Firefox 3 beta 3 finally has updated their add-ons dialog window. I ranted about this way back in 2006. Goes to show that typing blog posts is a good replacement for fixing things yourself. (No it isn’t.) You can now sort of download some Firefox extensions in the Tools => Add-ons […]

I tried Firefox 3 beta 2 today. (Happily it was in Portage, albeit hard-masked.) Seems to work OK so far. I managed to crash it once already by trying to open eight websites at once. But it is a beta after all.
Turns out some of the weird issues I was having […]

My conversion to Opera is still going well. I’m not sure that browsing is altogether more enjoyable or anything, but it’s at least as good as Firefox. I’m getting into using the sidebar nowadays. I tend to have an aversion to sidebars in general, but Opera’s are hideable and displayable via a […]

I decided to give Opera another try. How is Opera so much insanely faster than Firefox at rendering? I wish I knew the answer to that. Supposedly the 9.5 alpha is going to be faster still. It’s currently hard-masked in the portage tree so I’m going to hold off trying it […]

I use a dark QT theme. Many web pages (example: Youtube) have CSS which sets text fields to have black text, but don’t set the background color of text fields to be anything. So the background color ends up being my default dark (set by my browser / window manager), but the text […]

I was going to call this post “GIMP sucks!” without a moment’s thought, but GIMP doesn’t suck. I’m quick to say “XYZ sucks” but I always mean “XYZ sucks for my needs at the moment” or “XYZ sucks compared to ABC”. Of the many things I’ve said suck, most of them are fine […]

I’m up to Chapter 18 of Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language. The templates chapter was painful and I had to read it twice. I think I got it the second time through. Stroustrup talks about how people ask him how long it takes to learn C++ and he says (paraphrased) “a year […]

This little article gives instructions on how to make your input controls (input fields, buttons, drop-down lists) look nicer in Linux. I tried and it worked pretty well. The buttons end up very slightly rounded, which is better than the GTK1-like crudely-3D blocky things I had otherwise. The colors of the controls […]

In about:config change view_source.editor.external to true and you can pick a “View Page Source” editor via view_source.editor.path. /usr/bin/gvim for example. Wish I’d have discovered that a couple years ago.

I’ve never had luck with media-playing plugins in Linux. I enjoy MediaPlayerConnectivity; it lets you spawn a full-fledged media player of your choice as a separate browser-independent process. Where a media file would normally appear in Firefox, you instead get a big black box and you click on it and up pops your […]