MetaDelay

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As Sparticus rightly points out here: yes, it took me a while to get down to the catblogging, an unexcusable delay. You see, I wanted to write about the plants first, but I was constantly distracted writing about other things, so I could never seem to get down to either the flora or fauna which live around me, not to mention the various theological issues weighing on my spirit these days. But now that I have both photographed and written about my cat in my weblog, I suppose I can now be distinguished as a bona fide weblogger, which officially qualifies me to rant about the medium. Right?

(Those of you who don’t have cats, then dogs are equally acceptable. If you have neither, then you may pass birds, turtles, ferrets, fish, or other animals for qualification. Failing that, then you must have permalinks.)

Make Opera Look Like a Browser Again

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Update, 2006: Opera 9.x is now free, and much more browser-like. Pretty much all of the stuff here can now be disregarded, except for the stuff about the status bar.

Update, Oct 2004: Opera Looks Like a Browser Again! As of Opera 7.60, only steps 3, 5, 6, and 7 from this page are necessary.

If you’re like me, you’re really trying to like Opera 7.50, not for what it is, but for what it once was: a light, zippy web browser which gave you excellent web-and-email functionality in a straightfoward, no-nonsense package. Today, however, it seems to have fallen prey to what I call “NCSA Syndrome.” No, I don’t mean that NCSA, God bless their souls; I mean the “Netscape Communicator Suite of Applications” problem, from back when Netscape, when it was still a browser in its 4.x days, tried to be all things at once to the harried web professional who just wanted a web browser.

Update, 8/16/2004: A small addendum, following some of the feedback in this Slashdot thread: It’s much to Opera’s credit, I must say, that the feature bloat and graphic cruft about which I complain has not added to the file size of the download — still around 3.5 MB!

So, you, Opera user, may have just downloaded the new Opera 7.50, and, like Asa, are staring aghast at a mess of toolbars swimming in a goopy, gradiated, blue-off-white browser chrome. I know I am; I can barely tell where the browser ends and the web begins. I don’t want any chat, newsreading, or even email functionality; I just want a nice, default-looking browser which lets me use the web, with back/forward buttons to top-left, ad banner to top-right, address bar below them, status bar at the bottom, and a wide, uninterrupted, virgin browsing space.

So if you’re like me, you might appreciate Paulo’s Guide to Making Opera Look Like a Browser Again:

  1. Tools > Preferences > Skin. Select “Windows Native.” Uncheck “Enable Special Effects.” Things will probably look a bit grayer (or bluer if you’re on XP), but for me, that’s a good thing. Skip this step if you like the goop.
  2. That “panel selector” to the left? Click on its left edge: it should disappear, but there’s still a thick left border which toggles it. If you want to get rid of that for good — I sure did — View > Panels > Panel Placement > Off and Panel selector placement > Off. Also uncheck View > Show panel toggle. I don’t know what the difference is and I don’t care; I want whatever can pop out of that left-side thing gone.
  3. We’re missing a status bar to show page and link info. Toggle View > Toolbars > Status Bar. ARGH! What kind of UI Monster puts a status bar at the top by default? Right-click in the status bar — you’d think a right click context menu for position would be consistent with the “panel selector” model previously mentioned, but no, nothing of the sort — right click the status bar and select “Customize Toolbars.” Opera doesn’t let on too well, but that orange border around the status bar element corresponds to the properties in the dropdowns. If it is not so, click on the status bar to activate the orange border. Set the status bar’s “Placement” to “Bottom.”
  4. What’s with the bookmark bar above the address bar? Me, I don’t even use bookmark bars. While still in the “Customize Toolbars” Preferences dialog, click on the bookmark bar (you should see the orange border appear around it) and turn it off. (Or move it to the bottom if you like, but good luck finding a way to make it appear below the address bar. Address bars appear one to a window in the gray work area, of which the bookmark bar is not a part. This isn’t IE-Land.)
  5. I’m not too used to seeing the back, forward, and reload buttons there to the left of the address bar; they belong above it, as with any other browser. Toggle View > Toolbars > Main bar. Voila, we have the standard browser navigation bar, and Opera has removed that full-width ad bar and floated it to the right as a more normal-looking banner. (I can see how they might have meant well with the narrower ad banner taking up less screen space, but for me, it was literally interrupting the UI with its 100% width.)
  6. Now this looks more like a browser. Only one problem left: as a long-time Opera 5.x-6.x afficionado, I prefer having the Toggle images/CSS/print preview buttons left of the address bar rather than the redundant back/forward/reload. I have no idea why they changed that, one of Opera’s best tools for developers. Go to Tools > Preferences > Customize Toolbars > Buttons and fields (tab) > Browser View. If this were OS X, you could drag buttons off the toolbar and they would disappear in a puff of smoke. As it is, Opera makes you right-click on each button and hit “Remove from toolbar” to do it. Remove everything there, then, from the “Browser View” button selection, drag the “Author mode” (that’s CSS) and “Print preview” buttons into the address bar. No need to bring in “Show Images” and “Security”; they’re off to the right of the address bar and search field. Just drag them to the left as you wish. (Or you can put Author Mode and Print Preview to the right, but I’m trying to bring Opera back to its simple old glory.) Keyboard-shortcut junkies will love knowing that pressing G toggles images between on-off-cached states, and Ctrl-G will toggle user/author modes.
  7. Finally, for you Ctrl-Tab people, get rid of the annoying tab-switch order with Tools > Preferences > Windows > Cycle pages > Cycle in page bar order.

I still use Opera a lot today because of two things: first, quick CSS/image toggling, because sometimes I don’t want to bother with images and layouts; I just want to read! The unstyled text-only browser mode is perfect for that. Also, quick author/user mode toggling lets me test CSS layouts for structure and hierarchy, so have an idea of what the page will look like in Lynx or Netscape 4.x without having to open either. Second advantage, tabbed multiple-window work area which doesn’t overflow into desktop and taskbar. I love Moz/Firefox, I love tabbed browsing, I hate popups, and I don’t like that Firefox opens popups in a new window on the taskbar without the option to have them open in a new tab. When I click on a popup or new window link in Opera, I get a new page which doesn’t leave the Opera window. Everything in one place, an uncluttered workspace, and my Windows taskbar breathes a sigh of relief. (The popup problem isn’t an issue in OS X, by the way, where you have a Dock instead of a taskbar, and transparent application work areas, so every application has its own window grouping as you switch.)

Still, the way it’s going, I’ve been finding myself using Firefox more and more on my PC these days. Opera gets less and less viable as the bloat increases. Perhaps Opera should take a cue from Moz and release a browser-only package with the features I so love. I might even pay for that.

(Opera email client? Please. It was great in version 5.x, but Opera’s new “M2” email client is confusing and nonintuitive. Just ignore it and get Thunderbird or something. That’s my opinion. Some of you, on the other hand, especially the ones who never move messages out of the inbox, might enjoy sorting your mail by “Unread” and “All” rather than with a clear tag/folder structure.)

Update: More from Asa on Opera 7.50.

Update: Sparticus has more tips for getting rid of default Opera cruft:

  • Delete the mess of default bookmarks with Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks, select them all, and Delete.
  • And to stop using M2, Tools > Preferences > E-mail > Use default e-mail client on computer.

Note: Those of you who come to this page looking for a way to remove the Opera ad banners, follow the instructions here. ;)

Look, Up in the Sky!

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I trotted down to the Capitol Reflecting Pool at 9:30pm last night to catch the space station flyby. Unfortunately, a mischievous cumulus cloud happened to obscure Jupiter at the moment of closest contact, but the station came zooming out from behind the cloud, a brilliant point of light crossing from southwest to northeast in the span of about a minute.

At the same time, I was on my cellphone with Amy as she watched the same scene from atop her roof in Baltimore, 40 miles north. At the point that the station, low in the horizon, was on a horizontal level with Sirius, she reported that it was a few degrees above, and that it reached the level of Sirius only seconds later. Parallax in action.

On Spaceweather, someone has a GIF animation of the station passing by Jupiter. Good thing they didn’t collide. ;)

Beepy-Beepy

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Whew. The old folly has been rectified, and the photolog is now officially back to the state I left it in as of March 2003 (when I got lazy, then forgot to dump the DB info with its stupid naming convention while reinstalling MT). Over the last few weeks, I’ve been painstakingly rebuilding the log from scratch, picture by picture, and I finished the last picture at midnight last night. So I present you with BPBP. (Update, 07/04: BPBP has been dissolved and integrated into the main flow.)

Next step: a buffer of about seventy Zire photos to add and caption. Then some daily archives. Then the mobile part. And comments. And thumbnails. And fixing old links to now-dead photolog archive pages. Much yet.

I’ve also got a little cronjob getting my del.icio.us links every 13th minute of the hour, and feeding them to the sidebar. So now I have what could probably be termed a “sideblog.” (Who would have thought that using crontab to run PHP scripts would be so nonintuitive? lynx -dump?!)

Blogger’04

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The new Blogger.com is out, and it looks great, both visually and functionally. It’ll take a while to get used to not seeing the old black layout, but on the plus side, the new dashboard is clean and simple, and the public profiling brings the community/social network aspect of the system into sharp focus. The new features look extremely promising: so much so, in fact, that I think I will use Blogger.com for my moblog, a step I had not seriously considered since the BloggerBot stopped working. Setting up an email-to-post-based weblog on Blogger will certainly be easier than on Movabletype.

(I’ll update details, feedback, and insider info I see as I go along, but it’s almost 2am, and after all the hiking and skating my feet hurt, so I’m going to bed.)

Happy Trails

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This was an outdoorsy weekend. On Saturday, Amy and I headed up to Rock Creek Park to do a 2.5 mile hiking loop. Starting from the Van Ness Metro, we got on the Soapstone Valley Trail (the start of which turned out to be fairly well hidden a couple of blocks down Albemarle Street from Connecticut Ave), which gave us a few challenging bits, including a jump over the creek as it babbled over soapstone ledges, and a fallen tree which the Park Service had not yet chainsawed through. At the end of this trail, it joins with Beach Drive, on whose narrow shoulder one must walk for a few meters before arriving at the Western Ridge Trail, a backbone biking trail down which one may connect to grassy picnic areas and the Melvin Hazen Trail. From there, we walked over to the National Zoo to look at nautiluses and kangaroos, then capped off the day with a sunset dinner of rogan josh and shrimp vindaloo at Woodley Park.

Sunday after church, I broke out the rollerblades and skated down the Mall, across Memorial Bridge into VA, and down the Mount Vernon Bike Trail to Gravelly Point. That’s a park just a few hundred meters from the northern tip of National Airport’s runway, so that landing planes are practically in your hair. If you don’t mind the deafening scream of jets flying overhead every five minutes, it’s a great place for planespotting, soccer, fishing, and just lounging, which is what I did, catching the sun with a book and some rice crackers. Next time, I should bring an Airliners.net Info printout so I can tell the Airbuses from the Boeings.