Opinions, Expertise, Passion.

Installing the current version of Firefox 1.07 directly of course fixed my debugging problem. However, Firefox has now released 1.5 Available here. The problem is the debugger 0.9.85 is not supported in FireFox 1.5 and gets disabled.

In the world of open source, some enterprising person has available a version which does work Available from here.

Attempting to run the Venkman JavaScript Debugger in FireFox 1.07 doesn’t work under CentOS 4.2.

It keeps launching an error window with “JS Debugger Service is not installed”. This does not appear to be an isolated issue from a Google search, however finding the solution proved a little harder to track down.

There is a thread at the Mozilla Bug Tracking site that sheds light on the problem.

1. You should first ensure you have the latest version of the debugger? (0.9.85, as far as I’m aware) (Available from http://hacksrus.com/~ginda/venkman/)

2. You need in the location bar on the browser enter about:buildconfig and see if –disable-jsd is specified?

Should you see that, you have your problem, the Linux distro has disabled this.
The solution is to download the tar directly from FireFox, however if your OS has previously installed by rpm, as in my case, you have to consider now running a different non rpm version.

Well it’s not a new debate, thats for sure, and I have very strong views on this topic (especially blacklists and ISP’s restricting trade), as well as an approach to a new Protocol termed ‘Authenicated Mail’ or ‘amail’. I’ll need to put my notes on my blog one day.

The purpose for note, is the ongoing increasing spam and inappropiateness of mail that is coming to a general web accessible email address for a client.
I’ve proposed they move to a Challenge Response System for at least general listed email addresses on web sites. This will at least cut down the amount received at the mailbox, however it doesn’t eliminate the mail, the traffic, time, money and space used in mail.

What other approaches can you try. Well, not having a mailto link on your site is a good start. The use of an image to display an email address and not text is also a sound entry approach. I’d also recommend that for general web inquiries, you rotate your names, for example: website@domain.com, inquiries@domain.com, contactus@domain.com etc. As the address is only used on the website, changing the email, and turning the old name into an invalid mailbox will help.

I’ve also found another novel approach, this is the second time I’ve seen this. The website asks you to please add predefined characters into the subject line. Here’s and example.

http://r0.unctad.org/ecommerce/ecommerce_en/contact_en.htm