Another site post today — Urban Dictionary. I love this site. I use it mostly for slang, mostly of the vulgar and acronym varieties. I ran across UD (again) today because I didn’t know what NSFW meant — now I do. For added entertainment, try typing in vulgar names for things you learned in college but have no knowledge of anyone ever attempting.
Internet
T-Shirt Hell
I enjoy browsing t-shirt vendors’ web sites, but this might be the best I’ve seen.
Firefox Gripe
Why, when I have multiple Firefox windows open, does it occasionally randomly switch to a different window, for no reason at all? It seems like a page is loading in my current window, and then all of a sudden, I’m looking at a window that has had no network activity in the last ten minutes.
SmartFTP
This just in: SmartFTP is like a million times better than FileZilla. And it’s like 900,000 times better than LeechFTP.
I used FileZilla over LeechFTP but I never really liked FileZilla. Leech is outdated. FZ’s user interface was effective but ugly. I appreciated that it was open-source, and I enthusiastically hoped that that would mean it was the best product available.
Meanwhile I’m stuck on dial-up. My current site host, PowWeb, allows only two simultaneous FTP transfers. Last weekend I upgraded WordPress from 1.5.1 to 1.5.1.1 via LeechFTP on a cable modem, and it was more than satisfactory. I can only assume that using FZ over a cable modem would also have been acceptable. But using these two programs over dial-up gets bogged down not necessarily by the transfer speed, but the handshaking that goes on with the server.
Somehow, SmartFTP expediates the handshaking to a degree that leaves me flabbergasted. Now don’t get me wrong — the fact that I have to wait to upload 2MB of stuff keeps me firmly planted in my dial-up reality. But the annoying wait of a few seconds or even several minutes between files (this is what ultimately made me find my third FTP client in a month) seems to have completely disappeared.
I don’t know how they do it, but they got me to switch.
Fugly
This site is funny … even if you only ever visit it once.
FileZilla
I just installed a new FTP client: FileZilla. I’ve been using LeechFTP for years, but as its site states, there’s been no development on it for years.
(I used FTP Explorer before that — which has suddenly resumed development and started charging — and before that I was using WS FTP, which had a free version way back when.)
I don’t even know how I came across FileZilla. It’s in stable release and under current development/maintenance, so that’s good. It’s hard to tell after just a few minutes of use, but it appears to be faster than Leech.
Firefox 1.0.4
There is a new maintenance release of Firefox out today, I think. If you take a look at issues in the release notes, you’ll see a disabled, work-in-progress, enable-at-your-own-risk “single window mode.”
In one of my previous Firefox gripes, I called for just such a feature. When I discussed it with Lewis he claimed that this would disobey the wishes of the site developer. I admonished him, and he cried.
Speaking of old gripes, my next big move will be bringing back my old posts, at least as far back as the last version of the site. I may just upload the old files, but I’m considering manually entering each post into the current version of the site. If I (re)insert entries from one version back, I might as well do it for all of them. I like this idea a lot for two reasons, one of which is vain and one of which is functional: I will enjoy seeing my “Archives” section date all the way back to 2002; And the old entries will become completely searchable. Plus there’s Permalinks … I might lock out comments on old posts, though.
WordPress 1.5.1
WordPress released version 1.5.1 Monday. I installed it Tuesday morning. Apparently it makes the system run faster.
Firefox Gripe
Sometimes it disappears from my Windows taskbar. It’s possible that this occurs only when I have multiple Firefox windows open. I can retrieve the windows by either minimizing windows until I get to the one I want, or the simpler method of alt-tab. They’re always in alt-tab.
Sometimes I’ll be able to get one window back onto the toolbar but not all of them.
Yeah, this is a legitimate bug, unlike my typical Firefox gripes, which tend to be about omitted or clunky features.
Firefox Gripe
Firefox Gripe: I want to be able to resize tabs within windows.
You know how some sites are still optimized for 800×600? You know how some center the used portion of the screen, some right justify it, and some (like ESPN.com) give extra crap to fill in all the way over to 1024? To conform 800×600 sites to what I want, I resize the window. But if I resize one site in a Firefox window, then I resize them all … I want to be able to resize the browser in one tab and leave the browsers in other tabs alone.
Until next time …