I love Firefox. Love love love it, especially because I can tweak many things about it to make things work just the way I want. (Like creating Greasemonkey scripts to make other peoples’ websites do my bidding. Or syncing not only my bookmarks and passwords between computers, but also my Stylish userstyles.) Google Chrome may be zippier, but until I can run AdBlock Plus, All-in-One Gestures, Colorzilla, Firebug, FireShot, Firefox Sync, Greasemonkey, Open With, Stylish, and Update Notifier in it, I’m sticking with Firefox.
Anyway, the point here is that I wanted to have my Firefox tabs for different environments show up as different colors in my browser. As a web developer, I spend a lot of time in a localhost development server, on a staging dev server, and on a live web site. I may have ten tabs open, each of which could be from any of my environments, and each of which may look identical until you click into it to see the actual URL. So I spent a lot of time clicking back and forth between them trying to find the other page I’d been working on. I wanted a quick visual representation to show which of those environments I was in.
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We did a lot of fun and fantastic things this year and, of course, added a baby to the mix. Take a look at our 2010 “Christmas letter” — a personalized memory game that I made on Match The Memory. Have fun playing it!
Tonight when we were coming home from Grandma Gibby’s house, we were playing games made up by a 5-year-old. (Audrey said, “Let’s play a game called, ‘Let’s see if you can sing a song that you know’. How you play is, you sing a song that you know.”)
When we got to the game called “Tell a story” (“How do you play it?” Sarah wondered aloud, and we laughed), Audrey told one about a queen and king who had a 5-year-old named Audrey and a baby named Claire and a 2-year-old named Nathan. They lived in a royal palace and had lots of servants. One day they took a walk and found some more servants who didn’t have anywhere to live, so they hired them. The end.
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The set-up
When Sarah was about 20 weeks along with this baby, she began to lobby for us to not find out what the gender was until the baby was actually born. After all, she figured, we could be surprised by learning if it was a boy or a girl at 20 weeks, or at 40 weeks. Also, we already had one of each, so she wasn’t especially pining to have either a girl or a boy, and we already had the clothing for whichever kind of baby came out. She figured that if she didn’t know, she’d also end up spending less money on clothes and stuff. I supported her decision, even though I personally would have rather found out. So we never got an ultrasound.
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I’ve used Firefox’s Stylish plugin for years to get rid of stuff that I don’t want to see on all kinds of web sites. Once you know how CSS works, the plugin makes it easy to tweak the look of any page by adding a quick {width:100%;} or {display:none;} to your own personalized CSS userstyle for each site. Read the rest of this entry »
At work, I use the excellent FPDF library to write PDF files. But I couldn’t find any way to automatically make the text as large as possible to fit into a given space. So I wrote the following function to stick into the FPDF class. It’ll take a given text string and a width, incrementally set the font size higher and higher until it over-runs the space, then gives you the right size to just fit into the width. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been interested in web fonts for a while now, so I was rather excited when the Google Font Directory was released last month.
Am I the only one who’s not really impressed with it? Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, we were content with the two cars we had, planning to put all three of our kids in the back of Sarah’s Matrix when the baby was born. We knew we liked Toyota Siennas in general, since Sarah’s mom has one that we’ve driven around a lot, and they’re the most popular minivan among all our soccer-mom friends. But Sarah was afraid that the Sienna was too big — so she wanted to check out the Mazda MPV, which was smaller than most minivans and she’d read good reviews about it. So we thought that the MPV might be a minivan that we’d consider purchasing down the road, but we had decided that we could wait. Read the rest of this entry »
Since I built this web site, I’ve taken it as a source of pride that I created all of the major functionality from scratch: blog, pictures, links, and so forth. I learned that I could do it on my own.
But since I’ve started using WordPress in other applications, I knew that I wanted to use it for my blog here too. Read the rest of this entry »
This week we rented the fun “The Simpsons Game” for the Wii. (I say “we”, but really I rented it. Sarah never had anything to do with this one, either in the renting or the playing.)
You get to play with the four main Simpsons family members, who each have their own fun special super-hero abilities: Bart becomes Bart-Man with a grappling hook, glider cape and slingshot; Lisa has mystical Buddhist powers that include levitating large objects and striking enemies down with lightning; Homer can turn into a ball and roll around slamming into stuff; and Marge has a megaphone with the ability to make ordinary citizens become her very own mob, ready to do her bidding. Read the rest of this entry »
