The Flow of Consciousness

I recently noticed that WordPress added support for Gears, as have a few other sites, including ZohoOffice and MySpace.

Gears is essentially offline storage for rich Internet application data. GoogleOS has a list of Gears-enabled sites/applications. Read more on Gears at Wikipedia.

Much to my dismay, the only officially-available Firefox extension supports only 32-bit operating systems. I’m a 64-bit Linux user. Specifically, I use Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with my ASUS M3A32-MVP motherboard and 8 GB of DDR2 RAM (4GB of Geil and 4 GB of OCZ).

Fortunately, Gears is an open source project and one intrepid developer made a Gears Firefox extension package which supports 64-bit Linux.

I downloaded and installed the package by dragging and dropping it onto the Firefox Addons dialog, then restarting Firefox when prompted. I archived the Gears extension package on my own site in the event the package is suddenly no longer available. Be sure to check for new versions though, since this package may be out of date if you’re reading this post more than a few days after publication (though unlikely).

Huzzah for open source.

I’ve spent a few hours throughout the past few days attempting to get a working Java browser plugin to work on Rahab, which is my primary desktop running Ubuntu Gutsy amd64. It’s well-known that only the icedtea package provides a plugin that is at least java5-compliant. However, there’s a significant bug in it. There’s another version of Java that provides a java-1.4.2 plugin, but I need the newer one in order to upload my pictures to Facebook.

I’ve tried lots of things. I tried installing icedtea from the repos. It doesn’t work at all. I tried recompiling it from the repo source—some applets will load, but the one I really need (Facebook) will not. I tried installing a newer build from a developer’s stash, and it works better than my build (as it’s based on newer code from icedtea), but it still doesn’t load the Facebook photo applet.

I tried downloading Sun’s java-7 beta JDK package, but there’s not a plugin in it, either.

So, for now, I’m SOL. It looks like I’ll be using another computer running Ubuntu i386 or the Windows partition on Rahab to upload my photos.

Dear Lazyweb: any suggestions on how I can get ~400 pictures onto Facebook without uploading unmodified originals five at a time?

By the start of the new year, I will have eight gigabytes of RAM.

That is all.

<3 ubuntu-amd64 / win64