kudos to ViewSonic!

Mom just purchased a P95F+ from Securemart.com. It showed up in one piece, but DOA. This is the second order I've placed with securemart..the first order went without a hitch.

SecureMart has a return policy exemption for ViewSonic (and a few other mfgs) that prevents them from handing the case. They were not particularly helpful when mom first contacted them, but they did promptly get me a copy of the invoice to include with the fax to ViewSonic.

I had to contact VS directly. After 23 minutes and 34 seconds on hold I spoke to Mike. Mike was very helpful and immediately suggested that we use their advance replacement method. Using this method VS pays return shipping (sending a return label with the new monitor), saving us another $40-50.

He emailed me a .pdf, which I filled out and faxed back. As soon as the new unit ships he'll also send me a tracking number.

Excellent service (even if the hold time was a bit long), thanks ViewSonic!

fixing mozilla/firefox shortcuts

[update] The "Mozilla Suite" is now called "Mozilla Seamonkey"...and at least with Seamonkey 1.0a (mozilla rev 1.8b4) the res/builtin directory and all of it's .xml content is GONE. So this hack no longer works.

Looks like they rolled [all of?] res/builtin into chrome/toolkit.jar.

I don't know yet what it takes to unpack and repack the jar file....but might be able to get by using an editor that can safely edit binary files.

Ok, rumor has it that .jar files use traditional zip compression. So copy the chrome/toolkit.jar to a working directory, then unzip toolkit.jar

cd content/global and edit or replace the platformHTMLBindings.xml

Now cd ../.. and zip -r toolkit.jar content

Copy the toolkit.jar back to your chrome/ directory, restart your browser, and it should work! :)

[/update]

[edit] Turns out this hack /doesn't/ carry through to the new File dialogs.. [/edit]

As of some point in the mozilla 1.8 development cycle (between 1.8a2 and 1.8a5) , the mozilla/firefox developers decided to REMOVE the previously-supported EMACS style editing shortcuts for text boxes (and the address bar). This also affects Firefox builds based on this tree.

For Windows users this mostly moot...but for OSX or UN*X users who've been using these shortcuts in the browser since Netscape v1.something this is a rather drastic change.

Bugzilla is as usual a bit unwieldy tracking these down, but here's one version:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260572

A workaround can be found here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Emacs_Keybindings_(Firefox)


Note that Mozilla/Firefox devs now think that Firefox and Mozilla are GNOME applications.....absurd.

Anyway. No notice was made in any of the 1.8a5 release notes regarding this change.....and various pieces of documentation still suggest that these shortcuts are supported:

http://www.mozilla.org/access/keyboard/


The workaround essentially replaces res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml with the old version that contains the emacs shortcuts. I've provided a copy here:

platformHTMLBindings.xml-with-emacs.txt

So far this works as expected, with EMACS shortcuts overriding Mozilla/Firefox shortcuts in text boxes.

For the search engines when they get here: Ctrl+U, Control U, Ctrl+A, Control A

a new interface

today i replaced the old horribly ugly icantclick.org front page with this blog. I'm fiddling with it (it's from blogspot.com aka google)..eventually I'll install something local and maybe more flexible. In the meantime this is better then what was here. ;)

If you're looking for the gallery, the link is on the left!