I’m used to putting my laptop to sleep/hibernate, and often times, Firefox stays open in a single session, until I restart the machine eventually. However, I noted that some websites didn’t update automatically when their tabs were closed and re-opened later on, and that a click on the refresh button was needed in those cases.

To make cache work as it should when Firefox is left open for ages, modify the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency setting in about: config. Its values can be set as follows:

0 – once per session (default)
1 – every time
2 – never
3 – automatically

Changing the setting to 1 does the trick.

I tried to install the Google plugin into Eclipse yesterday. Everything appeared to be doing well, but retrieving data failed eventually, on grounds that some module was missing (apparently a known issue on some systems). Nothing worked, so I figured some core upgrading would be needed; I selected all installed plugins and core eclipse updates, and let the process run overnight. This morning, again the error message, only this time the PHP file view was corrupted.

I proceeded to just download Ganymede all over again and re-install everything from scratch, which, fortunately, went perfectly well. The last install dated back to last November (7 months ago).

I wish there were a more seamless way to upgrade; seems the dependency facility only goes so far in identifying what it needs to do a proper update when the local installation starts to get a little too “old”.

Just found out about GoogleUpdate, a Google service that installs itself to check for updates to local Google installations continuously. I’m not entirely certain how often it checks, but I’m the kind who thinks checking for updates while the application is running should be enough… Shouldn’t it?

It basically ninja-installs itself as soon as you install a Google application (in my case, after a Google chat trial with David) and doesn’t really have an uninstaller. It came back even after I killed the process and disabled the service, because there were some extensions still active in Firefox; it appears to have given up now.

Some useful links: The invisible GoogleUpdate.exe, How to remove Google update.

I registered and have been using WinZIP for several years, and mostly didn’t have issues with it for the longest time. Then, a few months ago, as I attempted to unzip the latest WordPress package for a local installation, it failed repeatedly (cringed at seeing plugins.php and a few others, if I remember correctly). Not only was the problem reproductible on the .tar.gz file even after I re-downloaded it, the very same issue also occured on my older WinXP laptop.

Today, I tried unzipping the latest XOOPS — a 3.6 Mb .tar.gz file… –, and WinZIP just went unresponsive, sending the drive on what appeared to be infinite R/W access. Had to kill the process. It seems to be an issue with the untarring process.

7-Zip has been on my hard drives for a while. Hasn’t been complaining at all. Is generally faster.

Those using Firefox version 3.0+ may have noticed a tooltip comes up when you hover on the url icon, providing some details about the domain you’re visiting. While possibly useful, this feature, enabled by default, effectively prevents usage of the toolbar bookmarks via drag&drop, if the target bookmark toolbar folder lies just under the address bar.

The solution is to disable the tooltip, by setting variable browser.chrome.toolbar_tips to false in about:config.

It had been a while since I tried out the Gimp, probably a couple of years. Back then, being used to Photoshop, the Gimp’s interface seemed a little too fuzzy for my taste, with a plethora of tool panes that didn’t make much sense. I vaguely remember some instability too, and in short, wasn’t impressed enough with the tool to keep it.

This past weekend, I looked at the progress update on Pixel (dead link at the moment, but a very promising product which apparently found golden angels to finance it at last), and decided to look at alternatives. I quickly stumbled across Paint.net, an Open Source project that’s grown out of necessity, and looked at the Gimp again. I downloaded both tools, but installed the Gimp first (I think I really liked Wilber’s confused look).

It takes a little while to get used to the interface, but it’s been much improved since the last time I tried it. The first immediate stumbling block is how the Gimp handles layers. They’re pasted into a “floating” layer by default, and it took me a while to understand why pasting several clipboards in a row made them all end up collated into the bottom layer. Once I found out that I needed to create a new layer after pasting clipboard content, I ran into issues with the scaling tool, which produced a blank space in the overgrown area; the default highlighting scheme isn’t quite as easy to make out as it should, but I got used to it.

All in all, I was able to get going and do all that I usually do with Photoshop in a rather short amount of time, and was happy to notice all tools are solid and compare with my usual software.

Stability-wise, I only managed to make it crash once, when scaling the color palette to an unreasonably narrow width. In other words, it’s stable enough, and intuitive. Thumbs up.

Didn’t get to Paint.net yet. I blame Wilber.