The new widget is a complete rewrite of the old widget. Earlier all options for plugin was in the widgets section. The new version adds a new options page to the “Settings” menu. Once you have installed the plugin, make sure to set your username on the picasa settings page. Once this is done, It’ll download the photo information and cache them. I’ve also added an option to list out the albums in this plugin. So, once the username is set, you can go to the widgets page and add any number of widgets – there you’ll get a list of albums, photo size and number of photos for each widget instance.

If you have uploaded new photos to the picasa albums, you can go to the options page and click on the “Refresh Cache” button to download new photos. Even if you have forgotten to do this, the photos will automatically get updated based on the cache lifetime you have set.

That’s all the features for now – I’ll add more features along the way once the base functionality of stable. Please remember, this is pretty much a complete rewrite, there might be few bugs here and there. If you have found any bugs, make a small comment here

Download from here

This is using the jreject jquery plugin. The wordpress plugin simply uses the wordpress hooks to insert jquery plugin into your theme.

Download Here

Sinhala language has been used in computers for a long time. In the beginning, it was simple ASCII fonts, replacing the English glyphs with sinhala letters. However, sinhala unicode came to play around in 2004. Around that time, we built a search engine converting ASCII text to unicode, so that it can search sinhala text written in any font. Actually, that’s how Paradox Software started. There were few blocks with rendering the unicode fonts, and people weren’t exactly using them. However, those problems are solved with newer releases and sinhala unicode is extensively used today.

You might have seen that there is a english to sinhala dictionary developed by UCSC Language Lab. It’s released under GPL as a firefox addon. Today, I extracted the words from the addon database and built a spell checker for firefox.

Following python code is used to extract the words from sqlite database :

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sqlite3
import re

conn = sqlite3.connect('en-si.db')
c = conn.cursor()
c.execute("select * from dict")
out = file("words","w")
for row in c:
  words = re.split(r"[ |]",row[1])
  for i in words:
    out.write(i.encode("utf8")+"\n")
out.close()

After that simply running, “cat words | uniq | sort > words.sorted” produced a sorted uniq list of words. The “affixcompress” tool comes with hunspell generated the affix rules file and I’ve placed some rules to support some common mistakes.

Install the addon from here. Once after you installed, you can right click a textbox, enable spell checking and select Sinhala as the language.

(Don’t ask me how සොක්කා got recommended for මඤ්ඤොක්කා)

The installation was straight forward. The only major difference was that ext4 file system was available. I created a separate partition for my home directory, and used ext4 for that. So far, I can’t tell a real difference. The ext3 was working fine, I just installed ext4 to test it out. Ext4 didn’t give any problems yet, but not any advantages so far either. Installation process finished very quickly and the booting time has been improved (They have finally changed the usplash theme and the GDM theme).

Besides the booting time, the next major feature 9.04 adds is the new notification system. This replaces the gtk notification daemon. The new notifications looks really nice, however the spec doesn’t allow any actions for the notifications. This seems to be a problem because lot of applications are using notifications with actions. It wouldn’t be a big deal if notifications are just shown without the actions, but instead it shows a dialog box with buttons as actions.

I’m using two applications which use notifications with actions, emesene and mail-notification. Mail-notifications doesn’t have any option to remove actions in the configure box, however there is an option in the gconf settings. You can fire up the gnome configuration editor using “gconf-editor” and remove the actions from “/apps/mail-notification/popups/actions” key. Emesene uses a plugin called “LibNotify” for it’s notifications. The code for actions can be easily disabled by commentting relevant the code. Comment following lines(lines 231 – 240) in “plugins_base/LibNotify.py” using ‘#’ chars.

	#if execute == 'conversation':
	#    def on_notify_action(notification, action):
	#        self.controller.newConversation(None, data[0], data[1], True)
	#    notification.add_action('default', 'default', on_notify_action)

	#elif execute == 'mail':
	#    def openMail(notification, action):
	#        desktop.open(self.controller.hotmail.getLoginPage\
	#            (data[0], data[1], data[2]))
	#    notification.add_action('default', 'Open Mail', openMail)

Other than that, the dropbox daemon was not working initially. I manaully downloaded the propertiary daemon and extracted it to “~/.dropbox-dist”. However, even with that dropbox was not starting up properly at boot. It should start automatically with the nautilus – the extension was loaded properly but it wasn’t not spawning the deamon. I simply added the “~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox” to startup and that sloved the problem (Yes, I know that it’s not a good hack). I also installed “ubuntuone” which is very similiar to dropbox, but I haven’t played around it yet.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import xml.dom.minidom
from xml.dom.minidom import Node
import os,sys

if len(sys.argv) != 2 :
	print "Usage " + sys.argv[0] + " [jnlp file]"
	sys.exit()

doc = xml.dom.minidom.parse(sys.argv[1])

jnlp = doc.getElementsByTagName("jnlp")[0]
codebase = jnlp.getAttribute("codebase")

resources = jnlp.getElementsByTagName("resources")[0]
jar = resources.getElementsByTagName("jar")[0].getAttribute("href")

application = jnlp.getElementsByTagName("application-desc")[0]
main = application.getAttribute("main-class")
arguments = application.getElementsByTagName("argument")

cmd = ""

for a in arguments :
	cmd += " " + a.firstChild.data

filename = jar.split("/")[-1]

if not jar.startswith("http:") :
	jar = codebase + jar

os.system("wget -N "+jar)

os.system("java -jar " + filename + cmd)

A small group of people, also known as hackers, formed a small foundation called “mozilla” and started hacking. As a result, they released “Firefox” in 2004. That was the beginning of second browser wars. Although Firefox mainly started it, It wasn’t a two player game this time. Apple was the other player. It was not easy to fight from the scratch. So, Apple forked the KHTML rendering engine and create Webkit project and the Safari browser. This war bought the life to many amazing technologies – Web 2.0 has emerged during the war. Yet, the war is not finished yet. Firefox is catching up with the market share with it’s newest release, Firefox 3.0 forming Guinness records.

Upto this point, the war was about new features, and the memory usage of browsers. Then, in September of 2008(yes, this month), Google turned the flow – they released one of their secret projects, Chrome. Like Safari, chrome is also built on Webkit, but Google has rewritten the javascript engine from scratch. This new engine, V8 is several times faster than the current script engines used in other browsers. Eventhough, Google released Chrome first, highlighting V8 and it’s speed, other projects have been also working on their own javascript optimizations. This is the beginning of Browser Wars 2.1.

So, this weekend I did some test runs on those engines. Namely, SpiderMonkey used in Firefox 3.0, TraceMonkey used in Firefox 3.1 and SquirrelFish Extreme used in Webkit. Unfortunately, Google hasn’t released the Chrome for linux yet – so, I wasn’t’ able to run accurate tests on V8 – but I’ve used a VM just to checkout the results anyway.

There are several javascript benchmarking tools available such as Sunspider, Dromaeo, and V8 benchmarks. If you do a little search on the internet, you’ll find tons of sites with benchmarking new engines using those. So, I decided to write few simple javascript functions based on commonly used techniques and benchmark them. These tests are further away from perfect, but it’ll give a rough idea.

Following graphs show how many of times the given function can be executed within one second. Each test has been run for 10 times and the mean is taken – Bigger is better.

Note : V8 tests have been run under a VM, you should technically ignore them.

Dom Create

function dom_create() {
	for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
		var d = document.createElement('div');
		d.innerHTML = "whatevertest";
	}
}

Dom Append

I wanted to append the ul to document but firefox(both 3 and 3.1) crashed.

function dom_append() {
	for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
		var x = document.createElement('ul');
		x.appendChild(document.createElement('li'));
	}
}

Update Inner HTML

Note : only function is measured, ‘var garbage = ….’ line is only called once before starting the benchmark.

var garbage = document.getElementById('garbage');

function dom_inner_html() {
	for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
		garbage.innerHTML = "<div>this should be some large string</div>
<p>with html elements</p><ul><l>>this</li><li>is</li>
<li>a</li><li>list</li> </ul>" + i;
	}
}

Get Element by ID

function get_element() {
	for ( var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
		var d = document.getElementById('garbage');
	}
}

Conclusion

(Chrome is not considered in this section, you can give it the benifit of doubt and come to your own conclusions)

As you can see, SquirrelFish Extreme has got an extreme boost over almost everything, except innerHTML updates. Tracemonkey wins the innerHTML updates from unbelievable margin. Both dom based techniques and innerHTML updates are used heavily in ajax based applications. For the time beign, SquirrelFish Extreme seems to have won the overall speed race.

However, browser is not just javascript and rendering. One of the strong features of Firefox is it’s huge number of extensions and the XUL interface which makes the life easier for extension developers. When you combine that with the current market share of Firefox, Firefox will rule the web for next few years.

Script

You can get the html file I used to benchmark from here. The benchmarking functions are taken from John Resig’s benchmarking quality blog post.

One of my browsing habits is to look for wikipedia articles. If it’s a movie, I look for imdb. So, instead of spending 1/2 seconds to go through results and analyze site address, i decided to write a simple greasemonkey script.

You can grab the script from here. If you have your own list of sites, you can simply edit the source(greasemonkey provides you a simple interface) and change the “sites” array.

For ubuntu 8.04, I had to compile, libgnome-2.23.4, intltool-0.40, gnome-desktop-2.23.4 and eel-2.23.4 before compiling nautilus svn trunk(svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/nautilus/trunk).

But it’s annoying to burn a CD for each distro you are going to try. One option is to use a USB drive. Unfortunately, my USB flash drive is USB1.0 but my motherboard only allows me to boot from USB2.0 devices. Another options is to copy the files into a new partition, and install grub/syslinux on that partition – but It’s not a good idea to mess around with partitions.

After experimenting a little bit with the ISOs and grub configuration, I manage to boot the distro, from the file resides in a sub directory of root.

Note : I used following commands in Ubuntu 8.10 – the file locations might be different based on your distribution.

Puppy Linux

Puppy linux is a light weighted, very small distro, yet contains most of the important applications for the daily use. In my opinion, this is a nicely designed great distro. My network card and video card worked without giving any trouble, but the sound card failed.

This distro is specially designed aiming towards portable users, who will run the distro in either a USB or a CD. Puppy linux uses squashfs compressed files to keep it’s root file system, and the init scripts are searching for these files in all hard drives, cdroms, and usb drives. So the installation is really easy.

1. Download the image, and mount it to a directory.

sudo mount -o loop puppy-linux.iso /media/cdrom

2. Create a directory in your root partition and copy the files from iso.

sudo mkdir /puppy
sudo cp -r /media/cdrom/* /puppy/

3. Modify your grub config file(/boot/grub/menu.lst) pointing to the puppy kernel and initrd file. Here is the menu entry I added, you’ll have to change the root according to your disk configuration.

title		Puppy Linux
root		(hd0,0)
kernel		/puppy/vmlinuz
initrd		/puppy/initrd.gz
quiet

That’s it – you can reboot the computer, select Puppy Linux from grub and boot.

Good OS – gOS

gOS is a distribution based on ubuntu designed for web 2.0 internet users (Latest version specially aims toward myspace users). I can’t really see a practicle advantage of using gOS, despite the fact that theming and dock is superb. Other than that, it’s just firefox bookmarks on desktop(dock).

The gOS root file system is also packed in a squashfs file, but the init scripts are different. So, the installation is bit tricky.

1. Mount the gOS image.

sudo mount -o loop gos-space.iso /media/cdrom

2. Then you’ll need the squashfs file, kernel and the initrd file.

sudo mkdir /gos
sudo cp /media/cdrom/casper/filesystem.squashfs /gos
sudo cp /media/cdrom/casper/vmlinuz /gos
sudo cp /media/cdrom/casper/initrd.gz /gos

(Note : You can also extract the squashfs file and make the process simpler, but that’ll require much more free space.)

3. When we do changes in the OS, we need those to be persistence. So, I choose to save changes on a file. Following commands will create a 500MB file, and format it as a ext3 drive.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 count=500 of=/gos/filesystem.ext3
sudo mkfs.ext3 /gos/filesystem.ext3

4. Now we need to configure the init scripts to use our files for root file system. So, first extract the initrd file.

cd /tmp
cp /gos/initrd.gz ./
gunzip initrd.gz
mkdir content; cd content
cpio -i < ../initrd

Now you have the initramfs on /tmp/content

5. We need loop, squashfs, and unionfs drivers. Edit the "conf/modules" file and append following.

squashfs
loop
unionfs

6. The default init script will get the "root" kernel parameter and mount it as "/root" in initramfs. We need a script to remount our files. Create a file called gos in scripts/init-bottom and paste the following content. (gedit scripts/init-bottom/gos)

#!/bin/sh -e
# initramfs premount script for gos

PREREQ=""

# Output pre-requisites
prereqs()
{
	echo "$PREREQ"
}

case "$1" in
    prereqs)
	prereqs
	exit 0
	;;
esac

mkdir /realroot
mount --move ${rootmnt} /realroot
mkdir /sqroot
mount -o loop /realroot/gos/filesystem.squashfs /sqroot
mkdir /extroot
mount -o loop /realroot/gos/filesystem.ext3 /extroot
mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/extroot:/sqroot none ${rootmnt}

Make the file executable.

chmod a+x scripts/init-bottom/gos

7. Create a new initrd file, and replace the old file.

cd /tmp/content
find . | cpio --quiet --dereference -o -H newc | gzip > ../initrd.gz
cp /tmp/initrd.gz /gos/initrd.gz

8. Edit your grub config file(/boot/grub/menu.lst) to boot from it. You'll need to change the devices according to your disk configuration.

title		gOS
root		(hd0,0)
kernel		/gos/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 rw quiet single
initrd		/gos/initrd.gz
quiet

First time we have to boot in the single user mode and configure the system.

9. Before rebooting, we need to create a fstab. To do that, we have to mount our ext3 filesystem.

mkdir /tmp/gos
sudo mount -o loop /gos/filesystem.ext3 /tmp/gos
sudo mkdir /tmp/gos/etc

10. Copy the following content into /tmp/etc/fstab. (/dev/sda5 should be your swap partition - check your /etc/fstab)

unionfs	/	unionfs rw 0 0
tmpfs	/tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sda5	none            swap    sw              0       0

11. Now reboot your computer and select "gOS" from grub. It'll boot into single user mode(called maintenance mode in ubuntu). Once you get into shell, create a user, and configure your X. There are two nice wizards, you can just follow those.

user-setup
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

12. Reboot back to your main OS and edit the grub - simply remove the "single" parameter. (You can also mount the root partition within the gOS single user mode, and change grub)

title		gOS
root		(hd0,0)
kernel		/gos/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 rw quiet
initrd		/gos/initrd.gz
quiet

Now, reboot and enjoy. This process is obviously bit long, and not perfect. So, if you are going to keep using that distro, I recommend you install it on a separate partition.

Here is a list of choices I made :

Operating System : Linux

There are lot of reasons why you should use linux : easy access to software, no viruses/adware, fast, possibility of configuring every bit. There is also a long list reasons why you shouldn’t run linux, which I don’t agree with most of them, except some great Windows only(may be Mac supported) software like Photoshop; and few drivers.

Desktop : GNOME
Simple elegant interface. Pretty stable.

Window Manager : compiz (compiz-fusion)
Rather than the cool 3D effects, there are some really useful plugins in compiz. For example : Expo, Scale.

Web Browser : Firefox 2
Firefox 3 has some great fixes on critical bugs like memory leaks, but there is one flaw. Some of the plugins I’m using are not available/stable for Firefox 3. So, I’ll stick to Firefox 2 for few more months.

Mail Client : Thunderbird
I’m not a heavy user of the desktop mail clients. I only use thunderbird for one of my mail accounts. There is no specific reason I’m choosing thunderbird over evolution, just like the interface.

IM : piding / emesene
Pidgin is one of the best multi protocol IM clients available in linux(kopete is also nice). Depicts the fact it supports many protocols, that’s only basic features. Most of my friends are using MSN network, and emesene is capable of handling those, and thousand times better than the crappy aMSN interface.

VOIP : Skype
Just one word : clear

IRC : xchat
Nice interface.

File Transfer (ftp/sftp) : Filezilla/GVFS
If I’m using a separate client for file transfer, that would definitely filezilla, but it’s much easier to mount the shares directly using GVFS and use it like a local directory.

Word Processing : abiword
It’s a light weighted, really fast word processor. Even though it’s light weighted, all necessary features are there.

Graphics : Adobe Photoshop
Yes, Adobe Photoshop, that’s the best I’ve ever seen. I never got along with gimp. Anyhow, I rarely mess with graphical stuff, yet I still miss Photoshop.

Text Editor/IDE : gedit
Simple, clean interface and have syntax highlighting. I can survive without an integrated debugger.

Video Player : mplayer/vlc
Those will play almost anything.

Audio player : banshee
Banshee has a nice audio library management features. Similar artists + cover info rocks.
Worth mentioning : one of the best media library management softwares I’ve seen is Windows Media player.

Twitter Client : twitux
Very stable, with many features. twhirl is stunning, but adobe AIR still doesn’t support tray icons on linux.

File Sharing : bittorrent
The content is reliable – well you have to read the comments.

Torrent client : azureus
Many features + plugins. I’m using the webui plugin, with auto start init script. (If you are curious, there is a azureus command line option : –ui=console)

Email Service : gmail / Google apps
It’s the cool ajax interface. The usage of conversations instead of individual mails is also remarkable. I’m using google apps to handle my gunathilake.com domain.

RSS Reader : Google Reader
Easy to use. Rather than a desktop RSS client, I can access it from anywhere. When I’m at somewhere with an internet connection killing time, I always have something to do. The sharing feature is handy too.

Photo sharing : Picasa
It’s the desktop application – It’s easier to upload.

Blogging platform : wordpress
Wordpress is a solid, easy to use platform. From a developers point of view, it’s internal structure is amazing.

Bookmarking : foxmarks
I tried to use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. But I don’t bookmark much, so I just use the firefox builtin bookmarking. I don’t want to experience losing my bookmarks again, that’s why I’m using foxmarks.

Web Developer plugins : firebug / web developer toolbar
Just check the plugins – you’ll see.

Virtualization : VirtualBox
I’m using VirtualBox to access IE to test sites. VirtualBox has nice integration features like free mouse.

What I read
Except reading my friends blogs, here are few feeds from my RSS reader.

• Techcrunch – I believe they have spies all over the world. Anything related to startups, it’s over there. Easy to keep track of what’s happening on the internet.
• Linux today – Everything related to linux/open source
• Gnome planet – Some nice content over there, related to gnome.
• ReadWriteWeb – This is like techcrunch. Techcrunch gives you more news, this will give you analysis/comparisons.
• Smashing Magazine – A source to get inspired – collections of creative work all over the internet.