[the] Code Girl (aka UnrulyGrrl)

I’m famous! well sort of. I made a post to SpreadFirefox.com recently about a letter writing campaign I did recently. I found a link to it on a german website!

Also, the SpreadFirefox admins liked my initiative so much they are sending me one of those super-cool limited editions Firefox coins, and some other swag. Cool. This all started because I checked out an article about how I could help spread Firefox (ie writing to your ISP, local net cafe, local officials, etc). Since my letter got such a good response, I created a template for it on the Firefox wiki

Please think about taking a minute and helping the cause. Every little bit helps combat the entrenched Internet Exploder. The easiest way to help is to put an ‘upgrade firefox’ link or image (pointing to getfirefox.com) on your site/blog somewhere

I was thinking I’d like to see the incoming subject lines of my email, not just how many new messages I had. So I wrote a procmail recipe that uses OSD:

:0c
| show_new_mail

and a one liner shell script called ’show_new_mail’ [really just to clean up the procmail recipe]

grep Subject|sed -e's/Subject: /New mail: /g'|DISPLAY=:0  osd_cat -f 9x15 -

Without the “DISPLAY=:0″ part, this fails with the error “Error initializing osd: No display” but only when it’s used as a procmail recipe. It worked fine from the command line.

This requires osd_cat, which is installed with xosd
———————————————————
7/8/2006 EDIT:
Good news for M$ Windows users: there is an xosd package available for Cygwin, so you can do cool OnScreenDisplay things just like linux/XWindows.

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:

• A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
• A collection of tools, which provide Linux look and feel.

Are you tired of Firefox taking up more and more RAM the longer you leave it running? Do you have to kill and restart it every day or two just to get back some RAM? Well suffer no more. It’s just one easy setting. Go to

about:config

and add this NEW value, of type Integer:

browser.cache.memory.capacity

The value is in KB, so to set it for 16MB, set the value ‘16384′. That should be plenty. By default this value is ‘-1′ which means ‘TAKE EVERYTHING I HAVE, PLEASE!’.

NOTE: This works on EVERY operating system [AFAIK], even sucky winDoze