The first two sections of my brand new toolbar tutorial have been posted over at Born Geek. This new version covers extension development in Firefox 1.5, so be sure to check it out if you want to get into extension development.
Over the past year or two (or three) I’ve become quite a fan of progressive rock. My journey into this genre of music began with Yes, thanks to my mother who became a Yes fan in the 1970′s (she even saw them in concert during that time!). The first studio album I got into was Close to the Edge, one of the band’s finest works. Other albums followed that: Relayer (my personal favorite), Fragile, Time and a Word, and others. Two other groups have since followed: Genesis and Rick Wakeman (the keyboardist from Yes). Both are incredible.
But just yesterday, I received two albums from Amazon.com that are too incredible for words: King Crimson‘s In the Court of the Crimson King and Emerson, Lake, & Palmer‘s self-titled album. Oh. My. Goodness. Both albums are mind-bogglingly good. I absolutely cannot wait to get more from both of these artists. You may see such items appearing on my wish list in the very near future. It’s that good.
I’ve run across an interesting bug in Firefox recently, but it’s unfortunately the kind of problem that is incredibly difficult to track down. The header image here at this website wasn’t showing up in my main Firefox profile on my PC. Other profiles worked, Internet Explorer worked, and the installation on my laptop also worked without a hitch. Trying to view the actual file in the problematic install (by entering the exact URL to the image in the address bar) only resulted in a “File Not Found” error page.
Doing a Bugzilla bug search, I ran across bug #312908, which seems to reference a similar issue. The comment in the bug reports that clearing the cache manually, then reloading the page, causes the problem to go away. Sure enough, that worked like a charm for me. Is this simply a cache problem? A more subtle rendering engine problem? It’s hard to tell. Trying to reproduce the problem should be interesting.
If you run into a website that all of a sudden doesn’t render properly, and you know the site isn’t at fault, clear your cache and try again. Hopefully this is a bug that will get squashed as we head towards Firefox 2.0.
Today happens to be the 20th birthday of what may be the greatest game of all time: The Legend of Zelda. It appears that there are several special features taking a look back at this incredible game. I’ll never forget saving all of my money when I was a young kid, and going to the store (a Sears as I recall) to buy the game. The sales clerk was quite surprised when I dumped a mountain of change on the counter, along with a few paper bills. When I got home and opened the package, and saw that the cartridge was golden, well … I nearly went berserk. Words are not sufficient to describe my joy in playing that one game. I’ve never been the same since.
In other gaming news, it appears that Half-Life 2 will have a second expansion pack, amazingly entitled Episode 2. What do they think this is, Star Wars? I hope this isn’t a sign of bad things to come. It seems as if Episode 1 will only be 4 to 6 hours long, not nearly sufficient for my taste. I want a good 15 hours of gameplay … any less just feels cheap.
In September of 2005, I let my subscription to Computer Gaming World run out. What had once been one of the finest computer gaming magazines published had degraded into sloppy writing, low-brow humor, and increasingly questionable ratings. Although it had its problems, CGW at least helped me stay on top of the gaming landscape: what games were being released, what genres they fell into, and what offerings I should expect in the near future. Now, I feel lost. I rarely know what games are on the horizon (although I do read Blue’s News daily), and I even more rarely know what’s recommended.
I don’t surf the multi-review sites like MetaCritic and Game Rankings near as often as I should, but I really feel like I’ve lost touch with the gaming world. Now that I’m working full time, I have way less time (and energy) to devote to gaming, something I dislike greatly. Part of the problem is that fewer and fewer decent games are being released for the PC. I’ve never been a fan of the “modern” gaming systems (XBox, PS2, etc), so that doesn’t help matters.
I’m yearning for more Half-Life 2. Not since the original Doom have I been so enamored with a game. Unfortunately, the Aftermath (now Episode 1?) expansion pack seems like a long ways off (in fact, I don’t even know when it’s planned for release). And there isn’t much else on my radar at the moment. If you have a suggestion, please leave a comment. I’d love to know what games folks are playing and recommending these days. I’m open to most any genre.
Jeffrey Zeldman called it. His book Designing With Web Standards pointed out that inaccessibility might get you in trouble (if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend that you do so). And just recently, a blind student sued Target for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act for providing an inaccessible website.
As much as I respect Target, and as much as I enjoy shopping there, I can only feel so sorry for them in this situation. Creating an accessible website is incredibly easy. To get it wrong, and subsequently discriminate your customers, is tragic. If you run a website, learn to incorporate accessibility into your design. Disabled users will thank you for it.
For the first time in my life (that I can recall at least), I have completed my taxes early. I usually wait until the last few weeks before the April 15 deadline, and subsequently have to wait to get my refund (due to the volume of returns the IRS has to handle). But tonight, in a little under two hours, I completed both the federal and state forms. Interestingly enough, I owe the feds some money this year, also a first for me. Thankfully, I’m getting a sizable refund from the state, so that should cover it.
It’s really incredible to me that the North Carolina state tax form is more complicated than the federal form (the 1040-EZ that is). I spent the majority of my time on the state form tonight, trying to figure out all of the nuances for charitable contributions and the like. What’s more, the PDF form that allows you to enter the data from your computer doesn’t allow you to save your work! You have to complete the form entirely in one sitting (unlike the federal form, which allows you to save). What could their justification for such a terrible “feature” be? I’m just glad that I didn’t lose all of the data once I was done; having to redo the thing would have driven me crazy.
The minutes from the latest Firefox team status meeting provide some interesting insights into what’s being considered for the next release of Firefox. From Firefox Places, to tabbed browsing improvements, and a visual refresh; all kinds of things are on the table. There are a number of really exciting “potential” items that I hope make the cut: inline spell checking, a built-in session saver, and improved RSS support. And it looks like further extension manager updates are planned. Could extension development get even easier?
I’ve tweaked a few things here at the site. The front page now shows the last 7 stories (vs. the last 5), as does the RSS feed. I’m carefully considering designing my own WordPress theme, although I’m not real sure how I’ll go about testing such a thing. Perhaps I can hijack my old Movable Type database and create a “sandbox” of sorts to allow me to play (without messing up the live site). I have some great ideas, inspired by some stuff that Dan Cederholm has done.
Fact: Mr. Cederholm is a genius.
I have recently been toying with the idea of upgrading my personal computer (although I don’t use it near as much as I used to). I’d like to double my system memory, get a faster processor (a new motherboard as a result), and replace my SATA hard drives (which have been surprisingly disappointing).
The problem is that computer hardware is complicated, and it’s getting more so all the time. I remember spending weeks researching various options for my last major upgrade; and that was well over two years ago! Since that time, processor model numbers have become increasingly complicated and motherboard options seem to have multiplied several times. Adding to my frustration are hardware review sites such as Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware, both of which make the assumption that readers spend each and every day staying up to date with hardware trends. Don’t they realize that there are those of us who look at hardware on an incredibly infrequent basis? Thankfully, Tom’s Hardware has some charts that they keep updated on a semi-regular basis for graphics cards, processors, and hard drives. The benchmarks within them are handy for people like me, who just want to get a feel for where things are.
I am thinking about moving to an AMD processor this time around. I’ve always used Intel Pentium chips, but the AMD solutions seem way more affordable. Can anyone recommend an AMD CPU / motherboard combination that would work well for gaming? It clearly needs to be faster than my current setup (P4 – 2.8GHz), but I don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for it. Why can’t any of this stuff be easy?