My writings, photos, music and links
I’ve been posting on twitter and ignoring my blog for some time now. In the meantime Disqus-generated comment spam has been annoying me. So, I’m disabling comments for now. If and when I start to really manage this blog properly I’ll probably turn them back on. Till then I’m easy to contact if you have something to say.
Have a nice day.
A useful web-tier debugging technique is to take a snapshot of a given page (i.e., saving the HTML and Javascript and CSS and images locally, serving them up w/ your local webserver) as this facilitates very rapid test and iterate cycles. However, properly saving the full set of files is something at which vanilla Firefox, well, sucks. Enter the “Save Complete Page As” add-on. Its dependency checking is much more robust, and the local snapshot you download is much much more likely to look and behave the same as the real thing.
For example for the Upromise visitor home page, the built-in FF “Save Page As” option resulted in an ugly, incomplete mess consisting of 20 files. The add-on “Save Complete Page As” option resulted in a perfect copy consisting of 95 files. (The performance issues of a page which requires 95 files is another story… but it illustrates the huge difference.)
This add-on is configurable too, e.g. to save iframes and even to try and correct links (which feature I can’t vouch for.)
Anyway webdev and QA types may get some mileage out of this one.
Cheers
This happens to me all the time; I accidentally enter the wrong username into a form field, and then every time I come back to that site my browser suggests this wrong value in the autocomplete dropdown list. To delete a given entry from the autocomplete dropdown, simply:
- Type in the form field until the dropdown appears
- Use the up or down arrow to move to the entry to be deleted
- Press Shift + Delete in FF (or just Delete in IE)
That’s it, the bad autocomplete option is gone.
I share a monitor between a Mac Pro tower and a Dell PC laptop, using a KVM switch. A couple days ago, toggling to the Mac resulted in a totally blank screen. Thinking it was a problem w/ the KVM switch itself (as I’d run into this trouble w/ a previous switch) I plugged the monitor directly into the Mac… with no change. I was able to launch itunes using keyboard shortcuts, so I could confirm OS X was running fine. After restarting the Mac, doing tests on the monitor and googling around, I still was faced with no display. This is a particularly frustrating problem to have, since most solutions involve being able to see what you’re doing. Finally a friend and mac guru suggested I try resetting the PRAM. It worked! I’m posting this in case anyone else has Mac display issues.
To reset your Mac’s PRAM:
1. Power the machine down
2. Hold down Command+Option+P+R all at the same time
3. Power the machine back up, while holding those keys down
4. Listen for the boot chimes to sound several times (I cycled it 5 times before releasing the keys)
5. Release the keys and cross your fingers.
With luck the reset PRAM will eliminate whatever temporary issue was getting in your way.
Here’s Apple’s page on this topic: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
Many thanks to EJ for the help!
This will only interest web developers.
Using Firefox 3.0.10 on XP, with the firebug console open, I kept noticing seemingly arbitrary errors like this:
[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED) [nsIRequest.name]” nsresult: “0×80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED)” location: “JS frame :: file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsLoginManager.js :: anonymous :: line 282″ data: no]
file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsLoginManager.js
Line 282
I finally realized this was triggered by using the right-click context menu option “View Selection Source” (which is very useful for examining generated markup, e.g. after scripted DOM manipulation). It’s a minor bug in Mozilla’s code that seems harmless enough.
Anyway thought I’d share in case anyone else is scratching their head wondering why this error is polluting their console logs.
Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for dreaming up the web 20 years ago. I’ve been making a living on it for more than half of its existence so I’ve got a lot to thank him for. =)
Hi
It’s more convenient for me to post to twitter sometimes, and though I may integrate those posts into this website at some point, for now there’s quite a bit that doesn’t make it here. So, if you have any interest in twitter and/or my random writings on technology, culture, interesting websites and my personal life, please follow me there. Thanks!
http://twitter.com/cweekly
Here are just a few of the things I’ve done to my Firefox client to make it more useful.
View > Add Ons > LiveHTTPHeaders > Options > Config > ‘Add … to sidebar’ checkbox
View > Sidebar > LiveHTTPHeaders
View > Toolbars > Customize: drag icons to Navigation toolbar, esp. “Clear Cache Button” and ieTab and Firebug
Type URL "about:config" in location bar, confirm "ok" at warning
Right-click and choose “new > string”
Enter name (without quotes) “extensions.firebug.yslow.cdnHostnames”
Enter CDN URL values (without quotes), e.g. “im.529.com,olmcdn.529.com”
Right-click and choose "new > string" again
Enter name (without quotes) “ietab.filterlist”
Enter value (without quotes) “/^file:\/\/\/.*\.(mht|mhtml)$/ http://*.usa-ed.net/* http://*update.microsoft.com/* http://shrpt/* http://ushare/* http://www.windowsupdate.com/*”
There are many more add-ons I like, and some about:config tweaks as well, but as a core shortlist of web development -related add-ons I find these ones indispensable. Enjoy!
I’ve been splitting online writing between here, facebook, twitter and comments on taplin’s blog. 8 or 9 years ago I made a concerted effort to bring all my online stuff together in one place, now it’s gotten dispersed again. I have the feeling there’s a reasonable way to avoid this balkanized content publishing, some kind of federation (the twitter javascript api does not come close) … but I haven’t found it. Interested in others’ thoughts, or if you’re reading this and are interested in following me, try also:
http://twitter.com/cweekly
or come find me on facebook. Cheers.
Hi
A reader kindly let me know he had trouble posting a comment here. I had cranked down the security on commenting too far (in fighting comment spam) and accidentally blocked discussion. Whoops. The comments are now open again and I welcome any non-commercial thoughts anyone reading this might care to share. Cheers.
