10am and the machine just crashed again. Time to take it apart and troubleshoot.
Firefox Crash Recovery Fails
My workstation is having trouble. I suspect a piece of hardware is dying or a huge dust bunny is wrecking havoc inside the case. It spontaneously reboots a few times a day which is not really a problem because I wouldn’t take breaks otherwise and Firefox always comes back in the same state as before the crash…well, almost always. I don’t help myself because of the way I use the computer. I have many apps open at once and typically will have multiple Firefox windows open with 10 to 20 tabs open in each one. This is how I do research and it is typically work related or blog related. In today’s instance I had 4 windows open. 3 were work related and 1 was filled with information I might one day blog about. These are usually just bookmarked at Delicious for that day I finally get a round to it. Considering my machine was having trouble and I had far too many tabs open, I was just starting to bookmark everything and reduce my windows down to the very few I needed when the computer crashed hard. Upon coming back up, Firefox opened to just a single blank window…no tabs. I needed that work related research! I can reproduce it but this is just frustrating!
So, is there a way to tell Firefox, "restore the previous, previous state?" I think I’m faced with scrolling through the mornings history and pulling up pages one at a time.
This pit is bottomless
No one told me Sh*t Creek had waterfalls! And tall waterfalls. With rocks at the bottom. Where’s that paddle?!
How’s dinner?
Twitter just doesn’t get better than this!
Best Tweet o’ the Day:
oldsillybear Good: Merle Haggard recovering at home from surgery. Bad: he had cancer surgery. Ugly: I didn’t know he was still alive. 10 minutes ago from web
If the matrix ran on Windows
Thoughts of a lazy programmer
If only I could draw comic strips!
"That tree sure is closer than that bathroom…"
I really like Tennessee
But apparently there are about 43 states better suited for my family.
Road Rage Haiku
She cut me off bad
I laid down on the horn mad
We screamed, no net gain
My apologies to the horrible driver I chose to engage. You put us in unnecessary danger. My response did nothing but entertain the line workers at the intersection and upset both of us. Certainly we would have behaved differently had there been children in either car. I am not an asshole as I am sure you are not a bitch. I hope we did not know each other prior to this interaction but perhaps we will meet later on better terms.
Happy Pre-schooler
He happily runs from the car to the school doors then clings to me and won’t let go at the classroom entrance.
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterli. Replies.
From the mouths of babes
Noah, 12.5 years old: "Who is Tom Sawyer?"
Dad: "You’ve never read Tom Sawyer?!"
Noah: "I’ve heard of him. He was on Fairly Odd Parents once."
Bad Dad
I am trying to work. Evan comes downstairs carrying a game CD and a case for Mart Kart Wii because he likes playing Mart Kart Wii with me. Instead of acknowledging the cuteness and giving him the 4 minutes it takes for him to get bored with the game, I got frustrated with the distraction and angered that a CD/DVD was out of its case being handled by a three year old. Don’t ever forget, they just want your love and your attention! To give a child what they want often takes very little. Make the time.
Another TN Business Closure
Adult World goes down.
Today’s Coding Challenge
In one of my applications, I use jQuery’s UI Datepicker as part of the interface for easy date selection in adding and editing some data. I have two screens that show the current date. One screen is a report that says "Today’s date is…" and shows the current date. The other is the form for adding this data. The datepicker calendar is supposed to default to today’s date.
Problem 1: On the development server, the report and the form both default to today’s date. On the staging server, the report and the form both default to today’s date. On the production server, the report defaults to today’s date; the form defaults to December 31, 1998.Solved. In a special case, a null string was being passed when a date type was expected.
Problem 2: When editing, if the date is in the current monthmonths of March and November, the highlights for datepicker don’t work. The day still gets selected appropriately but the date itself is never highlighted making the user think they didn’t click the date. Click to see a working example of the problem. Update: This is partially fixed. In UI version 1.5.2, the highlight does not work in November or March. This is demonstrated at http://sidesigns.com/pub/datepicker/index152.php. I tested with the 1.6rc2 release candidate and November now works but March is still not highlighting correctly (the first week highlights but no others). This is demonstrated at http://sidesigns.com/pub/datepicker/index16rc2.php. I’ll be submitting a bug report to the jQuery UI team.
Cutting Cedar Trees for Catapults – Need more
Today I’m helping cut down some cedar trees for the Boy Scouts. At next weekend’s camping trip, we will be building three catapults. Two kind people have each offered to let us harvest 6 trees from their respective groves. Each catapult requires six 15 foot long spars no bigger than four inches in diameter meaning we have materials for 2 out of 3 of the catapults.
If you are in Knoxville, and have a cedar tree or two or six that you wouldn’t mind us cutting down, please let me know. And thank you!
Update: To prepare for next weekend’s camping trip, our troop’s Scout leaders met from 7am-8:30am. One volunteered his truck but no one could volunteer additional labor so the tree harvesters were our Scout Master and me. By 10am we had the truck and were at the first cedar grove to pick up the trees that were felled Thursday late afternoon but had to be left since there was no truck to carry them. The property owner asked that the spars be hoofed out because of Friday’s rains. He didn’t want ruts left in his property. After a bit of friendly chatter, the spars were loaded and we were off to the ranch with the next cedar grove. The first property was younger trees and dense. The second property was older trees and more sparse. The owner offered to let us get enough trees to make 2 catapults but toward the end of the day we were wearing down and felt we had thinned the trees enough. We stopped short of what we thought we needed. Once back at the church, we unloaded the trees, returned the truck then came back to the church to size the spars. As it turns out, we harvested exactly the right amount of cedar trees to build three catapults. This wood should last several years and allow the scouts to build many catapults and monkey bridges. We wrapped up at 5:30pm. My thanks to these generous property owners!
