This post is a little bit off topic for this blog, but it contains important safety information about a dangerous failure condition that I feel should be shared.
First I'll mention that I attempted to contact the manufacturer, but their contact forms on their web site are broken. Nice one, guys.
I don't know what I would do without the awesome Web Developer extension for Firefox.
Suddenly my shortcut key for "Display Element Information" stopped working. This is pretty much the thing I use the most. Long story longer, the conflict is AdBlock Plus (another amazing extension).
In about:config I see an entry to alter the shortcut key for the function in Web Developer, but I do not see an entry to alter the shortcut key for AdBlock Plus. Boo!
Actually this is pretty much a review of the address bar. I don't know who designs this stuff but... Ugh! I'm more of a coder than a UI guy and there's no way I would let some of this stuff happen in my project.
There is a little border between the favicon and the URL in the address bar. To me, it now always looks like the cursor is in the address bar when the address bar is empty. This is rather annoying.
The web is becoming more atomic. That is to say, the little fragments of information that make up the web are more and more being made to stand on their own.
Every day, content that goes up on the web is less connected to (and thusly less contextualized) by its source. RSS feeds, aggregators, Yahoo Pipes and other mashup technologies immediately pluck news stories, blog entries and other bits of this and that from their www-based nests, wrap them up and deliver them however they like (really, however *you* like if you are game to figure out how to use the pipes).
According to the official release notes:
The option for "Shrink to fit" has been removed in Firefox 2. If you wish to change this from the value you had set in your previous version of Firefox, change the value of browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing.
One would carry this instruction out by putting "about:config" in the address bar and finding that value and adjusting it. To be clear, the change *should* take effect immediately, no browser restart should be required.
I recently entered the world of high-end mousing. I have to say, I'm impressed, and wonder how I ever got along without it.
The Razer Pro|Click V1.6 feels good in the hand, is smooth and accurate, the buttons have great action, the software driver has a "sensitivity adjust on the fly" feature that is wonderful, and is just plain cool looking too.
I had to migrate a multi-site installation of Drupal from one server to another, and devised a way to copy all the relevant MySQL databases from the old server to the new server with a single bash command. It is secure as it is piped through SSH. Hope someone finds this useful.
The DOM Inspector is a built-in Firefox extension that "can be used to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application." I had never found the DOM Inspector useful by itself, but some components of the (very useful) Web Developer extension rely on it.
One of the most exciting things about today's internet is the potential for next-generation social networking platforms to connect people who might want to be connected algorithmically.
One of the frustrating things about the so-called next-generation social networking platforms is that they seem, without exception, to ignore basic social networking theory, and miss the point entirely.