D. Lee Jackson

Words and Music

Did Firefox 45 Break The Internet?

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I find myself in a bit of a conundrum. You see, I like to save the critiques that I get of my writing on Scribophile to my hard drive as PDF files. Up until a few days ago, I had a perfectly good Firefox AddOn that allowed me to do just that (Print Pages to PDF). It would save all of the page layout, including text background colors which Scribophile displays for comments and other markups. I have over 33 megabytes of such critiques saved off to more than 100 files. Wonderful critique-saving goodness.

All of that goodness has changed with the release of Firefox 45.

The Print Pages to PDF AddOn has suddenly stopped working. In fact, it disappeared from my list of installed plugins when Firefox finished rebooting after the install. I found it, still listed in the AddOns section of Mozilla’s site, and reinstalled it. No joy. It now does nothing but sit there and stare at you when invoked.

I’ve tried most of the other alternatives available in Firefox. None of them provided the same speed and capabilities. Previously (and again today), I’ve tried programs that allow you to print any file straight to PDF. Again, I found none that does what Print Pages to PDF did.

Before you start talking about “signing” AddOns, the Print Pages to PDF AddOn is signed.

This is not the only plugin that has been affected. I had one called Scrapbook Plus. It, too, disappeared, leaving 112+ megabytes of now useless data sitting in my Google Drive. I’ve since found other various AddOns which users have reported as broken since the release of Firefox 45.

I finally broke down, dug up my old Mozilla login (and migrated to the “new” Firefox login), and found the support e-mail for the AddOn. I am sad to say that he no longer develops the AddOn—according to him, one certain individual at Mozilla had been rejecting his code commits without explanation. As a result, he gave up on development.

I have to question if this is intentional on Firefox/Mozilla’s part. Are they deliberately trying to break AddOns, with the side effect of making important parts of the Internet obsolete? What are doing? I wish I knew.

In the meantime, I’m afraid I’m going to have to bite the proverbial bullet and consider a subscription to Adobe Acrobat. There goes my budget—thank you, Firefox 45.

Questions? Comments? Please feel free to use the Contact page. Thank you for reading!

Speeding Up Things a Bit

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I would ask that you please let me know if anything looks odd on this site (my photo not included, thankyouverymuch). I’ve just installed a caching plug-in that should make site access a bit faster. It usually works without a hitch, but when it goes wrong things can turn rather strange. Here’s hoping it works.

In other news, the music writing progresses well. I had a bit of a struggle in choosing which General MIDI patches to use for something yesterday, but I think I’ve got that issue solved. I’m still ingesting my morning caffeine, so I haven’t listened to the song yet today. I might hear it and make massive changes (it’s happened before), or I might wind up being totally happy with what I ended on yesterday (not as common). Stay tuned. 😀

Questions? Comments? Please feel free to use the Contact page. Thank you for reading!

Shadow Warrior Shareware Music, Plus UPS Fun Part 3

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I have received quite a bit of help over the past day concerning the shareware MIDI tracks I wrote for the original Shadow Warrior game. I’d been looking for them for some while now, and all of a sudden they’ve shown up today! My thanks go out to those who have gone to the trouble and contributed their recordings—I do appreciate it.

If you would like to hear them, please go to my Music page and scroll down. You’ll find plenty of links for your listening pleasure.

Additionally, the saga of the replacement Uninterruptible Power Supply is reaching a peak. The unit arrived today, appropriately enough via UPS (no FedEx jokes for me, *sigh*), and it is now plugged into the wall outlet and charging its battery. I really do hope I don’t trip a breaker—there are a lot of things plugged in in my little corner of the house, and a blown circuit breaker is the next-to-last thing I need (the last thing being something happening to the computer once everything is switched on (heaven forbid)).

Questions? Comments? Please feel free to use the Contact page. Thank you again for reading!

CleanTalk? Yes, CleanTalk.

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Before I go on with this post, I want to again thank Joe Siegler for the incredible amount of help he’s given me in setting up this WordPress website. Please click on the highlighted link to see just one of the sites he’s put together. He has the patience of a saint when it comes to dealing with a newbie like myself.

That said, I did go out and find a few things on my own. One is an anti-spam program called CleanTalk. If you scroll down and look on the right side of the page, you’ll see a stat counter showing how many spam contacts it has blocked since installation. It doesn’t look like many, I know, but what goes on behind the scenes is what has me convinced that CleanTalk is a worthwhile investment.

First, it’s constantly being updated (as far as I’ve seen). The developer stays on top of issues and corrects any that pop up as soon as he can. Good maintenance usually equals good software, and in this case it’s true.

Second, it doesn’t rely on Captcha codes. You’ve seen them—the things at the bottom of a comment, contact, or sign-up form that force you to read goofy-looking letters or decipher bad photos of street numbers on houses. I’m not 100% sure how he does it, but the author of CleanTalk has managed to do away with these.

Finally, it has a wonderful feature called a SpamFireWall. This uses outside information to keep potential spammers from even getting close to your site. You wouldn’t believe the number of hits I’ve had from China.

If you’re asking, “Why not use Akismet? It comes with WordPress, and it’s free.” Well, I would (and in fact you can use both if you’re really going on a security jag), but I find CleanTalk easier to deal with. It’s truly plug & play.

“But what about the cost?” You’re right, it’s not free, but it’s so inexpensive that a delivered pizza almost costs twice as much. I’m paying $8 a year to have access to their security cloud. Money well spent, I say.

When you get a minute, go over to the CleanTalk website and look around. I think you’ll like what you see.