Brian Yi

Whenever people draw comparisons between Adblock Plus for Firefox and Opera’s built-in content blocker, they point out Opera’s lack of support for regular expressions as a deficiency. This isn’t the case at all. While regular expressions are powerful tools that give great flexibility in defining filters, they should not be used in most cases in Adblock Plus. Tips that apply to the older Adblock project, such as using regular expressions to improve speed and cramming rules into as few filters as possible, do not apply to the newer Adblock Plus project. In fact, those tips are more harmful than they are helpful.

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Everybody who has a blog and their dog will pick up on the news about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1’s release and its two new features, Activities and WebSlices. Instead of parroting back the same old platitudes, I wanted to talk about some of the small interface improvements in the new beta.

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For some reason, the nice folks at Opera deemed Seattle Traffic, a widget that I created, special enough to win a contest. This mildly amused me because I didn’t realize that there was a contest ongoing. They sent me a bag chock full of goodies including a t-shirt with the words Opera + Widgets inside a drawing of a heart.

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Vista gives me a rating of 2.0 because of my Radeon X300, which as 64MB of memory. I run my computer with 512MB of system memory. These statistics fall short of minimum requirements for the premium-ready computers, but my notebook is able to run Aero (with Flip3D) flawlessly. What’s interesting is that 64MB of system memory is being used for video memory to bring up my total to 128MB. Of course, Vista is not as snappy as XP used to be on my computer, but it’s responsive enough to be productive for everyday use.

There was a false positive that blocked political cartoons on Naver. It’s been fixed. Also, the contact form will accept links now. I’ll keep it that way unless the spam is bad. Thanks 젝 바우어 (Jack Bauer).

Having recently switched completely to Ubuntu, I sought a DirectConnect client that works as well on Linux as DC++ does on Windows. Sadly, the experience on Linux wasn’t as easy for me as it is on Windows where I can install DC++ and expect it to just work. I’ve had to go through many trials of installing various clients to figure out the best way to experience DirectConnect on Linux.

There are a few DirectConnect clients on Linux, but they’re not worth bothering to use. Most of them aren’t maintained anymore and almost all aren’t compatitble with the latest DC++ which most people use. The sheer popularity of DC++ means that one must use a program based on its core. There are two ways to do this. One can run DC++ through Wine or compile LinuxDC++ (linuxdcpp) from source.

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Many people who are on hosting plans that offer terabytes of bandwidth may not care, but WordPress feeds suck up a lot of bandwidth. This is bad news for people like me who are charged by the byte, but it’s possible to reduce bandwidth consumption on feeds with a quick hack.

In theory, WordPress receives If-modified-since and If-none-match headers, processes them, and responds with an appropriate 200 OK or 304 Not Modified header. Bandwidth would be saved if it matches 304 Not Modified because the content wouldn’t be sent. However, in practice, WordPress does not correctly process the If-none-match header due to some PHP and WordPress weirdness. That means content is sent with a 200 OK header no matter what.

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Ever since the release of Firefox 2.0, Adblock Plus has displaced the original Adblock as one of the five most popular extensions at Mozilla Add-ons. If you’ve installed Adblock Plus, you know that it presents a list of recommended subscriptions on first run. Instead of the extemely popular Filterset.G, EasyList is listed. Which one is better? Let’s find out.

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It’s wonderful that there are so many extensions such as Greasemonkey, Stylish, RIP, Chickenfoot, NukeAnything, and countless others out there that let users modify content to their liking. It really demonstrates the richness of the Firefox community and the capabilities of Firefox. Some people choose Adblock Plus because it blocks ads instead of merely hiding them, which is one of the most important advantages of Adblock Plus. I chose it because of the following reason.

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In my spare time, I have been contributing to the development of EasyList and EasyElement. The author of the filterset maintains a great relationship with the community. Once a lurker and anonymous poster in the forum, I have been granted access to the private development area of the forum where people are free to develop the filterset without fear that advertisers will simply visit the forum and cull their work to bypass the filters. It’s not a special privilege to work on development because the administrator will grant access to anyone who asks. But it is great to feel a sense of accomplishment that I’m making a contribution to the ad blocking community.

EasyList works best with Adblock Plus. They’re getting some impressive numbers these days. Now that the developer of Filterset.G has appeared to stop updating his filterset and Adblock (always) seems stagnant, Adblock Plus and EasyList are poised to become a dominant force in the ad blocking community. Even if that never quite happens, I think Adblock Plus and EasyList will be highly-praised and recommended because they are very polished and easier to use than their more popular counterparts.

I am learning some skills such as writing regular expessions and inspecting pages with FireBug, which increases my geek cred. The skills and tricks I learn are being put into the development of my own personal Filtersetb Corset. Check it out. You’ll see my recommendations for the best way to block advertisements if you use Mozilla Firefox.