Ctrl T, Ctrl T, Ctrl T, Ctrl T.

Bang, we got 4 tabs in firefox. Tabs are so addictive in firefox. Normally i would have like 20 tabs or so at any one time.
Lifehacker recently reviewed another tab management extension.
lifehacker.com/5123708/tabhunter-adds-faster-tab-switching-to-firefox

I say, nar, not good enough.
I’m using vimperator. vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator

It is my favourite firefox extension which i think i can’t live without now. It is based on the concept of vim keybindings. Love VI/VIM? Vimperator is the extension for you in firefox.
Let me have a run down on how this firefox extension improved my life, increase productivity and basically makes me the master of my browser. Vimperator allows basically mouseless browsing.

I’ll try to do a screencast probably over the weekend.
Let’s do a rundown on the basic functionality that i love about vimperator.
1. How can i open a new tab? Press “t www.google.com“. It auto expands to :tabopen www.google.com, with a total of about 12 characters i can open up the google search page, without even touching my mouse! Without vimperator, probably you need to press Ctrl T, F6, www.google.com ?
2. How can i switch to another tab? CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB? Yeah, with vimperator. you press “b”, you will get a list of the tabs that are open, like in vim buffer. For example, if you have gmail in one your 40 tabs, you can press “b gm” bingo, you jump to the gmail tab if there is only a tab with the words gm.
3. How to copy the current URL location? Press “Y”
4. How to close the current tab? “d”
5. How to unclose the last tab? “u”

I use to use mouse gesture in firefox. Why bother now to use the mouse gesture to open tab and jump to the keyboard to type the url? Down left-> close tab, Down right -> unclose tab?

Oh for godsake, give vimperator a try. You will love it, take a look at this screencast done by Jean Paul
blog.jpboodhoo.com/VimperatorTeaserScreencast.aspx
Though it’s a bit confusing on that screencast, it has some basic information. Hopefully i can do a better one.

Look out for my screencast and another post on yubnub
Another “extension” to firefox.

What’s the video player that you use?
VLC? www.videolan.org/vlc/
Windows Media Classic? www.free-codecs.com/download/Media_Player_Classic.htm

I say SMPlayer, frontend of MPlayer. smplayer.sourceforge.net/
Two major reasons.
1. Playback speed, variable playback rate, by just pressing [ and ] . This is critical if you have backlog of videocast to watch. Basically saves about 33% of the time required to clear them. I’m using the discountinued tcpmp on my wm5 hp6965 to clear my podcast. Too many podcast as again.
2. Subtitle support, jump to next line in subtitle file. No more subtitle that are not synced.

Do try this opensource app out.

Scouring the internet for the most suitable plugin as stated before was quite a pain. Somehow there are not much quality control in plugins, there is just a huge torrent of plugins probably as many iphone apps there are around as well.

But i did managed to sift out tantan-flickr, it was one of the better plugins with quite a large number of user base as well.
tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/

I managed to do some modification to it to allow non-hardcoded shortcode flickr images templates for albums.
Here are the changes, yymv, basically it resolve issue 96 found here code.google.com/p/photo-album/issues/detail?id=96

pastebin.com/m637c0d27

Quite a bit of changes i wanna make to tantan-flickr, it’s a great plugin and a great place to start typing away at.

This is one episode that everyone should watch or listen to

revision3.com/hak5/SessionHijackingAndVirtualizing/

Session hijacking. In short, by using tools available now, you can effectively
1. Use Jasager [www.digininja.org/jasager/index.php] to let people think that they are on their default wifi network. Meaning, i go to a starbucks, i turn on my wifi, and my laptop automatically tries to connect to wireless@SG. Jasager lets you log on to it, making you think that you have connected to the wireless@SG hotspot. You start surfing, thinking cool, free internet again
2. Prankster, hacker, kid, whatever who had setup the jasager, use ferret and hamster and tap into whatever you are surfing, using you session, your cookie, etc. erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/08/sidejacking-with-hamster_05.html
3. Game over, you find you have posted some things in facebook or started to poke people at the wrong place, started to mass mail your friends, etc.

From point 2, you can see that this is a very old post, so i hope that this post will bring about more awareness.
So how to prevent this from happening? You can’t really, you just have to be careful, you have to know the infrastructure of the network like what Hak5 said.
1. For example, if you are logged in to your home router ssid, but hey you are at macdonalds, that can be right? You better get your butt off from that network.
2. For example, if you are logged on to wireless@SG, it did’nt prompt you for the usual password? Something is wrong, even if it prompts you for your password, better check the SSL certs, etc to make sure you are on the right wifi network
3. Make use of SSH tunnelling, so that people won’t be able to see the packets and side jack you.

The video just blows me away, you got to watch it, to know how bad this is.

Listening to hak5 ep 0414,
Some interesting stuff i came across.
Keeping your pc “steady” instead of using ghost or vm.

www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

Some other applications that keeps things clean and neat
Sandboxie www.sandboxie.com/
Was discussed in-depth in episode of 172 of the Security Now podcast as well, when steve gibson interviewed the creator.
twit.tv/sn172

Unetbootin
Allows “burning” of iso to usb thumbdrive, suitable for creating bootable “cds” to your thumbdrive
unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Last i looked at wordpress probably was for version 2.3?
Seems that there is lots of changes since then and lots of new plugins and tools for wordpress. I had lots of problem searching for plugins, there were just too many of them all of which had quite reasonable ratings. Had quite a lot of fun downloading them, though it’s really time consuming.
*edit* Did’nt realise that we can do search for plugins in the admin page of wordpress under Plugins->Add New, even allows you to do installation directly, no more fancy shell access like below.

To me, the fastest way to install these plugin was to through the shell access of your hosting company. This is what I used

First get to the correct directory

wp-content/plugins

[bawls]$ wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin.1.0.zip....
<pre>
After getting the zip file, we can use the unzip command
<pre lang="bash">
[bawls]$ unzip wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin.1.0.zip

Pretty easy right? Beats using http, and transferring to the your webhost.

Manaaged to google a good site from mashable.com for all the fun plugins, do check whether it is supported up to 2.7 though

mashable.com/2007/08/16/wordpress-god300-tools-for-running-your-wordpress-blog/

Hope this helps you all getting plugin faster. Going to post a list of plugins that i am currently using and firefox extensions that i find useful.

One of the key features of 2.7 which i figured was very important is|
auto-updater. Yeah, now security holes will be plugged faster and with ease.

Lots of work to be done still, changing themes and further customization. Still lots of cleanup in my hdd as well.

Yeah! A brand new year 2008 2009.

Lots of cleaning up and clearing of stuff on my harddrive, since it’s new year right?

Some interesting things i came across over the cleaning up of my harddrive.

From watching Hak5 ep 416, clearing up my 40 gig of podcast!
1. Ping.fm, allows blogging or “pinging” to multiple site. Seems pretty useful, especially you will have a simplified entry page.
2. SSH tunnelling, finally a video with instructions on doing ssh tunneling.

Some fun commands I used in cleaning up my dns323, and portable hdd
1. Sorting directories based on directory size
du -d 1 -s * | sort -n
Or you can check out this site.
www.ducea.com/2006/05/14/tip-how-to-sort-folders-by-size-with-one-command-line-in-linux/

2.  Freeware directory size
- treesize
- windirstat

3. Exiftool
Command line exif tool

Some wishes of the coming year.
Good health to all, from family to friends to the financial system

Yeah, my first post @ my own url

Some tech things that i found out, while doing a RMA on my ASUS motherboard. They really burn out very easily, there was another guy there to do a RMA on a motherboard that refused to boot. But anyway, lots of advancement in the motherboard technology. Here are some things i read on the Asus World magazine found at the RMA centre.

1. Seamless switch over from triple cross-fire to triple SLI.
Conclusion : There are people who have 6 video cards in their box!

2. 16 + 2 power phase.
Conclusion : No idea what is that, supposed to have better power ratings etc. Looks fancify.

3. External touch screen for overclocking
Conclusion : Fancy external display, able to overclock your pc on the fly and also run yahoo widgets on it.

4. Green technology initiative by Asus, found in router, and optical drives
Conclusion : Looks promising for those earth friendly. Supposed to save about 65% of the energy.

5. Asus EEE stick, wii like controller.
Conclusion  : Wii games coming to the pc?

Hope you folks are up to date on this.