Archive for February, 2006

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 20^th 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.

A new version of CoLT is now available over at Born Geek. New-line characters can now be specified in the custom format string, and a few option defaults have been tweaked.

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.

I have just released CoLT version 1.1 over at Born Geek. This new release adds the incredibly handy (and optional) feature of copying a link’s text and URL at once. The data can be copied either as plain text, an HTML hyperlink, or in the format that you supply. Check it out if you haven’t already. It’s a handy tool for blogging.