dolphinling’s weblog

I’ve been browsing with popup blocking turned off for the past I’m-not-sure-how-long, and I didn’t even notice it.

Of course, I got popups. I got them, but they were few and far between, and I assumed they were from that stupid flash advertiser workaround thing from a while ago. There weren’t enough of them to make me stop and notice and do anything except just hit X. If there had been more, I probably would have thought about it and remembered that had been fixed. If there had been more, I probably would have checked my preferences. Instead, it wasn’t until I was on bugzilla triaging a bug about popup blocking, and went to a popup test site, that I noticed it was off.

So what does this mean for the web? Are there now few enough sites using popups that it’s actually livable? Have they all moved on to other forms of advertising? Is this why my spam filter suddenly dropped to 50% success today? Should I continue browsing with the popup blocker off, secure in the knowledge that they have weakened to a very minor annoyance? All provocative questions that perhaps should be researched.

Of course, it probably helps that I normally browse with javascript off. :-P

Apparently Wordpress breaks (outputs invalid (X)HTML) on <pre>x(newline)(newline)x</pre>, which I can’t show properly because then it would break (darn catch-22s…). And I can’t find the option to turn off auto-formatting and let me just type what I mean. So my last post is slightly semantically incorrect: instead of putting it all in one <pre> like I should have, it’s in several separate ones.

dolphinlingx root # emerge --ask --deep --update world

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating world dependencies ...done!
[ebuild     U ] sys-libs/ncurses-5.4-r6 [5.4-r5]
[ebuild     U ] sys-apps/grep-2.5.1-r7 [2.5.1-r6]
[ebuild     U ] sys-devel/libtool-1.5.16 [1.5.14]
[ebuild     U ] x11-terms/xterm-201 [200-r1]
[ebuild     U ] media-libs/libsdl-1.2.8-r1 [1.2.7-r3]
[ebuild     U ] dev-libs/atk-1.8.0-r1 [1.8.0]
[ebuild     U ] dev-libs/libxml2-2.6.17 [2.6.16]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/libglade-2.4.2 [2.4.0]
[ebuild     U ] dev-libs/libIDL-0.8.5 [0.8.4]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/orbit-2.12.1 [2.12.0]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/libbonobo-2.8.1 [2.8.0]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/libgnome-2.8.1 [2.8.0]
[ebuild     U ] media-libs/libart_lgpl-2.3.17 [2.3.16]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/libbonoboui-2.8.1 [2.8.0]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/gnome-keyring-0.4.1 [0.4.0]
[ebuild     U ] x11-themes/gnome-themes-2.8.2 [2.8.1]
[ebuild     U ] app-editors/gedit-2.8.3 [2.8.2]
[ebuild     U ] x11-libs/startup-notification-0.8 [0.7]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/gnome-desktop-2.8.3 [2.8.1]
[ebuild     U ] media-libs/gstreamer-0.8.9-r3 [0.8.8]
[ebuild     U ] media-libs/gst-plugins-0.8.8 [0.8.7]
[ebuild     U ] media-plugins/gst-plugins-vorbis-0.8.8 [0.8.7]
[ebuild     U ] media-plugins/gst-plugins-alsa-0.8.8 [0.8.7-r1]
[ebuild     U ] media-plugins/gst-plugins-esd-0.8.8 [0.8.7]
[ebuild     U ] media-plugins/gst-plugins-ogg-0.8.8 [0.8.7]
[ebuild     U ] media-plugins/gst-plugins-mad-0.8.8 [0.8.7]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/libgtop-2.8.3 [2.8.2]
[ebuild     U ] x11-libs/libwnck-2.8.1-r1 [2.8.1]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/gnome-panel-2.8.3 [2.8.2]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-extra/gcalctool-4.4.22 [4.4.20]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-extra/gal-2.2.5 [2.2.4]
[ebuild     U ] x11-wm/metacity-2.8.13 [2.8.8]
[ebuild     U ] net-libs/libsoup-2.2.2 [2.2.1]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-extra/evolution-data-server-1.0.4 [1.0.3]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/control-center-2.8.2 [2.8.1-r1]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-extra/gnome-system-monitor-2.8.3 [2.8.1-r1]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-extra/libgtkhtml-3.2.5 [3.2.4]
[ebuild     U ] mail-client/evolution-2.0.4 [2.0.3-r2]
[ebuild     U ] app-arch/file-roller-2.8.4 [2.8.3]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-base/gdm-2.6.0.7 [2.6.0.6]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-extra/nautilus-cd-burner-2.8.7 [2.8.6]
[ebuild     U ] app-text/gpdf-2.8.3 [2.8.2]
[ebuild     U ] app-text/ggv-2.8.3 [2.8.1]
[ebuild     U ] gnome-extra/gnome-games-2.8.3 [2.8.2]
[ebuild     U ] www-client/epiphany-1.4.8 [1.4.6]
[ebuild     U ] dev-perl/DBI-1.46 [1.38-r1]
[ebuild     U ] dev-perl/DBD-mysql-2.9003 [2.1027]
[ebuild     U ] games-strategy/wesnoth-0.9.1 [0.9.0]

Do you want me to merge these packages? [Yes/No]

Holy cow that’s a lot of updates. I swear I just synced yesterday morning, too.

Here’s an idea. When someone finally gets around to implementing logout/etc. functionality in HTTP authentication, why not put the username in a little box at the right of the address bar, like where the lock is for secure sites. Not only would this be nice and usable, but it would also help stop phishing attacks of the form http://www.examplebank.com@evilsite.net/, since the username part, www.examplebank.com, would be moved away from the normal address and be visually distinct.

Edit: posted this on my website, with a nice, pretty mock-up.

After a long stint at 0, my PageRank is suddenly 5. And yet Google shows no more pages linking to me than it did before. What’s up with that?

My site’s top level home page (http://dolphinling.net/) also has a pagerank of 5, and it only links here, so that might explain it… but how did it get that high? It’s only got 6 things linking to it (other than my weblog): 1 post on Daniel Glazman’s weblog, and 5 on Slashdot. Surely that’s not enough to get it a pagerank of 5? What am I missing?

Edit: Oh, now I see where I got linked too from. Somehow, even though I’m usually a dedicated reader of Anne’s hrefs, I missed two. Thanks Anne!

Thanks to this person too, whoever they are :-)

It appears comments are broken here. I tried posting one, and the preview just kept telling me to fill in my name and email, even though they were. That would explain, then, why I haven’t gotten any comments for a month and a half. I just wish someone had told me about it.

That wouldn’t explain, though, how someone did post a comment, which my going to reply to was the reason I found out about all this. Hmm….

Edit: it seems to have fixed itself. Yay.

Edit 2: Or perhaps not. <br> doesn’t work. Maybe some other things don’t?

For the past while I’ve been trying to get Rosegarden to work. For Christmas I got a really nice midi controller (ie, a keyboard, but it doesn’t actually make sounds itself, you hook it up to your computer and it tells the computer what sounds to make*), and I looked around for a sequencer to go with it and heard good things about Rosegarden.

Only problem was that I couldn’t actually build it on my computer. I’m not much of a fan of KDE, so I’d told Gentoo not to build KDE support into things, but Rosegarden uses KDE libraries. That wouldn’t have been a problem, as I could pick and choose the libraries I needed, except the ebuild file that controlls the compiling and installation was broken and it checked to see whether I actually had KDE, not just the libraries I needed. (I think. It might have been checking something else, though.)

A newer version, of both Rosegarden and the ebuild file, had come out, but it was still in the testing branch of Portage (Gentoo’s package manager), and so I couldn’t see it. From reading Gentoo Bugzilla I knew that it was out there somewhere, but I couldn’t find it, and from reading the Gentoo Forums I found some old advice on getting the old version working, which I tried, failed at, and thought that with my efforts I’d probably broken something.

Today I decided to have another go at it, and this time I found some information on getting programs from the testing branch. It worked like a charm, and Rosegarden is now compiling.

* You need a good sound card for this, which I also got for Christmas. Thanks Mom and Dad!

You know, I really wish more people linked to me. It’d be nice if I had a PageRank above 0

So today, though it may be a bit late, I finally decided to honor the Pope’s death—by downloading The Vatican Rag by Tom Lehrer.

Actually, it was really hearing Scott Joplin that made me think of it, but oh well.

A while ago I asked if markup and behaviour could be separated. Today I stumbled on a page that shows how.

Unobtrusive Javascript

There’s been a bit of talking about the name “Foxfire” recently, and how people are confusing it and “Firefox”. So out of curiosity, I googled it.

Firefox was not in the top 100 results.

So I figured I should do my part to remedy this: Foxfire.