Filepicker Preview Image for Firefox 3

Download from here

Again, a fix for Firefox to allow preview images, but this time for the latest beta/alpha/whatever they consider it for Firefox 3 (codename Gran Paradiso). Like the last one, use at your own risk, but it certainly works for me.

Firefox Preview Images

There have been complaints that Firefox’s file picker in Linux does not give a preview of the image one is about to open. While GTK doesn’t allow a list of preview images like other filepickers do, it does allow the preview of the image currently selected, and that was good enough for me to work on a patch to do exactly that.

The patch is available on my site here; please read the notes, and know that this is not extensively tested, so use at your own risk; I can’t be responsible for messing up Firefox or your system or anything else if you want to try this. However, it does seem to work just fine for me.

Hope you enjoy it.

Cave Story (Dōkutsu Monogatari) For Linux!

An awesome freeware 2d sidescrolling platform/adventure game is now available as a native Linux game. You can now download the native version of Cave Story from this site.

The configuration GUI is still a Windows-only binary (DoConfig.exe) but can easily be ran with Wine, though I really wish they could have converted it as well since the configuration file is a binary blob of data that can’t be edited. Still, I’m happy to see the game as a native executable. Thanks to the person that did the conversion.

Note: You’ll probably have to do a search for the Linux port’s download, since the link on that site seems to be down. Just do a search for “doukutsu-linux.tar.bz2″.

Microsoft’s Influence

In the past I have blogged negatively about Gnome, its developer’s fascination with Microsoft technologies, and OOXML, twice.

Now it seems that the originator of Gnome is taking the pollution of Microsoft’s influence on Gnome a step farther and is now promoting OOXML as “a superb standard”. Taking this by itself, it could be possible that he believes that this might be true, possibly without knowing all of the facts (such as the fact that OOXML isn’t truly open and relies on huge binary blobs of proprietary data inside the XML containers to actually render a document), but put together with Gnome’s (and de Icaza’s) fascination with Microsoft (a registry-like configuration in Gnome, their .NET workalike Mono, and the desire to copy Silverlight, as well as their connection with Novell which has strong Microsoft connections), you have to think that there is something going on behind the scenes here.

Could Microsoft be subtly influencing Linux by way of Gnome and de Icaza?

There’s really no way to know what something like this could hope to accomplish, but Microsoft’s desire to control or demolish Linux is famously known. You have to wonder if they might be planning to either dominate or attack it from within once its technologies have permeated into many Linux distributions, saying that Microsoft is responsible for Linux’s success and that they now own it. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but with Microsoft, you never know.

I encourage everyone to stop using Gnome, any Mono application, anything to do with Silverlight/Moonlight, and to use or continue to use only office suites that support OpenDocument, such as OpenOffice.org. We can’t take the chance of letting Microsoft’s influence destroy Linux from within.