Ehsanul Haque » web

Turn off the feature of Google Toolbar to display web history on new tabs of Firefox 3 for Mac

Ehsan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:55:18 +0000

The other day when I was browsing on my Mac (using Firefox 3) I noticed everytime I open a new tab it shows the recent websites I’ve visited and few more items under Google Toolbar title. At the begining I liked the idea. I thought it saves me time to type in URL of the sites I frequently visit. But this feature was not available on my PC.

Although I initially liked the feature, it started to bug me when I opened new tab in front of someone (visiting me – for example) and it was showing the cached page of my online banking. It actually cached the account detail page! I didn’t like the idea that if someone is looking over my shoulder will get to see my account balance.

Anyway I started digging into it to turn off that feature. Then I found it was something that needed to be turned off from Google Toolbar’s settings. So to turn it off go to Tools > Add-ons. It should take you to the Extensions tab. Click on the Google Toolbar for Firefox extension and then click on Preferences button. Preference window will start with Search tab and under “Web-browsing tools” section uncheck the option “Enable the Google new tab page”. You should now get back your homepage, whatever it is set to.

50 Firefox 3 Add-ons That Will Change the Way You Surf the Web

Ehsan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:36:27 +0000

Read about 50 Firefox 3 Add-ons That Will Change the Way You Surf the Web on BestCollegesOnline.com

PHP Function I frquently use

Ehsan — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:06:43 +0000

While developing the web applications with PHP I have made my own small function library. In this library I have few functions that I use very frequently. One of the functions that is used more often is echo_d(). The purpose of this function is to check a variable to see if it is empty or not set; then based on the check result it either prints a default value or the value of the variable.

This is a simple function that saves me a lot of time and keeps my main codes cleaner. So here it is.

function echo_d($var, $def) {
  $var = trim($var);
  echo ((isset($var)) && (!empty($var))) ? $var : $def;
}

When to use this function? One of the most common places I use this function is in the reports. When I am generating reports for anything I always have to check whether certain value is in the database; it prints a default value if it cannot find one. The usage of this function in the scenario is something like:

$lastLoginDate = $rowsFromDB['last_login_date'];
echo_d($lastLoginDate, "---");

This function can be expanded to make it more versatile but I have found this tiny little function very useful.

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Thank you.