June 20, 2005
Foxes (no fire).
About a month ago me and my girlfriend (who's now my fiance!) went on vacation to Hawaii (Kona) for a week. When we got back we had my fiance's family over for dinner. All of a sudden, in the middle of our dinner, we see a fox sit down right by our window. We've never seen a fox where we live before (out in the boonies, in a really cool canyon in Castro Valley, CA), and now we've got one sitting about 5' from our dining room window. It's got a dead rat in its mouth... it wonders around a bit, then drops the rat by our patio. Seconds later, a baby fox appears from underneath our patio. And then one more, and one more... there's 5 babies total! They come out to feed on what mom just brought home, right in front of us!
Since that day, we had the fortune of getting to watch these little foxes run around in our yard every day for 3 weeks, until they apparently moved elsewhere on Sunday a week ago. I hope they're doing well. They were so darn cute!
In the end it's fortunate that they did leave since we've got a wedding to prepare for, and the patio in our yard (along with lots of other things on our property) is going to be completely redone. The patio that was our little foxes' home is already completely gone.
More photos available here.
Posted by jst at 11:09 PM | Comments (5)
Killing more popups
Popups suck. We all know that. They make the user experience for the site that spews them at you far short of ideal. For a while there the web was a pretty calm place as far as popups go, but site developers (or abusers, really) got smarter and they figured out how to get past the popup blocker in Firefox 1.0 (and some other browsers too). The calmness is slowly but surely fading.
One of the easier and more common approaches for getting around the popup blockers is use a plugin to open the popup. Solving this problem in the browser across platforms is next to impossible. However, it's sort of solvable on Win32 and the Mac. The real fix needs to be a combined effort between the browsers and the plugins, the browsers need to disable popups from plugin content, unless the plugin says it's ok to open popups. To do this, the browser and the plugin needs to be able to communicate about this, and that's now possible in recent Deer Park nightlies. But for this new communication to happen the plugin needs to support it, and that means the user needs a new plugin and getting new versions of a plugin out to all Firefox users takes a long time. So we need an interim fix as well. The interim fix is to disable popups from plugins by default (which users have been able to do since Firefox 1.0) and to make an attempt permitting popups from plugins when the user interacts with the plugin content where possible (i.e. Win32 and Mac). This leaves Linux users sort of out in the dark, and that's unfortunate, but given the relatively small number of Linux users and the really small number of pages that open valid popups from plugins (I know of exactly 0 such pages) it seems like a reasonable overall approach until updated plugins are available.
That's now all done. If you want to help test this out, get a nightly Deer Park Alpha build and go to all pages you know of that open popups from plugin content, either wanted or unwanted ones (i.e. ones that show up just because you load the page, or ones that show up when you click a button in a flash animation or whatever).
Posted by jst at 10:29 PM | Comments (11)
My First Blogpost!
Yeah, I'm new to this. I've been meaning to start a blog since the beginning of time, it just hasn't happened, until now! The next big challenge will be to actually start posting.
Many thanks to Asa for encouraging me to get off my butt and email Jason (who btw is a great guy, not just for setting up this blog for me) and ask him to set up a blog for me. Thanks! :)
Posted by jst at 10:16 PM | Comments (2)