Far to many spelling options in Thunderbird and Firefox

Mozilla projects offer to check the spelling in every language installed on your computer. Which is great, except I don't need South African English, nor will I ever use Swiss French. And wading through the 20 items in the menu to switch from Canadian English to Québecois French is annoying.

And there is no easy way to fix this.

The hard way is to go into /usr/share/myspell and remove all the .dic and .aff files you don't want.

$ sudo su -
Password for fil@scott: 
# cd /usr/share/myspell/
# mkdir NOT
# mv *.dic *.aff NOT
# ln -s NOT/fr_CA.aff
# ln -s NOT/fr_CA.dic
# ln -s NOT/en_CA.aff
# ln -s NOT/en_CA.dic

Restart Thunderbird and you will now have 2 spelling options.

Yes, these changes are system-wide. There is currently no other way to do it, apparently.

sqlite3 vs firefox

Firefox keeps lots of useful in sqlite files in the user's profile. Under Linux, you will find these files in ~/.mozilla/firefox/PROFILE_DIR/. To find PROFILE_DIR, you pull look in ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini. Of interest to me is places.sqlite, which contains info on all sites visited. To pull a list out, simply do

 sqlite3 -csv ~/.mozilla/firefox/ucjmuboi.default/places.sqlite \
    'SELECT url,title,visit_count,visit_date/1000000 FROM moz_historyvisits JOIN moz_places ON place_id = moz_places.id'

The visit_date is bizarely in microseconds, so divide by 1,000,000 to get epoch seconds.

Of course, the above doesn't work on CentOS 5 nor 6. You wil get a Error: file is encrypted or is not a database error. CentOS 5 ships with sqlite 3.3.6, CentOS 6 ships with 3.6.20. Firefox uses 3.7 and creates a file that isn't backward compatible. Here is how to install a compatible version:

cd ~/work
wget http://www.sqlite.org/2016/sqlite-autoconf-3130000.tar.gz
tar zxvf sqlite-autoconf-3130000.tar.gz
cd sqlite-autoconf-3130000
./configure --prefix=/opt/sqlite-3130000
make all
sudo make install
sudo ln -s sqlite-3130000 /opt/sqlite
sudo bash -c "echo /opt/sqlite/lib > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/sqlite.conf"
sudo ldconfig

This will install 3.13.0. Make sure to check the download page for the latest version.

It should be pointed out that by putting /opt/sqlite/lib into ld.so.conf.d, we are overriding the .so default system .so. I don't know if this will break anything. I do know that it means that DBD::SQLite and /usr/bin/sqlite3 now use the new .so and this is what I want.

Firefox "upgrade"

If you are upgrading to Firefox 18, 19 or newer on a slightly older system (say Ubuntu 10 LTS), you will see the following error message :

libxul.so: undefined symbol: _ZNSbItN4base20string16_char_traitsESaItEE4_Rep20_S_empty_rep_storageE

The solution is to use Firefox 17.0ESR. It's a better version anyway.

Ideally you will also make your displeasure known to the idiots at Mozilla