Monday, 12 July 2004, 19:04:54 EDT

What a conflicting day. It was a mixture of good and bad. It was good because I was finally able to do something at work other than find obscure locations to use the wireless connection; I helped install equipment in the two wiring closets on the first floor of the new University Center and tomorrow will be more of that just on another floor. Although, at the end of the day a curse that afflicts me arose. I seem to be cursed in that I break things without even trying; at least what I broke is easily fixed with some plastic epoxy. I still feel like a complete jackass for having broken something though. But, nothing to do about it now other than fix it.

Before I left for work I managed to completely mess up my FireFox configuration so I had to delete it this afternoon when I got home. While I was at it I decided to quit waiting on the person maintaining the Debian package and reverted to installing 0.9 to `~/bin/firefox`. I am a little disappointed that the flashblock and session saver extensions won't load but that will be fixed in due course. I am pleased, however, with the single window extension. It fixes the broken behaviour that almost every site out there seems to want to use — opening links in a new window. Links are not meant to be opened in a new window unless the user decides they should be. It is insanely annoying to have to switch between five different windows just because the website authors do not want you to leave their site. I hate to burst your bubble mister "you can click the links but you are going to stay here" site maintainer but if I want to leave your site then I am going to do so. When you open windows I didn't request then that is probably going to make me leave it quicker. Not quite as quick as if the site required a flash file that makes no sense but I will leave almost as quickly. If you run a website, or plan to, then keep this in mind. If you really want to open a link in a new window then do it like so: link. If you form the link like that then the link will open in a new window if the user has support for javascript, and it is enabled, otherwise it will open in the same window. The web is not about what the author wants, it is about what the user wants. If you do not cater to the user they are going to go elsewhere for what they were looking for on your site.

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