Random Developments

In Firefox 1.5, when you hit “back” and the focus is not in a text field, the effect is the same as that of clicking on the “Back” button or typing Alt + left arrow. In Firefox 2.0, this does not happen. If you want it to work as it did in FF1.5, do this:

• in the browser address bar, type “about:config” and hit Enter
• in the screen that will show up, type “backspace” in the “Filter:” box
• you should see a single configuration option left, “browser.backspace_action”, with value 1
• double-click on it and change the value to 0 (zero)

That’s it. No need to restart the browser or save anything, and the backspace key works as desired again.

I got “addicted” to the new version of Battlestar Galactica somewhat late; I watched the miniseries on DVD a few months ago, and then ran through the whole of the first and second seasons as fast as I could (which was not that fast; I just finished season two this weekend, and I’m already four episodes behind in season 3). The rest of this post may contain spoilers to anyone who has not finished watching season 2 yet; in Australia, the last episode broadcast on Channel Ten was 2-12, “Resurrection Ship, Part 2″, with eight episodes left to the end of the season.

For those who don’t watch it: the story is basically a war between humans and intelligent robotic assistants created by them, known as cylons, who rebelled against their creators; the humans don’t live on Earth, but on twelve planets known as the “twelve colonies”, with Earth being a mythological thirteenth colony. As the miniseries starts, a truce is in effect and humans and cylons live in separate solar systems in relative peace; the cylons break the truce with a surprise attack and manage to kill almost every single human being on the twelve colonies. The few remaining ones (mostly people who were in transit between planets at the time of the attack), protected by the only remaining military ship (Battlestar Galactica) flee their solar system and are pursued. The rest of the series follows what happens next; at the end of the second season, there are just over 47,000 humans left.

One thing that is interesting about this series is that there are no “role models” among the characters; there’s not a single one of them that is not significantly flawed in some way (or, to put it in another way, the characters are human). One could say that the “villains”, the cylons, are usually more admirable than the remaining humans, but the fact that they did kill 20 billion people makes them hard to recommend as role models.

I also like the way in which the human society is not shown as “utopic”; it is depicted more realistically, with dissenters, strikers, criminals, terrorists, religious fanatics, corrupt government officials etc. One particular episode deals with the black market that comes to life across the surviving ships; other, with whether abortion should be outlawed in a society that desperately needs people to reproduce. A recurring theme is whether captured enemies should be treated as prisoners or as “equipment” (they are not human, but machines).

The second season has much less “action” that the first, but it’s much more entertaining exactly because it deals in more interesting themes. I liked all episodes (some more than others… 2-14, “Black Market”, was not particularly good in my opinion), except what happens in the season final after the text “One year later” appears on the screen. It’s not that the rest of the episode is bad… it was more the general feeling of “o how the mighty have fallen”… and the webisodes that advanced the plot before the start of season 3 keep the same feeling going.

Speaking of the final of season 2: Gaius was exactly the kind of president I would expect him to be, but I was left with a few questions (which won’t make sense to people who are not following the series):

• how come Adama (the father) accepted Gaius’s orders so readily? he was always ready to confront the former president and to go against her orders when they did not make sense militarily, but he sets out to do what Baltar tells him with no argument, even after the nuclear explosion that destroyed Cloud 9; why is that? it seemed very much out of character
• how does the cylon occupation of New Caprica fit with the message delivered by the cylon “preacher” and the apparent de-occupation of the original Caprica (and, supposedly, the other eleven colonies)?
• the original Caprica is not exactly a “nuclear wasteland”, as mentioned by the then president Rosslyn; haven’t the rescue-party members (or the rescued people, for that matter) related back about how habitable is the planet?

Maybe some of these are answered in the first episodes of the third season… time to start working on them!

This weekend I stayed up to watch the Japanese F1 Grand Prix, as I usually do (note to those outside Australia: F1 GPs are shown in Australia late at night on Sundays, regardless of when they actually happen, except for the Australian GP, which is shown live; that broadcast time is approximately the right one for the European GPs, but the Asian ones are severely delayed - the American ones are shown approximately live early on Monday mornings). The GP was exciting up to the point when Schumacher’s car broke down, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

There’s an ad for Mobil oil that, as far as I know, is only shown during the F1 transmissions, and it’s driving me crazy. It tells of a “drive around the world” expedition that used Mobil oil to protect the cars’ engines from the environment: dust, mud, water, smog etc. The ad ends with a member of the expedition standing knee-dep on mud, lifting his ruined shoe and saying, and I quote, “too bad everything wasn’t protected by Mobil oil”. NO! That’s wrong! If the expression “everything wasn’t protected” makes any sense — and I don’t think it does —, it means that not a single thing was protected, and what would be the point of making an ad then? What the guy should have said is “too bad not everything was protected by Mobil oil”.

There. I had to vent. Back to the regular programming, now.

Quite a while ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Bloglines (in a post that actually got a few responses from their team) and, later, with stand-alone feed readers. In the end, after using Omea Reader for a while, I ended up gravitating back to Bloglines (especially after I moved to Linux on my desktop machine) and stayed happily there (but always wondering about possible missing posts…).

When the first version of Google Reader launched, I imported all my subscriptions and tried using it for a few days, but gave up; their “river of news” approach, with content from all feeds “mixed up”, did not appeal to me. Nor to many other people, it seems.

And now Google came up with the new version of Google Reader, and I’m a convert. It maintains the two-pane, “folder-like” structure of Bloglines, but in a more appealing interface. This way, I can read feeds in the order I want and still get the “continuous scroll” of the first version. A few advantages of Google Reader over Bloglines, in my opinion:

• selecting a feed doesn’t automatically mark it as read: in Bloglines, if I want/need to stop reading a feed with several articles before getting to the end, I actually need to mark every unread post as new; Google Reader only marks posts as read when they are displayed (but, unnervingly, sometimes not even then)
• similarly, selecting a feed doesn’t display all of the new articles: it loads them in blocks of 20, seamlessly (if you scroll almost to the bottom, it starts loading the next block of 20 and appends them to the page)
• the interface doesn’t keep reloading the left pane (the list of feeds) all the time; although, to be fair, it looks like Bloglines released a few changes right after Google Reader lauched that do basically this

The one thing that irks me is that Google Reader is a bit “CPU intensive”, at least in Firefox; the CPU usage goes way up every now and then, and Firefox becomes unresponsive for about one second (this is in a fast machine). Maybe that’s just me, or just Firefox; I have still to test it in other browsers. Still, so far, I’m a satisfied customer.