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ramblings of a hikikomori - Mozilla, Firefox, Rails, Anime, Mac

ramblings of a hikikomori - Rails, Firefox, Anime, Mac

Dragging tab to a new window coming to FirefoxNovember 16 2008

Completely by accident, I discovered that you can now drag a tab out from its current window to a new window in a recent Firefox nightly. A short video 24-second better explains what I’m talking about:

This tab tearing capability is a pretty neat feature - I know you can already do this in Safari, Opera and Galeon. It’s really well done in Safari, which I think is what Firefox is emulating. Nice to see Firefox follow suit!

If you can’t wait for Firefox 3.1, try it out in a recent Firefox nighty build (remember to use a new profile unless you are willing to risk corrupting your daily profile).

Optimize Firefox’s memory usage by tweaking session preferencesSeptember 10 2008

I’m a heavy tabbed browsing user - I have around 30 tabs open in my day-to-day Firefox profile all the time. Since the day Firefox 3 was released, I’ve noticed Firefox progressively getting slower with this particular Firefox profile (I use a different profile for web development). When it got to the point where changing tabs took a noticeable pause of 1-2 seconds, I tweaked some of Firefox’s session store and history preferences and now things are blazing fast again.

Here’s what you can do:

1. Go to about:config in Firefox.
2. Type in “session” in the “Filter” box.
3. Edit browser.sessionhistory.max_entries - this is the number of pages stored in the history of your browsing session. Basically these are pages that can be reached using your Back and Forward buttons. The default is 50 - I reduced it to 20.
4. Edit browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers - this is the number of pages that are stored in RAM so that they aren’t re-processed by Firefox’s rendering engine. This is what allows you to go Back to a page in Firefox and have it load almost instantaneously. The number of pages stored actually depends on the amount of RAM on your machine (see this). I reduced this to 4 (I have 2GB RAM).
5. Edit browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo - the number of tabs

Sass with Rails - avoiding disappearing stylesheets in productionAugust 7 2008

A few days ago I noticed that some of the pages on the Hotels app on wego.com were completely unstyled. They turned out looking rather Jakob Nielsen-istic:

But we were attached to our ugly shade of green to leave those pages in their naked glory. Preliminary CSI work told me that some cached stylesheets generated by Rails were empty files. Why is this is happening?

stylesheet_link_tag and the :cache option

Was I overriding the stylesheets generated by Rails in different pages? Because we have a lot of cobranded sites and country sites on wego.com, I use the :cache option when using stylesheet_link_tag very often.

For example, the main wego.com site’s layout template has a stylesheet_link_tag like this (in reality there are a whole lot more stylesheets):

<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'yui/reset-fonts', 'search', :cache => 'cache/search/listings' %>

When I need to make a new page for a cobranded site, I’ll create a new layout template with this:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'yui/reset-fonts', 'search', "sites/#{current_site}/cobrand", :cache => "cache/#{current_site}/search/listings" %>

Oftentimes I’d copy and paste (boo and hiss all you want!) the stylesheet_link_tag from one la

Reveal currently open files in Mac OS XJune 28 2008

Something I noticed completely by accident today when I clicked on the titlebar of QuickTime Player today with the Cmd key held down. The “titlebar” is this thing here - I’m not sure that’s the right name for it:

Anyway, if you hold down the Cmd key (aka the Apple key), a menu pops up that shows the folder hierarchy of where the currently opened QuickTime movie is in your filesystem:

This works in all Mac apps that display the filename of the currently open/focused file in the titlebar.

It’s useful for me since my NADD means I try to close as many unused windows as possible to adhere to my Cmd-Tab diet - now I can close Finder windows after opening files and be sure that I can get back to them quickly. What about QuickSilver? Yup, I do use (and love) QuickSilver but I don’t let it catalog every single file!

Another nice thing about this is that I can easily rev

Living on the Edge (of Rails) has a new home at the Official Ruby on Rails weblogJune 22 2008

You may have heard of it, but just in case, Living on the Edge is now going to be published on the official Ruby on Rails weblog. Big thanks to Gregg Pollack for getting me the new “gig”, and more importantly, for reviving and freshening up the content on the official Rails blog.

Catch the new first edition - this one’s about the API changes since Rails 2.1.