10 August, 2004

Got around to adding a few more links to my bar over there.
For you LJ users, all of you that are in my Sage List (minus maybe a couple of you) are in the Ell Jay category, in a rotation. It chooses a random number of you to show, and goes from there.

The blo.gs category was made initially when I used http://blo.gs to keep track of a few weblogs that were not LJ, and pinged weblogs.com… but now, I use it mainly for people who’re not on LJ, who run weblogs, and not plain content sites.

Well, between job applications, I’ve had to start a little project.

As most of you know, I hate Internet Explorer with a passion. I can’t stand how insecure it is, how it tracks your every move, how easy it is for someone to drop something into the browser and you never know it… And these public library terminals are hardly secured. This one has some Y! toolbar installed into it.

So, I went a-Gecko huntin’. Looked for the smallest browser I could find that used Gecko. I eventually settled in on K-Meleon. K-Meleon basically did what I needed it to do:
* Not be IE
* Fit on my USB stick (16 MB stick)
* Be easily customizable to be as small as possible.

I installed it, and it ate most of my stick, in the beginning (I had far too little space to be useful. Couldn’t even cache data to the stick).
So, I went to the forums, and began my search: Had anyone else attempted this project?
I didn’t see anything in the forums yet, so I began to post there.
It’s been really fun, doing what some thought I was foolish for. I was even given the suggestion that I should get a larger USB stick to complete this project with.
I may go that route, as I expand my freeware / open source stick to include other useful things that I find myself in need of.
Before I installed a new skin today, my K-Meleon install was a whopping 7.99 megabytes. I’m using the library’s hard drive, combined with a small batch file and rm.exe to cache files, and clean up after myself.
I’m up to 8.34 MB with the new skin. I might rename its folder to “default”, after deleting the other skin, and go from there, to lower the size. I should find a small, but attractive throbber.avi to replace this one, though, since the thing weighs in at 80kb.

(on an aside, I should post on the WhatPulse forums, asking them why whatpulse.exe is 2.4 mb, and can’t be UPXed…)

It did, however, take quite a bit of work on my part, to squish K-Meleon into that little space, including a lot of stripping of the files inside embed.jar and pippki.jar, since they contained lots and lots of communicator/* and licensing drivel that the average end user will never see! (Note: because K-Meleon IS a Gecko based browser, it’s not the only one that suffers from this issue </firefox> </moz-app-suite>…)
I also UPXed many of the DLLs for K-Meleon, because that gave me more space to work with.
The result is, I have a functional browser that does what I need it to do, that is portable (minus one issue I (as Omshiirion) mentioned near the end of the thread), has something similar to tabs (layers), and is tweakable (userContent.css, user.js are right there).

This makes me quite happy.
So now, on this USB stick drive, I have:
Something that I can use for pop3 access to my mailbox, for cleaning it out (nPOP);
Something to get on the Internet and surf about with (K-Meleon/*);
Something to make zip files with that isn’t WinZip or EasyZip (7-Zip’s 7za.exe);
A combination notepad/ftp client to work on my résumé (NotepadFTP);
My WhatPulse client, because I seem to do a lot of typing in here as of late, and I’m tired of sliding down the damned ranks! (WhatPulse’s whatpulse.exe);
A really good replacement for notepad.exe (metapad.exe);
The Universal Packer for eXecutables (UPX 1.25w);
Ken Silverman’s excellent PNG utility (pngout.exe);
A port of the ‘rm’ command to Windows that doesn’t require Cygwin’s DLL to run (rm.exe)
My old GPG/PGP keys (no GPG yet, however);
And finally, a couple of shortcuts to things I’m reading (JohnKerryisadouchebagbutImvotingforhimanyway.com and my thread at the K-Meleon forums).

All that, and I still have 3,350,528 bytes (3.19 MB) free on the stick.
I’m… rather amazed by this development.

Now to hack post_meta back into this template.