Every two or three days, I receive an e-mail from someone asking when the next version of the Javascript Browser Sniffer will be released and it’s beginning to be annoying, because it makes me feel lazy or something like.

So what am I going to do?

I am developing jsbrwsniff in my free time. Sure, it began as a project for the company I work for, but later it was released as open source and since then I work on it only in my free time. Yes, I know, it’s already been almost one year since the latest version. The explanation is very simple: my free time is scarce and I have lots of interests.

Now the good news: the next version is almost here, most probably at the end of May. What’s new? Well, a lot of things! Here comes a sneak preview of the “what’s new”:

  • New browsers (making a total of around 40)
  • New bots (excuse me, I cannot remember the number now)
  • Lots of new plugins are detected (Acrobat Reader, Windows Media, Real Player, QuickTime, Java, SVG…)
  • Will be enclosed in an object to avoid namespace conflicts (per request)
  • PHP script to create your own jsbrwsniff, supporting exactly the browsers you want, the bots you want and the plugins you want. This is still under development, but I think it will be ready very soon.

The rationale here is very simple: either just wait for me to have some free time to implement all this stuff, or pay me (my company) to do it. I will be very pleased.

My first contribution to the KDE project, specifically, to KOffice

CVS commit by mlaurent:
Apply patch from Pau Garcia i Quiles <pgquiles AT elpauer DOT org> (Improve create html slideshow)
Just add a special text when time between slide == 0 (Disable)

CCMAIL: Pau Garcia i Quiles <pgquiles AT elpauer DOT org>

M +200 -83 webpresentation.cc
M +23 -6 webpresentation.h

ed on March 18th, 2005. I don’t know why it doesn’t show in the KDE CVS Digest


Internet Explorer theme for Mozilla and Firefox

Are you a sysadmin fed up with Internet Explorer nasty bugs? Would you like to move your users to Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox? Is the different look the main hindrance?

If you answered yes to those questions, here is the solution: an Internet Explorer theme for Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox. Now your users will believe they are running Internet Explorer, but in fact they will be using Mozilla.

Update: Here is another site, this time more hardcore IE-skinning for Mozilla (but somewhat old)


Javascript Browser Sniffer 0.5 released

The Javascript Browser Sniffer is a Javascript library for identifying which browser and operating system is the visitor using, including the version number. It also detects bots and the Flash plugin.

Currently, jsbrwsniff identifies 30 browsers, 14 browser engines, 25 operating sytems and 6 bots, comprising more than 99% of the visits to any site and making it far more powerful than the Mozilla javascript sniffer.

Most remarkable hits in this new version 0.5 are working at server-side (with ASP, for instance) and the long-awaited Flash plugin detection.

You can download it at http://jsbrwsniff.sf.net. It’s free under the LGPL license.

The first time I saw the news I thought it was a hoax. Three days have passed since, and nobody from AOL nor Red Hat has denied the information, so let’s believe there’s some point in it.

The original article is here (The Washington Post). What people is saying: Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Ars Technica, Barrapunto [Spanish], Cat-Linux [Catalan].

Also interesting is this article in Newsforge, which I agree: Red Hat with AOL/TW recources will be powerful enought to battle Microsoft.

Update: There’s no buy-out, according to CNet.

The Debian Project has new pages dealing with how to get their ISO images of their GNU/Linux.

The new pages are here. There are links to some (few) sites that host the ISO images and information on two ways of constructing your own image from package files (the ones that carry the two hundred mirrors Debian has in the world): the (ugly) pseudo-image kit and the (new) jigdo.