Tag Archives: firefox

HELP NEEDED: Mouse wheel vs. keyboard

Posted on 11 January 2010 | 4 comments

I recently switched the default browser on all my machines from Firefox to Google Chrome. In general I’m loving Chrome but there is one behaviour that is driving me nuts. Scrolling with the mouse wheel takes keyboard focus away from the document.

Here’s what happens. I’ve just opened a page and can use the keyboard up/down and PgUp/PgDn keys to scroll it; no problem there. But if I then use the wheel on my mouse to scroll the page, it loses the keyboard focus and no longer responds to up/down, PgUp/PgDn, or in fact any other keyboard keys. I have to click on the page background to restore the keyboard focus. This is a minor inconvenience for scrolling but where it really drives me nuts is in Google Reader and Gmail where I use shortcuts a lot. Here I find that I scroll the article or e-mail I’m reading with the mouse wheel then get no response when I press j/k to move to the next or previous article or e-mail.

I would be eternally grateful if anyone can provide me with a solution to this problem.

UPDATE: Problem solved. There is apparently a bug in Chrome that cause some incompatibility with mouse wheel extenders such as KatMouse, which I use. Rob Boek has documented a workaround, where changing some settings in KatMouse solves the problem.

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Posted in Photos

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Memory; think I’m losing it

Posted on 12 September 2008 | 1 comment

I have been having a lot of problems with my computers, particularly the one at work, behaving strangely in past months. I’ve never been able to grasp why I have trouble compiling and debugging our solution when others don’t; or why Firefox 3 is so unstable. Last night I was on my machine at home and got a popup telling me that my virtual memory setting was too low and I might want to increase it. I’ve been ignoring similar popups for a week or two but decided that I might as well increase the size. So I open the memory settings and what do I see? Total paging file size for all drives: 0 MB; ZERO? WTF!!

Then it crawled up from the depths of my repressed memories; I had once seen an article suggesting that in most cases disabling the paging file will improve performance. I tried it and found that it worked. Clearly the memory requirements of the software I run has now grown to the point where this is no longer viable, so I turned on my paging file again. Just found the same thing here at work and have enabled paging. Let’s hope this delivers the more stable, if slightly slower, experience I’ve been missing.

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Posted in Thoughts

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Twitter: Who Do You Block?

Posted on 28 April 2008 | 1 comment

It seems to me that there are several types of accounts/people that might follow you on Twitter.

  1. “twiends” have with similar interests to yours and you may wish to reciprocate by following them too.
  2. “twollowers” have a legitimate interest in what you have to say but you have no interest in following what they have to say.
  3. “twollectors” aim appears to be to follow as many people as they can with no apparent regard for commonality of interests.  You probably don’t want to follow them.
  4. “twammers” act like “twollectors” but almost every one of their tweets contain links to the same sort of sites that can be found linked in spam e-mails.  You definitely don’t want to follow these.

“twollectors” and “twammers” are likely to feature on The Twitter Blacklist, which may have a bearing on your decision to block them or not.  If you are a Firefox and Greasemonkey user there is even a Twitter Blacklist script that displays a nice big red banner at the top of a “twacklisted” user’s page.

twacklisted

The question is; which of these do you block?  I have previously always blocked “twammers” and sometimes blocked “twollectors”.  The question is whether there is any advantage to the Twitter community as a whole for them to be blocked.  If you don’t follow them their updates are not seen on your profile page, but they still appear in your list of followers.  Twitter says that blocking someone has the following effect.

  • You will no longer show up in the blocked person’s list of friends.
  • Your updates won’t show up on the blocked person’s profile page.
  • The blocked person will not be able to add you as a friend.

I suppose that there may be some value to your reputation in not being associated with them, in which case you won’t want to appear in their list of friends and not have your updates appear on their profile page.  But is there any tangible value to them if you do appear on their list of friends or you updates are seen on their profile page?

Update (2008-05-01)

First tweets below found with SUMMIZE.

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Posted in Thoughts

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