Category: Annoyances

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Since I’ve been using Opera a lot more than usual since Opera 9 Preview 2 came out, I’ve repeatedly run into the canonical reason that sharing one button for stop/refresh is a bad idea: Reaction time.

When a button changes in response to your own actions, it’s easy to adjust. When a button changes in response to something over which you have no control, there’s a possibility that it may change between the time your brain tells your finger to click on the mouse button and the time it presses down, registering the click with the computer.

Case in point: A web page is loading slowly. You’ve already seen the part you’re looking for, and you don’t need the rest of the images, or the rest of the 587 comments on the blog post. Maybe all you needed to do was confirm you had the right site, and you need to copy the URL. So you go to hit Stop. The web page finishes loading before your finger finishes clicking, the button changes to Reload… and the browser starts reloading the entire slow page from byte one.

I’ve done this at least four times in the past week.

The bad news: I can’t find separate stop/reload buttons anywhere in Opera’s button collection. The closest I could find seem to apply only to panels, not to browser views.

The good news: The Custom Buttons page at NonTroppo.org has them!

Once I get these on all the computers where I normally use Opera, accidental reloads should be a thing of the past!

*This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.

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Spotted the following in a grocery store on Saturday, three days before Valentine’s Day.

Easter egg dye cups

I think the holiday decoration/candy/card industry has started selling two holidays ahead. Christmas stuff was out in October, with both Halloween and Thanksgiving ahead. Here’s Easter stuff on sale with both Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day in the future.

Decoration-wise, there’s not much between Easter and Independence Day. Sure, people get the day off for Memorial Day, but the closest you get to a themed aisle in the grocery store is that you can buy American flags in more places. After the big Fourth of July patriotic blow-out (which of course is on sale by June), the holiday-industrial complex doesn’t really get going again until October—though back-to-school sales seem to be getting earlier all the time. I wonder when they’ll start going straight into back-to-school from graduation sales?

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Here’s a piece of friendly advice from a mail server admin to companies that interact with subscribers and customers via email:

Pick one domain name for your business. Just one. Don’t use any other domains in your emails, even if you want to keep order confirmations separate from promotions. If you contract out for some other company to send out a newsletter or survey to your customers, insist that they send it out using your own domain name. If you’re using DomainKeys or SPF, make sure they’re authorized or send it yourself. And don’t even think of making the links through redirection scripts, even if you really want to track which subscribers are clicking.

Why?

Two words: Spam and fraud. Continue reading →

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The SANS Internet Storm Center remarks on the challenges of fixing Java vulnerabilities, since Sun’s installer only checks once a month by default—based on when you installed it, not on a standard schedule.

Well, it’s worse than that. My Windows 2000 box at work was easy. I just went into Control Panel, opened the Java Plugin, and told it to update. At home, on our Windows XP box, I had to go through multiple reboots just to get the installer started.

It wasn’t XP that was the problem, though: It was Norton Internet Security. First it disabled all network access from Firefox when I installed the new version. Then it blocked access to the Java updater, so whenever I clicked on “Install” it would just disappear instead of launching the installer. I resolved it (for now) by disabling Norton while I did the install…but I had to reboot in order to get as far as the first step again.

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Christmas aisle

I dropped into Sav-on briefly today. Among other things I wanted to top off the supply of Halloween candy for Monday. Imagine my surprise to find that Halloween was crammed into half an aisle, and there were two aisles of Christmas already. (You may notice that the sign above this one doesn’t say “Seasonal” or even just “Christmas.” “Christmas” was the next aisle over. This was labeled “Christmas Lights,” presumably to avoid duplicate signs.)

Yes, the Christmas stuff is already up, and it’s still October. It’s annoying enough when malls put up decorations and start playing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving! Soon, buying holiday decorations is going to be like buying seasonal clothing. You’ll have to finish your Christmas shopping in July, or you’ll have to rely on the remaindered stuff that the stores couldn’t get rid of. And you’ll have to pre-order Independence Day fireworks in December, and hope they’re still legal to set off by the time summer rolls around.