simon.schönbeck.dk

  • AVG 8 LinkScanner crashes Firefox

    After upgrading to the latest version of the free anti virus application from AVG I encountered constant crashes of Firefox. It seems that AVG 8 includes a utility called LinkScanner which marks whether a website is supposedly a threat or safe upon using a search engine:

    AVG LinkScanner ThreatAVG LinkScanner No Threat
    I am not the biggest fan of these utilities as many false positives arise plus the user ends up losing his own
    criteria and relies solely on the utility’s advice instead of thinking and evaluating each site by himself. Nevertheless it may be suitable for complete beginners as a helping hand.

    Firefox did start to behave erratically after the AVG upgrade from version 7.5 to 8 so there was no real doubt about why it was happening, so I immediately disabled the LinkScanner component within the AVG user interface. This seemed to be the only part that could affect the browsers somehow:

    AVG LinkScanner disabled

    Firefox stopped crashing and all was fine again. There was just a little thing that kept nagging me. The little red exclamation mark by the clock in the traybar kept displaying now. It was not possible to know whether there was an update waiting or any other issue as the exclamation sign was on constantly. I ended up turning LinkScanner on again just to remove the exclamation.

    Back to Firefox crashing…!

    Until today when I again got so tired of the continuous crashes that I finally searched for the problem and located a very simple solution to it.

    Simply leave the LinkScanner component running so you do not get the annoying exclamation mark. Now launch Firefox and go to Tools > Add-ons and disable the AVG add-on. This would disable the AVG 8 LinkScanner component without interfering with anything else on your PC.

  • Home and End keys in PuTTY

    I wondered why sometimes the Home and End keys work as expected during a SSH session via PuTTY and some other times it just writes tildes (~) instead. When writing long commands it is a real annoyance having to press down the left arrow to get back to the beginning of the command.

    A simple solution which worked for me was to change the Terminal-type String under the Connection > Data tab from the default “xterm” to simply “linux”:

    PuTTY Terminal Type String

    Now you should be able to use your Home and End keys to easily move the cursor back and forth during a SSH session using PuTTY.

  • Tags vs. Categories, my ontological classification

    When writing something I usually have a hard time categorising the content as very seldom it will fit into one single category. The solution to this may simply be adding it to more categories instead but then the category hierarchy actually breaks. Instead I definitely prefer to assign tags to content which is much more specific and does not limit you in any way, as there is really no predefined containers but instead any word in the vocabulary can be used to tag your content. During my research determining if WordPress actually had improved the categorisation system I came across an interesting piece of writing about ontology on the web which I recommend you to read through in its full length.

    The latest version of WordPress does seem to handle tags fine although there is some misconception between the tag and category idea. It is somehow mingled together to actually overlap each other although still not the same. I guess the WordPress developers are worried about legacy installations and possible issues during an upgrade path, so they keep things backwards compatible somehow.

    As you can see on this site I make no use of the categories whatsoever. I am forced by WordPress to assign any content to at least one category which I left as the default “Uncategorized”. The name is really irrelevant as I make no use of categories in the display. You may notice the tags assigned to each post just below the title where before the category was displayed.

    To make this little change depending on your theme you may have to edit a couple of files. In my own case I edited three files:

    1. page.php
    2. index.php
    3. single.php

    The change required is the same in all three files, namely replace the following snippet:

    <?php the_category(',') ?>

    with this one:

    <?php /*the_category(',')*/ the_tags( ' ', ', ', ''); ?>

    That is all. Now you will have a nice list of tags instead of the irrational categories list which does not really suit written content.