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While sorting my unsorted bookmarks, I come across a site like Rules of Thumb. Interesting information, but not easily classifiable into a folder for later perusal. I will save it here, but I doubt I will ever look at this bookmark again.
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An excellent summary of best practices for fulfilling your dietary necessities and becoming a healthy vegetarian from the Mayo Clinic.
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Excellent article explaining the methodology and theory behind imbibing absinthe… I must try this someday.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
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New York Times archive for the 1850s through 1920s. Articles are scanned directly from the source, and semantically delineated with synopses. Pretty trick shit.
I saw a headline on Reddit heralding the release of Google Health, and I am not sure if this idea is fantastic or horrendous… for example, take this pic from the FAQ:
Import your search information into a database maintained by the innovator in search and advertising technology… what could they want to do with the data?
A safe, secure central repository for your health information, which you could choose to share with your medical professionals on an as-needed basis, is a fantastic idea. I have no idea where my medical records are from my youth… It is as if I began living at age 30.
Simultaneously, Google is a for-profit entity, and, even if its privacy policy states that the documents are safe and will never be used, there is the possibility that this service will be compromised or that it will become a carrier of Google advertisements that are focused to your personal information, medical record and health predispositions.
Personally, I would not sign-up at this time for such a service (mostly because all of my medical information is at one office currently), but this service, or a service of a similar type, could be the future of medical data and its storage.
This is just another nail in the coffin for the medical transcriptionist trade advertised on daytime TV…
One of the things that has always frustrated me when updating to a new version of Firefox is the lag in official compatibility for extensions that I need. This is an all-too-common sight on the official Add-Ons site…
Fortunately, there is an extension that quickly overrides the max version check and re-enables the extensions called MR Tech Local install. The MR Tech extension as well as the manual XPI editing process described below will work with any version of Firefox, so file this away for future use.
Update 6/18/08 – Since FF3 is now live, and people are still looking at this article on occasion, MR Tech Local Install is now known as MR Tech Toolkit, and has been updated to a final version located on the official Add-Ons website.
Unfortunately, the most recent version of the MR Tech extension is not compatible with Firefox 3.0 RC1 (big fucking surprise), but there is a compatible alpha version of the extension at the following URL: [Ext] MR Tech Local Install 5.3.2.6/6.0 Alpha 29 (04-8-08) – MozillaZine Forums. This alpha release seems to work just fine, but may have a few bugs.
There can be some serious issues with forcing older versions of extensions to work with Firefox, but usually the problem is that the max version designated in the install.rdf file of the extension does not include the most recent version of Firefox.
I would suggest enabling your older extensions one at a time to ensure they work… or take the impetuous approach and barrel headlong into the unknown by enabling all of them in simultaneity (as I did without any issues).
You can go through your list of Add-Ons (found in the Tools menu)Â and right-click the obsolete versions in order to choose Make Compatible.
If you have chosen to make them compatible one-by-one, you can restart Firefox after re-enabling each and then checking to see if anything is hosed. If you re-enabled all of them, you will just have to guess at what might have gone wrong by looking at the borked element and hypothesizing what might be the culprit.
Alternately, if you don’t want to fuss with the MR Tech extension, you can manually open the .XPI files with a zip client and open the install.rdf file with a text editor. Change the maxVersion in the text file to something like “4.0,” save the changed file, replace the original install.rdf in the zip package and install the extension as you normally would in order to gain and assess its re-enabled functionality. Unfortunately, this process is slow and lame, but this is what you had to do before the release of this marvelous extension.
Either of the above methods of forcing compatibility for an older extension will work as soon as they have been downloaded locally. The Add-Ons site is a stickler for compatibility, and it will not allow you to download an extension that has an older version number–it has no sense of adventure.
Have fun hosing your Add-Ons and troubleshooting what went wrong!
More than likely, this process will have no major issues, but getting to the bottom of why things went wrong is half of the reason to use pre-release software! Hell, bragging rights are even better when you can make something work for you that is broken for everyone else.
BTW, themes are broken if made for a Firefox version prior to 3.0 Alphas, and you will lose the enhanced forward/backward functionality if you force an incompatible theme… so don’t do it.
With the Final Crisis drawing nigh, it looks like we have yet another Speedster returning from the dead…
It really isn’t all that odd to have Barry Allen return; I think he has been in the current Flash run at least 5 or 6 times already. Simultaneously, he is one of those comic characters that had an iconic and meaningful death that was intended to be permanent. He served as a mentor for his nephew, who has taken Barry’s mantle and come into his own over the past 20 years.
Bringing Barry back from the dead is unnecessary. He had his time and place, and his return will lessen his sacrifice during the first Crisis.
