iNODE

Found one way to get a bit of a speed boost on Firefox–grab one of the Mac CPU optimized compilations from Neil Lee’s BeatnikPad site.

Neil offers versions of Firefox 2 compiled for G4, G5 and Intel CPUs…with standard form widgets or “aqua” widgets (which bring the look and feel of Firefox closer to the typical Mac application).

I put the G4 version on my older Powerbook and an Intel version on my MacPro. In both cases I could see an increase in speed and recommend Neil’s work. You’ll notice when you install one of these versions, the name changes from Firefox to Bon Echo and the icon’s a bit different. To quote from Neil’s blog:

“The Firefox name and icon are copyrighted and cannot be used with non-official builds. These are non-official builds, so they cannot have the official branding. Pretty straight-forward. Please don’t ask me to build versions with the official branding.”

Any extension or plugin you’ve installed for Firefox 2 will show up and work as advertised in one of these BonEcho builds.

My work-related email account sits behind “wall” of spam-catching machines employed by the university–and for traditional SPAM it seems to work well. For whatever reason it seems to have no idea that a message filled with Dada text and an attached graphic is probably some sort of \/|@gra or investment spam. After watching Thunderbird fail to identify these as well on anything like a consistent basis, I finally decided to create a rule.

This seems to be working (offered here in pseudo-code so you can adapt it your favorite email client):

If Content-Type contains “multipart/related” and
Sender is not in your “personal address book” and
Sender is not in your “collected addresses” then
move it to Junk Folder.

This doesn’t get them all (some come in as “multipart/alternative”) but it has definitely reduced the flood.

This is hardly a new idea and it may not interest a wider audience, but I’ll post it here just the same (if I don’t write this down somewhere I’ll have to start from scratch again next time I want to add a new search engine link).

For the past two or three weeks I’ve been moving gradually to Firefox 2 (away from Camino which I still find faster, lighter and better looking) so I can use and test and try developing for the Zotero plugin my friends over in Mason’s Center for History and New Media have developed. Today I just got really tired of not being able to search our catalog from the Firefox search box. Thanks to the way google exposes the work of others, it didn’t take long to implement. I found several ways to accomplish the task and combined and collapsed a couple of them into this really simple method.

Full details on crafting search engine plugins are available on the Mycroft Project site, but if you’re just looking to implement a Voyager search box, here’s a quick cookbook entry. The focus here is on creating an installable link so users can add the Voyager searchbox to their browsers. The link I provide at the end of this post just installs Mason’s catalog search—if you want to develop one for your Voyager site, you’ll have to modify the two code examples I offer below.

1. Create the plugin code. The name you give this file is optional (I called it MasonCatalog.src) but you need to make sure you pay attention to whatever name you use—you’ll reference it by name in both this file and in the file you create in step 2.

If you run a Voyager site, you’ll see the parts that you need to modify (name=, description=, action=, and update=). You can place this file (and the others) in any web-accessible directory on your server but keep them together (or use complete paths where necessary). The “name=” value is what displays in the empty search box when it is awaiting input.

# Mason Library Catalog Firefox Search Plugin
<search
name="Mason Library"
description="Mason Library Catalog Search"
method="GET"
action="http://magik.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi"
update="MasonCatalog.src"
updateCheckDays=5
queryEncoding="utf-8"
queryCharset="utf-8"
>

<input name="Search_Arg" user>
<input name="Search_Code" value="FT*">
<input name="CNT" value="25">

<interpret
browserResultType="result"
resultListStart="PostSearchSortBy1"
resultListEnd="PostSearchSortBy2"
resultItemStart="<TD ALIGN=LEFT VALIGN=TOP>"
resultItemEnd="<TD ALIGN=LEFT>"
>

<browser
update="http://lso.gmu.edu/FFXplugins/MasonCatalog.src"
updateCheckDays=5
>
</search>

2. Next, create an html file. This file is where you’ll put your link for anyone interested in installing the search engine plugin and where you’ll store the javascript necessary to pull off the installation. I named this one AddMasonSearch.html

<html>
<head>
<title>Get Mason Catalog Search Plugin</title>
</head>
<body>
<script
type="text/javascript">
<!--
function errorMsg()
{
alert("Need Netscape 6 or Firefox");
}

function addEngine(name,ext,cat,type)
{
if ((typeof window.sidebar == "object") &&
(typeof window.sidebar.addSearchEngine == "function"))
{
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine(
"http://lso.gmu.edu/FFXplugins/"+name+".src",
"http://lso.gmu.edu/FFXplugins/"+name+"."+ext,
name,cat );
}
else
{
errorMsg();
}
}
//-->
</script>
<a xhref="javascript:addEngine('MasonCatalog','png','Reference',0)" mce_href="javascript:addEngine('MasonCatalog','png','Reference',0)"      >Mason Catalog Firefox Plugin</a>
/body>
</html>

3. Figure out what you want to use for an icon and create a .png file. I did that with PhotoShop but there are many other alternatives. Put the png file in the same directory you reference in the window.sidebar.addSearchEngine() function during step 2.

The minimalist outcome of this coding can be seen here:

Today’s post is a bit of a “how to” on debugging database specific problems with EZproxy. More to the point, it focuses on a command line utility that helps when troubleshooting problems of this sort if you’re using a Mac (there are similar tools—and more of them— for a Windows or Unix machine). First, a bit of background:

A user called to say that whenever he did a search on nature.com, despite having logged into our proxy server, he was prompted for a password when he asked to view the full text of an article. I configured my desktop machine to go through the proxy server and while doing a search, saw the same behavior. Clearly the proxy server was dropping out of the loop somewhere between hitting the search button and results page (I could see that the “Full Text” link did not carry our proxy server’s URL stem).

We’ve made Nature available to library users for years—without any issues, so clearly something had changed recently.  First stop was the ‘database-specific issues’ page on the EZproxy website. Finding no mention of Nature, I dug deeper. On my machine, I noticed that as the search results page loaded, several URLs streaked by on the browser’s status bar but they went by too fast for me to read them.
What I needed was a way to watch all the traffic going between my machine and nature.com. Not a big deal in the unix or Windows world, but finding just the right tool on a mac took a bit longer. I first tried bending tcpdump to my will but it was picking up all sorts of “extraneous” network traffic which made diagnosis difficult. There are likely command line switches that will reduce the reported traffic but I didn’t want to spend the morning reading documentation. I figured someone had developed a tool that was more tightly focused on web traffic (and not, for example, preoccupied with IP headers and local machine interaction). Turns out, the proper tool was a command line utility called tcpflow.

You can download a precompiled binary from entropy.ch or grab and compile your own from darwinports. Once installed, open a terminal window and type this command as root:

tcpflow -i en0 -c port 80

If you don’t have root enabled, use this instead:

sudo tcpflow -i en0 -c port 80

This assumes that your ethernet connection is on en0 (run ipconfig if you’re not sure) and that tcpflow is on your path. If you compile the darwinports version, it likely will be. If you use the precompiled binary, it gets installed in /usr/local/bin/tcpflow.

So with a terminal window scrolling all my port 80 traffic, I fired up the browser again and went back to nature.com. Took a while to wade through the output but I finally found the culprit—lots of javascript involved on Nature’s site. It was clear that after calls to ad.doubleclick.net and search.atomz.com the nature site was losing track of our proxy server in the ‘Referer’ links it was passing around.

I modified our EZproxy configuration files to add javascript support to Nature (e.g., HJ search.nature.com and so on). Voila! Things began working again. If you look at the Referer: block for each of these, you’ll see the ‘blue’ one (after adding HJ tags to our configuration file) correctly stores the proxy server’s URL.

As Yogi Berra once said, “you can see a lot just by observing.” In this particular case using tcpflow was the key to finding something to look at.

We’re moving over tomorrow around noon—completing (I hope) the task that began last week with a few days of small server moves. The machine hosting this weblog moved last week but tomorrow we move our Voyager server, our web OPAC gateway machine and a rack of XServes and RAID Arrays (hosting our MARS system (DSpace), our database portal, and a number of LAMP applications). We expect about 30-45 minutes of downtime, probably around 3:00 or so in the afternoon.

Update: The physical move of servers went smoothly enough but once we jacked things in over in the new building, large chunks of the network began failing. Took a while to get the campus network engineers on the scene but as I write this (and if you can read this) it’s all working again.

Two posts in a row on search engines. This one’s more interesting than Ms. Dewey.

Google has discretely placed a new search engine on the net—well, to be more accurate, what we can safely say is that it is a new UI for the regular google service. You won’t find the Google name anywhere on the page but “whois” reveals that searchmash.com was registered to Google in September of this year.
Layout’s a bit different and various AJAX’y features reduce the number of page backs you have to do (e.g., hit “more results” and more results add on to the page you’ve been viewing). Also nice is the fact that a search also pulls up the top three image hits as well. Nothing to do with AJAX but it’s really nice to be spared advertising and “sponsored links” as well.

Worth a visit, and I hope at least of few of these features make it into the “mainstream” google.com search.

http://www.searchmash.com

http://www.msdewey.com