Find in Firefox frames

If – like me – you spend a lot of time browsing Javadocs (e.g. http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/) and/or Rails docs (e.g. http://api.rubyonrails.org/) and/or any other frames-based documentation, you may well have encountered a rather annoying feature of Firefox’s “find” functionality. Whenever you search (using Ctrl-F, or via Edit->Find) Firefox searches frames from left -> right, top -> bottom. i.e. it searches the top left frame first, followed by the middle left frame, followed by the bottom left, followed by the top right, middle right, etc. This can be very annoying if you want to search in a particular frame; you either have to open the frame itself in a new tab, or you have to Ctrl-G through all the unwanted results (like me, you’ll probably end up over-shooting, and cursing).

Anyway…there’s an extension that fixes this problem, “Find in Frame”:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1075

Having installed it … it appears to fix the problem. Will report any gotchas but … all looks good at the moment!

Find in Frame

Getting Amarok to play m4a (and others)

I installed amarok + gstreamer on linux:

sudo yum install amarok
sudo yum install gstreamer*

But had trouble getting amarok to play m4a files (from iTunes). The following fixed it:

sudo yum install amarok-extras-nonfree

I’m going to whisper it…

(because the media is full of apocalyptic predictions at the moment)

I think that the Irish government’s decision to guarantee all deposits held in Irish-regulated banks is essentially a massive bluff-calling exercise. They’re potentially exposed to losses of EUR 400 billion (although this theoretical maximum exposure would only be realised if the Irish banks’ assets turned out to have a combined value of zero euro – even with plummeting house prices, that won’t ever be the case!).

In the event of a total banking collapse, with all assets being worth zilch, the government would obviously never be able to pay out EUR 400 billion (amounting to EUR ~100,000 for every man, woman and child in the state!).

I can see why they’ve said it, and it’s (as far as I can see) quite sensible but…what they really mean is:

Well…we’ll try to guarantee your savings (or any loans that you might have made to the banks), but…y’know, if more than one bank goes under, we’re all fecked so don’t expect any more than a copper coin and the address of a soup kitchen (run by a chinese international aid agency).

firebug is back – but was never really gone

Firebug has become an indispensible part of web development, in particular wrt writing and testing client-side code. However, I’ve been at a loss for the last little while on account of the fact that when I upgraded to Firefox 3, the Plugins manager told me that Firebug wasn’t compatible with Firefox 3. Turns out it is though, you just need to go and download the more recent version manually.

A story that’s too good to ignore

Companies often complain that tax legislation is too complicated to understand, let alone implement.

The CAG published their yearly report detailing shortcomings in how public money has been spent. This quote comes from a report on RTE:

It noted the Revenue Commissioners made an undisclosed voluntary settlement with the Inspector of Taxes in November 2007. The settlement related to a liability of almost €1.7m in unpaid Benefit in Kind (BIK) by Revenue’s own staff.

The CAG observed the Revenue, in its capacity as employer, did not adequately consider the potential impact of the BIK legislation on its own operations.

Smile! It’s euroCHAPS

I’m not a currency speculator, but I do have a need to bulk-buy currency.

I’m in a slightly uncommon situation in that I get paid in GBP (£/Sterling) but I live in the eurozone. So…each month I have to transfer my wages (+ some other expenses) from the UK to Ireland. Hitherto, I have been using a specialist foreign exchange company. I won’t say specifically who they are, but they’re along the lines of http://www.moneycorp.com/, http://www.interchangefx.co.uk/. They give a much better exchange rate than you would get from the High St (Thomas Cook, The Post Office, etc.) and charge £10-20 for performing the transaction.

Recently, with currency rates bouncing around like jumping beans, I thought I’d double-check what rate my bank could offer. I will name them, as they’re the heroes of the story: Smile http://www.smile.co.uk/. They offer a service called “euroCHAPS”. My “foreign exchange specialist” offered me a (EUR/£) rate of 1.2220 (plus £20 fee). Smile offered 1.2370 (plus £25 fee).

I think the interbank rate was about 1.2450 at the time.

These numbers might not seem too different but trust me: half a cent this way of that way can cost me £50 or more per month.

I lose money every month, but…less with Smile.

(I’m hoping that this service is different to the one described in this article – otherwise…someone clearly hasn’t told Smile!)

Supermarkets are not “markets”

They’re effectively monopolies.

Often, those mourning the loss of the local butchers etc. seem to overlook the fact that having “everything under one roof” (supermarket-style) is hugely convenient.

What about actually having an out-of-town real market. i.e. lots of food retailers under one roof; a one-stop shop with real competition.

(Supermarkets should be forced to remove the word “market” from their names)

Eircom ipv6, linux, slow Firefox & Thunderbird

Have just installed Linux on another laptop (Fedora 9 on Lenovo Thinkpad T61).

It’s 10 times easier than it was to do a similar thing 4 years ago. Wireless card works, windows partitions are recognized, “yum” can pretty much install everything I need (even flash plugin for firefox).

One thing that – again – I had forgotten, having discovered it three years ago, is that – out of the box – Firefox and Thunderbird have ipv6 support switched on. Some might argue this is a good thing. I don’t know enough to comment. What I do know, though, is that for some reason, this causes an annoying delay of a few seconds when connecting to (respectively) websites and pop servers.

I don’t know enough to know whether this is a problem with Mozilla, Fedora, Eircom (our home ISP in Dublin), or my ADSL router. However, the solution is to disable ipv6 in both of these products.

In Firefox, navigate to “about:config”, and find the following property:

network.dns.disableIPv6

and set it to “true”.

In Thunderbird, go to “config editor” and amend the same property similarly.

Something I saw today

Today, in a town in Sussex, I saw a lady with a pram. In the pram was a dog. The lady was feeding fish and chips to the dog. Both seemed pretty happy with this arrangement.