I got curious about userstyles.org, so I clicked on a random “Popular” site style. That brought me to something called Brushed Look for Google. The screenshot is probably the worst Firefox customization I’ve seen so far, and it has the Windows theme to—cough—match. If I were a theme author, I’d sure as hell be discouraged by such a blatant lack of aesthetics. Whoever this Greg S person is, I recommend he stop whatever it is he is doing.
I’m sure the majority of Telenet’s customers are aware of this already, but all they’re good at is fucking you over royally.
If you’re anything like me, and you’re on Windows, you’ve probably grabbed a decent Beta 2 build of Firefox 2 for your platform, and everything is nice and fast. But, let’s face it, cool people stick to Windows Classic, and every Firefox milestone to date has looked worse and worse on that theme. Beta 2 definitely isn’t an exception to that rule: it looks dreadful.
First off, a couple of notes on that screenshot. I don’t like the Home button, since I always use Alt+Home, so that’s why it’s not there. Also, I use Classic Menus for Winstripe to keep the menu bar from sucking, so the menu items are probably off by a couple of pixels. And, finally, pigfoot’s builds all use “Firefox Community Edition” as the window title, which I’m not that fond of, so I use Nightly Tester Tools to change it back to “Mozilla Firefox.”
If you tried to install any of those extensions, and Firefox complained about compatibility, you probably aren’t aware of the new about:config preference called extensions.checkCompatibility, which you can set to false to be able to install any addon without Firefox whining about the version problem—provided that it’s actually compatible, of course.
Now, back to the screenshot … Whether you’re a Master of Arts or not, you’ll probably agree that it’s still horrible, and, beta or not, personally, I don’t want my browser to look like that. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to clean up this mess. Don’t bother with the Winstripe package—it’s seriously flawed. Instead, you can just tamper with userChrome.css to apply some quick fixes. I used the DOM Inspector to discover the IDs and class names of the user interface elements that I wanted to mess with, so if your configuration is any different from mine, be sure to give that a whirl.
The first thing we’ll take care of is the ridiculously cramped toolbar buttons. After some experimenting, I found out that 5 pixels of padding above and below them looks much nicer, or at least more like the old Winstripe. So that gives us:.toolbarbutton-1 { padding: 5px 0 !important; }
Moving on, with the Go button. I’ve always hated that thing. I like how they’ve integrated it with the Location bar, but I still think it’s an utter waste of space, and I have yet to meet someone who won’t just press Enter instead. Now, while this is very likely to be fixed in an upcoming build, mine wouldn’t let me remove the Go button without taking the entire Location bar with it. It’s easily fixed though:#go-button { display: none !important; }
Now, if you apply those changes, Firefox’ll probably look pretty decent already. Personally, I wanted more space on the left and right of the Location bar. Adding 3 pixels on the left and 6 on the right gave me the nicest result:#urlbar-container { margin: 0 6px 0 3px !important; }
Obviously, YMMV, but, while I still miss Winstripe, the result could grow on me. And I didn’t like Winstripe at first either, so I’m sure I’ll adapt eventually.
As most of you are probably aware, Windows Live Messenger is supported by advertisements and there are several patches that allow you to remove those from the UI. Now, personally, I’m sort of opposed to those. The thought of unofficial binary patches isn’t very comforting to begin with, but I prefer to keep the ads there, since I’m willing to accept that maintaining a costless large-scale IM network can’t be done without substantial investment. Be that as it may, my ISP has a nasty habit of capping download speeds to a rather ludicrous 4 kilobytes per second, thus making downloading the ads a burden. If you suffer from a similar problem, there’s a fairly straightforward way of avoiding downloading the ads, without having to use another client or install shady software. All you need is a decent firewall. Personally, I’m a big fan of the freely available Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall. Its Packet Filter option allows you to restrict traffic per protocol, port and address. All you need to block Windows Live Messenger’s ads is an embargo on its HTTP traffic, since, as far as I can tell, that’s the only thing it uses HTTP for. That results in this packet filter rule, which seems to be working well for me so far. Of course, alternatively, you could use another software firewall—even ZoneAlarm, but trust me, it’s shit—or even a hardware-based solution, though that won’t give you fine-grained control over the source application, so you will have to figure out what destination address range it uses, and block that for all applications, which may be an inconvenience.
Update: When HTTP connections fail, Windows Live Messenger also removes a number of other features from the UI, such as the MSN Search shortcuts, dynamic display pictures, and stuff from people’s Spaces. I can only applaud that.
I’m way cooler than you because my education is so elitist, its designation won’t even fit on my student card: “Schakelprogramma tot de master in de industriële wetenschappen: informatica voor professionele bachelors in de toegepaste informatica en in de multimedia en communicatietechnologie.”
Following an investigation on my part, using relevant intelligence as well as VMware Server, I was able to resolve bug 1515692, thus bringing Safari support to everybody’s favorite quote manager—another step closer to version 0.3! Initially, I wanted to fix this bug using Swift, but, despite its great potential, it’s not exactly useful for debugging. Don’t get me wrong—I’m still no fan of Macs. Incidentally, the reason why the <canvas> wouldn’t display had several facets. The main problem was that the element had been created dynamically using DOM manipulation (i.e. document.createElement("canvas")) and then the graph was being painted before adding it to the DOM tree (via a cascade of appendChild() calls). Other than that, Safari doesn’t seem to care about the canvas element’s width and height attributes, so I set those using CSS. And, finally, it didn’t seem to like calling both fill() and stroke() after creating a path, so each slice of the pie chart now consists of two identical paths.
“Broken Flowers”: 6/10. You could call it “open to interpretation” or “thought-provoking,” but I wouldn’t give you my vote. It wouldn’t feel right if I gave a movie that doesn’t have any profoundness as such, intentional as it may be, a good rating. I mean, there’s plenty of stuff to think about without watching a movie. And if you’re going to get all explicitly philosophical all of a sudden, don’t go for a trite “The past is gone, the future isn’t here yet, so all we have is this.” Go back to your marijuana, hippie. Well, maybe I’m just missing the point. But this is my blog and my opinion.
“Brokeback Mountain”: 6/10. Yakkety-fucking-yak. That was some serious drivel. Pretty much as I expected, actually.
I wonder why MPL called me this morning without leaving a message. Well, I can imagine: they probably realized they neglected to send me a cable, and now they’re wondering if I want the €5 cable shipped to me at the low low rate of €10—yeah, I’ll pass, and I’d probably do the same if I hadn’t bought it elsewhere already. Another possibility is that they didn’t like the evoz I gave them in that post. In that case: how unfortunate.
Hurrah, my new man purse arrived! Rather surprisingly, actually. It’d been a week since I ordered it, and I had to call DHL about “irregularities” with the shipment this morning. After patching me through twice and telling me they couldn’t find my shipment in either of their systems, they asked me when I’d like it delivered tomorrow. Not that I’m complaining about getting it a day early, but I must say I’ve had far better experiences with UPS than with DHL. Though I’m guessing it’s just the Belgian division of DHL that’s ass, not the German one. I mean, seriously, who loses a shipment and then delivers it the same day? Not even at the right address, mind you: the neighbors came to drop it off. Oh, and those “irregularities” were just a delay in shipment in the end—the week’s wait instead of 2 to 3 days. It totally makes sense that it took me a 15-minute phone call to find that out. Well, anyway, I’m just glad I’ve finally got my bag.
