After updating my Firefox to the new 3.6 version I've noticed that my favorite shortcut Cmd+Shift+F (Display Element Information – Web Developer Toolbar) didn't work anymore. Instead of getting the expected results Firefox just switched to full screen mode. Well, my first thought was that there might be an version conflict between the Web Developer Toolbar and the new Firefox and I would simply update the plugin to fix the issue. But there is no new version of the toolbar yet.

What happened?

Mozilla has added the new shortcut for full screen mode to Firefox which apparently overrules the shortcut of the plugin. As a web developer I use Cmd+Shift+F on a daily basis for my work. And honestly, who needs to switch Firefox to full screen mode, at least I never do.

Firefox Menu

Web Developer Toolbar Menu

The Solution

There is a very simple solution to this issue:

1. Download the Keyconfig plugin for Firefox at http://mozilla.dorando.at/keyconfig.xpi
2. Restart Firefox
3. In Firefox go to Tools -> Keyconfig
4. Find the entry "Full Screen" (the one with the unwanted shortcut) and press Disable

That's it. Your Web Developer Toolbar should work again.

Did you ever wonder why there is no Ant support in your Eclipse installation?

If you are working with Eclipse as your standard IDE for PHP Projects you will probably use the PDT Eclipse environment which doesn’t include much of the Java project tools. Ant is one of the very handy ones.

What is Ant?

With Ant you can write simple and as well sophisticated batch jobs for compiling and deploying your code or any other task you could think of. For an example, I’m using Ant to compress and obfuscate my Javascript and CSS files.

How does it work?

Tasks you would like to be processed with Ant you put in a build.xml file.
Here is a simple example:

 
     Files foo.txt and bar.txt are present.
 

 
     
         
             
             
         
     
 

To learn how to write your own build files checkout the Ant Manual.

Activating Ant in Eclipse

1. In Eclipse go to Help -> Software Updates -> Available Software
2. Select Java Development Tools and install it
3. Restart Eclipse

Now you should be able to see Ant in your Eclipse Preferences and when you right-click on a build.xml file in your project you can run it via Run As -> Ant Build.

The Mozilla Team has done a great job with the new Firefox 3.5 browser. FF 3.5 is twice as fast as FF 3 in terms of Javascript speed and even 10 times faster than FF 2.

Smaller Memory Footprint

One of the things I didn’t like about Firefox was the fact that having several tabs open would lead to an unbelievably high consumption of memory. These days are over. The XPCOM cycle collector continuously cleans up unused memory. Plus, hundreds of memory leaks have been remedied.

Awesome Bar

The location bar is now called the awesome bar for good reasons. Now you have Safari functionality inside Firefox. You don’t need to remember exactly the website URL anymore – just start typing some keyword and it will present you results from your browsing history. Great!

Offline Browsing

Websites that are Google Gear enabled (like GMail) you can surf offline without having to install any additional Add-ons.

Newest Web Technologies

These web technologies are now natively supported:

• CSS 2.1
• CSS 3
• HTML5
• SVG Filters
• Ogg Vorbis
• Ogg Theora
• Native JSON
• MathML
• Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG)
• Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest
• Microformats
• Web Worker Threads

Private Browsing

You can easily switch between normal and private browsing and you won’t leave a single browsing fingerprint behind for others to discover. You can even remove every trace of a specific site from your browser without loosing the history of the rest of the sites.

So don’t wait any longer and get your Firefox 3.5 upgrade here.

From time to time iPhoto’s face detection database gets broken and faces are not recognized on new imported photos. It can even happen that face information of old photos is lost or only partially working.

I think one of the reasons could be using iPhoto image library among several users ( there is an how-to i wrote recently: Sharing iPhoto Library among several users on a Mac). To be more precise it could have something to do with file privileges.

Well the bad news here are that there is no fix for that matter from Apple and all face data is lost. The good news: you can reset the database and make it work again.

The Solution

To reset the face database you need to delete the database files of iPhoto can create a new one. To achieve that you need to launch the Terminal application (you will find it in the Utilities folder within you Applications).

Now type the following commands in the terminal application (before you continue here make as usual a backup and quit iPhoto):

sudo bash – this will give you superuser privileges after typing the admin password
cd /Users/… – change to the folder where your iPhoto library is located
rm -rf face … – delete the two database files that start with “face”

Now when you run iPhoto again your face database will be empty and you can start to add new faces. Depending on the number of photos you have in you library the first scan of all photos can take a while (10.000 photos made me wait half an hour).

WordPress has released the new 2.8 “Baker” version. I already did the automated update and I have to say that I really like it.

These are the new features of WP 2.8 Baker:

• Browsing and installing new themes within the WP panel
• CodePress Editor: syntax highlighter and contextual documentation for functions
• the widget interface has been redesigned
• new screen options allow rearranging of every page
• and many more (see full list of changes here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8)

Screenshot of the new CodePress Editor (btw, finally):

There is even a video you can watch to see the new features in action:

You should update too, but don’t forget to make a full backup before you start.