Mysterious Thunderbird crashes – finally solved

GPGee (website down during time of writing) causes Thunderbird to crash on opening mails containing http:// links after having opened a mail containing a file:// link before. This sentence alone should make it clear to everyone how much trouble this issue caused me, and how hard it was to track down… Well – at least I learned a thing or two about debugging (Mozilla applications) on Windows.

See my bug report in Mozilla’s bug tracker if you want to read the whole story. You can even watch a screen video of the crash there 😉

Firefox “Download Day”

They asked for it – they got it… a nice DDoS 😉 (spreadfirefox.com and mozilla.com were unreachable for a couple of minutes after 17:00 UTC).

Anyway… go ahead and download it, it’s a good piece of software. I tried out beta3 and the RCs, and I like the new version so much, that I’m now using Firefox as my default browser again (after more than two years with Konqueror as my default browser).

Download Day 2008

Nice birthday present by the way, Mozilla! Thanks! 🙂

GPRS with Nokia 9300i, Gentoo and China mobile (2, OpenRC)

Since I moved my laptop to the new OpenRC init framework, my GPRS connection stopped working. At first I didn’t know what needed to be changed, but after having a careful look at /usr/share/doc/openrc/net.example and adjusting the proposed ppp chat script, I got it up and running again. Here is my configuration:

### GPRS ###

config_ppp0=( "ppp" )

link_ppp0="/dev/rfcomm0"

pppd_ppp0=(
        "noauth"        # Do not require the peer to authenticate itself
        "debug"
        "local"         # Ignore carrier detect signal from the modem

        "defaultroute"  # Make this PPP interface the default route
        "usepeerdns"    # Use the DNS settings provided by PPP

        "lcp-echo-interval 15"  # Send a LCP echo every 15 seconds
        "lcp-echo-failure 3"    # Make peer dead after 3 consective
                                                        # echo-requests

        "lock"                          # Lock serial port
        "115200"                        # Set the serial port baud rate
        "crtscts"                       # Enable hardware flow control
)

chat_ppp0="
ABORT BUSY
ABORT ERROR
ABORT 'NO ANSWER'
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'
ABORT 'Invalid Login'
ABORT 'Login incorrect'
'' AT
TIMEOUT 5
OK 'ATH'
OK 'ATE1'
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,\"IP\",\"cmnet\"'
OK 'ATD*99#'
TIMEOUT 60
CONNECT ''
TIMEOUT 5
~-- ''
"