bunnyblog

I have one Gang of Four song in my entire collection and it got played eight times last night on random. I don’t trust media players whose authors couldn’t even write a decent random function.

So I’m now using musikCube for my audio. Not perfect, but good enough. And good enough is where it’s at.

Weaned myself off GetRight for the time being, but I’ll see how the alternative stands up to further abuse before uninstalling.

Assuming I can live with it, that leaves Free Download Manager and TUGzip as the only non-frees. Impressed.

Someone desperately needs to make WordPress work properly in wysiwyg. i.e., actual what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Your home page has a "post" button. You click it and start typing on the page. No admin mode. And a bold mode which doesn’t bring up my fucking bookmarks with the shortcut. is it that difficult to trap keyboard presses?

Crossposted here because I really want to actually start using this bloody thing for something.

New Opera’s out.

1. The installer doesn’t use XP-styled widgets. This is trivial to fix.
2. The installer asks whether to use profiles, rather than just using them. This is extremely useful if you want to read your brother’s passwords, but not really otherwise.
3. The UI defaults to a non-native theme. Widgets in this theme have different hover effects. The scrollbar, for instance, turns blazing yellow the instant you hover over it. Buttons, on the other hand, have a fade-in grey highlight which takes about 500ms to animate.
4. The default UI, on the other hand, is sane. For the first time ever. It’s ready to start using without looking for a way to turn off half of the UI. Thanks.

5. New “pages” default to being blank, with some nifty toolbar hanging under the location bar whose purpose appears to be to bring up your home page. I don’t understand why this is more efficient than choosing the home page automatically. This toolbar also includes two additional search bars for Amazon and “price comparison”.

   I assume it’s a bug, but clicking “home” didn’t actually go to the page the first time I did it. it just filled in the URL. This leads to another problem, which is that there’s no “go” button and therefore no way to visit a URL that’s already in the URL bar without using the keyboard.

6. Search bars include text by default to make their purpose clear. This makes selection of the box slower because the user must remember that the text disappears on focus, rather than having to be deleted.
7. There’s a little button on the right-hand side of the default search bar which I had assumed was a “go” button for the search field. It is not. It is a toolbar toggle. It brings up a Find Toolbar with no glaringly obvious inspiration. This toolbar includes some other random prefs which have presumably been orphaned here for zooming the page or turning on “user mode”, which is presumably documented somewhere.
8. The “voice” button on this toolbar prompts the user to download a 10MB setup file. This is three times the size of the browser setup file. Once this file has been downloaded, the progress bar disappears. Clicking the “voice” button again, to find out what happened, leads to Microsoft Sam explaining that “Sorry, I did not understand”.
9. It is heroic that we’re at point nine before I go to look for a way to turn the theme off. Cheers boys. It isn’t under “View”, where it used to be (but I’d quite happily sacrifice backwards compatibility in the case of Opera’s UI). It’s under Tools -> Appearance. Windows Native is the only other “skin” to choose – it doesn’t have different buttons, but it makes Opera use normal Windows XP widgets. Unticking the box for “use special effects” removes the 500ms fade-in from the toolbar buttons.
10. Context menus under the “Windows default” theme use a fade-in which is not controlled by one’s Windows menu preferences. The toolbars themselves, like Firefox’s, are spaced for Windows 95 and not Windows XP, which makes individual items harder to hit and makes the menus look more cluttered than they are with icons present. Back when Opera’s menus contained 175 items each this was an advantage, but now it is not.
11. The “trash” button at the end of the tab bar allows one to retrieve pages they’ve visited recently. I’ve already used it more times than I’ve ever used Mozilla’s Go menu. I want this.
12. Opera’s “portal” page, which is the default home page in Opera, appears to have been designed to fit exactly into Opera’s viewport on a 1024×768 screen without scrolling. That is, if you disable the tab bar. This page has an interesting radio button named “news” which, when toggled, eradicated half of the page content. I marvel at Opera’s ability to include crazy new widgets which do unexpected things, even on their web pages.
13. I accidentally forgot not to use a mouse gesture to go back, and Opera alerted me to this. To be honest I was pleasantly surprised, but I’m a CS graduate who spends his whole day in a web browser. I’m not sure popping up a modal dialogue box is the best idea for a gesture which is quite easy to do accidentally.
14. New Page and New Window have a menu item each. New Page brings up a new tab, and although I mentioned it earlier, I should really note here that in the “desktop” metaphor, it is windows which are meant to be pages. Pages should be renamed. “Resizable tabs” is better than breaking “pages”.
15. When I hit New Window, I wasn’t sure what had happened. It appeared that the current tab had gone blank. This is because when Opera creates a new window in maximised mode, it does so instantaneously (I mean, faster than Notepad). Mozilla has the same bug, but because window creation is so slow it’s pretty clear what has happened. This bug exists because web browsers are the only document viewers with a “new” function. In editing applications, “new” closes the current document and opens a blank one in its place.
16. Opera’s back-forward time is truly instant. I’m crossing my fingers for the DOM caching work to get into Gecko 1.9.
17. File -> Import and Export is cruft from O7. I am never, ever going to import bookmarks from Konqueror on Windows. Neither is a living soul on Earth.
18. The Customise Toolbar dialogue is still extremely complicated. If Opera has a rich customisation file which can be used to do all of this, it should be left in there. All I want to do is have small icons with text on. I have to learn a whole panel to do this thing. Icon size is still global, which makes no sense when all other options are toolbar-specific (as I’d like to have large nav buttons and small non-nav buttons).
19. View -> Encoding is better than Firefox’s. There’s some way-overdue lovin’ needed there.
20. Manage Bookmarks opens in a tab rather than a dialogue. This is just a bad idea, basically. So do several items on Tools, but not Appearance or Preferences, or Advanced -> Cookies. Cookies opens a modal dialogue whose buttons are not “OK” and “Cancel”, but “Cancel” and “Help”. Help opens a new window, which I could swear I have been told by several million Opera users should never happen without explicit instruction.Advanced -> Plugins (and Cache) is even better. it overwrites the current tab.
21. One must click at least twice in the URL bar to select part of a URL if it not already focussed. Firefox allows partial selection of an unfocussed URL.

22. Random compatibility: My installed Flash works out of the box. Java is iffy: Opera has an “Opera Java Console” which I can only assume is the same as the Sun one. Viewing my webcam crashes Opera. Attempting to view my styled RSS feed results in Opers popping up an error box with a silly message in it (“the address type is unknown or unsupported”) because it’s a feed: link. I’d expected Opera to ask if it could be my RSS reader, not to error on me.

    Viewing the actual feed resulted in two things; firstly, rather than the nifty styled feed you the viewer just got in Mozilla, I get three pages of raw ASCII in Times New Roman because Opera doesn’t do XLST. I also get a (modal) dialogue box asking if I want to subscribe to the feed, which opens a new window. Again.

23. Having just restarted from a crash, Opera lost all my prefs. This is possibly because I chose “no” on the session saver panel, because I didn’t know what that meant. It also asked me if I want it to be the default browser this time, which it didn’t the first.
24. Help and About also overwrite the current tab. Dataloss is fun!
25. No UK English. Bah.

Prefs can wait.

Wasting too much time at the minute. Need to stop doing that. The new template is spiffy. Werry nearly what I want for the site in the lang run, which is nice, even if I’m going to look a bit generic.

Mozilla doesn’t support active FTP and FileZilla doesn’t like local connections using passive. Sigh.

[edit: filezilla working now. w-oo. ]

Firstly, I should Google “HUD”. Or Wiki it. (I’m so verbing that.)

Secondly, Wordpress 1.3 looking pretty cool. Have to sort this font though. It’s too curly for me.

I should have been updating this! I’ve probably forgotten stuff. Oh well. Let’s see…

Cute girl has a name. Lindsay Vicky. Woo. Nice accent too.
I am sooo floorwalker material already.
Loads of norks NORKS at work. Excellent.

(Ecsellent must be used.)

Emma is now saying “gads” about John. And the world returns to normal.

No money, no hair, no girlfriend. Merry Christmas!

It’s odd that the webcam capture thingy didn’t come on this time. Usually does when I come off hibernate.

EK was cool. Nice place and Craig (my Buddy) is pretty cool too. Couple of fitties in as well, not that I noticed. Went out after work with Paul and johnboy, whipped everyone at pool (my potting was just shIIIIte but I got a couple of exceptionally good tricks, thus looking ace) and then hit Living (first time. Quite cool. Night called Firefox on Friday. I have to go, on principle) before hitting Maohdaoh (I’m allowed to fancy Mel) and getting free drinks from Ants, watching mr Smith putting seventy moneys into the puggy and leaving.

I’m becoming more and more addicted to ms Boyle. The girl would get it thoroughly, and if low self-esteem really is her problem then I know exactly the cure. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s making chicks think they’re better than they really are.

In far too late. Need bed soon. These sausage rolls are the fucking MUTT’S NUTS. Life is ace. Minus the shagging. If I had Emma (fingers not crossed, thoughts out of mind, not thingy line from Fitter Happier) then life may just be better than ever. I’m sure she is actually interesting once you get beyond the cuteness, fitness, awesome dress sense, lovely accent and laugh I could listen to all day. Did I mention her shockingly lovely eyes?

Fuck’s sake.

Right, I am not not not subclubbing tomorrow as consolation. That would be a waste of time. Tomorrow will be spent giving the flat a proper tidy and putting my clotheses away.

Bloggar’s spellchecker is appalling by the way. Might as well just beep or something.

Having said that, I love this song. Music will save me.

So, I hacked up this. I’m so proud.