Memos from November 2005

The Journey to Update Firefox from 1.0.7 to 1.5

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Just a few weeks ago, Mozil­la released Fire­fox 1.5 RC3. This seems to be the same as the final release. So, if you haven’t con­vert­ed yet (most­ly IE6 users) nor have tried out Fire­fox, now is the time.

Mozilla Firefox

I final­ly decid­ed to update my Fire­fox ver­sion from 1.0.7 to the newest 1.5. I will be imple­ment­ing this on my work PC as it has the most exten­sions installed. This should be inter­est­ing.

Here are the exten­sions:

  • Web Devel­op­er 0.9.4
  • Wizz RSS Read­er 1.1.0
  • gTrans­late 0.2.6 gTrans­late 0.2.7
  • ShowIP 0.7.11
  • Col­orZil­la 0.8.2 (New ver­sion: 0.8.3)
  • Grease­mon­key 0.5.3 Grease­mon­key 0.6.2
  • fireFTP 0.88.3
  • Site­bar Side­bar 1.02
  • Tab­brows­er Exten­sions 1.14.2005092501 (New ver­sion: 2.0.2005113001)
  • View Ren­dered Source Chart 1.2.03
  • Screen­Grab 0.6
  • HTML Val­ida­tor 0.7.6
  • Aut­ofill 0.2
  • IE Tab 1.0.5 (New ver­sion: 1.0.6.4)

Here goes noth­ing, or some­thing. To be con­tin­ued…

Updates
The striked-out exten­sions above were not­ed as incom­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 1.5. Fire­fox Update auto­mat­i­cal­ly “dis­abled [them] until com­pat­i­ble ver­sions are installed.” I then not­ed the newest, avail­able ver­sion of the exten­sion that is com­pat­i­ble with Fire­fox 1.5, as stat­ed by Fire­fox Update.

Also to note, I need­ed to update my theme “Noia 2.0 (extreme)” as it was caus­ing a dis­play bug on the URL-address bar. This went from 2.88 to 2.991 and appar­ent­ly fixed the dis­play issue. This took a while to fig­ure out. Maybe in the future, Moz-dev team can have a note to check one’s theme if there are any dis­play issues being encoun­tered.

All in all, the update went quite well. It seems that Fire­fox 1.5 loads a tad faster than its pre­de­ces­sor. I’m just bummed about not hav­ing some exten­sions: Site­bar Side­bar (which is my links depos­i­to­ry) and Grease­mon­key (which is one of the best exten­sions to have for a Fire­fox user).

Note: Grease­mon­key 0.6.2 seems to be hav­ing bug issues at the moment. Peo­ple have been address­ing this issue, so there should be a fix soon. It’s prob­a­bly going to roll out with ver­sion 0.6.4 of the exten­sion.

Try Ruby!

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No, not the stone. I’m refer­ring to the pro­gram­ming lan­guage.

Ruby is the inter­pret­ed script­ing lan­guage for quick and easy object-ori­ent­ed pro­gram­ming. It has many fea­tures to process text files and to do sys­tem man­age­ment tasks (as in Perl). It is sim­ple, straight-for­ward, exten­si­ble, and portable.

Any­ways, here’s a nice inter­ac­tive demo on what Ruby can do. Good job whytheluck­ys­tiff on this project. Very enter­taint­ing. I’m sure this will open some eyes and get some peo­ple to learn more about it.

Note: For those non-tech­ni­cal peo­ple, don’t be scared to try the demo. It’s clear enough to fol­low. Just read the tips below the com­mand-prompt area and you should be good to go.

Home for Thanksgiving

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Being home for the hol­i­days is a good thing. Going home on a 6:40am flight is not so good. Espe­cial­ly if you do not want to pay $25 for a cab to the air­port, and want to just get a free ride from a room­mate that goes to work at 4:30am like me.

Maybe its just poor plan­ning on my part last night. I tried to clean up my room as much as I can when I got home from the city, as well as do laun­dry. I also tried knock­ing out some easy tasks for work since I’ll be OOTO (out of the office) till Tues­day next week. I think I fin­ished clean­ing and pack­ing my lug­gage around 2am. So by that, I only slept 2–2.5 hours and got up at 4:15am to get ready to leave with Big­gy for the air­port.

It was get­ting busy when I arrived and lined up on the secu­ri­ty check line. I was for­tu­nate enough to get in group‑B for South­west. I think I was the third per­son on that line. The thing with that is, or at least being alone on a flight, would prob­a­bly be not hav­ing a bud­dy to watch your stuff when you go to the restroom.

Any­ways, the fligh was on sched­ule for a 6:40am depar­ture out of Oak­land. We arrived in Bur­bank right on time, 7:50am. Got picked up by my broth­er in his tweaked Civic Hatch­back ’95. It freak­ing only had two seats. The rest of the inside was pret­ty much the frame. Some­times, I don’t know how he thinks. Then again, it’s his car.

Mean­while, the ride home was bumpy. Dropped cars ain’t real­ly your typ­i­cal smooth ride. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good for rac­ing but com­mon… when was the last time you’ve been on a real rac­ing cir­cuit? So yah, got home a bit before 10am after eat­ing some break­fast. I real­ly want­ed to do stuff and not just sit at home. But alas, 2 hours of sleep ain’t going to get things the way you want­ed to. And all I can remem­ber was turn­ing off the TV, pulling the sheet over me and wak­ing up at 3pm.

So, here I am: check­ing email; look­ing at my fan­ta­sy foot­ball and bas­ket­ball leagues; and wait­ing for my mom and aunt to get home so we can do some­thing. We’ll prob­a­bly just end up eat­ing (as usu­al) and chill at home. But we’ll see, a 5 hour “nap” real­ly does some weird stuff to peo­ple’s body and clock. Maybe the movies?

Alas, hap­py Thanksgiving/Turkey Day every­one. Den­ver at Dal­las seems like a good game to watch for NFL this Thurs­day. That should keep you enter­tained after/before you hov­er all that deli­cious food. “Eat, drink and be mer­ry” as Dave would say. Go Turkey!

H&M San Francisco, Just Your Average Opening?

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/stechico/64822899/


H&M SF Grand Open­ing by stechico.

Talk about your reg­u­lar Sat­ur­day morn­ing… I went to the city to hang out with some peeps and roll to the H&M Grand Open­ing (150 Pow­ell St.). I got to Pow­ell St. ter­mi­nal via BART around 9:45am. As you walk up the hill, you can already see the chaos. Hun­dreds were already lined up antic­i­pat­ing the store’s rib­bons to be cut.

The cops, heli­copters and secu­ri­ty guards were out in force to keep an eye on things, and keep order. It was no sur­prise that this thing was a great Grand Open­ing. H&M did a won­der­ful job spread­ing the word about their first instal­la­tions on the west coast.

They kept the crowd (lined up around the block, lit­er­al­ly) in order by hav­ing secu­ri­ty guards act as “line mon­i­tors” perse. This gave cut­ters the wrong idea, and kept things fair for every­one who have been wait­ing there for a long time. I over­heard peo­ple say­ing that the aver­age wait was 1–2 hours dur­ing the morn­ing. That’s just too crazy.

So, I skipped that morn­ing fias­co and head­ed over to grab some brunch at King of Thai (aka. King Thai, or Pur­ple Thai between my cowork­ers and I). After get­ting some chick­en satay, hop­ing over to the dif­fer­ent stores in the area and some refresh­ments, we head­ed over to the H&M line.

The time is now 2:30pm. It was­n’t as bad as the secu­ri­ty guard said it was about a 10 minute wait now. But low and behold, we got in the store in less than 5 min­utes. The inside, well… that’s anoth­er sto­ry.

It was just com­plete pan­de­mo­ni­um. Imag­ine shop­ping dur­ing Christ­mas Eve, only in Novem­ber. It was freak­ing hot, humid and stuffy. It felt like Sum­mer time all over again.

Mean­while, after an hour of brows­ing the men’s sec­tion, I came up emp­ty hand­ed. Noth­ing real­ly caught my eye, except for some nice suits that were just not jus­ti­fi­able for me to get at the moment. I haven’t even worn one since Liz & Joel’s Wed­ding two weeks ago, and dur­ing my inter­views back in Feb­ru­ary-March.

Any­ways, I fig­ured that every­one who shopped today at H&M would prob­a­bly be wear­ing the same clothes this week. That’s just gonna be hilar­i­ous. So for those who work and live in/near the city, be on a look out for peo­ple wear­ing the same H&M cloth­ing next to each oth­er. Take a pho­to if you can. HA!