Don’t look at the big Spinfox too long, you might get sick. As it is, I whipped up replacement throbbers for the toolbars, and accompanying userChrome.css mojo so it works with large, small, and text only sizes of buttons. Next up is userChrome.css for the tab throbbers, and then packaging it all in an XPI/Extension, but this is a good start… The individual frames are here. Note, this isn’t just the logo rotated, only the fox spins around of the stationary globe. Whee!

Very cool. Make a South Park style character.

Asa gave a little airtime in his blog to the eminently talented Jesse Ruderman, linking to a post about how Jesse tests application security. Moral absolutists, those who wish to define what is right and wrong for everyone and bar dissent, turned it into a forum for ad hominem attacks on the porn industry, insults on the intelligence of women (declaring porn degrading to women despite the fact that many women disagree), and declaring tens of millions of people as sexist purely based upon their excercise of their first amendment rights. One even insinuated that the Mozilla Foundation should somehow stop Jesse from using the name Pornzilla, and chided Asa for merely mentioning it.

I find these closed minded people to be anathema to the foundations of America and our preservations of Freedoms. Apparently they feel we’re free only to believe as they do, and if we do not, we’re branded as sexist and immoral. It’s also anathema to the ideals of open source and free software, that you can use and change the software as you please provided you return your changes to the public. I never saw a morals clause in the GPL.

There’s been a lot of fantastic work done on Bug 274784, “Make back and forward blazingly fast and side-effect free.” Well, at 3am thoughts were rolling through my mind, and I came up with a cool name for this new feature. Whiplash. I like it, a few other folks do. Let’s make it official! “Firefox 1.1: Faster, Smarter, and now with Whiplash!“

Another six gigabytes up in smoke again yesterday. Recently Slashdot ran a story that perfectly phrased a thought I’ve had for years. The Social Contract. I don’t block most ads because I feel viewing a few ads and occasionally clicking an interesting one is the least I can do in exchange for free content. I also don’t really mind TV ads, except when the SCREAM AT ME and such. I block ads from DoubleClick due to their heinous data tracking efforts, and popup ads. Those break the advertisers’ and content providers’ end of the Social Contract. But normal ads, I leave them alone, because I’m not going to break my end. The key to it is equity and fairness. Don’t make your ads evil or obnoxious, and I’ll view them.

But then there’s Fusker, a web tool to blatantly break the social contract. It’s used primarily for image and porn galleries. It allows the users to scrape all the images on a page or gallery at one time in the browser, bypassing a site’s framing and support content. In the forums they suggest disabling Referrer Logging, to bypass referrer blocks. Referrer identification is useful to servers to help prevent file and image hotlinking, a big drain on bandwidth. I moved from TCH to DreamHost specifically to get more bandwidth. I now have 6 times more than I did. But I got Fuskered again, and at this rate I’ll burn up 180 GB of my 120 GB by the end of the month. That’d leave me with -60GB, which would cost me an extra $60 this month alone. This is not good.

I’m trying to keep the Shared Media directory as open as possible, but I’m having to lock it down a touch. Most people will never notice what going on. That’s good, it means we’re abiding by the social contract. I thank you for that, and that’s why I have some stuff up for folks to enjoy.

But A few of you may be reading this when you were expecting something else. If that’s the case, you were redirected for hotlinking. You’re making it hard for other people to enjoy the stuff I’m trying to share on my nickel. I don’t ask much; don’t be a jerk.

Ok, I visit Astronomy Picture of the Day on fairly regular basis (one could quantify it as daily). It’s always got something great to see. Today’s picture is just flipping gorgeous. I had to know more. I emailed the photographer Larry Landolfi. I was fairly sure he would be deluged with mail, and mine would go unnoticed. Not the case! He replied rather quickly with a lot of useful information. Nice guy. And I visited his site. This guy is a really great photographer, and not just of astronomical phenomena. You need to check this out, JoesRoom.com. He also mentioned in a few days his official site will be LandolfiPhoto.com, so when that goes live I’ll linkify that one.

Well, now that I’m on better hosting, I enabled “fancy urls”, or queryless URLs. When you click a blog link, it takes you to urls that look like this: http://burntelectrons.org/item/90 rather than http://burntelectrons.org/index.php?item=90. This makes it more Google friendly, possibly easier to remember URLs too, and looks cleaner. Also, down on the right by the “Valid X” buttons is a button and link to Nucleus.org. I use Nucleus here, as does Tristor (in the linklist), and other folks I know. I really like it. It’s small, fast, flexible, and in PHP. It’s surprisingly easy to extend with plugins, or even just to edit the rather well designed PHP code, even for folks with minimal coding experience.

I’ll get the Annoyed Contributor’s Network back up soon too. It died in the move, but I wanted to work on it more anyway.

If you see anything broken on the site, let me know with a comment here.