Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Worst service ever · 2008-06-08 19:51 by Wladimir Palant
I came back from Ekaterinburg today, second time that I’ve been to Russia in the last 15 years. And while I have lots of impressions that I might share later — my experience with Lufthansa service caused even stronger impressions, so these come first.
Thing is, Lufthansa’s main airport is Frankfurt and I live in Cologne which is one hour distance by train. For people like me, Lufthansa offers a service called AIRail where the train from Cologne to Frankfurt is declared a Lufthansa “flight” and I can book both the train and the actual flight together.
HTTP Referer header won't help you with CSRF · 2008-05-21 15:44 by Wladimir Palant
It seems to be obvious but apparently this idea still isn’t common knowledge — HTTP Referer header is unreliable, and it is especially unsuited for any security measures. The Referer header isn’t always present because of users going to a page directly (via bookmark and similar), using an “unusual” browser (most commonly download helper applications), using filtering firewalls (privacy protection) etc. The Referer header might be incorrect because of the same filtering firewalls (some prefer to advertise rather than remove the header entirely), special browser extensions to manipulate the Referer header etc.
Moving to a new server · 2008-05-20 09:57 by Wladimir Palant
My issues with adblockplus.org didn’t get magically resolved. While Netdepot was able to reactivate the domain once the performance issues were resolved, they didn’t feel like overlooking my exorbitant traffic use (>120 GB on an account with 10 GB traffic limit) any more. At which point it is time to say goodbye to Netdepot who generously provided me with free hosting for the past seven years and always helped me patiently with my issues. For a project of this size, it is better not to rely on somebody’s good will any more.
Dear authors of ad blocking software · 2008-05-09 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
I know that there is lots of different ad blocking software out there, for browsers other than Firefox or even independent of any browser. Some of these programs can use the same filter subscriptions that Adblock Plus offers, and some even use EasyList and/or other Adblock Plus subscriptions by default. And I don’t see a problem with that — as long as they do it in a nice way. However, I do have a problem when bugs in those ad blocking solutions overload my server.
Web pages accessing chrome:// is forbidden · 2008-04-13 22:30 by Wladimir Palant
I didn’t believe that this would still be fixed in Firefox 3 but bug 292789 has landed. The timing could be better, having such a big change go in shortly before a release is certainly less than optimal — yet still, I think that we are much better off now than we were before.
Status update on adblockplus.org · 2008-04-02 15:31 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, one of the scripts used by adblockplus.org was putting considerable load on the server (actually tiny load but it was invoked every time somebody downloaded EasyList). Unfortunately, the provider didn’t communicate that to me so that I didn’t know of any load issues until the server got overloaded yesterday and the provider disabled adblockplus.org. The problem is now fixed and the server load is acceptable again. However, I will probably still have to move to a different server — NetDepot isn’t comfortable sponsoring hosting for a project of this size.
Shortcut keys are hard · 2008-03-24 00:44 by Wladimir Palant
When I wrote the first Adblock Plus version two years ago, I already knew that keyboard shortcuts are trouble. Using a “simple” keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+B was pretty much impossible — basically all these keys were already in use by the browser. Yet most of the more complicated “Ctrl+Shift+…” shortcut keys were still free and could be used by extensions. Of course, all extensions shared the same browser window and would eventually clash with their shortcut key definitions, but one could expect that to happen on relatively rare occasions (and the shortcut keys were made configurable just for that reason). Still, I decided to use only two shortcut keys to reduce the probability of issues — original Adblock extension had five. And for two years Adblock Plus answered to Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Shift+B.
What software update isn't · 2008-03-23 22:11 by Wladimir Palant
Having read John Lilly’s post on Apple’s software update I think I’ll stay away from Apple’s software in future. Commenters confirm that iTunes offering Safari as a “software update” is not an exception, it rather has been a company policy to push unrelated products in software updates — e.g. QuickTime updates offer you to install iTunes as well. And I agree, this is very, very wrong. I expect software update to keep my computer safe and up-to-date, not sneak some crap onto it I don’t need. I am already extremely annoyed by Windows Update nagging me about Microsoft’s malware removal tool each month even if I don’t have it installed. Now Apple is doing the same thing, and I don’t think it is funny.
Upgraded to Textpattern 4.0.6 · 2008-03-17 23:09 by Wladimir Palant
Yet another Textpattern upgrade (yes, I am slow), and again I have to expect that it will break something. Textpattern developers don’t seem to have a concept of stable versions and change the already fragile markup module with every minor version. So if you notice something odd on this site, it is probably just broken because of this upgrade — please tell me then.
TomTom HOME and add-ons · 2008-03-17 10:17 by Wladimir Palant
I have been writing very little about what I am doing in my day job, maybe it is time to change this. As some might know, I am a developer in the team behind TomTom HOME, an application that allows users to manage their TomTom navigator devices (e.g. installing new content on them, sharing it with other users or doing backups).