I Don't Need Help Crashing Firefox

Firefox has typically been a little crashy for me, but it's gotten worse with some of the newer versions, especially now with 2.0.0.11.

And, I admit, I flog it pretty hard -- I usually have several windows open at once, each with lots and lots of tabs going. (Right now, it's 2 windows with a total of 16 tabs, which is nothing. I still prefer this to using a feedreader, though this may change, since I just installed the now-free full NetNewswire.)

Anyway, crashing out is generally only a slight inconvenience, thanks to Blogger's draft autosave, and the window and tab restoring features of the invaluable extensions Tab Mix Plus and Session Saver (currently in the sandbox -- I haven't tried Session Manager yet).

I find, though, that there's one thing I can do to consistently cause Firefox to crash: If I've already got an overburdened browser session going, when I mouse over the Firefox Help menu (with the integrated search box), the browser will freeze up, then crash out.

I'm assuming that I just need more RAM, but it reminds me of some of my past Macs. Many, many Mac OSes ago, I had a work machine (I forget if it was the Quadra or the Powerbook 5300) that would crash when I hit the Help key on the extended keyboard.

Since I only hit the Help key by accident, I ended up prying it off the keyboard. Problem solved. I may still have it somewhere.

Likewise, on one of the compact desktops with the external volume buttons -- when I hit them, the machine would freeze up. I ended up covering them with tape.

Then as now, I never aspired to be a true Mac power user and actually figure out the root cause (e.g. I had MacsBugs and ResEdit but it was like giving a graphing calculator to a caveman), so I just tried to avoid the symptoms.

Tags: firefox

Tabbing Through Web Form Fields in Mac OS X

While I've always liked Macs more than PCs, over time, I'd come to appreciate one thing about Windows: Since it basically started out as a graphical shell over the DOS command line, it meant that you could do just about everything in Windows using just the keyboard (including repositioning windows).

Macs have always been built around the mouse (which makes it a little harder to defend the lack of a two-button mouse for so long), and it shows... though OS X does give it essentially a command line underpinning.

Case in point -- for a long while now, I've been annoyed by the fact that using OS X and Firefox, when you try to tab between form fields on a Web page, it skips drop-down menus. Since I was doing most of my stuff on the PC at work, this wasn't a huge problem and I never bothered to look into it, but now that I'm exclusively Mac, I found it intensely annoying.

I did a little searching around for an extension or something to change, so I found to my chagrin that it's just a simple settings change in the Keyboard & Mouse preference in Leopard (and probably previous versions) -- in the section marked, "Full keyboard access: In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move the keyboard focus between:" change the selection from "Text boxes and lists only" to "All Controls":

Why this isn't the default is baffling to me.

I'm sure I'm the last person to figure this out. (However, remember: Just because you know something doesn't mean that it's common knowledge, and just because you didn't know something doesn't mean it's obscure.)

Now that that's squared away, in System 7 and 8, I used to have an extension that assigned hotkeys to menu items (similar to Windows menus) -- I have to find the OS X equivalent.

It Started With the Blackwater Wife and the World Gold Cabal

It's been an up and down day today (which, despite whatever time stamp shows, is still Thursday).

I woke up in the middle of a dream confrontation with a blonde cafeteria worker (who I think I'd seen recently guest starring on CSI) who was married to a Blackwater contractor and who was trying to add a $1.75 surcharge to my meal to offset the global conspiracy that's trying to corner the world gold supply.

(Maybe I should send that in as a Ficlet.)

Up and down. Call it a wash.

I was a few minutes late to my session at the outplacement center, which was basically "So You Wanna Set Up a Consulting Business?" I saw a few familiar faces, and it was actually pretty useful. I don't know that I want to go the full-time consulting/contracting racket, but I'm looking at my options. It's been a month since the layoff -- I'm starting to get bored, so I'm trying to actually, you know, look for a job now.

Up.

After that, I picked up a few groceries, got home around 1pm, and then... hit the wall. I just could not stay awake. I guess I should have stopped in and got that cup of coffee. I was fading in and out until about an hour ago.

Down.

In an update, after being balky yesterday, my new printer seems to be working again. On the one hand, that's good, and on the other hand, it makes me a little nervous -- hardware problems generally don't spontaneously fix themselves. So I'll need to keep an eye on it and decide if I'm going to return it or not.

Neutral.

Lastly, I see that Apple released its last Tiger update. As I still have the Leopard DVD sitting on my desk, I was debating installing it, since I was waiting for the first Tiger update, but lo and behold, it's out today. So no more excuses -- I guess I'll back up my drive and install it tomorrow.

Up.

Oh, and my credit card statement arrived yesterday -- I saw a 5 dollar charge from AOL. I'd had AOLbyPhone since forever (hey, freebie for internals) and forgot about it until I saw the charge. So I called to cancel. I think I got the Philippines call center -- the rep was very competent and courteous, and it went smoothly once I spelled my screen name using the military phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc). I guess I could have tried to get a refund of the last charge, but I decided not to push it.

Neutral.

A few folks are meeting out tonight, and I basically slept through Refresh DC, so I think I'll just stay in and keep a little bit ahead of the game today.

Is it Friday already?

One thing I've found out -- Fridays don't really feel like Fridays when you don't have a job.

I've been mostly channel surfing today, mixed in with occasional bursts of photo editing. The Godfather was on, which explains why I have a pot of linguini on the stove right now, as I'm easily suggestible.

Yesterday was a mini-reunion for our group at Sweetwater, which was okay. Afterwards, I went to Carpool for a bit, then stopped off at the Barnes and Noble for a bit before popping over to Clyde's for a bit. Nothing particularly notable.

Afterwards, though, I couldn't get to sleep. So I just flopped on the couch for a while. Oddly enough, I did wake up at an hour approaching normal.

Oh, and as it turns out, I got slightly screwed because I bought the new Macbook right before their latest speed bump, and I'm just out of the 14-day return period. But I'm not going to worry about it too much.

Tags: slightly screwed

The Macbook Story So Far...

Okay, I ordered the Macbook on Tuesday. Got it on Thursday. It had a trackpad bump. They gave me a new one. iSight didn't work, but I fixed it. Here's what else happened.

It's All About Connections

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I had a damned of a time getting the MacBook to connect to my home network Thursday night. It was fine with an unencrypted connection, but as soon as I turned on encryption, it refused to recognize the router and tried to assign itself an IP from the on-board Airport card (which resulted in a whole lot of fail).

It took me a long, long time, but after a lot of searching and reading, I finally was able to get it unfucked -- I had to update the firmware on my router (a D-Link DI-624, which is now "end-of-life" -- if it happens in the future, I'll probably need to get a new router), and it started working normally.

(I guess that explains why my sister was never able to get a wireless connection with her Mac laptop. Sorry about that.)

Back That Azz Up

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Now, I can't find my license key for Retrospect Express to do an auto-restore from my external drive. But I figured I could use this opportunity to do some cleanup, instead of copying everything straight across the Evergrowing Pile of Unexamined Crap. So I manually restored what I was able, and I'm in the process of getting updated versions of all the other programs I need.

I'll be doing a lot of fine tuning and tweaking over the next few... years... but I'm basically up and running. The only hardware I need and don't have right now is a printer, so I see a lot of Kinkos in my near future.

What's the Word? Thunderbird!

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The main thing I'm wrestling with now is getting Thunderbird to work across my various and sundry accounts. Moving my personal mail to Thunderbird is a big step for me -- outside of an extended tryst with Eudora way back in the day, I've pretty much been using PINE for everything. (Pine Is Not Elm.) The command line is just so much faster, but I'm tired of bouncing HTML mail to another address so I can see everything.

Since my only experience with Thunderbird to date has been on the corporate network, I'm still trying to figure out how to get the IMAP from over here, and the SMTP from over there. Oddly enough, hooking it up to my AOL account (which I have back now), was fairly painless... well, once it grabbed 3,000 sent mails and 20,000 received mails (and that's only from 2004 or so).

Sign Here, Please

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Even though I'm not 100% running yet in T-bird (I can still use PINE, so it's not a big deal), I did spend an inordinate amount of time twiddling with my e-mail sig. I'm trying to use elements from my old, text-only sig, and mash them up with stuff from my newer HTML sigs (including the Feedburner headline animator) -- here's what I got so far:

### | Joe Loong | joe@joelogon.com | AIM/GTalk/etc: Joelogon -0n0-| "...the Recording Angel, making occasional adjustments  \-/ | in the direction of the interrogation..." -- William Gibson      | Dumb Things: http://www.joelogon.com/blog

Four lines of text, an ASCII picture, and two animated gifs. I know, I'm a bad person, and I risk angering the antispam guardians. Also, the ASCII pic looks especially vulnerable, since the non-breaking spaces aren't sticking. We'll see if it lasts.

I also removed one of the quotes I've been using for a dozen years or so (sorry, Bert), though here it is for posterity:

"*shake shake shake* HELLO? The Web is not a reference source! It's a cesspool of dubious information!" -- barton

Even in a world of Google and Wikipedia, I think it mostly still applies.

Tags: thunderbird, e-mail clients, PINE, macbook, signatures, cesspool of dubious information, evergrowing pile of unexamined crap

Effects of a Layoff, in Facial Hair

Here's what a week of unemployment has done to me:

Actually, that's two weeks of beard right there -- a week of sick and a week of slack. What you see is what I get. And that's it -- nothing more, nothing less. (How could there be less?)

It's unlikely I'll keep it much longer -- if I do, I'll need to clean it up a little. The iSight camera isn't catching it well, but the word "patchy" does not do it justice.

Speaking of which, this is also the first pic I've taken using the Macbook's built-in iSight camera, uploaded via Flickrbooth. And following up on my trip to the Apple store, they took a look at the bump on the trackpad and just replaced it with a new machine (since I'd only had it for a day, barely).

I fired up the new machine last night, but when I tried using Skype, it wasn't recognizing the camera. I was afraid I had another lemon, but I did some searching around and found that resetting the System Management Controller (SMC) fixed it for other folks with similar problems. (Real simple -- pull the battery and hit the power button for 10 seconds.)

I'm still fiddling with the Macbook to get it just right (I'm also taking this opportunity to go over to Thunderbird for all my personal mail -- I've been using PINE all this time) but I'm pretty much up and running now, and I'm almost caught up on everything I missed last week when I was offline (I'd used my work laptop for nearly everything, so I needed to get the new system up and running). I guess I'll cover all that excitement in another entry.

Tags: isight, macbook, system management controller