Unable to connect to Google bookmark service. Your browser is offline

Google Toolbar for Firefox may return this error whenever you try to bookmark a site if Internet Explorer has been setted to work offline. Open IE and check out if the Work Offline option is enabled 

( Menu Tools > Work Offline) and, if so, disable it. Google Toolbar will work fine again.

Best regards

Mozilla - Dynamically filling menus

I'm updating a toolbar extension for Firefox I wrote last year. I have 3 toolbarbuttons with menupopups filled dynamically. A Javascript function called by an onpopupshowing handler retrieves the contents from the internet, builds the menuitems and adds them to a menupopup at runtime. Obviously the function depends on the remote server response speed and on my internet connection. In addition, the function takes a little time to manipulate the data. In short, in my case, the process of retrieving contents and filling a menu takes about half a second, so, if I click on the toolbarbutton, a very little white rectangle is showed for a split second before the menu appears.

I'd like to delay the menu appearence but it seems quite difficult.

According to Mozilla, if we have nothing to show on a menu, we should follow the standard used in Firefox: show a single disabled item with an "(Empty)" label. If filling the menu takes a noticeable amount of time, we should not make Firefox (and users) wait for it to fill up before displaying anything. It's best to show an item with a throbber image (chrome://global/skin/icons/loading_16.png) so the user knows there's something going on, and asynchronously fill its contents.

I'm still wondering if it's possible to delay the menu appearence.

Best regards.

Problem with Google Images and Firefox - 2

By browsing the internet, my brother Massimo found out the solution for the problem described here. This problem is due to the router.

As explained here: 

"When image results are to be displayed, Safari and Firefox make multiple simultaneous connections to the host to retrieve them. This is usually faster than downloading one and moving on to the next and on and on."

...

"Some consumer-level SPI firewalls misinterpret the attempt to open that many simultaneous connections to one server as a "SYN flood" and block the traffic. Not good, especially when the connections are being made from your machine to an outside host, so the firewall is effectively blocking you from perpetrating what it thinks is a SYN flood."

The SYN flood attack is visible in the router logs. The solution:

"If your router allows configuration of its SPI firewall, you may be able to solve this problem if it has a setting labeled something like:

Maximum incomplete TCP/UDP sessions number from same host

On those routers, this setting is often set to a default of "10"; simply increasing this value to a much higher value - many have had good luck with "20" - will allow accesses to work as desired and will also allow some room for possible future expansion in the number of simultaneous queries made.

If your router does not offer such a setting, there's no solution other than to disable the firewall.

Note that any operating system - Linux, Solaris, even perhaps Windows 7 - could trigger the same problem. You can even generate the same issue in Windows XP by applying "speed tweaks" such as this."

New version of CGPersia Toolbar for Firefox

CGPersia Toolbar 0.1 is under approval control by Mozilla. 
In the meantime it's possible to download the new version here.
This release is compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 3.6.*.

Changelog:

• Removed links to no more existing Forums.
• Added links to new Forums.
• Added 3 new drop-down buttons to dynamically retrieve Latest Posts, Hottest and Most Viewed Threads.
• Added an Options Window.
• Added the possibility to remove the new drop-down buttons through the Options Window.
• Added the feature to save and reload the search history.
• Added the file translations.dtd in locale/en-US to store tooltips and labels.
• The extension now uses a new icon set. 

To-Do List:

• Advanced search window.
• A toolbar button for the Blog.
• A method to drag and drop links onto a target programmed to run external applications (ie: JDownloader).
• Drop-down button for bookmarked pages.

Best regards.

Problem with Google Images and Firefox 3.6.8

EDIT: Solution here.

In my holidays house I cannot search Google Images. Recently Google changed the design of its image search engine and I have been experiencing a problem with Firefox and other browsers on Ubuntu and Windows.

If I try to search Google Images, Firefox hangs loading the results, no image is shown at all and Google related sites are unreachable for a little while (it's still possible to browse other sites) :

I think it's impossible to revert Google Images to its old design, so I  thought to use Google Mobile to search images because I can browse it with my smartphone without problems.

It's quite easy to use Google Mobile to search images: we can use a string formatted in this way:

"http://www.google.com/m/search?site=images&q=" + search terms

for example:

http://www.google.com/m/search?site=images&q=firefox+ubuntu

I wrote a simple search plugin for the Firefox Search bar to search images with Google Mobile.

Copy this text:


<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google Mobile Images</ShortName>
<Description>Search images with Google Mobile</Description>
<InputEncoding>inputEncoding</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">data:image/x-icon;base64,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</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/m/search?site=images&amp;q={searchTerms}" />
</OpenSearchDescription>


and paste into your preferred text editor, save as gm.xml in

~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/searchplugins

Restart Firefox and the plugin will be added to pre-loaded search engines:

It's possible to use it on windows too (Shortcut Win + R --> %appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles).

A best solution comes from my brother, Massimo: It's possible to bypass the problem using an anonymous web proxy like anonymouse.org. A bookmark with a link like this:

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www.google.com/imghp

speeds up the process and works fine.

Best regards

CGPersia Toolbar 0.1b

New Beta version available here.
Nothing fancy in this version, I added a few search options (it's possible to search keywords in  blog and specific forums). Menus have been reorganized.
This version is supported by Firefox 3.6.*. Next release will be available for next versions of Firefox.
Best regards.

Opening Sopcast links from within Firefox on Ubuntu Karmic 9.10

I'd like to open sop:// protocol links automatically in Firefox. The most popular solution I found is:

1. In Firefox, in the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter.  2. Right-click anywhere in the grid, choose New, then String.  3. In the Enter the preference name prompt, type in network.protocol-handler.app.sop and press OK.  4. In the Enter string value prompt, type sopcast-player and press OK.  5. Try to open sop:// link on your favorite website and you will be presented with dialog box where you can search location of sopcast player. Navigate to ~/usr/bin and point to sopcast-player and click OK.  6. OK out of dialog box and now all sop:// links should open sopcast player automatically.

This solution doesn't work for me. When I try to to open sop:// link, I'm not presented with "Open with..." dialog box. I receive an error message like:

Firefox doesn't know how to open this address, because the protocol (sop) isn't associated with any program.

In my case Firefox 3 does not actually launch sopcast-player using the network.protocol-handler.app configuration option.

If I go to Edit -> Preferences -> Applications, the sop protocol is not listed and I cannot add it there.

So I tought to retrieve all needed parameters from Windows and add the protocol manually via config file. mimeTypes.rdf stores information about which action is to be performed when downloading certain types of files, such as opening the file in a specific program or saving it to disk. mimeTypes.rdf is stored on our hard drive in ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/. 

1.  Quit Firefox. 

2. we can back up the profile directory: if something goes wrong we can restore original files.

3. Let's open up mimeTypes.rdf. We have to find the section and modify it in this way (adding the line <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:scheme:sop"/>):

<RDF:Seq RDF:about="urn:schemes:root">

    <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:scheme:mailto"/>

    <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:scheme:irc"/>

    <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:scheme:ircs"/>

    <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:scheme:webcal"/>

    <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:scheme:dlc"/>

    <RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:scheme:sop"/>

</RDF:Seq>

4. Now we have to add these parameters below the line </RDF:Seq>:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:scheme:sop"
                              NC:value="sop">
   <NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:scheme:handler:sop"/>
</RDF:Description>
<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:scheme:handler:sop"
                              NC:alwaysAsk="true" />

Done! Now if we open sop:// protocol links in Firefox, we will be presented with "Open with..." dialog box. Or, once Firefox is loaded, we can go to to Edit -> Preferences -> Applications and set the location of sopcast-player.

EDIT (09/12/2010):

It may be necessary to modify the boolean value of network.protocol-handler.expose-all on Ubuntu 10.04:

1. In Firefox, in the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter.  2. Set the value of network.protocol-handler.expose-all to false .  3. Try to open sop:// link on your favorite website and you will be presented with dialog box where you can search location of sopcast player. Navigate to ~/usr/bin and point to sopcast-player and click OK.  4. OK out of dialog box and now all sop:// links should open sopcast player automatically  5. We can restore the value of network.protocol-handler.expose-all to true.

Best regards.

CGPersia toolbar for Firefox

CGPersia is a great forum dedicated to 3D arts and related softwares. CGPersia has a lot of sections and sub-sections. Since I visit CGPersia every day, I created a toolbar extension for Firefox to speed up my navigation and to easily search threads and posts.

The very early version of the toolbar is available here.
It does not contain all of the features that are planned for the final version, but it works fine for me.
Probably I will add drop-down menus with dynamic links to hottest and most  viewed threads and a window for advanced search.
I'm releasing it because a 3d passionate could find it useful.

Best regards.

JDownloader Click'N'Load on Ubuntu Karmic

JDownloader is a terrific Java software to simplify downloading files from One-Click-Hosters like Rapidshare.com or Megaupload.com. These sites allow us to upload any kind of file that can be downloaded by other users. If the file size exceeds the allowed limit, the data are splitted into a lot of parts, zipped and uploaded to the hosters. If we don't have a Premium Account, we have to download one part at time. Click'N'Load is a JDownloader's built-in technology to downloading a container file that lists the different parts. Installing Click'N'Load on Windows is pretty simple. On Ubuntu we have to install it by ourself:

Download the Linux/Mac Installer/Starter, open it and change the path to the Installation folder, make it executable with the terminal command:

stefano@SERVER:~$ chmod +x jd.sh

and run it. This file will download the latest Jdownloader.
Now, what we wanna do is add some protocols to Firefox to handle Click'N'Load.
On Linux/MAC, some needed protocols are not controlled by the OS. If you are using Firefox, you may add the protocols by ourself:

1. Open Firefox advanced configs by typing “about:config” in the address bar.
2. Right click –>new: create the following entries for each protocol:
   
   1. Replace PATH_TO_SCRIPT with the path to jd.sh. First Line is String
   2. Second Line is Boolean
3.  Restart JDownloader

network.protocol-handler.app.jd = PATH_TO_SCRIPT/jd.sh  network.protocol-handler.external.jd=true  network.protocol-handler.app.jdlist = PATH_TO_SCRIPT/jd.sh  network.protocol-handler.external.jdlist=true  network.protocol-handler.app.ccf = PATH_TO_SCRIPT/jd.sh  network.protocol-handler.external.ccf=true  network.protocol-handler.app.rsdf = PATH_TO_SCRIPT/jd.sh  network.protocol-handler.external.rsdf=true  network.protocol-handler.app.dlc = PATH_TO_SCRIPT/jd.sh  network.protocol-handler.external.dlc=true