Tag: problem

Firefox Privacy Options

Have you been using Firefox for several months? And during that time noticed that it’s taking longer & longer for the Save File dialog box to come up? Then likely, you’ve got the same problem that I’ve had. Fortunately, there’s an easy (but slow) fix for this.

 

Instructions:

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Go into Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences).
  3. Click on the Privacy icon in the left-hand pane.
  4. In the right-hand pane, click on Download Manager History.
  5. Click the Clear button. At this point, Firefox may appear to have crashed but in reality it should be going through and clearing out all of the items from your download history. On my home machine, this took several minutes to complete but I’ve been running Firefox since v0.9 and have never cleared the download history before.
  6. Optionally, you may wish to change the “Remove files from the Download Manager:” from “Manually” to “When Firefox exits”. To help prevent this slow down from happening again.

This fix works on both the Linux & Windows versions of Firefox. I would presume it also works for the OS X version, but I (sadly enough) do not have a Mac to try it out on.

4th of July Fireworks

I finally got around to updating the Gallery‘s CSS to better match the styling of the rest of the site; plus I added some of the more interesting photos that I took during our local 4th of July celebrations. I’ve also tweaked the About page by adding back in a sketch of the site’s mascot. I’ve got a better sketch in my pad, but I need to get that scanned so I can post it. The problem is the wife’s computer was the only one with an ISA slot for the adapter card for the ancient scanner I have and her machine recently died. Of course, even if her machine was fully running; there’d be the bigger problem of trying to get it to run under SuSE. I don’t think SuSe has ever been able to detect the card, much less the scanner itself, though the XSane project does show the scanner as one that is supported.

When I was in elementary school; I used to get in trouble for talking to the other kids during class. Eventually, this got bad enough that the teacher called my Mom in for a parent-teacher conference to discuss the problem…

Teacher: Mark keeps talking during class and it’s very disruptive.
Mom: When is he doing all this talking?
Teacher: After he finishes his assignment.
Mom: Did you give him something to read?
Teacher: Yes, but he finished that book.
Mom: Did you try giving him another one?
Teacher: Yes, but he finished that one too.
Mom: *glare*
Teacher: In fact, he’s already read all the books in the room.
Mom: Why don’t you get him another one from the library then?
Teacher: I did but he finished it already.
Mom: *glare* Then why don’t you let him go to the library and get another one?
Teacher: Wha…. I can’t do that!?! He could get into all sorts of trouble walking down the hallway.
Mom: *glare* If you let him go to the library; he’ll stop talking in class.

Eventually, I was allowed to walk those halls, wander the shelves of the library and seek out new books to read. As Mom predicted, once I had something to read; I was quiet in class. This is a habit that has stuck with me over the years and I ended up spending much of my youth in school & public libraries. I bring this up today because for the first time in a long time; I went down to CPL and checked out some books. This sudden trip to my local public library was prompted by their advertising of an adult summer reading program. The basic idea is you have to read 6 books, turn in a log and then you’ll be entered to win a gift certificate to a book store. I never could turn down free books; so I decided to go sign up2.

As I wandered around the library looking for some books to read; I felt a sense of nostalgia and loss. There were entire summers in my youth were I barely went anywhere else besides the library. These days, the rarity is when I do go. I miss those fabled days of yesteryear when life was simple and I could relax with a book in my hand all summer long. *sigh*

So why haven’t I been going? Partly because I’m an ornery cuss who doesn’t like having to wait and if the library doesn’t have the next book in a series I’m reading; it irks me. Partly because I can afford to buy more books for myself than I could when I was younger. Having my own copy of a book means I can read it whenever I like 24/7/3653 and the copy of the book I’m reading is likely to be in better condition (plus it’ll stay that way). *shrug* Not sure what else I have to say, except that I hope to be making visits to my public library more often. It’ll let me relive parts of my past (and beat some of this summer heat).

1 For some reason, employers don’t like it when you read books all day instead of testing their software.
2 Besides, money has been a bit tighter of late and borrowing books from the library is cheap entertainment. 😀
3 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (366 in a leap year).

Ever since I upgraded CoffeeBear to the newer version of WordPress and my fancy new theme; I noticed that mozcc wasn’t displaying any Creative Commons info for my site. I’d thought it a bit odd but figured I’d broken the extension somehow and have been a bit too distracted to really look into it until this evening.

First, I made sure I had the current version of mozcc installed and that I’d freshly restarted Firefox so I knew I had the lastest version running. When that didn’t work, I checked the source code of my pages and realized that I’d completely forgotten to add in the license info when I did the upgrade. Whoops! I’ve since rectified the problem and now you can see that this site is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. The missing license info has been added in by using the WP-CC Plugin developed by Firas. So many kudos to him for this nifty plugin!

I’m going to be moving the CoffeeBear.net from Digital Sense Hosting to Web Key Design. I’m making this move for 2 reasons and neither of them is any real fault of Digital Sense.
Reason #1: I can get pretty much the same package from Web Key Design as I can from Digital Sense Hosting, but for a couple bucks cheaper over the year.
Reason #2: Web Key Design is being run by a friend of mine.

This change over will be happening sometime in the next few days and may cause some temporary interrupt in our daily waste of your time. We apologize for any extra work that you may have to do as a result of this interruption and appreciate your patience.

Update [05 June 2005, 12:46 (-06:00 GMT)]: The move to the new webhost has been completed and everything (except for the SSGSPDS pages) appears to be working correctly. I’m working on getting that last bit setup correctly on the new host, but it might be a couple of days yet before it’s functional. If you do encounter any problems with CoffeeBear.net; let me know. Thanks!

Update [07 June 2005, 22:19 (-06:00 GMT)]: the SSGSPDS pages are now up and running again. All praise WKD for their assistance in this matter! 🙂