SAHANA runs on a LAMP/WAMP server and enables fast setup and web based management of disaster recovery networks. Features include a missing person registry, organization registry, request management system, camp registry, volunteer management, inventory management, and situation awareness. SAHANA has been used in several recent disasters for various applications. More can be found on its website.

Link
UNESCO Free & Open Source Software Portal

• a file archiver – my favorite is 7-zip, but you can just as easily use any archiving program that is compatible with zip files
• a text plain text editor

For more advanced webapps, a more advanced context highlighting text editor can be helpful for coding custom style sheets or adding javascript customizations. And don’t forget icons! I use a combination of Paint.Net and @icon sushi (which covers everything but MacOS, which is because I can’t seem to find software for Linux or Windows to accommodate icons for it – recommendations anyone?).

The No “.webapp” WebApp

There are several ways to open webpages with Prism or WebRunner. The first and easiest is to install Prism, then create a link to it on your desktop. Then change that link adding the option “-uri” and the url of the page you want to open. Here are two examples:

Windows:
c:\your\path\to_prism\prism.exe -uri http://web_url_of_site c:\your\path\to_prism\prism.exe -uri c:\location\of\local_file

GNU/Linux:
/your/path/to_prism/prism -uri http://web_url_of_site /your/path/to_prism/prism -uri /location/of/local_file

This method does not require a webapp file, it just launches the website or file you specify. This means, no icons are required, but you also don’t get to add any custom themes or js files. This would be a really good method to use with applications like Wiki on a Stick (woas).

WebApp Bundles

The second method is also pretty straight forward (until you make it complex by adding more functionality). For the most basic webApp bundle you only need to create one file; the webapp.ini. Here’s the content from the example webapp.ini on the Prism wiki:

[Parameters] id=unique-app-id@unique-author-id.whatever uri=http://[the-url-what-you-want-to-connect-to]/ status=yes location=no sidebar=no navigation=no

The “id” parameter is required to be unique. I’ve been using my website’s url (as most others have done as well) preceded by the name of the site, but any unique identifier will work. The “uri” parameter is required and will accept both url of the target website as well as local file paths. Everything after that appears to be optional and the values show are the defaults. These remaining parameters are options to tell Prism whether or not to show certain GUI elements (“status” = status bar;”location” = address bar;”sidebar” = sidebar;”navigation” = well, quite frankly, I have no idea – maybe navigation buttons that haven’t been implemented yet?).

The next step after saving your changes to this document, is to use your archiving program to zip up this file creating, as an example, “your_webapp.zip”. Replace the “zip” extension with “webapp” and you’re ready to roll! Now either double click the webapp file or you can launch the webapp from the command line thusly:

Windows:
c:\your\path\to_prism\prism.exe -webapp your_webapp_bundle

GNU/Linux:
/your/path/to_prism/prism -webapp your_webapp_bundle

For more advanced webapps you can add icons, scripting and style sheet support (see the Prism page for more details).

Happy coding!

Prism
Prism/WebApp Bundle
Prism/Scripting
Prism/Styling
7-Zip
Paint.Net
@icon sushi
Wiki on a Stick

Update!!
Had to add a comment to the replacement code below in order for this to work.

080404 Update!!
Yet again, code changes for new versions and what not.

Looks like Mozilla has added WebRunner to it’s Mozilla Labs line up and changed the name to Prism. From what they say, it’s going to be a cross between an open version of Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight and a localized lancher for web applications. Which, by my definition, is what utility computing is supposed to be like. Prism is currently for Windows only (they’d better hurry up with a Linux version), but it runs the same webapp files and also has added style sheet support – among other things – so you can style your webapps your way.

Anyway, I’ve been kind of discouraged by the lack of extension availability for WebRunner (and XulRunner for that matter). You’ll find in another of my posts a webapp for accessing the WebRunner extensions panel. Using this webapp, you can add new extensions (by installing or dropping them onto the panel), but at this point, adding extensions will fail because the version checking mechanism for WebRunner/XulRunner. To get around that, you need to change the extension’s compatibility information. These instructions will not work for every extension and your results will vary…

I recommend you find a smaller extension, download it and make the following changes:

1. Open the extension package (you can open it with 7-zip, ALzip, Winzip or any other archive program that works with zip files.
2. Extract and open the install.rdf with a text editor, I’d recommend Wordpad if your using windows.
3. Locate and change the following or something that looks like the following (this will vary by extension, but look for the Firefox description section – and you may find that you have to remove all references to all other Mozilla programs that the extension is compatible with for this to work):

<!--Firefox-->
<RDF:Description RDF:about="rdf:#$djS7s"
  em:id="{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}"
  em:minVersion="0.8"
  em:maxVersion="2.0.0.*" />

To:

<!--Webrunner-->
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="webrunner"
    em:id="webrunner@webapps.org"
    em:minVersion="0.1"
    em:maxVersion="10.0" />

or (again it will depend on which way the developer implemented the Firefox description):

<em:targetApplication>
  <!--Webrunner-->
  <Description>
    <em:id>webrunner@webapps.org</em:id>
    <em:minVersion>0.1</em:minVersion>
    <em:maxVersion>10.0</em:maxVersion>
  </Description>
</em:targetApplication>

If you’re using Prism, change to the following:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="prism"
  em:id="prism@developer.mozilla.org"
  em:minVersion="0.1"
  em:maxVersion="10.0" />

or

<em:targetApplication>
  <Description>
    <!--Prism-->
    <em:id>prism@developer.mozilla.org</em:id>
    <em:minVersion>0.1</em:minVersion>
    <em:maxVersion>10.0</em:maxVersion>
  </Description>
</em:targetApplication>

4. Then save the rdf file and add it back into the xpi archive.
5. You should be ready to install the extension using the Extensions.webapp

I found this parts of this bit of magic on Alex Sirota’s website along with the tip to check in the applicaiton.ini file for any XulRunner application’s ID. If you run into errors, then something is probably malformed in the rdf file so check that first. I won’t be much help in trouble shooting, and I’m not about to offer support for other peoples extensions on an unsupported application, but if you have problems, post a comment and I’ll give editing the rdf a go myself.

I’m no real programmer, I mean, I know enough to be dangerous. I’ve got a good handle on html, css, javascript, asp etc. In the past I’ve played with the source code for Portable Firefox from PortableApps.com trying to get XulRunner portable. I didn’t have much luck. Ran into too many code errors to resolve myself. What I needed was a way to make the program portable without programming anything new.

X-Launcher

What I was able to find was X-Launcher. X-Launcher is a nifty little app that allows you to launch just about any application portably – that is, without leaving much of a trace on the host computer. I’ve been able to use X-Launcher without too much effort (hey, just my style :).

You can get X-Launcher from winPenPack.com (downloads section) along with a host of other open source software all made portable using X-Launcher or other means. WinPenPack is an Italian website, but you can get English on most pages by choosing it from the language menu. Nice site and a lot of good software!
X-Launcher itself is an easy to use program, you simply configure the X-launcher.ini file for it and you’re ready to use it. One of the things that really sets X-Launcher apart is the fact that you can have multiple launchers in the same directory. Just rename the X-launcher.ini file and the X-launcher.exe to any name you wish (just as long as both have the same file name) and you can put a second set of exe/ini files with a different set of names in the same directory together. Why would you do this? Well, for one, this allows you to run multiple versions of a program with wildly different configurations. Another thing this buys you (and more relevant to this discussion) is the ability to launch different WebRunner apps portably.

Normally if you launch a program you can pass it options through command line switches. If you’re using another program to launch the application you want to run, then you don’t usually have the option of passing switches to the second program from the first. With X-Launcher, these switches are built into the configuration file.

The default configuration file that comes with X-Launcher is loaded with information on feature settings, but it’s also a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, if you run X-launcher.exe with no like-named ini file, it will create it’s own, scaled down X-launcher.ini. This configuration file is a heck of a lot easier to read!

There are several application variables that can be defined, the most important one being the application name. This will eventually point to folder names and the application itself. Here’s the contents of a X-launcher.ini for a webapp with included explanations for most settings:

wikipedia.ini

[Setup]
AppName=WebRunner
;Application name, this will also be used below as the
;name of some of the folders.

[FileToRun]
PathToExe=$AppName$\$AppName$.exe
;This is the name and path to the file you're trying to
;launch.
WorkingDir=%HOME%
;This is the name of the directory which will be used
;by the program as it's working directory.
Parameters= -webapp wikipedia@luckydisasters.com
;List of any parameters to pass to the application, in
;this case we're telling WebRunner to load the webapp
;"wikipedia@luckydisasters.com"

[Environment]
HOME=$HOME$\$AppName$
;This folder will be used to save any user specific file
;information - like the Mozilla profiles folder.
USERPROFILE=%HOME%
;As you can see I've used the same folders for all the
;programs files, this will make it a lot easier later if we
;want to see what the program is doing or make
;changes.
PATH=%PATH%;@ScriptDir@
;This adds the @ScriptDir@ variable to the system
;path used by the application

[Functions]
DirCreate=%HOME%
;if this folder doesn't exist when you start the
;program, it will created. You can place other
;functions here as well if you need them.

[Options]
;These settings are other X-launcher application
;options, such as showing a splash screen and
;what not, feel free to make changes, but these
;should be fine as is
DeleteTemp=true
MultipleIstances=true
FixAppData=false
RunWait=true
ShowSplash=true
WriteLog=false

[SplashScreen]
;This section allows you to add a custom splash
;screen and sets the length of time the splash
;screen is shown. Leave the Image and Title blank
;for X-launcher defaults. The image path (as well
;as all paths in this ini file) are relative to the
;current location of the ini/exe files for the
;X-launcher app.
Image=
Title=
TimeOut=1500

Download the Wikipiedia X-launcher files here:
Wikipedia X-launcher

7-Steps

What I’ve done to use the above webapp portably is as follows (assume that the USB drive/portable device is drive letter “X”):

1. Make sure you have WebRunner and the Wikipedia.webapp installed.
2. Create a folder under “X:\PortableApps\” (or where ever you store your portable applicaitons) called “X-WebRunner” (“X:\PortableApps\X-WebRunner”)
3. Copy the “C:\Program Files\WebRunner” folder to “X:\PortableApps\X-WebRunner” (“X:\PortableApps\X-WebRunner\WebRunner”)
4. Copy the wikipedia.exe and the wikipedia.ini files into “X:\PortableApps\X-Webrunner”
5. Run the Webrunner.exe, this will create the user profile you’ll need to copy your webapp into
6. Now copy your webapp folder from your profile folder on your hard drive usually located about here:
   “C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\WebRunner\Profiles\RANDOMSTRING.default\webapps\WEBAPPNAME”
   to your new profile folder on your portable device:
   “X:\PortableApps\Application Data\WebRunner\Profiles\NEWRANDOMSTRING.default\webapps\WEBAPPNAME“
7. Last step, start the wikipedia.exe file again, this will start the webapp that you’ve copied.

My “X-WebRunner” install:

Now you can start moving your webapps over and making X-launcher.exe and X-launcher.ini files for each one, the only line in the ini file that needs to be changed for each is “Parameters“, which gets changed to the webapp folder name for each webapp. So basically all you have to do is copy the original wikipedia.ini file, rename it and change the Parameters setting.

Next I’ll have to configure Plain Old Webserver USB (POWUSB) to run with X-launcher. Then I can carry around a nice little XUL Webserver!

Links:

winPenPack
X-Launcher download
My Wikipedia X-launcher configuration
My Wikipedia.webapp Bundle

While I’m at it, here are a couple of other webapps I’ve cobbled together, I’ll appologize in advance for the low quality of the icons on all of these…
Google Page Creator Webapp
Google Webmaster Tools Webapp

At this point I should probably include a warning, so – keep in mind while running these webapps with WebRunner, that WebRunner itself is still a in pre-release/beta stages. Which means that the webapps found on this site, while working to view sites and what not, are not intended to be a replacement for your standard browser. The websites you’ll be viewing were not designed to be used with WebRunner, and therefore not all features on these sites may be compatible with it. I claim no responsibility for any malfunctions related to WebRunner. I’m providing files that allow you to access some websites, nothing more. Feel free to use the webapp files found on this site, but keep in mind you’re using them at your own risk – and without warranty!

About:Config.Webapp

This webapp is for displaying the chrome about:config URI. This makes it a hell of a lot easier to modify the configuration (especially when adding a proxy for those of us trying to use this stuck behind a proxy).

Use this webapp to edit important settings such as:

• Cookies Rules
• Proxy Settings
• Pipelining Rules
• Password Rules

For more information on directly editing the about:config click here. For more on individual settings (for instance, figuring out which settings to add back in – like the afore mentioned proxy settings), click here.

Extensions.Webapp

This is the second webapp which gives access to WebRunner’s extensions panel. The thing about either one of these webapps (and WebRunner in general) is that you access each one separately – that is to say each gets launched as it’s own application – but any changes in either one affects any other webapp you might be running with WebRunner.

Now the only thing we need is for extensions to be modified and made available for WebRunner (like Lifehacker’s Better Gmail). There are ways to hack extensions to allow them to run in WebRunner, but that’s for another post.

Links:

Webapps:

• About:Config.Webapp
• Extensions.Webapp

Offsite References:

• Firefox Help: Editing Configuration Files
• mozillaZine: About:config entries

Other:

• Lifehacker
• Better Gmail

Disclaimer

Keep in mind while running these webapps with WebRunner, that WebRunner itself is still a in pre-release/beta stages. Which means that the webapps found on this site, while working to view sites and what not, are not intended to be a replacement for your standard browser. The websites you’ll be viewing were not designed to be used with WebRunner, and therefore not all features on these sites may be compatible with it. I claim no responsibility for any malfunctions related to WebRunner. I’m providing files that allow you to access some websites, nothing more. Feel free to use the webapp files found on this site, but keep in mind you’re using them at your own risk – and without warranty!

Over at Lifehacker they’ve posted about the standalone Mozilla based WebRunner. WebRunner is, well I’ve pretty much been over that already. The point is, you can launch a webapp from a standalone program, allowing you to do things without getting distracted by all that… extra web. I really like this concept, I now have links for Gmail, Google Reader, and all those other nifty web 2.0 apps I like.

I wanted to give this a try myself, so I’ve made a standalone Wikipedia launcher. Get it here. It’s a launcher for the Wikipedia’s English main page.

Make your own! It’s dead simple! All you do is install the WebRunner software, create an ini file for your app, create icons and zip these files together. Rename the zip file to your.webapp and your good to go!

There’s a couple of worrying things about the webapp files – from a security standpoint. The biggest of these is that you can include a js file with javascript that runs at an application level. In other words it has access to everything that the application has access to, like – oh I don’t know – the file system?! (in my best Church Lady voice – oh crap am I revealing my age!). Another is the fact that you’re using a zip format to distribute the rest of your files. Which of course can have it’s own security problems when used with other programs. You also don’t really have the ability to get at a lot of the standard Mozilla settings that WebRunner shares. So you can’t make adjustments to settings for cookies, passwords and the like.

At any rate, it’s still a relatively young application, so I’m sure they’ll get the security issues addressed, but for now, make sure you inspect those files before you run them!

Links:
WebRunner
Lifehacker post
My Wikipedia launcher

Disclaimer

Keep in mind while running these webapps with WebRunner, that WebRunner itself is still a in pre-release/beta stages. Which means that the webapps found on this site, while working to view sites and what not, are not intended to be a replacement for your standard browser. The websites you’ll be viewing were not designed to be used with WebRunner, and therefore not all features on these sites may be compatible with it. I claim no responsibility for any malfunctions related to WebRunner. I’m providing files that allow you to access some websites, nothing more. Feel free to use the webapp files found on this site, but keep in mind you’re using them at your own risk – and without warranty!

The New Zealand government has put the review process of it’s Police Act, which is coming up for review, onto the web in wiki-format! They’ve invited not only the New Zealand public to edit and make comments, but to also upload their own versions if they’d like.

This is one of the things that is so great about the internet! The freedom that it creates and the openness it promotes are paramount and need to be protected!

I just hope that all the people of New Zealand have at least access to the internet.

Quick First Impressions:

System requirements are quite hefty (compared to Firefox):

For instance, while it automatically imports your Favorites and Bookmarks, you can’t automatically get to them without going into a kind of bookmarks manager (again, comparing to Firefox) page, clicking on a link here will take you to a new website, but I have to right click and choose “Open in new tab” to get a fresh tab view of the link as opposed to using the middle click or scroll wheel click open a new tab. Just small stuff like that really…

I like the RSS icon (see screen shot) in the address bar and the ability to view the feed directly in the browser.

It automatically loaded the network settings (maybe pulled in from IE? or is using windows settings?), which is useful if you’re on a corporate network or behind a proxy service.

Quick Conclusions

All in all, just another browser for Windows. It doesn’t cover any new ground, and I really doubt it’ll set the web on fire any time soon, but nice to play with something new every once in a while…

Plain Old Webserver (POW)

POW is either a really cool Firefox extension that turns Firefox into a web server or a lightweight xulRunner web server. Either way it serves up web pages using server side javascripting. Sweat! I still have to play with this a bit to get a feel for it because I’ve never used javascript on a server before, but considering this is portable to any system that xulRunner or Firefox will run on, it makes it a very versatile package right out of the box. While the fact that it doesn’t have a php module means I can’t do local development of my website on it (yet), POW does offer sqllite as a database. You can also download some extras for it like a Firefox database management or directory file listing.

You can also use the xulRunner “portably”. I quoted that because, while the POWUSB package includes both Windows and MAC xulrunner versions (no Linux yet either!), it isn’t exactly portable in the way that say, FirefoxPoratable is. In other words, if you run the included xulRunner on Windows, it will still leave files on your local file system. To make this truly portable, you’d need to refrain from leaving footprints on the system you’re using, therefore this really doesn’t qualify as a portableapp quite yet…

What can I say, other than – freakin’ sweat! Contained in just 14 files is a (partial) javascript based blog, file management (will kind of, read on), and a *nix-like terminal (again, kind of). The reason for all those caveats is this; pretty much the fact that is is a work in progress AND, the fact that nearly the entirety of the system is contained in the one file: miniweb.html. Any new blog posts, files (which can be text or I think some form of executable – through some javascript magic), etc. are all stored in the miniweb.html file.

As I mentioned, it’s a work in progress, so nothing is complete, the terminal, the blog, pretty much everything but file viewing and management is incomplete. At this point I’m still just toying with it, so it pretty much takes on the Arthur C. Clark idiom of being so far beyond my understanding that it appears to be magic. To wield some of this magic Dean appears to use a home grown javascript compressor. Just… wow…

To check out MiniWeb click here. To download it and play with it on your own, click here. When you open up the file or depending on what you click on in what ever browser you’re using, you’ll probably have to get passed some of your browser’s security to fully use the software. In IE I think you need to allow the software to function on the bar that appears at the top of the browser window, in Firefox, depending on what you’re trying to do you may have to allow the script to complete some actions (don’t forget that “remember this decision” checkbox). Too much fun to pass up…

Google’s translation service (as well as some of the other online translation services that I’d like to use) is classified as an anonymizer. This is due to the fact that you can use it to bypass the proxy and load pages that you can’t get to otherwise. Which is weird because Babel Fish will do exactly the same thing, only less reliably. I’m guessing this unreliability is why we’re allowed to use it (maybe I’m just being paranoid).

I’ve found a way around the proxy we use (of course this will only work until someone figures this out and adds a new filter and stops this behavior). Use Google in another country/language and access that translation service as an anonymizer:
German: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=de
Japanese: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=ja
Etc., you get the point.

From there just select the proper language to translate to/from. I haven’t tried the above links form work yet. I usually navigate to the translation services from the Google home page for that country (ie http://www.google.de > Mehr > Übersetzen or http://www.google.jp > more » > 翻訳). So, we’ll see if this works when I try to access the translation services directly…

UPDATE – 070725

This does work from behind proxies. At least as of this date…

Here’s something fun. If I run cache:www.luckydisasters.com from my Google Site Search bar I get the cached version of my website on my website. From there I can go to my current website from the Google search frame and browse from there.[cpg_imagefixthumb:70]

What does this mean? I have no clue, but it is amusing for a few minutes. If I come up with anything useful for this, I’ll post it! In the mean time, give it a try if you have Google Site Search!

UPDATE!! 070219

I originally did this from work. I tried this at home and it didn’t work. Looks like I’ve got to compare the Tab Mix Plus Firefox Extension settings on either system to figure out how I got this to work on one browser and not the other…

A few weeks ago I was typing search text (actually a part number followed by a manufacturer) into the search bar in Firefox and I noticed that as I typed the auto-suggest was subtracting the numbers on either side of the hyphen in the part number before I had input the manufacturer. After I’d finished with my search, I decided to look into this further. Sure enough, if you typed in formulas, added conversions or input special operators, the Firefox search bar and Google were returning the results – without actually submitting it!

Now call me crazy, but I think this is pretty sweet! I don’t have to waste all that time hitting enter or clicking the search button and waiting for the page to load (OK, so I’m lazy :). All I’ve got to do is punch in the formulas I want and I automagically get results back!

Of course, this got me to wondering what else is going on behind the scenes in my favorite browser. Then I thought better of it. That’s the kind of thing that could keep you up at night…

Link to Nancy Blachman’s Google Calculator (Cheat Sheet)