All what should become a great mess later started with a single bug report some time back: " HTML5 Live stream has bad sound and video" (dramatic music effect) found by Gwendragon, who in the following events tested, logged and categorized a lot of audio stuff too. This bug happened only on a single site, which is well frequented in one country, but otherwise rather irrelevant. Back then we could only check if it works for us - which it did for those who tested it after spoofing the user agent - so this bug was set to "cannot reproduce" (which means: Closed) after contacting the site owner because at that time it appeared to be a problem for the site to fix. Usually this is the end of the story, the developers can only fix what they see and what they can analyze, and if it works for the testers and the developers, it can't be broken, right? Sadly not. Somehow we managed to forget one operating system (OS) during the check, which was partly my fault, because usually I use that OS while testing. All was good until the next report came in for exactly the same site. We checked it again (usual procedure, no bug gets closed unchecked), this time with the right OS too and the result was: ! Not only that - suddenly reports about dozens of other sites started popping up! PANIC!!! Well, no panic, but no real solution in sight either, which is quite frustrating because at that time all of the developers, who can fix this kind of bugs, were heavily burdened with really important stuff like frozen UI or crashes, which of course have a higher priority, especially because super traffic-heavy sites like YT, Vimeo etc. worked well - but of course those audio bugs were constantly nagging in the background. Then, one day, it was finally possible to assign a developer to the problem, but the fix was everything but easy. One of the first things was to find out where it breaks and what exactly breaks - which sounds easy enough but isn't, especially if you have to deal with the codecs inside of the OS because prohibitive license fees from the MPEG-LA and the Fraunhofer institute forbid to bundle the full ffmpeg+aac codec in binary form to Vivaldi, no thanks to them. (Linux users might have noticed by now, that they are not hit by this because they can steal re-purpose the original Chrome codecs hosted in the usual repositories - a luxury the owners of other OSs don't have) The first thing to do was to add some sophisticated debugging code to the internal builds which can provide log files for the sites that were affected by the issue. Said and done, we testers (both the employed and we volunteers) went through all of the bugs and created tons of big log files which we dumped on the poor Developer. After some time some of us became experienced enough to identify some common problems so that we could "Duplicate" bugs (meaning link together bugs that have the identical cause) on some kind of master bugs (usually the bug where the exact problem was first seen). One thing all of those bugs had in common was the interaction between Vivaldi and the OS codecs...

Would you like have thumbnails like this? Maybe you're a new user of this browser and you want customize it, but when you add the thumbnails you get just a preview of the web page and not logos like these. Personally, I don't like the previews. I will theach you how to do it. Just you need: 1) Google images 2) Paint.net If you prefer, you can use Bing and Photoshop, it's the same. I use Paint.net because I like it for quick editions (and it's free). What I will show you, is the dimensions that the image must have, because a wrong size make some like this: Let's begin... 1.- First, select the image that you want for the web site, can be the name, logo, or anything else. The original dimension no matters. The size of this pic is 1200 x 800 px. 2.- Open it in your edition software My native language is spanish, sorry, but I will explan everyting Go to Image > Resize and change just the width by 222 px. Make sure to check the aspect ratio for the automatic resize of the high. Note: Width = Anchura; High = Altura Then, you get a smaller image. 3.- Go to Image > Canvas size and change the high to 180 px. Now, here is important to uncheck the aspect ratio for don't move the width. This is the result: 4.- Finally, open canvas resize again and now check by percentage, and change it to 120%, this is for get the logo a litte more centred If you have some areas of different color, use Paint Bucket. And voilà. Just save it in a folder...

I have always been an open-source devotee. I have tried to make use of free and/or open-source software all the time. While back in college, this initiative saved me lots of money and I was capable of doing whatever's necessary. Since Google's becoming the E-Corp of our reality, I avoided Chrome and pushed myself to use Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla is great at promoting privacy among internet users, yet Firefox isn't that great when it comes to browsing. Firefox doesn't feel like a quantum project but rather like an ancient thinker's ideas of the universe. Since my adored browser Opera has lost its way, I decided to give Vivaldi a shot. Now, I feel like inside an exciting idea that I first met back when Opera browser was a community of helpful people...

Back then ... Whenever I knew what information I needed but didn't know which search terms would lead me to this information, you were there and helped me reliably. I only needed to enter a search term and you showed me a cloud of pictures with lines in between, showing the interlinks with added keywords connecting these pictures. You allowed to hover over one of the pictures to get a short summary of the content of the page. I could click on one of the terms on the connecting lines and you provided me with a new, refined cloud until there were only 10 or 20 pages left, all of which were filled with very good results. If I clicked on one of the preview pictures, you opened the page in a new tab in the browser and flagged that I have visited the page in your search window. Also, it was possible to set which additional information I wanted to have and you even showed me groups of possible search results... Unfortunately, you are no longer. Why? I have no idea. Maybe you were just too innovative for the "I don't have time" searchers who just want quick information tidbits, 1,000,000 hits in 0.23s, who are not interested in the quality of the results. But maybe you were just too unknown and therefore didn't get any advertising revenue - although I did a lot of advertising for you... ... but what's a single voice against the overwhelming advertising power of the data kraken? The above eulogy was originally posted February 12, 2010 on my.opera, it is still available in the Web Archive. The first part of this article is a translated and slightly rewritten version - I am still moaning about its too early demise. I wonder if we will ever see a public search engine like this again. ... and today Advertising money is what makes the web spin. Cases like the above, where new ideas and technologies were starved to death, maybe without noticing or maybe even deliberately, are still a thing, maybe even more than ever, as we can see with e...

GNU wget is an unavoidably common command-line download tool. With the -r flag, wget will basically spindle around the entire internet and download it to your computer. Moreover, without extra parameters given, it will preserve the folder structures it finds on the source locations, so that you stand no chance of finding anything on your computer. If you are like me and you want to download things at a specific location in the source server to a specific folder at your destination, just the files, not the folders, then here is an example how to reduce wget's quirky behaviour. Example wget -r -l1 -np -nd --accept=pdf -c -nc $URL Explanation The example does not specify a destination, so it should be run in your exact destination folder. Before the example command, run pwd to see where you are at and, if needed, cd $DESTINATION. Only then run the example...

By the first marathon, it was a half marathon, and I changed it to a 10km run at the end. I had gotten roped into doing a marathon through work. I have a co-worker that likes to volunteer everyone into anything that she thinks they would be good at. Which is appreciated on some levels, but sometimes it is a bit much. I have never done a Marathon or any race that you must sign up for; I guess I did a bike-a-thon for M.S once, but that was it. Running is another thing entirely. I have been an active runner for about four years, and I enjoy running (I know, one of those people) recreationally. I love the high you get from it, and I can  put on some tunes and just go...

For people in 2018 who are looking for a fast, stable, and flexible browser, Vivaldi more than does its share in that department. Vivaldi is a browser built by Norse company Vivaldi AS in Oslo, Norway. Vivaldi hasn’t been around as long, it was only released in 2016, but even at time of release, many users found it to be almost on par with every other long-lived and stable browser on the market. Vivaldi is built on open source software Chromium, with a more proprietary finish on top. They often rely on chromium codecs or codecs found on your system to handle playback, for this reason, Vivaldi might take some tweaking to get fully working on some Arch systems. Vivaldi doesn’t track its users, the founder of Vivaldi was the co-founder of Opera and many of his beliefs during his time at Opera came to Vivaldi with him. In Norway, there are stronger regulations dealing with tracking and the like as opposed to the United States...

NOTE: This post is written with full comprehension of it's ultimate triviality and in no way seeks to belittle those battling real personal problems. If you feel you have a problem that needs to be remedied please seek help. Photo by: Rodrigo Senna via Flickr.com I've heard the first step to fixing a personal problem is admitting you have one. That's a bit difficult when you are blissfully unaware a particular problem even exists. Fortunately, Linux was kind enough to fill me in. You see, I am hopelessly dependent on the mouse wheel...