Zzot!

Am I this fickle? In a word, yes. Not only do I see a lot of these sort of changes, some of them are almost predictable.

My preferred web browser, for example, changes almost monthly. Camino used to be in the rotation, but I somehow got myself all worked up about the lack of accesskey support, and it hasn’t been my top pick since. By the way; rah rah Bookit.

Text editing is another fine example, right now I almost always do that in Vim 6. SubEthaEdit has been my primary recently, and as my current second choice, it shows up fairly often. BBEdit was what brought me back to the Mac after years away, and while I haven’t checked out BBEdit 8 yet, I will soon.

E-Mail is an example, but not a great one. I switch from Apple Mail to something else for a while, then back again. Mail has an odd, traumatic response to one specific mail server I connect to, but only for certain messages. Thunderbird is as close to a second as I have right now; it deletes the above problem messages and runs on Linux and Windows machines against an IMAP server on my PowerBook when I need a serial number or something. I basically like Mailsmith, but it doesn’t talk IMAP and the snotty dialog it pops up every time it doesn’t exit cleanly telling me how I forced it to crash and burn by running WindowShade X makes me want to choke the life out of someone (it’d irritate me less if it actually had crashed when I saw the dialog, not, say…a device driver panicking the kernel).

My dock is a small, non-magnifying matter at the left edge of the bottom of my screen, and contains nothing that isn’t currently running (mark me down on the list). LaunchBar is my main launcher. DragThing appears and disappears in my daily life from time to time (and often for no good reason either way). The collection of icons at the right edge of my menubar has a higher turnover rate than cashiers at the corner 7-Eleven. The only other Mac user I see regularly who I would call a power user has his dock in the default location, and about as many apps on it as I have on my machine (he desperately wants LaunchBar, but never believes me when I tell him this).

Weblog | Permalink | No Comments

One of my (few) rants about the new Firefox, now that I’ve switched back, involved horizontal scrolling. Specifically, they bound it to something silly — history forward and history back. What can I say; install an alternate trackpad driver and you actually use horizontal scroll-wheel events to…uh…scroll.

So, naturally I checked about:config for the relevant prefs, and quickly found them…sort of. The default value for “mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action” is “2”. It didn’t occur to me immediately to use LXR to find out what the numbers mean (like it should have), but it did when I stumbled across a hint on the subject. Rock on (by setting that preference to “0”).

Don’t get me wrong — I like when I can set things how I want using the regular prefs dialog, but at least finding an obscure setting in about:config is an awful lot easier than doing the same in regedit.

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

The little dateline block at the bottom of entries on index pages are showing more info (again) — including the numbers of pings and comments. Entry pages are showing pings and comments again, the trackback mechanics (which had been there, in spite of not displaying the results anywhere) are a little more obvious than they had been, and there are auto-discoverable links to my feeds everywhere.

All that isn’t to say that everything is happy again, but it’s closer.

Site Info | Permalink | No Comments

This entry exists only because I refuse to spend any more time figuring out how to force a category archive to be rebuilt when it has no entries in it (as I write this, the only entries are in child categories). Move along now…

Projects | Permalink | No Comments

I haven’t checked, but this might be the first “Rave”. I wonder if I ever said I want to be a curmudgeon when I grow up. Oh, nevermind — I’m sure I did. Probably in the last couple of years. Anyway.

I pulled down Firefox 1.0PR and installed on all my machines. I was amazed at two specific features, each of which seems so tiny, that I got so worked up over.

First, the find bar. Progressive find features rock. Gecko-based browsers have had them in one form or another forever. But the GUI they added for it is great. Simple, understated, and gives feedback on what the feature is doing without you even really having to look down there and examine it very closely.

Second, minimize. I’ve been using Safari as my primary browser for a while, only recently having switched back to Firefox. When I last used Firefox, Cmd-M minimized the window you were looking at. Now, it opens a new, totally empty message in Mail. What’s with that? I mean, it’s just minimize, and fixing OS X issues like this one is right on the roadmap, so it’ll get fixed soon, but still…it drives me nuts.

So, for the one Mac-using friend of mine who has listened enough to my rambling about Firefox to try it out, and want to see the next cool release, that might be the next one. That being said, I’m running it quite happily on three different platforms.

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

I just made a handful of tweaks to the site:

• I fixed a back-end markup problem with code blocks (such as that in the
  preceding post). Because of this:
  • Pages now validate in the presence of code samples
  • The code swatches are run through Beautifier
  • The feeds are back, with (I think) the same relative paths as before

Site Info | Permalink | No Comments

So, I made some changes recently to which computer I use for certain activities, and now there’s a gaming PC (hence, Zbox — more on that later). Win2k’s standard background settings didn’t quite do what I wanted, so I quickly threw together a web page that does. The actual images mostly come from Custer’s Desktops. Here’s the code:

function loaded() {
    var info = document.all.infoBlock,
        path = "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Game Wonk\\My Documents\\My Pictures",
        fs = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject"),
        folder = fs.GetFolder(path);
    info.innerHTML = "Path " + folder.Path + "<br />";
    info.innerHTML += "Size: " + folder.Size / 1024 + " Kb" + "<br />";
    for (var fc = new Enumerator(folder.Files) ; !fc.atEnd() ; fc.moveNext()) {
	if (fc.item().Name == "Desktop.ini")
	   continue;
	images[images.length] = fc.item().Path;
	info.innerHTML += fc.item().Name + "<br />";
    }
    setTimeout('choose()', 0);
}
 
function choose() {
    try {
    	document.body.background = images[Math.floor(Math.random() * images.length)];
	setTimeout('choose()', 90000);
    } catch (e) {
	alert(e.description);
    }
}
window.onload = loaded;

The HTML of the rest of the page is trivial (there’s a CSS block to hide that info blurb when it isn’t needed). You’ll have to do something to tell IE to let the page load controls not marked as safe, and that much is left as an exercise. (The only reason I didn’t just put a list in was so I wouldn’t have to later edit it).

Updates

• Fixed the link in the first paragraph to…uh…be a link.
• The line-break tags in the code were getting escaped one too many times (in my original, rightly or wrongly, the tag appears as a string literal unescaped).

Code | Permalink | No Comments

When my mom went back to school, one of her teachers referred to parts of the Fine Arts world as “art snot” — you can probably imagine which parts. I was reminded of this today when I was thinking about a couple of decisions I made recently. These aren’t major life-changing decisions, mind you, but they still got me thinking.

Continue reading…

Rants | Permalink | No Comments