Tag: ‘bugs’ · TangleBones

Background Tab Strangeness

In the past I’ve noticed some strange behav­iors in WebKit based browsers, espe­cially when open­ing tabs in the back­ground. For instance, some­times if a page con­tains an embed­ded YouTube video (or the like), Safari on the Mac won’t load the video unless you go to the tab and reload the whole page. Frus­trat­ing, but no big deal.

I was will­ing to chalk that up to the ever-​crappy Mac ver­sion of the Adobe Flash plugin (so slow, Adobe! Why do you hate us?), but then I opened a link to this nifty new Javascript-​based graph­ing library in a back­ground tab in Google Chrome and when I clicked over got this:

(It’s a little tricky to see, but a bunch of the graph’s labels are way off to the left.)

Now, Safari on Win­dows doesn’t have this prob­lem, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s an issue with a par­tic­u­lar snap­shot of WebKit, or some­thing Google did in imple­ment­ing their custom Javascript engine V8. Either way, that sucks.

Old site broken, thoroughly pissed

When I woke up on Sunday Morn­ing at 3:30, I dis­cov­ered that there was a new ver­sion of Typo out. Anx­ious to find fixes for the bugs I’d enoutered in ver­sion 4, I started read­ing through the release notes where I dis­coved that the copy of rails on my server wasn’t com­pat­i­ble with the latest Typo. Worse yet, nei­ther was com­pat­i­ble with the ver­sion of Ruby installed.

So, think­ing I knew what I was doing, I did the download-​configure-​make-​make install dance for Ruby, read­line, gems, rails and typo. With all of that going smoothly, I went for the final step: typo install [direc­to­ry­name], at which point every­thing went to hell. It backed up my data­base, but then mod­i­fied the orig­i­nal and crapped out. Trying to back out the changes didn’t work. Nor did any­thing else I tried. The error mes­sages? How about: “unable to find method read!” Yeah, that’s working.

To be honest, I prob­a­bly screwed it up. In fact, I’m sure of it. Which is why I’m switch­ing to Word­Press. Dreamhost’s one-​click-​install made instal­la­tion a breeze, and hope­fully I’ll figure out how to get my old data tran­si­tioned over soon.