Worlds Violently Colliding

Say What?!

In other news, The Bush administration has decreed that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

That does it, if Bush gets elected in 2004, I'm seriously going to apply for citizenship in Canada.

Hot Stuff, Coming Through

Today, I picked up Soul Caliber II and F-Zero GX for the Gamecube.

Soul Caliber II is a lot like the first one, but the graphics have been bumped up, and I find it even more enjoyable than the first. Weapons Master mode is very challenging, and two-player is a blast. The best part is that since I purchased it for the GameCube, my bonus character is Link from The Legend of Zelda, and man oh man does he kick ass. He has excellent long-range attacks like arrows, bombs, and his boomerang, and his short range attacks are also quite excellent. I've played the PS2 and XBox versions, and Link is definitely the best of the bonus characters.

As for F-Zero, I am amazed by this game; it is reason enough to buy a GameCube (even if Zelda, Metroid, or Eternal Darkness weren't enough already). Despite having 30 players on the screen at once, it never drops below a steady 60 FPS. On top of that, the controls are superb, the track layouts are incredible, and the tracks themselves are gorgeous. It has very detailed distance drawing, and with over 20 unlockable characters, a full storefront for building your own racer, and a complete story line on top of the grand prix, it's seriously an incredible game, and a must-have for any fan of racing games. Who wants to race me?

Customizing Firebird Middle-click Behavior

I've been using Firebird since the first builds were available for Windows and Linux, and Mozilla (SeaMonkey) for far longer. One of the things that always irritated me about both products, however, was the fact that the Linux clients acted different from their Windows counterparts, in regards to middle-clicking.

Before I continue onward, I should say that I mostly understand why these differences exist. X-Windows has a fundamentally different method of copying and pasting than Windows or Apple systems; you can select text to place it on the clipboard, and middle-click to paste it. I won't go into how irritating this can be, especially when you want to select text to replace with clipboard text (the act of selecting text blows away what you already have on your clipboard, making your effort futile).

That said, here is how I use Firebird middle-clicking on Windows:

1. Find a link I want to open in a tab, and middle-click on it. The page loads in a new tab. 
2. When I'm done with a tab, I middle-click on the tab itself in the tab bar to close it. 
3. If I accidentally middle-click in the page, nothing happens. This is expected behavior to me. 

Instead, this is how Firebird under Linux worked (and works, by default):

1. Find a link I want to open in a tab, and middle-click on it. The page loads in a new tab. 
2. When I'm done with a tab, I would attempt to middle-click on it in the tab bar, but this would do nothing. So instead, I would have to click with the secondary mouse button, and select "Close Tab" from the available selections. This is much slower than a middle-click. 
3. If I accidentally middle-clicked in a page, it would attempt to load whatever was on my clipboard. That is to say, if I had "www.ibm.com" on my clipboard, it would load IBM.com. If I had a non-URL on my clipboard, such as a SQL query, it would still try to load that as a URL, and then give me an error when it can't. The best part is that if it did load a URL, and I was in the middle of filling out a form (read: buying something online), I'd potentially have to start over again, or risk re-posting to the previous page.

Needless to say, steps 2 and 3 on Linux annoyed the crap out of me. Fortunately, there is hope.

Several builds ago, the "about:config" feature was added to Mozilla and Firebird, letting you tweak every setting the browser has to offer (be wary, it's a long list!). Fortunately, I was able to find the controls that caused the behavior I was seeing, and change them. If you're on Linux, and want to change this behavior, here are the steps to follow:

1. Type about:config into the address bar. 
2. Scroll down in the huge list to section beginning with the letter M. 
3. Find the entry middlemouse.contentLoadURL, double-click on it, and change the value to "false". 

Ta-da! Now steps 2 & 3 listed above work on Linux the way it works on Windows. As an added bonus, if you want the ability to paste your clipboard contents on Windows with a middle-click, you can change the middlemouse.paste option to "true". Thanks to these two tweaks, my Firebird builds act exactly the way I want them to, across two platforms. Go, Firebird, Go!

Without further ado

Well, here it is, finally, my weblog at Mike Palumbo.com. I've kept several different weblogs in several different spots over the years, but finally I am moving almost all of my writing, etc., to this location. I will be slowly but surely back-porting my more readable entries from my other blogs to this one, please bear with me as I make the transition. And yes, I'm aware that this page looks ugly as all hell right now, forgive the tacky default template.

Everything will come together soon.

I'm a daddy.

My laptop had a baby.

So I caved.

After a not-so-quick trip to the Apple Store at the King of Prussia mall, I am now the proud owner of a 17" G4 PowerBook and a 30GB iPod. Thank you, Apple.

It's gorgeous: