned by openjdk). This was going to be necessary eventually anyway. since openjdk does not yet support signed applets and other advanced features I’ll want to experiment with. Although installing it isn’t a big deal, I already had a copy of the latest stable Sun 64-bit JDK 1.6 installed (1.6.0_07) symlinked to /opt/java/jdk, I had to reset my JAVA_HOME to that path and reconfigure alternatives to use $JAVA_HOME/bin/java and $JAVA_HOME/bin/javac.

One “program” note :-). Apparently there’s a bug in the VM of the “stable” releases of Sun’s Java 1.6 (current is 1.6.0_07) that causes Eclipse, the IDE that Core Java uses in its examples, to crash when it’s first run by a user on Linux. The solution is to start it for the first time with the environment set to use the latest Java 1.5 (another way that I stumbled on through sheer luck was launching with the env set to Java 1.6 while the openjdk 1.6 libraries are still installed — apparently the bug has been fixed in the open source openjdk!). This is supposed to be fixed in the latest development version, 1.6 Update 10 RC (Build 27), which is not recommended for production use at this time (RC being for “Release Candidate”, a sure sign there may still be other issues to iron out).

Important Prereq: Make sure you have at least gcc 3.4.6 (RHEL 5 uses 4.1.2) and make 3.81 installed before proceeding. If the gcc libs don’t show up by doing a ldconfig -p, you’ll need to add them to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH with something like export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH. You’ll also need to make sure your PATH includes the location for make (for example export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH, if make is in /usr/local/bin). There may be other build tools needed depending on what is already installed with your system (the reason why I always include all dev tools in my base RHEL installs).

1. First, you need to download the source.

The latest is openssl-0.9.8h.tar.gz, available from here.

2. Unpack the source and cd into it.

3. The most common way to begin building it is simply to run ./config, but this has the effect of eventually making it install to /usr/local/ssl and won’t create any of the share libraries many programs, like Apache, want. If I’m installing this as a stand-alone, especially where another version may already exist, I usually name the install directory for the version and ask that it create the shared libraries. This gives me the following:

./config \
--prefix=/usr/local/openssl-0.9.8h \
--openssldir=/usr/local/openssl-0.9.8h \
shared

The “openssldir” parameter tells the configurator to put all binaries and libraries into the custom directory, instead of scattering them around /usr/bin and /usr/lib, as it would otherwise do.

4. Now run ./make and . Some of the tests in the latter will probably fail because the URLs they're directed at are obsolute.

5. Finally, as root, do a ./make install.

Check the install directory (here /usr/local/openssl-0.9.8h) to make sure all the expected files (and symlinks) are there. For example, the lib directory should look like this (except for the build datestamps):

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2800260 Aug 22 13:45 libcrypto.a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      14 Aug 22 13:45 libcrypto.so -> libcrypto.so.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      18 Aug 22 13:45 libcrypto.so.0 -> libcrypto.so.0.9.8
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1529889 Aug 22 13:45 libcrypto.so.0.9.8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  413358 Aug 22 13:45 libssl.a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      11 Aug 22 13:45 libssl.so -> libssl.so.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      15 Aug 22 13:45 libssl.so.0 -> libssl.so.0.9.8
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root  252586 Aug 22 13:45 libssl.so.0.9.8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 Aug 22 13:45 pkgconfig

6. If you’re on an older O/S that doesn’t map libraries automatically or use ldconfig to let you configure up those mappings manually by editing ld.so.conf, then you’ll need to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to include the path to your new libraries (in our example, /usr/local/openssl-0.9.8h), for any app that will use them. For Apache I usually just put a line at the top of apachectl to do this, like:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/openssl-0.9.8h/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

7. Once you’ve done all this, verify everything is working by running openssl version from the command line (make sure you do this from the install bin directory or have it mapped in your PATH!). That should return a:

OpenSSL 0.9.8h 28 May 2008

Now you’re ready to compile apache, openldapl or the dozens of other open source applications that can use openssl.