Geek on Two Wheels

My good friend Allen over at antipode has recently decided to say a few words about the new Firefox 3 address bar.

I, for one, agree with him. I love it, and have gone to relatively great lengths to keep it.

An obvious rebuttal to the nay-sayers is that URLs don’t always share the same prefix as what is actually available at the address. And, although I’ve become trained to memorize the former instead of the latter, it always annoyed me that I had to.

gianttip? cad-c? apfo? No, what I want are “Order of the Stick“, “Ctrl-Alt-Del Comic“, and “One Piece Manga“.

In this day and age, I don’t want to care that the URL is moofs.com instead of moof.com, or .net, or actually baz.co.tv/content/random/moof—what I want is “Clarus the Dogcow“, and it’s about time computers started doing what we mean instead of what we say.

Old habits are hard to break, but there are some habits worth breaking. Should we all go back to driving flywheel-less manual transmission cars with no power steering, too? (Me, I prefer paddle shifters)

It’s also useful for bug squashing! (or, バグつぶし, as the locals would say*)

I have been using the beta releases of Firefox 3.0 for quite some time now, and have become very reliant on some of its new features. Beta 4, however, presented an interesting challenge: it refuses to start.

After failing miserably to locate the cause of the problem on Google, one lead finally lead me to a Japanese blog on Linux mentioning a problem with newer Firefox trunk builds having issues with uim. It was just a matter of another two hops through a Japanese Mozilla bug tracker to locate an upstream fix in uim.

An upgrade to uim-1.4.2 later, the Fox is up and jumping over lazy canines once again.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some One Piece to re-read.

*I have no idea if anyone actually says this.