Year of the Code Monkey

I recently noted in Firefox 3.0 RC 2 that the sort order for autocompleting input fields is broken. In Firefox 2.x, items are sorted alphabetically (different from the insertion order scheme used in Firefox 1.x, if I recall correctly). Now, it appears that the items are sorted according to how they were inserted, with the most recent entries appearing on the bottom. This strange result unfortunately affects Googlebar Lite, beginning with Firefox 3 builds. I haven’t received any complaints about this at the moment, but I’m guessing that most people haven’t switched away from 2.x, so no one has caught it yet.

It’s possible that this issue is a valid Firefox bug. I see that bug 418343 has been written against the search autocomplete results, though I’m guessing it applies to all autocompleting elements (with the exception of the AwesomeBar).

The autocomplete textbox inherits the sortDirection property from the base XUL element, but I have yet to try setting that manually to see if it has any effect. And I’m not sure whether to set it on the textbox itself, or on one of the child elements that lives inside.

Hopefully setting this property will fix the issue, though I’m only given three sort options: ascending, descending, and natural. I’m guessing that the natural option is what I’m seeing now in Firefox 3, with newest at the bottom. One of the largest feature requests that I get for Googlebar Lite is to sort search history items in the order they were inserted, with newest at the top. While I may not be able to easily sort things like people want, I might at least be able to return to the behavior seen in 2.x.

Mozilla Developer News reports that Firefox 3 will be officially launched next Tuesday, June 17. Make sure you download your copy that day, to help Mozilla break the world download record. I’ve been using Firefox 3 for a while now, and it’s worlds better than Firefox 2 (which was already super awesome).

I have added a new section to the sidebar of this site, showing the most recent comments posted here. Hopefully, this will help foster further discussion on older topics (which occasionally get comments). This new feature comes via the aptly named Recent Comments WordPress plug-in. I’m quite impressed with the customization options available, and installation was a snap.

Does anyone have any recommendations for how the recent comments list should appear? Plenty of options are available, including an excerpt preview of each comment. I tried several options out, but I’m not sure what visitors would find most useful.

Your suggestions would be appreciated.

I have fixed two bugs in Monkey Album:

• Comment cookie data is now restored properly. The cookies were being created just fine, but form data wasn’t being pre-filled from them like it should have been.
• Apostrophes in comments no longer generate a leading slash. This was due to an unfortunate side effect of including several WordPress files (strange as that may sound).

Hat tip to Dustin for pointing these out.

Are there any readers here who use Windows and don’t make use of an anti-virus client? I’ve been thinking about ditching my anti-virus client altogether on my personal system, and after reading an interesting article on the subject, I’m wondering if anyone else out there has taken this route. In my experience, anti-virus solutions are slow, ineffective (I’m not sure they’ve ever flagged anything for me over the years), and are generally a bother to keep up with.

If you’ve ditched anti-virus, why’d you do it? And what have been your results?

To celebrate the new version of Monkey Album, I have posted a new photo series of a trip my family took yesterday to the North Carolina Transportation Museum. I highly recommend the museum for anyone who is even remotely interested in trains (or other forms of transportation). It’s located in Spencer, NC, an easy drive from either the Triangle area or from Charlotte (and points in between). The museum is absolutely free to visitors, though you’ll have to pay to ride the train or the turntable.

I hope you enjoy this photo series.

Over the past few months, I have been hard at work on a new version of Monkey Album, the software I use to display my photography at this site. The new version is now live, and includes the following changes:

Per-Picture Comments

This is a feature I’ve wanted to do since day 1. Visitors to this site may now leave comments on each picture, via a handy WordPress-style comment form. Akismet is being used for anti-spam purposes (it will be interesting to see how well it works), and several built-in WordPress functions are being used for sanitization purposes. I’m a little nervous about turning this feature on, but I will gauge how well it works over time and adjust as necessary. Thanks to the magic of cookies, you only need to enter your author information one time.

Better Album Previews

The previous album selection page was sorely in need of an update; it wasted too much screen space and generally looked bad. No more! Album previews are now handled in a much more professional manner, and I’m proud of the results. I really like the wide-screen style preview image, and I hope you do too.

RSS Feeds

Two feeds are now available for my photo album: a feed following new albums, and one following new comments. The latter is probably not as interesting to you as the former, but I’m making both available.

Cleaner Presentation

The overall presentation of my photos should be a little cleaner now. Vertical space has been improved, color schemes now match my primary site theme, and other minor tweaks have been made here and there.

In addition to these changes, a number of administrative changes have been made, all of which will make my life much easier. As always, if you find a bug, please let me know. So much has changed in this new release, that I’m sure a few things fell between the cracks; letting me know about them will help get them fixed quickly.

Enjoy!