simon's blog

I was recently at BSDCan 2006 which is a great yearly BSD conference in Ottawa, Canada organized by Dan Langille. There were several Yahoo! employees attending which made me think a bit more about why I was using Google as my primary search engine when they run that other operating system, and Yahoo run FreeBSD (and support FreeBSD in various ways).

So, when I got home I decided to find out how to get Opera 8.54 to use Yahoo search in the little permanent search box. It turned out to be rather simple (at least with my quick hack). Opera keeps the search engine configuration in .opera/search.ini and in the default version installed on my system has Google is the first entry and Opera Web as nr. 2. I never use Opera Web so I decided to simply remove Opera Web, bump Google to be the second search engine and add an entry for Yahoo! as the first search engine.

I have been running with Yahoo! search for a bit more than a week now and it hasn’t really made a big difference, in that I still find what I’m searching for, so I have no current plans to switch back.

Before editing any config files remember to make a backup of the files, just in case….

So, to do the same in your Opera just open .opera/search.ini in your favorite editor (which obviously should be Emacs), delete the [Search Engine 2] section, change the Google entry [Search Engine 1] header into [Search Engine 2], and then finally add the new [Search Engine 1] section as shown below.

[Search Engine 1]
Name=&Yahoo
URL=http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s&ei=UTF-8
Query=
Key=y
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=utf-8
Search Type=0
Verbtext=17063
Position=-2
Nameid=0

Well, so here we are.

flz has been poking people for some time to got some blogs which could be part of the FreeBSD planet, but I never gotten around to setting one up. This is mainly because my homepage is static HTML so I can’t (/won’t) just use most of the standard blog software on my site. Anyway, flz now set up this blog so I thought I might as well register and try it out.

Time will show if I find something useful to say here. In case you are really bored and wonder who I am you can take a look at my homepage.

Today is a public holiday in Denmark and tomorrow is “mandatory” vacation from work, so with a bit of luck it will mean that over the next days I will get around to some of the things on my FreeBSD TODO list. This includes preparing for the new www.FreeBSD.org system, writing a FreeBSD Security Advisory, perhaps even working a bit on getting the wiki upgraded to a less ancient version (looks like flz is going to help with that). I might even make a post or two to this blog, time will tell.