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.

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.