Mozex Not Dead

I’m very pleased to have made the pleasant discovery today that Mozex is not dead. It had just lain in a coma for a while.

In case you don’t know, Mozex is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to edit Web form textboxes in the comfort of your favourite editor, which in my case is Vim. This was more of a breakthrough in the days before Firefox 2.x, when a browser crash could signal the pre-publication loss of, for example, a long and detailed blog entry, meaning an hour’s work down the drain.

Since Firefox 2.x, we’ve been treated to session recovery, which can also recover your draft textboxes, but Mozex can do a lot more besides. For example, you can choose to use an external program for viewing the source of HTML pages. Although Firefox’s internal viewer is pretty good these days, it’s nice to have advanced syntax highlighting and the ability to search within a page, using regular expressions.

I’d missed Mozex since upgrading to Firefox 2.0, but it’s nice to know that it’s now available once again.

For improved session management and more tab-related control than you imagined possible, I would also suggest installing the Tab Mix Plus plug-in.

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Up In Smoke

Finally.

The moment everyone who cares about their lungs, their children’s lungs, their clothes, their hair, their nostrils and their tastebuds has been dreaming about, has arrived.

The Dutch cabinet today ruled that all hotels, cafés and restaurants must be smoke-free from 1st July 2008. Coffee-shops have been given a break: only their point of sale must be smoke-free.

Minister Klink of Volksgezondheid (Public Health) is my hero.

Now the rest of Europe.

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Frogs

The last few days, our garden lawn has been jumping with frogs. Eloïse and I have great fun every day now, walking around looking for them. We generally find around half a dozen, ranging from thumbnail size babies to good-sized ones that would fit in the palm of your hand.

We don’t know where they’re coming from, but there must be a water source nearby. Perhaps one of our close neighbours has a pond or perhaps they’re coming from further afield. Quite why they camp out in our grass, however, is a mystery at the moment.

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Play Ogg

Play Ogg

The Free Software Foundation has launched its Play Ogg campaign for a “legally, ethically and technically superior audio alternative to the proprietary MP3 format”.

Even though Ogg Vorbis truly is legally, ethically and technically superior to MP3, I doubt this will turn the market for downloadable music upside-down. The superior product often doesn’t triumph.

V2000, anyone?

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Willemspark Yesteryear

I’ve been browsing through the Gemeentearchief‘s Beeldbank (the municipal archive’s image bank) and was delighted to find old photos of the Koningslaan, Oranje Nassaulaan and Prins Hendriklaan.

Amongst the photos are pictures of the original drawings and planning submissions for several of the neighbourhood’s most striking and characteristic buildings.

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