I don’t have time for this
No, really. I don’t. Someone said in IRC last night: “I don’t have time to type these words to you now”. Except he was in the channel and typing them out anyway.
Life in drac land has been littered with an assorted series of road blocks recently. First, I made the traumatic decision to turn off Tab Mix Plus this morning. I say this with all the pathos of someone forced to switch off a life support machine. I think I’m justified because my browser essentially is my life support. I spend an embarassing amount of time in front of a LCD screen these days (as I have done for years now) and a good proportion of said time is spent staring at a browser. How my browser is behaving at any point in time matters for this reason.
It’s not really a secret that Firefox can be problematic at times. My biggest bugbear in the pre 2.0 days was the ghastly memory leaks. Spend a few days using the same Firefox instance and the memory usage jumps to obscene proportions. I thought I had it narrowed down to Greasemonkey and a couple of other extensions so I didn’t install them. Unfortunately, Firefox 2.0 introduced a horrible (for me) feature of a scrolling tab bar.
A scrolling tab bar is great if you have about … say … 10 tabs open at a time. I guess. I rarely have less than 30 tabs open. Yes, really. I can probably justify three quarters of those being left open all the time. [Random tip: that many tabs and Reload Every obviate the need for a separate RSS reader]
But I digress
30 odd tabs make the scrolling tab bar malarkey seem ridiculous. I can’t even remember if I have a tab of my customized slashdot home page open and if I did, it’s probably on the wrong end of a long long scroll; so I open another tab on this end. And so on and so forth. When I can’t see all the tabs I have open in one glance; my lousy memory dictates opening another tab anyway. And so the number of tabs open climb, even when they don’t need to.
Tab Mix Plus has a killer feature of being able to show all open tabs in multiple rows. None of this scrolling business. Wonderful. Never mind all the other nifty bonus features; that multi-row tab bar was what I really wanted. And then Tab Mix Plus (it seems like) started leaking memory on me.
Update: No, it’s not TMP but Firebug causing the memory leak nastiness and instability. W00t! I can live with a selective enabling of Firebug when I want it, living without TMP is enough to drive me to Opera. And yes, Firebug is still a beta so I should have checked that first.
Add to that a date mixup between the campus authorities and the department authorities (which I had to try sorting out), an impending supervisor meeting where I needed to mug up on several papers (but haven’t yet), random frustrations with the slow (glacial) pace of writing up and you can probably understand why I want this week to go off into a corner and die a quiet death. None of this kicking and screaming, don’t go all drama queen on me; just go away already.
And yet, the cotton wool escapism of a weekend of sports TV (Masters Snooker, Aussie Open and ODIs); not to mention the kickoff episode of American Idol await.
On 19-Jan-07 at 3:35 pm,
rastiadu karaya wrote:
American Idol?
I disown you.
On 19-Jan-07 at 4:45 pm,
drac wrote:
don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. The preliminary “separate chaff from wheat” episodes are comedy gold.
I intend to
borrowsteal some ideas and do a drinking game.Chug once when:
1. Randy says “dawg”
2. Simon says any one of “terrible”, “ghastly”, “awful” to describe a performance
3. A wannabe dissolves into tears
4. One of the judges covers their ears or looks away from a “performance”
5. A wannabe gets so pissed that words have to be bleeped out from the ensuing tirade
I reckon I’ll be three sheets to the wind by the end of the first hour. How can that not be funny? (I am completely certain I would suck harder than most of those folks, but I’m not going to try out for AI, ever)
On 20-Jan-07 at 4:47 am,
Tez wrote:
I was using the TMP multi-row mode as well, but not really enjoying it ’cause of the inevitable loss of browser real estate. I get claustrophobic as the screen keeps shrinking. I prefer the FF1.5/Opera method of progressively making the tabs smaller until they’re down to a strip of favicons squished up against each other. You can emulate the same behaviour in FF2.0 by setting TMP to scrollable without buttons, tab width to 40 and tab close button on pointed for 50 msecs. This gets you a maximum of 25 tabs or so without needing to scroll. And that’s about as many as I allow myself anyway -in general, tabs that I intend to keep open for a long time drift left until they bump into the wall, and ephemeral tabs come and go on the right. So a little bit of scrolling, 25+ tabs, is still okay.
On 20-Jan-07 at 4:59 am,
Tez wrote:
Or switch off the tab close button altogether and just use mouse gestures. That works too. The show-tab-close-button-when-pointed gimmick is cool, but it gives me whiplash.
On 20-Jan-07 at 11:07 am,
drac wrote:
Eek, I hate the close button on the tab
It seems like that wastes tabbar real estate which is the scarcer resource. It’s permanently off but doesn’t really matter because I almost exclusively use the keyboard shortcut anyway.
I used to have the tab size down too (browser.tabMinWidth on about:config; default is 100) but I have multiple tabs open of the same site at times so the favicon isn’t enough to differentiate anymore.
*sigh* I could use some of that tab opening discipline; when I’m just scanning I open lots of tabs to “read later”. A few days later, I eventually get around to it. 50 open tabs is not unusual.
Never could get the hang of mouse gestures either (I positively hate them because they never seem to do what I want). I lack the motor control. Keyboard shortcuts all the way.
On 20-Jan-07 at 11:27 am,
Curious Yellow wrote:
*Ahem*
“…weekend of sports TV (Masters Snooker, Aussie Open and ODIs)”
Aren’t you forgetting something?
On 20-Jan-07 at 11:30 am,
Tez wrote:
Heh. Ditto with the complicated mouse gestures (Up-Left-Down-Right-Left to recompile Firefox!), but I’ve got them down to two, which actually works for me. Up to open a tab, down to close a tab.
Come to think of it, I don’t know any FF keyboard shortcuts. I spend most websurfing time leaning back with head resting on forearm in classic nice-day-at-the-beach posture, so it’s mouse all the way.
On 20-Jan-07 at 11:43 am,
drac wrote:
Curious Yellow: I’m pointedly avoiding mention of that to prevent a jinx. Not that I think it’s going to help, the Mancunians do seem to be the better team at the moment.
Sir Alex had a point. I’ll give points away to stop the Mafia from winning again
Tez: Oh, I don’t know that many shortcuts myself. Ctrl-L to focus on the address bar, Ctrl-F4 to close a tab… more here but I’ve been known to navigate hyperlinks with tab, arrow key and find-as-you-type so I don’t need to take hands off the keyboard
On 22-Jan-07 at 5:21 am,
chickenbutt wrote:
Dude, they’ve started the Sri Lankan Idol here!eeeeeeek! I say it’s bloody traumatizing watching it :0. And mind you i just watched only one minute of it. Man unt lost
On 22-Jan-07 at 5:55 am,
chickenbutt wrote:
Apologies, apparently the sri lankan idol *cringe has been on for awhile it seems
On 22-Jan-07 at 2:08 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
Gods bless Thierry Henry’s shaven(?) head!
Did you see it? It was awesome!
Watching Murray clinically take Nadal apart now, I know see why being one of the 1.67m is such a coveted position these days.
On 22-Jan-07 at 3:22 pm,
drac wrote:
And on that note, Robin van Persie is a dumbass. I saw that and was horrorstruck. Pity about the dent to title hopes though… I hope ManU are good enough to stick it to the Blues.
See, I’m making my biases apparent
And hey, Nadal had the momentum going into the 5th set? Scoretracker on the website said 1-0 Nadal in the fifth.
On 22-Jan-07 at 4:28 pm,
Chickenbutt wrote:
Finally yes, but this could have soo been Murrays match *sigh.
On 22-Jan-07 at 5:29 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
Why? I didn’t watch the pundits talk the match to death afterwards, but van Persie was in the right place at the right time no? Not sure what will happen to Chelsea this year, I’m still hoping for Shevchenko to come good. Call me foolish
but I think he still has at least a couple of years in him. Why do you want them to not defend the title? I like seeing records being made!
I’m watching a slightly delayed version of the match, and if you didn’t know by now, Nadal’s won. Sad though, it would have been a good win for Murray.
On 23-Jan-07 at 2:34 am,
elric wrote:
bah…to both the tennis and the footy. still better to a bunch of frogs than
to a bunch of Russian mafia funded rent bots
On 23-Jan-07 at 2:35 am,
elric wrote:
*rent boys even…
On 23-Jan-07 at 9:37 am,
N wrote:
Hmm….yes this new tab feature on Firefox is bloody annoying…especially when one has a sieve for a memory…
On 23-Jan-07 at 10:17 am,
drac wrote:
Curious Yellow: I meant van Persie’s idiocy in breaking his toe, not the goal. And no, I didn’t stick around for the pundits talking the match to death either… The hype machine is in full gear about how great Arsenal and Liverpool are. I ain’t buying it.
You know, I want to believe that Shevchenko is a better player. Everyone (lots better informed and far more knowledgeable than I am about footie) insist that he’ll come good. I ain’t seeing it. I am however seeing how he fluffs chances that he’s fed (in the box, no less) and I remain unconvinced that he’s anything more than the archetypal Carlos Tevez/Javier Mascherano.
Yeah, Nadal won. Murray ran out of gas in the fifth set.
elric: I may well keep that typo in there because I found it hilarious
I’m with you on the preferences. Better the Mancunians than the Russkis 
N: Firefox 2.0 works well on all machines. Check which extensions you have installed, one of them is probably leaking memory. The Leakmonitor extension might also help track it down.
On 23-Jan-07 at 12:28 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
Come on guys, don’t you mean better the Glazers than the Abramovich? So shouldn’t it be better the Americans than the Russian? I don’t get it. Villa and Manyoo are owned by yanks, West Ham by some meatballs, Liverpool will eventually be pwned by the ragheads, and you guys are insulting a once great nation that provided some much needed foreign talent to grace the dives called nightclubs in our motherland?
A plague on both your houses!
On 23-Jan-07 at 12:59 pm,
drac wrote:
I don’t think I can top that for a comeback
Fair enough.
I think some obscure sense of fair play is offended by how much money is being thrown around by said Russki. Manyoo may be owned by a Yank, but he’s holding tight onto the purse strings. That seems to matter, somehow. An emotive point though
Besides, the drama of having Drogba and co tripped up in mid swagger? Priceless. They didn’t see this happening (no one did) and it’s comical to watch them struggle for a change.
On 23-Jan-07 at 1:25 pm,
elric wrote:
Yes, it is the very emotive issue of the open cheque book Abramovich has.
There’s more than a few United fans who would argue that the club’s
financial position is worse under the Glazer’s - given the debt burden and
much stricter spending limitations. And even when United were chucking money around for fun, it was revenue generated by a combination of good timing, smart management and at least four decades of being a club whose reach exceeded beyond England.
Which leads me to the considerable degree of snobbery involved too -
Chelski are regarded as nouveau riche, whereas the likes of United, Arsenal and Liverpool are old money. Hell let’s face it Forest, Villa, Spurs, Leeds and a few others have a greater history. All achieved without dodge Russki blood
money.
On 24-Jan-07 at 12:40 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
Snobbery it indeed is.
The open chequebook seems to have shut at the moment. No players in during the transfer window, and one guy to a non-premiership team, and I don’t think he’s even played a first team match as a benchwarmer.
Yesterday night was great though. I’m going to be cautious unlike the commentators who think Shevchenko will now go on to replicate his form at Milan, Kiev etc., but you could see some confidence coming back. The clever little dribbles, the percentage shots, the assist to greedy showoff Lampard
He made these deft little passes inside the box but it was painfully obvious that none of them were used to playing with him and wasted those chances because of it, could easily have been 6-0 at the end instead of 4 if they had played around him more I think.
I think Ballack was a bit selfish last night with his wonder-goal attempts, Drogba and co seemed like they were trying to help Shevchenko out, but maybe if Shevchenko starts to pick it up then Ballack will feel the pinch? He looks really lack-a-daisical on the pitch and a little bit petulant at times. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Kaka maybe bought up in the summer if Shevchenko gets better, hell, maybe even if he doesn’t!
On 24-Jan-07 at 1:46 pm,
drac wrote:
Ballack always did seem a tad petulant. Have you seen him interacting with the ref? I expect him to stamp his foot and pout at any moment.
I thought Ronaldinho was a target? And anyway, I think they want people to strengthen up their back four more than they do midfield players. At least Jose seems to want that badly.
And since I can’t resist, this is Wycombe - a league two side. What works on them may not necessarily work elsewhere.
On 24-Jan-07 at 7:40 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
Fair point.
Will definitely be hard to do what he did against Wycombe, but one commentator observed that he seemed a bit sharper after that first goal, and I think I saw it. Let’s see how he does against Sheffield on Sunday(?)
Ronaldinho is rumoured to be a target, but I don’t think Real will sell (Lordy look at me fearlessly foraying into the minefield of armchair football punditry). You’re right about the back 4. Who could’ve predicted those injuries eh? Most teams will have some area where they will not have cover if 2 or more players are injured so Jose cannot have it all his way there I think. He even said that Essien and Bouhlarouz were bought for that reason, and I think he’s been right there. Especially with Essien. I guess we’ll have to wait till the summer to see who they’ll buy, and if Mourinho will still be there. I’m nurturing the vain hope that Crespo will come back from Inter or be forced to come back because he has one of the coolest names in football!
P.S: There is something weird going on with the comment form, it clips the last couple of characters in the line. You can type them but not see them. :s
On 25-Jan-07 at 5:40 am,
elric wrote:
My nightmare scenario - Ronaldinho to Chelski and the non-fat Ronaldo to Real to placate the fans and keep the marketing hype up.
On 25-Jan-07 at 6:25 am,
elric wrote:
ack - that last part of that last comment made no sense. ignore