Firebug 1.4 Activation Model
I use Gentoo Linux with KDE for my development box at my day job. Gentoo is pretty good about keeping their package repository as close to matching what’s stable upstream as they can, but Firefox 3.5.x took a good long while to be marked stable and consequently, I was running Firebug 1.3 until just recently.
Upon upgrading, I spent a couple days being pretty annoyed by it’s new “simplified” activation model. Each dev has a subdomain for a development site, but our issue tracker and wiki is also on a subdomain causing firebug to automatically activate itself for the wiki or tracker anytime I had activated it for a development site. My google-fu must have been weak because I couldn’t find a good solution to the problem. Only frustrated people.
I stumbled upon the answer today: Activate Same Origin URLs under Tools > Firebug > Options. Unchecking it restored my sanity.
And it begins…
I couldn’t think of a clever title for the re-launch of the site, but suffice it to say that the crappy WordPress template is gone, replaced by a slightly less crappy template of my own design. The header image was taken by a friend of mine, and is a shot of the sunset over the Izembek Lagoon [map]. Alaska is truly a unique place, and I can’t recommend strongly enough that people visit there someday, should they get the chance.
That said, the style of the blog doesn’t really have a whole lot of meaning to convey (graphic designers everywhere just felt a disturbance in the Force). I intend, over the next several months, to write a series of articles about developing software: both things that are well-defined, as well as processes that are lacking. My experience in some areas may be a bit scarce, but undoubtedly writing about something is a fantastic way to learn, and as software developers, if we’re not constantly learning, we’re gradually becoming obsolete.
I’ll close with a note about the blog title: Fractions of a Penny. It’s an allusion to the cult classic, Office Space. One of the characters, Michael Bolton, a scrawny Software Engineer commits a fatal mistake, and in a moment of utter regret, offers the following:
Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place
or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane
detail.
That single quote sums up so much about software development today, 10 years later! It’s to that end that I hope to use this blog as a sort of mental unloading place to keep some of the more valuable things I learn about design, architecture, testing, and deployment.
Stay tuned.