Here's some links, quotes, funny pictures and love for Firefox 3.0.

Firefox hacking

about:config

Type that in the browser and you can edit some of its bits and pieces...

Quotes

"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." ("Dr Who")

"One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching." (Steve Jobs)

- Above and below quotes are from http://www.sysprog.net/quotbugs.html He, he, he, I like these two quotes. I think I'm going to use the stupid mistakes one :-)

"Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything." (Karl Lehenbauer) The power of voodoo is a worrying thing, before I got some Flash training my fla's would only work by magic :-)

"When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code." (Richard Pattis) I like that one - I think that holds true when I'm new to a system I will be very careful when changing code, compared to when the code is mine or I know it very well I am more then happy to re-factor to remove dodgy processing (of course there's no dodgy processing in my code....).

"In a software project team of 10, there are probably 3 people who produce enough defects to make them net negative producers." (Gordon Schulmeyer) LOL

Should have gone to spec savers

http://tolppa.apina.biz/3346.jpg - What do your glasses say about you. Mine is computer programmer, added glasses, oh look computer programmer still! Dammit doesn't work for me :-)

Firefox 3.0

You can download Firefox 3.0 here http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/. I've just installed it for the Mac. First impressions are that its awesome, everything is loading so much faster which is very impressive. Looks slightly different, and I like it. All my bookmarks were carried forward and passwords remembered from the previous version and my stumble upon bar works. The only two problems are that a couple of my plug-ins no longer work (firebug) and the install instructions are incomplete. The important thing for me was that FF 3.0 would carry forward all my settings. Safe to say it does. What I did was copy it to my desktop (rather than applications) and run it to test it works, which it did. Then I renamed it Firefox 3.0 and renamed the previous version to Firefox 2.0 and they both now sit in the applications directory. So if I ever need to revert back...

Kool-Aid man

http://www.morefishthanman.com/2008/06/19/wanted/ - Kool-Aid man strikes again. Right I saw a sketch in Family Guy with the Kool-Aid man, and maybe even on the Simpsons, whats that all about then?

Real programming

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html - The real programmer, I've come across this a couple of times, its a wonderful story about what someone can achieve when they are highly skilled in a particular technology. However whilst this programmer could produce something as amazing as the Blackjack game that worked how it did, this isn't necessary what you want in programming in general; this code was quite clearly unmaintainable and you should always write code that is as simple and easy to maintain as possible (where performance permits). I guess this is kind of like in writing where good authors don't use several words when one word would do (although I argue this rule as well - I think when author-types use clever long words that I don't understand, I would rather they explain themselves in a full sentence then a single word I don't understand - yeah I could look it up, but most time I'll pass over the word or it'll stop me reading on...).

I think this is an interesting point because even if the code may be amazing, complicated code can be unmaintainable and it can be more buggy; code that's easier to maintain will likely lead to fewer bugs when changed then code which is harder to maintain. Something that demonstrates this is some perl code, in fact there's something called Perl Golf http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PerlGolf which aims to reduce a program into a single line of as few characters as possible e.g.

-lp @==sort@p=map$_.shift@=,@@for@@=/,|\pL/g;$_=@p[$`] from http://perlgolf.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/PGAS/post_mortem.cgi?id=11 perl golf competition which does a Burrows Wheeler transform apparently.

Which is some kind of string compression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows-Wheeler_transform

Anyway the point is, yes that's very clever, but what on earth is it doing... and I wouldn't want to have to change it...