Silver's Simple Site - Weblog - 2007 - June

I'm sure browser plugins come with their own little Quantum Failure Generators or something. I've spent most of today trying to narrow down certain sizing issues with the Windows Media Player plugin across various OS versions and browsers. It was not (and still isn't) fun.

At one point, even Virtual PC 2007 itself crashed.

Then, starting openSUSE 10.2, it decided that it needed to fsck each and every partition just because it hadn't done it for a while. This would have been fine, except that it blocks the boot process for upwards of an hour with no indications on the graphical boot screen.

Now, I'm about to go install some beta software as part of a private beta test program; this can't possibly go wrong, can it?

ChatZilla users have for a while wanted to get a notification on all messages, but we've never considered it important enough to warrant fixing individually, instead opting to recommended some workarounds:

• Add all vowels/letters to the Stalk List, thus triggering the normal stalk matching on (almost) every message.
• Write a simple script, but never providing one ourselves.
• Wait for the new message filtering which will be able to do it, among many other variations.

Today, another user asked for this feature, and I caved in and wrote a script to do it. To install the script:

1. Find the scripts folder. You can use either /pref profilePath or /pref initialScripts since the latter defaults to the "scripts" subdirectory of the former. You want the "scripts" subdirectory, if that wasn't obvious.
2. Create a new directory for this script. My suggested name is "message-notify", just to match the script's ID, but ChatZilla doesn't care.
3. Save the script itself into the new directory, making sure to name it "init.js".
4. Reload all scripts with "/eval processStartupScripts()". This will reload all the scripts found in the subdirectories of the "scripts" directory - including the new one.

The following message categories trigger the script, but only when the window is inactive (nothing happens if the window is active):

• channel:privmsg
• channel:action
• channel:notice
• channel:join
• channel:part
• channel:quit
• channel:kick

The script has two preferences:

• sound - specifies what sound to play when a message arrives. Defaults to "beep", and can accept the same things as the standard ChatZilla sound preferences (namely, a file: URL, "beep" or "none").
• attention - specifies whether to grab the user's attention, which usually means flashing the window but can vary by platform. Defaults to "true".

Enjoy.

It's that time of year again. I will be away from Monday (25th) to Friday (29th), enjoying the annual mega LAN.