A Random Pattern

Archive for the 'firefox' Category

Performancing and Myspace get together

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Performancing adds a MySpace Blog Editor – Who’da’thunk’it? On one hand, I’m thinking “yay Performancing“, great plugin, want to see them get more traction. On the other hand I’m seriously not too pleased with MySpace, and don’t want to see them get any bigger than they already are. On the third hand, this plugin may be one step needed to break the MySpace dominance…

Let me explain a little:

1. I didn’t understand MySpace at all, but I got a page anyways because two of my favorite bands were on there, Unsed and .heretoday.

2. I discovered there was no way to remove the ‘astrological sign’ junk on my main MySpace page. That’s just plain lousy and lame. On top of that, “TrueLuv” ads with scantily-clad women pulling at their skirts shows up every time I log in. You have no idea how much that ticks me off.
3. I discovered a few other people in my circle of friends, and since I had moved MySpace is the only way I would be able to keep in touch with them.

4. We had the neighbors over for dinner, and their son has a MySpace page. We discussed MySpace, because I still wasn’t getting why it was popular. Then it hit me as we talked – kids don’t care about any of the stuff I complain about. They just want to keep in touch with people, be cool, have friends.

The more I think about it, the more MySpace’s success makes sense. And it’s a little scary, because I don’t think the site is healthy – I think it’s a trap for our kids. Not that good can’t come of it, just that it facilitates evil far too easily.

But MySpace’s lead won’t be easily overcome. There’s no easy way to catch up with a friend network like that…

Firefox display issues on a Mac

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Fellow (Firefox) geeks, I need your help. I’m in way over my head here.

Although I’ve been blogging about Ubuntu, and am quite happy learning and using it, we also recently got a Mac Mini. My wife would be fine using it, except for one critical thing: one website doesn’t display pictures on Firefox on the Mac.

Tonight, I got around to digging into it more, and also used some tools that I know very little about. :D The site (and an example page) is www.babycenter.com boards. First I ran the Javascript Console, and discovered the site throws a ton of errors. The errors seemed to be similar and similar in number on both the Mac and Windows. I didn’t look too much into these, as I wouldn’t know what to do next anyways.

So I opened the DOM Inspector and inspected a specific item I knew was failing on the Mac. I looked at the first picture of our kitchen that my wife had posted, and happened to discover that “Moz-binding” was “none” on the Mac Firefox, but had the proper image address on Windows. If anyone can tell me where to go from here, or what this means, I’d appreciate it as I would like this to work.

I did discover that the same page works ‘properly’ in Safari, as well as in Ubuntu Firefox. So who do I feed this back to? Is there a fix possible? And what, exactly, did I find out (or not find out)? :)

UPDATE:  My wife says that the page displays fine on my Mac login, just not on hers.  I first installed Firefox on my account, so maybe that has something to do with it?  I don’t really know too much about how the Mac user accounts work as far as sharing applications.  Can anyone shed any light on this?