Congressman Barney Frank introduces legislation to remove federal penalties on personal marijuana use. Sweet. I’ve emailed my representative (Congressman Jim McDermott), and you should email yours. Unless you’re for federal penalties, of course.

There are sites out there (in the tired “Rick Roll” category) that make it hard to close a tab, by adding hooks that allow for dozens or hundreds of alert dialog boxes to appear, preventing the tab from closing. One is http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com. Don’t go to this site, unless you want to see the bug in action.

I posted a bug on bugzilla, after doing a search. I didn’t see any, but as there are hundreds of thousands of other bugs on there, I didn’t want to spend hours hunting down an exact match, so I just went ahead with it. Turns out I should have searched for “rick roll,” rather than something more specific such as “javascript alert exit loop” or similar. Ah, well, such is the folly of search engines.

So, it got merged in to another bug that’s over 7 years old. Surprisingly, it has only gathered 60 votes in that incredible period of time. I’m asking you, the loyal dpk dot net reader, to use one of your 10000 votes on this bug, and to help raise awareness of this issue, so that it might be squashed.

Looking at the code, it seems like it might involve simply adding another button to the alert dialog box, that would just kill the tab’s javascript context. But, I don’t really know how to do all that. It kinda looks like there’s different alert box code for each “platform.” I dunno. I’m no mozilla pro.

The comments people post on The Consumerist articles are among the most blame-the-customer-first I’ve ever seen. Is it unfair to judge a blog based on the comments? Perhaps, but it’s hard for me not to when the pro-corporate theme is so overwhelming.

Text you place in code that you know you’ll search for later. One common example is “XXX“. If I have to write a quick-n-dirty hack to get around a problem, I’ll usually put an XXX comment near it. When I’m done writing the code, I’ll recursively grep for XXX to see if there’s anything I can clean up prior to release. Other examples include “TODO” (as mentioned at the above link) and a person’s login or nickname (”dpk”).

I’ve moved from Iceweasel to Firefox 3 beta4, and I’m in love. The bookmark handling is sweet. You can just edit a bookmark by going to the page and clicking on a little icon in the location bar. You can add and remove bookmarks right there, too. The save-password dialog box has been replaced with a box like the “pop-up blocked” thing that shows up just under the toolbars on FF2/Iceweasel, so you can decide whether or not to save it after you’re sure it was successful.

Best of all, the beta is way faster than Iceweasel ever was.

My only legit issue* with it is the ginormous drop-down that appears when you are entering URLs. If your mouse is hovering over a link in the drop-down, you can’t take proper advantage of the tab-completion — it’ll end up using your URL you’re hovering over. I think that might have been the case before, but it didn’t come up as often because the menu was so much smaller. I’m counting it as a focus issue, something that plagues Linux window managers and applications.

That rant said, I’m giving this browser the dpk stamp of approval.

* That is, other than that some plugins aren’t available for it yet.

So I’m taking a math class (pre-calc), mostly as a way to try to feel less dumb in my day-to-day life. I’m doing OK at it, getting most of the “higher” principles such as using conjugates to decomplexificate* a complex ratio. But I’m having trouble remembering some of the basics, especially during quizzes.

Historically, I’ve done better on quizzes than on homework, but now that I’m old, things have changed. Now I watch as other students finish their quizzes before I’m half way done with mine, and I still get things wrong.

I titled this post “math shame” because I hope that by sharing my shame, I will remember what I typed here, and will get it right the next time. Today’s inspiration is due to the fact that on a quiz, I forgot how to change √-2 into something that follows the “a + bi” form. I wrote 2i. The real answer, as pointed out by another student on our way out of class, is actually i√2. D’oh. If I had thought about √-4, I might have realized that’s really what 2i is.

I think this plan may work. There’s only two remaining class periods before the final, so I’ve got to get this shit down quick.

* Firefox says that’s not a word. Too bad.

I think I should hand out dpk.net Alexa ranking t-shirts at the next convention.

Here is a link that was shared to me. I now share it to you.

Garfield minus Garfield. I see now it was already on digg. I’ve failed you all.