Archive for March, 2011

Guitar lessons rock!

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

I like playing guitar. Not that I’m any good at it (despite classes), but it’s fun. Sometimes, it’s even awesome. For example, when you suddenly manage to produce something recognisably similar to this:

Yes, nowhere near as cool. I won’t guitar-play a drummer into ecstacy any time soon. But very, very, very cool nonetheless. Happy me! :)

PS: This version may be more appropriate — only guitar and Melissa. Failing a Melissa here, I will work on getting the guitar part sounding more reminiscent of this.

Monday mornings: low power levels

Monday, March 21st, 2011

It’s Monday. Despite the Monday-y-ness of the day, you manage to arrive in the office before 9. Hooray! As usual, you turn on your PC and fetch some water to make some… hold on. Let’s try that again.
You turn on your PC… … you turn on your PC… … …

Okay, let me check the instructions for turning on the PC:

  1. Press the powerbutton

Unlike its usual effect of starting to whizz and burr happily, today this doesn’t even induce the slightest dissatisfied hiccup from my trusty old PC. Just a blinking orange light of the power button. Hmmms.

Fastforward a bit, and after opening two deprecated PCs hunting for a replacement power supply, we have to give up. Before I finished setting up one of those old PCs as my temporary PC, the man from computer support returns wielding… a new powersupply! Hoooraaaaaay!

Five minutes later, and I’m typing this. It took a while to hunt down, but I am seriously impressed by the speed with which local computer support got me back on track. So: a happy note to start the week!

FireFox 4 tweaks for better browsing

Monday, March 14th, 2011

As you know, I’ve been experimenting with the new Firefox. It’s quick, it washer whiter than white, and … it can be improved with a few tweaks.

Tweak one: search from address bar

Firefox 4 omits a feature I love: Browse By Name. That link explains it all, but I’ll recap it here.

In Firefox, you can type anything as the name of the website. Go ahead, try it! Open a new tab, and type “Hugo Jonker“. No “http://”, no “www”, no “.com”. Just a few words. What Firefox used to do, was to ask Google. If Google was sure what to answer, you were immediately redirected. If Google wasn’t so sure, you’d get a Google search for what you just typed.(*)

I was so impressed when I saw this. This was damned awesome! “Google knows” made reality — Google does know! Imagine my disappointment upon finding out that Firefox 4 broke this. It now always gives you a Google result page(*). Not cool.

Luckily, this is easily enough fixed — see the above link. Quick recap:

  1. Surf to about:config
  2. find “keyword.URL”
  3. Give it the value “http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=”

Tadaa, your Firefox works again — without needing Yet Another Plugin.

* Unless your internet provider is a dick that redirects all unresolved traffic to their own pages.

PS: Obviously, you can use other web services (Google search, Bing search, Yahoo, etc.– just search for “address bar search firefox” in your favourite search engine). But I love this “redirect-if-sure-otherwise-search” option, and I wanted it back. So now I do :)

Tweak two: animated tabs

Opening/closing tabs in firefox 4 is soooooooooooo cool! Your tabs slide into existence, and wink out again as the others slide over them.

Well, you know what? I’m typing this on a netbook, and this stuff hurts. Eyecandy is fine — if I don’t notice any downsides. Here, I do.
So: goodbye, animated tabs!

Short short version: about:config, browsers.tabs.animate = false. And surfing is good again :)

Browser mini-game

Monday, March 14th, 2011

This must be one of the smallest games you’ve ever played in a browser.
Yeah, that’s right. It’s in the favicon!

Occasional hiccups in FF3.6, will check FF4 RC1 nextway better!!!

PS: Tetris from the URL bar, over whatever site you’re visiting.

Comprendre le francais, c’est facile? (in English)

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

It's about France/French -- you can tell, because of the beret :)Just so you know, this post is in English. Relax, you can all breathe again :) The posh French title is there because this is about French (the language, not the people). The local platform for innovation is organising a series of lectures on intellectual property rights. Since I am sideways, tangently involved with that on rare occasions, I figured it would be nice to attend some of these lectures. Caveat: they’re in French.

Le ouch! Hmmms, then again, after 4 years in a foreign country (where I usually speak English), and day-to-day interactions with non-Dutch (again, English), my grasp of French ought to be sufficient, no? Well, shucks, why not give it a go.
So I did. Imagine my surprise when I could not only follow most of the first lecture, but was actually quite at ease. Of course, this is a subject with which I am familiar (e.g. I know some things about the Berne Convention — beyond knowing of its existence :), and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the first lecture had little news for me in store.
I was a little dismayed when the second lecture was similar. It makes sense, they are focusing on SMEs, but listening to a talk about the intellectual property rights involved in setting up your website was not the reason I was attending.

So I even learned that I can multitaks (to a limited degree) while listening to a presentation in French on a subject with which I am passingly acquainted. :) Hooray for me! :)

FireFox 4.0 RC 1

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

Firefox 4Firefox is almost up to version 4. Today, I had occasion to boot into Windows (in short, I was forced). My Firefox needed updating after a long period of neglect. So I updated it, and noticed that there was a Release Candidate for the newest version. Now a release candidate isn’t the finished product. You might run into bugs. Then again, I almost never use Windows, so why not give it a try? Next boot, there will probably be Firefox 4.5 or so to install anyway :)

I did. While it was downloading, I wasted some time browsing slashdot (a site which I should stop browsing since it no longer is as good as it was, but okay). Slashdot uses quite some javascript. So after finishing the install, I figured to test the speed claims on Slashdot, check if there was an improvement.

BY GOLLY THERE WAS!! The flames left by the racing speedmonster Firefox had become threatened to engulf my desktop (metaphorically speaking, of course). I’m now actually tempted to install RC1 in Ubuntu as well. If I do, I will let you trusty reader(s?) know all about it :)