Moar wiurd SSIDs

Following my previous post on SSIDs, I saw this today when I fired up my MacBook on the bus:

SSID = Jesus Redeemer


Some of the ones I liked from the comments are:

  • broken
  • youneedbettersecurity
  • INTERNETS THROUGH THE AIR

Have you seen any amusing SSIDs today?

“Open in Tabs” fixed in Firefox 3, at last

The last time I blogged about Firefox’s “Open in Tabs” behavior was 3 years ago in September 2004. Open in Tabs is quite a cool bookmark feature where you can open a folder of bookmarks.

Unfortunately, some of us felt that there it had a flawed implementation. Here’s how you can see it for yourself:

Here, try this in a new Firefox window. Open up 4 tabs. Make sure that there’s nothing in these tabs that you want to remember to come back to later, especially the last 2. Now try using “Open in Tabs” on a bookmark folder with just 2 bookmarks. What just happened? Firefox has closed the last 2 tabs and loaded the first 2 tabs with the first 2 bookmarks. Well, actually this is not so bad for the first 2 tabs, because you can use the “Back” button to go back to your page should you want to, but the tabs that were closed are lost.

It was then rather unfortunate that this bug was closed as WONTFIX. I was thus surprised to see a patch for a similar bug land in the Firefox 3 trunk about a week ago (I haven’t had time to blog about it until now!)

This change in Firefox 3 means that “Open in Tabs” is no longer a destructive proposition - a “use existing tabs and append” strategy is employed.

Here’s how it looks like graphically (which I expect would be easier to understand compared to aforementioned “use existing tabs and append” strategy). Let’s start with 4 tabs, with the Google, Ruby on Rails, Facebook and jQuery websites loaded:

Open in tabs, initial


I have a bookmark folder with 2 bookmarks (to the Firebug and Prototype websites) in them:

Open in tabs, bookmark folder


If I click on “Open in Tabs” in Firefox 3, I end up with this:

Open in tabs, initial


Notice how the Back button is enabled on the Firebug tab (allowing us to go back to the Google webpage), and the Prototype bookmark is loaded in a new tab after the Firebug one.

Small little tweak you may say, but it’s all these small usability tweaks (like the recent Password Manager improvement) that promise to make Firefox 3 a much better browser.

Dugg? No problem with WordPress

An old post I wrote on a spoof MMORPG named “Outside” was Dugg not too long ago and I was quite pleased to find that my server and the blogging software (WordPress) that I use was handling the load extremely well. Quite obviously I was getting more hits in a day than entire months:

Blog stats after getting Dugg


My setup is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 256MB RAM hosted at SliceHost and this blog is served off Nginx and PHP FastCGI processes to handle PHP scripts. The wonderful (because it just works and is really easy to setup) WP-Cache WordPress plugin keeps a cache of pages that’s swept at logical times (i.e. whenever there are any updates or comments).

I may be a Rails/merb fanboy, but this awesome piece of blog software that can stand up to the Digg Effect with ease is great. WordPress FTW!

jQuery 1.2 goodness

jQuery 1.2 was released yesterday and while it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t work with some of the fantastic jQuery plugins I am already using, there’re some really cool new features. In particular (this is my favorite), built-in cross-domain script loading via the getScript is just too convenient.

This would be awesome for loading heavy scripts later and only when they are “activated”, like Google Maps (which was exactly what I was trying to do earlier before realizing I’d need to setup a reverse proxy to workaround the cross-domain problem).

Oh, and the easy way to turn off browser caching in AJAX calls is a nice convenience as well (no need to append random numbers or timestamps manually).

Yup, I’m in love with jQuery right now. Protoype and YUI have fallen by the wayside like Chinese first and second wives of yore.

What’s your SSID?

After seeing this amusingly-named SSID, I thought it’d be fun to post the SSID of my wireless network at home:

AssAssID / SSID?


The name is completely not my idea so I claim no credit - I stole it from my girlfriend’s brother, who conceived the SSID of “AssAssID”.

What’s your SSID and have you seen any amusing ones? Or is yours one of the bajillion ‘linksys’ or ‘DLINK’ SSIDs in existence?