Southpaw Blog

Firefox 3.6 brought the world Personas. I’m not against them; people really like that kind of thing. I am 100% against the mouseover-to-preview functionality, though. Combined with the fact that they are now shoved in your face and that it’s not trivial to disable it, I’ve lost a little faith in Mozilla.

Fortunately, there are a couple of things a person can do.

Go to Tools — Options (Firefox — Preferences on Mac OS) and click the Security icon. Click exceptions, and then remove “getpersonas.com” from the list. This will disable Personas until they are moved to another domain (which is planned).

It is possible to edit your profile and disable the “LightWeightThemeManager,” some options are discussed here: MozillaZine Forums.

In order to simply things and vent, I made Zero Personality to disable Personas.

Remember when Firefox was the browser without the crazy bloat? Glenn Beck and I do.

The latest in the long march to version 420, Texto 3.2 features:

• Domain preferences saved automatically, without clicking a Save button
• Set file extensions – trigger syntax highlighting in most any editor.

It’s tagged as a beta version, because so far I always end up making a x.x.1 version a few minutes later with one little tweak. I’m about to break that cycle, this is the one.

New file extension preferences:

Grab it here, before they’re all gone.

Texto 3.2beta1

I’ve finally gotten some Mozex-Testo enhancements that I’ve had in mind for years and worked on for months polished to the point where I feel like inflicting them on the world. So here’s my initial release of the thing, possibly to be followed by a rename and submission to AMO (I like the current name, but I don’t want to turn up in searches for “mozex” when the original isn’t even listed on AMO). It requires Firefox 3.6.

The big idea behind the new features is the ability to customize the editor (and its options) per website. You can setup a set of global options and then override them to your heart’s content on Facebook, Wikipedia, Webmail, or anywhere else you edit a lot of text in your browser (and wish you didn’t).

Screenshots

Here is the Preferences window, with a global setup for MacVim.  The --servername and --remote-tab-silent-wait options cause MacVim to group open documents by domain (the %h placeholder) and open each document in a vim tab. Firefox 3.6 supports a real asynchronous process interface, so adding the -wait option means that when the Vim window containing the domain’s open documents closes, Firefox can update the textareas and delete the tempfiles.

The Globally Enabled toggle lets you choose whether mozex-testo is available on all web pages, or just the ones included in the Domain Specific Options.

Here is an example of a domain I have added just to disable Mozex-Testo.

For this domain, I am using the CSS3 selector :nth-of-type to add Mozex-Testo to only the second textarea on the page.

Finally, for the Trac instance at this URL, I am enabling syntax highlighting in the arguments passed to MacVim.

Video

And a screencast I made – it turned out much longer than I meant, really I just want to play with <video> and Theora encoding: There is a mistake at 15:15, when I use the :nth-of-type(n) CSS selector; it should have been textarea:nth-of-type(2) (otherwise every second element of any kind gets a nice, useless Mozex-Testo icon).

Download it. Seriously.

There are a couple of little tweaks to Firefoc you can make that will simplify extension development greatly – and I always forget them until I’m neck deep in actual work and don’t feel like adjusting my setup.  So here are some essentials, documented for my own purposes in one central place

Setup a development profile

Somewhere along the way, the Mozilla profile manager was marked “uncool” so unless you know it exists, it’s impossible to get to.  Set:

profile.manage_only_at_launch  true

to always start up with the profile manager.

Disable XUL caching

nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache true

Make changes to your XUL and JS without having to completely restart every time. Launch a new window and find yourself running the latest stuff.

Use unpacked extensions instead of jar files

This one is just a small tweak to your extension packaging process; I use a makefile with a “dev” target to include unpacked files instead of building a jar file.  To be honest, I don’t know if there is a real advantage to using jar files in production but that’s just how I’ve done it.

Those couple of tweaks will make extension development a lot smoother.  There are some additional options on the Mozilla Developer Center page I lifted most of this from.

Finally finished David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” A couple things:

• Liked the bits about tennis.
• Would have to read multiple times to keep all the drugs straight.
• Dude could write.
• Reaction to footnotes went:
  • Huh.
  • Oh, boy.
  • Not again.
  • hahaha
  • Really?
  • I need to read #24 again.
  • Don’t make me read #304 again!
  • Whoa, last page of footnotes.
• Did NOT end how I thought it might.

I definitely enjoyed it. Very sad there won’t be more.

In downtown Corvallis, there is a popular fountain where maybe 64 (or 36?) jets of water arranged in a square shoot straight up out of the concrete at intervals. On warm afternoons there are always a million happy kids, a fence of watchful, mostly-dry parents, and a few WHARRGARBL dogs. The river is right there, the fountain action puts a cool mist and hint of chlorine in the air, and it’s really a great place to sit and relax.

Lots of mornings after coffee and a bike ride I end up at the fountain to read for an hour or so. And almost 100% of the time, the water’s off, and one or four city employees have opened up the panel in the sidewalk to climb down underneath this thing and… plumb it, I guess. Usually with a bucket of tools on a cord and occasionally a shovel. The thing’s definitely a lemon as fountains go.

But, the fountain being such a Spot in town, folks stand around expectantly for a few minutes when it’s off. Eventually getting bold and peering down the ladder into its guts for some sign of the maintenance guys, and then giving up to wander off.

Yesterday’s shutdown included some rare above-ground maintenance, and this gave one woman a chance to ask the lone city worker some tough questions as he went about his work.

Q: Is this going to be turned on soon? A: Yeah, this should just take 15 minutes or so if you want to come back. Stmt: We’ll wait, you might get finished faster.

A minute or two passes.

Q: Is that a wet vac, or a wet-dry vac? A: (turning the vac off) Sorry? Q: I said, is that a wet vac, or does it do both? A: It does both, we use it to clean the drains. Stmt: Oh, alright. Looks like it’s working.

More vacuuming. A minute, at most, passes.

Q: Do those earplugs work well? and Q: Where do you get them? A: (vac off, not turning to speak) It’s whatever they buy us, they work okay. I have to wear them. Stmt: I could use some at home.

I wish I had a strong ending, but at this point I was hungry and went home. The fountain was working today, so I think it’s safe to assume the vacuuming was successful.

An old friend decided to drop by this weekend:

Mozex-testo 1.13

Works with Firefox 3 now on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Might work on Firefox 2, pretty sure anything older won’t work.

Here’s the Mac incantation for MacVim users:

/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim -g "+set syntax=html" %t

Now that it’s caught up to FF3 standards, I think I will work on implementing a couple of the features I’ve had in mind for a while.

Every time I work on one of these extensions, it’s 50% rage over the inconsistent (and contradictory) documentation on extension development, and 50% joy over actually getting the thing to work.

I have been struggling for a while to write something about the loss of David Foster Wallace. Struggling partly because I haven’t written anything in a human language for a while, and partly because of my complete feeling of awe towards the man’s work. Nothing I could say would be adequate.

Instead I have been bailed out by the staff of the Onion:

NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death

Absolutely perfect.

So, unemployment hasn’t reached the point where I don’t have any work to do yet, in fact I’m probably putting in more hours now than I have in the last couple of months. Got this one last project that I really want to see put to bed, and to be honest it’s actually been hugely rewarding to sit and focus on a problem for 10-12 hours at a stretch. So no danger of turning into a total hippie, but it’s still a possibility. In the grand tradition of over analyzing every little thing, I am attempting to counter hippie junk with some grounded, structured practices.

I have been drifting a little bit, 90 minutes in the coffee shop, couple of hours in the comfy library rotunda, window seat, not window seat. To counter this meandering, I have been trying to more rigidly define the tasks I’m working on.

Been wearing sandals (no socks!) all over the place. To balance this out, I got a haircut. Nothing like a haircut to move you from grungy looking slacker to sporty looking go-getter.

Of course biking everywhere. I can’t say that I know how to cancel this out; maybe I need to wear more slacks? Buy lottery tickets? Is keeping my bike cleaned, oiled, and not having a messenger bag or a basket on it sufficient?

I will throw out “avoiding farmer’s market” as a non-hippie tactic in my favor, although that’s certainly not been deliberate. Early rising, yard care, and constant iPod use should count for something as well.

I expect as work gets wrapped up I will start sleeping in, cease paying for haircuts, get too lazy to oil my bike, and perhaps give up meat to save money. No time to grow dread locks for my high school reunion, unfortunately.

Update: Had a nosebleed today. Probably due to my recent diet, but this could be evidence either way; nerdy or hippie?