last.fm is off the rails

pop up ads on window close? really guys? When you sold out I knew you were gonna sell out, but this is getting ridiculous. and fast.

what's with this browser skins trend?

Seriously. Chrome does it. Firefox does it. These aren't like themes, where you change the text size and color scheme to better suit your eyes. These fill up every available surface with images, usually of a product or women, and make the browser less usable.

It was stupid when winamp did it in 1995. What makes us think it's not stupid now?

Shit, chrome mac barely even works yet*, and yet they have skins going?

*started typing this in chrome mac and had to copy it to FF because it wouldn't save. the html was all screwed up when it got here too.

oh, awesome (bar)

As I mentioned a bit ago, I had all but stopped using Firefox recently. Now that I'm back, I'm struck again by how awesome the awesome-bar is.

During my time away I was using chrome and safari as my primary browsers. They have bars, but they are not even half as awesome. In fact, they are merely adequate. They are adequate-bars. Firefox still wins this one, hands down.

i can use firefox again!

So I've been complaining constantly that firefox is slow. But why is firefox slow? Apparently because it uses SQLite. The evidence is that a quick vacuum, as described by lifehacker, just made a noticeably huge improvement on startup time and interface responsiveness. Using FF isn't painful anymore.

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/
browser/nav-history-service;1"].
getService(Components.interfaces.
nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.
executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

This is great and all, but why do I have to do this again? Shouldn't firefox be able to tell when it's database is crufty, and run the vacuum itself? PgAdmin is quick to tell you when a postgres table needs a cleaning, and it's crap.

Come on Mozilla, this is huge. Huger than any new feature you're currently working on. Until today I was actively avoiding firefox for all but essential tasks. And this is me, the guy that was sad when Mozilla didn't hire him, but still kept telling everybody to use firefox. I haven't told anybody that for a while.

Firefox has always been a tinkerer's browser. It's gotten a lot more polish over the last couple of years, to where you start to think of it as mainstream. But as long as you have to know how the guts work to keep it going, it'll continue to be the linux of browsers.

Holy crap, it's nice out

It makes me happy. Just wish i brought a good camera

i broke my own rule, now i'm paying for it

[warning: rant]

I used apple software, other than the base OS. It's always a mistake. I know this.

And then, for some reason which I can't fathom, when I clicked on a flickr folder in iphoto it had some sort of trouble with the sync or something. Ok, so shit happens right? But knowing that there were a bunch of photos in there, and knowing that I took no action it thought that it should go ahead and modify the contents on the server to match it's own, wrong, internal state. Without asking it deleted most of the photos from the flickr set; a permanent, irrevocable action. I have the photos locally, but any comments or conversations are now gone forever*.

This is obviously inexcusable. I only have myself to blame, because I know better. Apple software should never, ever be relied on for anything you actually care about. But it was just so easy… Yes, I only have myself to blame, but I still blame apple. Windows 7 just keeps looking better and better.

*because flickr is run by chumps who can't be bothered to put a ui in to flip the 'deleted flag' back to false. You know they've had the backend for it since the beginning because a free->pro upgrade undeletes anything that falls off the bottom of your free 200 (or however many it is these days)