![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm calling these "stray peeves" because I haven't adopted them as pets yet, though a DNA test will show each to be closely related to a pet peeve of mine regarding readability/useability vs. "stylishness" or unfortunate limitations resulting from poorly chosen assumptions.
1) Who formats an entire story deliberately center-justified and using a stylesheet that doesn't leave any space between paragraphs? Not the way to get anybody to bother reading what you took all that trouble to write...
2) Webcartoonists who use eensy weensy fonts in their speech bubbles don't usually annoy me as much as they do right now; I guess this is really a browser complaint: why can't I magnify the images in most browsers? (Related to this, I was looking at sites with a lot of math on them earlier, and most of the equations were done as images; it would have been nice to be able to scale those as well.) It works in Opera; why not in Firefox and Konqueror? Or am I supposed to keep changing my screen resolution when I switch apps, or even when I switch tabs within the browser and go to pages laid out for different screen sizes?
3) [related to #2] I want Opera to be reliable again! I don't know whether it's some configuration issue specific to my Debian machine or a problem others have been having with Opera 9, but when I upgraded to 9.10, Opera started hanging at odd intervals and needing to be killed manually and restarted. I'm currently running 9.20 and having similar trouble. Until now, Opera's been a rock, and there are a bunch of little things I took for granted that I really miss when I use Firefox (well, Iceweasel, the Debian-badged build of Firefox). I want to be able to go back to just using Opera again.
I thought other browsers had caught up to Opera by now, and that switching would be mostly a matter of getting used to subtle differences in the user interface aesthetic. I've been telling people looking for an alternative to MSIE, "I like Opera myself, but a lot of my friends really like Firefox and apparently it's about as good; I suggest either of those." But it turns out that Opera's still actually ahead when it comes to features I use regularly. After having used Firefox for a few weeks, I think I'm going to have to go back to simply recommending, "Install Opera" -- at least once I know they've got it stable under Linux again.
Hey, at least when Opera does need to be killed, the next time I restart it I'm right back where I left off with all the same tabs open and the same pages loaded. When Firefox crashes, whatever I was in the middle of goes bye-bye. I've heard there's a plug-in I can download to give it Opera-like session recovery capability, but I haven't gotten around to digging up the info on that yet.
I don't think Opera 9.10 has the same problem under Windows,
but I'm not sure -- I think I put 9.10 on the WinXP laptop I
borrow when visiting ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
anniemal, but I don't remember
for sure. The Win2K machine in the other bedroom has had its RAM
tied up with other stuff lately so I hven't gotten around
to upgrading the browser past Opera 8.51 yet -- maybe after I get
around to closing the other apps I've had running there. And I'm
guessing that if a lot of other Linux users were having
this problem with 9.x, I'd have heard screaming by now. I'm hoping
the next beta release will fix it for me.
(no subject)
(no subject)
Idiots do, idiots of a particularly pernicious breed. They know enough to understand that they are breaking formatting conventions, but not enough to know why doing so is a bad, bad idea. Worse, they tend not to take criticism very well at all.
On the Firefox front, I use the session saver capability bundled into Tab Mix Plus. I'm not really keen on FF's native tab handling, so it kills at least two birds with one addon for me.
(no subject)
In my experience, TMP is not reliable about saving state when FF is quit normally. On the Mac I leave FF running for weeks at a time, so there's few data points. But on the Sun I shut FF down daily, after saving my session manually. When started the next day, TMP shows my list of saved sessions, including a "Last Session" which should have been saved when FF closed, but is generally older (sometimes many days older) than the last session I saved manually. (Perhaps this is deliberate, not saving a new "Last Session" if nothing has changed since I manually saved everything?)
(no subject)
My supervisor found a nice (I think maybe internal-only) Website showing lots of this art. It seemed promising.
There are two problems with it. The first is that the entry in the 56SC manuscript might have just said "pick up from 43GA_CR2_L12_1", and searching for "56SC" won't find it. The second is that a big piece of that database consists of scanned images, in which the label is part of the scanned image, and thus invisible to the browser search function. I have no idea why they bothered doing this: specifically, why someone thought putting that stuff into an otherwise-minimally-organized database (organization is into collections of images categorized at the level of "biology," "earth science," "math") and not attaching any sort of label to the items was remotely useful.
(no subject)
(no subject)
Enjoy!
(no subject)