Technology

Firefox Gripe

Daniel

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 …

Firefox Gripe

Validation

Daniel

The front page will now validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Eat that, Lewis. Insert better-late-than-never “your site is down” joke here.

You’ll find two entries below that I wrote a couple weeks ago but never got around to uploading.

Based on the appearance of this site on flat-panel monitors and the fact that I have started to use a 1280×1024 screen resolution, I will be making some cosmetic changes to the site soon. Look out for that.

Validation

Yahoo! Toolbar

Daniel

Big news today.

Besides the fact that Prince Charles and Camilla are getting hitched. Big news today.

Besides the fact that Prince Charles and Camilla are getting hitched.

Yahoo put out an official toolbar for Firefox. It’s 0.2 beta, but it offers immediate improvement over the homebrew version. Notably, the alerts work.

Yahoo put out an official toolbar for Firefox. It’s 0.2 beta, but it offers immediate improvement over the homebrew version. Notably, the alerts work.

Yahoo! Toolbar

Site Stuff

Daniel

If you’re viewing this site with Firefox, it should now display correctly. Well, there might be issues at 1280×1024. But don’t tell anybody.

I finally got this page to validate. Right now it validates under HTML 4.01 and CSS. I don’t know whether it’s worth my time to see if it would validate as anything different or perhaps “better.”

Here’s something that caught me by surprise: When I finally declared a doctype, it kept breaking the site, both in Firefox and IE. It appears that when either browser encounters an explicit doctype declaration, it holds the CSS to strict standards. Who knew? So I fixed all the CSS, and when I put the doctype declaration back in, everything worked. And my validation worked. So I’m in business. Scroll all the way down to see my validation buttons.

I got my Halo 2 Stats page to validate first, because there’s a lot less code there.

Site Stuff

Firefox Gripes

Daniel

Okay, I’ve got some gripes with Firefox.

First, the “new tab” shortcut. You double click to the right of the rightmost tab. I love that shortcut, until I have so many tabs open that the space between the rightmost tab and the “close tab” button is about four pixels wide. The “close tab” button is a red square with a white “x.” They should add a “new tab” button that is a green square with a white “*.”

Second. Firefox should force websites to take advantage of tabs. One of the great benefits of tabbed browsing is that there is only one browser window. It means I don’t have to move the mouse pointer to the task bar to change browsers. But a lot of websites incorporate links that open in new windows. A lot of times this makes sense with the IE model, but when my broswer supports tabs, I would much rather “new window” links open in a new tab.

Firefox Gripes

ASP

Daniel

This page is ASP.

Eventually I’m going to switch the whole site over to ASP. I’m kind of pissed, actually. The big thing — the only thing — that has always bothered me about 1&1 is the fact that Server Side Includes (SSI) don’t work. Well, turns out ASP has an analogous method. WTF!

The night I downloaded everything from Tripod and uploaded it to my 1&1 servers, I called 1&1 tech support because my SSIs weren’t working. The person I talked to told me that SSIs weren’t included in my package. So I consolidated all pages … it hurt. Fortunately, when I pasted the code together, I left the includes in and copy-pasted them so I could see exactly what got Frankensteined.

The whole reason I’ve been looking at ASP so closely (besides the fact that I purchased the Microsoft Server plan through 1&1) is because I have my Halo 2 stats, which come from an RSS feed provided by Bungie, and I wanted to take control of how they are displayed. So I’ve been reading ASP web sites like it’s my job.

At least something good came of it.

ASP

iPod Issues

Daniel

As most of you know, I purchased an iPod about four months ago. It comes with iTunes, which is free, and iTunes is the application you use to transfer songs to (but not from) your iPod. Under Apple’s EULA (and as physically restricted by iTunes), you can only use each iPod on one computer.

So that’s two strikes against Apple’s way of doing things.

For the past year, I’ve been spending most of my nights in scenic Coudersport, Pennsylvania because of work. My Dell is at home in Chipmonk. I have my work laptop with me in Coudersport. My iPod is associated with my Dell per Apple’s restrictions. I insist on using my iPod with whatever computer is nearby. To facilitate this, I downloaded a program called EphPod. I was happy with it. It allowed me to move songs from my work laptop to my iPod. But it wasn’t great. I felt that the user interface was confusing, and didn’t allow me to see what was going on or really take much control over the process. I was aware of another iPod utility that I had read about in the same place I read about EphPod — sites like iPodLounge.

So I downloaded the trial version of Anapod Explorer. It uses the Explorer interface, which assuages my gripes with EphPod. The full version, which costs $25, allows you to transfer songs from the iPod to your computer. And Red Chair Software encourages you to use your paid license on more than one computer. This solves my whole main-computer-there-work-computer-here issue.

So the only feature missing from Anapod Explorer is a ripper. Its support pages recommend Audiograbber, which is freeware. At this point, that’s a requirement. When you install it “out of the box,” it will only encode up to 56 Kbps. This is unacceptable. But Audiograbber’s download page contains links to some MP3 encoder .dlls which allow you to encode MP3s up to 320 Kbps.

I haven’t used Audiograbber to rip any CDs as I write this, but it looks robust enough, and if it’s got Red Chair Software’s endorsement, I’ll commit some time to it.

Interestingly, I went home this last weekend and had some trouble with iTunes. I connected the iPod to my Dell. I have the “start iTunes when iPod is connected” option turned off, but I opened iTunes to rip a CD. As soon as iTunes was up, it started to autosync the iPod. I stopped this as quickly as possible.

So I did the whole “safely remove hardware” to the i Pod and unplugged it, and sure enough songs that I copied to it with third party software were missing. I assumed that the files still existed on the iPod’s hard drive, and that iTunes had simply deleted their entries from the iPod’s database. So I used Anapod Explorer to “rebuild the database.” In other words, I told it to scan the iPod’s hard drive for songs that were not in the database, and then re-add them. It told me it found like 35 songs and I thought everything was great … but it found songs I don’t even recall changing.

This little episode inspired me to drop iTunes altogether, uncluding as a ripper. It’s why I got Audiograbber.

In conclusion, while iTunes is convenient because it includes a ripper, burning software, a utility to download music (for 99 cents a song), and software to update the iPod, it isn’t quite feature-rich enough, it’s too restrictive, and it breaks cahnges you make with other software. So iTunes can F off.

iPod Issues

Cell Phone Wish List

Daniel

So how about a cell phone that starts my car? Or unlocks my front door. Not enough security? Make me type in a four-digit code. I’ll scroll through contacts … “Remote Start Car” … 4321. Why not? It already lets me surf the web, check my email, talk to everyone on Earth, and play video games.

Cell Phone Wish List

Hi There

Daniel

You know what Triceratops ate? Ya think it grazed grass? Wrong. There was no grass. It hadn’t evolved yet.

New Hampshire Primary is tomorrow. I’ll hold out comments on that one.

This site has been blocked by my employer’s intranet. I don’t want to say why — I’m afraid that using the name of the category it’s grouped in will just cement its blocked status.

Traditionally, computer pointing hardware, such as the mouse, transmits packets with three bytes of data. When Microsoft introduced the wheel mouse, they kicked those packets up to four bytes. BUT … laptops have pointing devices built in. Some have touchpads, some have nubs — some have both. These built-in pointing devices do not include a wheel. So, they transmit packets composed of four bytes of data.

This isn’t a big deal, until you connect a pointing device that transmits four-byte packets to a PC that is set up for three-byte packets. In such a setup, the fourth byte of data is sometimes interpreted as the first byte of the next packet and — ding! — your pointer jumps.

I use a wheel mouse on my company laptop, and the sucker jumps all over the place. Microsoft has ackowledged this problem; They suggest a BIOS upgrade. I upgraded my BIOS. I disabled the built-in pointing devices. No beans. Isn’t somebody working on a solution to this problem?

Hi There