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Firefox and the Web Developer Extension

After months of occasional experimentation, I finally made Firefox my default browser a few weeks ago.

Encouraging a Mac user to stop using Safari is a harder sell than encouraging a Windows user to stop using Explorer; Mac users already have tabbed browsing, and aren’t plagued by spyware, security craters, or broken CSS support. And Safari has a cleaner interface, so Firefox isn’t going to win over Mac users on looks alone. But FF does have luscious chocolatey goodness where it counts: More powerful bookmark management, plugin sidebars, better resource management (or so it seems), embedded page searching and search string highlighting (this feature alone is worth switching for), even faster page rendering than Safari… the list goes on.

Also experimenting a bit with Firefox extensions, and am blown away by Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Extension, which can analyze any web page (especially ones you’re working on) any which way to Sunday. Rather than list its features, just scan this page and imagine being able to do everything listed there from a single browser toolbar. Phenomenal.

Now if only Thunderbird could make similar advances on the state-of-the-art mail client technology — do for email what Firefox has done for browsers… But judging from the relative amount of press the two are receiving, the Thunderbird project doesn’t seem to have nearly the same momentum as Firefox.

Music: Patricia Barber :: Pieces
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Cost of War

JavaScript counter tallies the financial cost of the U.S. war in Iraq at costofwar.com. Watch the tally mount at a rate of more than $1,000 per second….

Cost of the War in Iraq

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The One Resignation That Matters

From The Left Coaster:

In all the breathless coverage over cabinet resignations and the retirement of overrated network television news readers, it is more than a little disappointing that so few journalists are taking note of the upcoming retirement of one of the very best of their own. While the media whoops and hollers over knaves like Tom Ridge, discarded facades like Colin Powell, pusillanimous media moguls such as Tom Brokaw, mediocrities on the order of Ron Paige, and outright despots like John Ashcroft, the retirement of Bill Moyers from the Public Broadcasting Corporation stands out as the only resignation event of the season that will clearly diminish America and leave it poorer for his going.

Music: Ronu Majumdar, Ry Cooder :: Vaisnava Bhajan
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Multi-Flash Photo Illustrations

Tech-Ill-Car A digital camera with four flash units takes four images, each with slightly different shadow boundaries. These boundaries can then be used to compute the outlines of objects. What comes out of the camera is essentially an outline of the object, which can then be overlayed on the original photo in Photoshop. In less than a minute you have an illustration based on photo-reality. A few samples. Shown here, an engine block, the original photo of which looked murky and indistinct, now informative.

So imagine a journalist in the field covering a story s/he thinks is going to need an illustration, rather than a photo. With one of these cameras, they could shoot an illustration on the spot and file it from the field, rather than commissioning it from the pub’s art dept.

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Money Doesn’t Talk

Heading down into the BART tonight, a few minutes to spare before my train arrived, reached for a handful of misc newspaper fragments in the recycle bin next to the turnstile, as usual. A man was standing on the other side of the bin with a dirty sweatshirt, long reddish ZZ Top beard, sparkling blue eyes. Possibly homeless. I passed over a few uninteresting bits (sports section, this morning’s headlines), and picked up the business section, just to see what’s shakin’. The man suddenly looked up, gazed sincerely and peacefully into my eyes, and spoke:

“Dylan said, ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.'”

Something about him seemed so gentle and kind and understanding, I didn’t feel any response was necessary. Strange but comforting to hold a stranger’s gaze longer than the socially normalized timeslice. He knew I understood what he meant. Wished that life was made of more of these moments.

Music: Ramones :: Teenage Lobotomy
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Stay in School

“Be studious, stay in school, and stay away from the military. I mean it.”

– Marine Staff Sgt. Russell Slay, giving instructions to his 5-year-old son, Walker, in a letter to his family shortly before he was killed in action in Iraq last month. (Newsweek)

Music: Who, The :: Eyesight To The Blind
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Bagger 288

bagger288 It’s a mechanical hydra! It’s a mountaintop’s worst nightmare! It’s Mother Earth’s Master Molester! It’s a Photoshop fake! Nope, it’s real — all too real. “It’s a mobile strip mining machine, which can also be used to saw a country in half.” (Aldoblog). The deconstructivists would be proud; SRL wishes they had the bread to build something like this. More images.

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60 Minutes Meets South Park

Over Thanksgiving, had the chance to watch a few episodes of a Showtime program I didn’t know existed: Penn & Teller’s Bull—-.

No magic, just the two of them doing a sort of commentary/documentary on subjects like drinking water, alternative medicines, alien abductions, parents who go overboard trying to perfect their children, the dangers of second-hand smoke, etc. A quick intro, then they launch full-gale into debunking the hell out of the day’s topic. They’re both hard-core rationalists, and they miss no opportunity to make the most gullible consumers and believers look like absolute fools.
Continue reading “60 Minutes Meets South Park”

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Beavertail

Dreamed last night that I had put on an old-school beavertail wetsuit with twist grommets rather than velcro, like the one my dad used when I was a kid — before they started laminating the neoprene with nylon, and suits were rubbery-slick inside and out. Then a weight belt and booties, and I descended into shallow water (8 or 10 feet) beneath a pier. No flippers, no tank. Mask, no snorkel. The water was clear, and sunlight shone through as if it were air. Bright under water, not bluish, all the colors were vivid. Holding my breath, walked along the ocean floor until I found a dead fish — a 30 lb. snapper — and dug three fingers into the gills. Hauled it back to shore to have it mounted on a wooden plaque. We (whoever “we” were) intended to hang it on the wall of a seaside bistro we were building. The whole thing had the feeling of being on some kind of important mission, a sense of urgency.

Music: Glenn Gould :: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, Variatio XIX A 1 Clavier
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Peter Norton: Off My A-List

There are two kinds of pop-ups: The evil kind, which spawn unrequested when a page loads, and the relatively benign kind, which appear when requested (by clicking a JavaScript link). Virtually all browser-based pop-up blockers are able to distinguish between the two, so that sites that use pop-ups without devilish intent continue to work properly.

Over the past week, I’ve been getting email from a small handful of students informing me that the J-School’s course schedule was appearing as a blank window. Could not reproduce the behavior on any OS/browser.

Finally a student lent me her laptop, and sure enough, blank page. Viewed source and was horrified to find JavaScript in the page that I had not put there. Turns out she was running Norton Internet Security, which works as a sort of proxy server on the client, and literally rewrites web pages before they get to the browser, stripping page control from the developer. With NIS “Ad Blocking” enabled, the program is unable to distinguish between evil and benign pop-up code, and assumes the user would rather not see the page at all.

Had to order a copy of this POS today just so I can get started on work-arounds. Between this and recent discoveries of incompatibilities between Norton AntiVirus and both Final Cut and Pro Tools, am forced to the conclude that Peter Norton is no longer my hero.

Music: Graham Central Station :: It Ain’t No Fun To Me