Everyday I log into Passpack and leave it open all day. So here’s the problem after having Passpack open for a while I get the following message (it is extremely annoying as it interupts whatever else your up to on the net). This only happens for me in Chrome. It works like butter in Firefox and I can’t speak for IE.

The initial trigger for the message seems to be random. But after it initial message is seems to come back around every 3 minutes. So I did some digging. After poking around in the source I discovered that they’re using an older version of Tako Sano’s jQuery history plugin.

So I added some code to the historyCallback do some logging so I could get a better feel for what was going on.

After letting this run for a while I started to see a pattern. Here’s an excerpt of the results.

• hh: 8, m: 7, delta: 209901 (~3.4 minutes)
• hh: 8, m: 7, delta: 200888 (~3.3 minutes)
• hh: 8, m: 7, delta: 190944 (~3.2 minutes)
• hh: 8, m: 7, delta: 183514 (~3.0 minutes)
• hh: 8, m: 7, delta: 197517 (~3.3 minutes)

For webkit (Chrome/Safari) based browsers the jQuery history plugin manually creates a stack to keep track of the history. So this is where I believe we are encountering the problem. If you look at line 4426 you can see that we create a history with a stack length of 9.

But on line 4419 we are working with a stack with a length of 8.

var m = $.browser.netscape ? 2 : $.browser.msie ? 3 : 7;

Shouldn’t this read as follows?

var m = $.browser.netscape ? 2 : $.browser.msie ? 4 : 8;

So your at work and you really want to watch that YouTube video your buddy sent you. But you can’t cuz YouTube is blocked. Well I’m here to show you how. This builds on a previous post I did about listening to Pandora in Canada. Your using the socks proxy we setup before but you still can’t watch YouTube clips because their being blocked at the DNS level. Nothing we can do about that right? Wrong. Lets configure Firefox to send DNS requests over the socks proxy. There by circumventing the DNS blocks at work.

In Firefox type about:config into the address bar. Now type dns into the filter. Double-click on the network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to configure Firefox to send our DNS requests through the proxy. Voila! We can now laugh it up watching YouTube clips to our hearts content.

So you looking at this sketchy file you just downloaded and your a little nervious about running it because you don’t using any antivirus software. What do you do? Ususally just run the file and hope for the best. Well no more, welcome Virus Total. All you doing is upload the file to Virus Total. They scan it with 39 different antivirus engines and give you the results.

A great solution for scanning those small sketchy files that all of us end up downloading at some point to get our software to work they way we want it to.

I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 for a while. Just recently I updated my install to the Windows 7 Beta 1 (Build 7000). When I was coping over my iTunes library I noticed something kind of cool going on in the taskbar. While the files were transfering in a mini progress bar was displayed behind the Explorer icon in the taskbar.

It’s the little things like this that make Windows 7 really cool. I won’t talk about it too much right now but what makes Windows 7 worth while for me is the new Explorer interface. So much better than Vista’s Explorer interface.