thread policy

[Max Battcher]

Dave Land wrote:
> Hey! Another GreaseMonkey fan. I have contributed a couple of scripts
> to that repository of scripty greatness and have written a couple of
> dozen more for my own personal use. GreaseMonkey completely changed how
> I use the Web, and I've been using the Web since 1994 (actually, it's
> been using me for the majority of that time).

I don't have any scripts that I run in GreaseMonkey but I have gotten in 
the habit of checking the script repository if there's a plugin I'm 
looking for but can't find.  So far no scripts for my missing plugins. 
Maybe one of these days I'll bother to sit down and write some scripts 
myself.

The Firefox plugin that has recently changed the way that I surf is a 
crazy little gem called Vimperator.  (It makes Firefox more like Vim, 
which freaks people out the first time they see it, particularly those 
that hate Vim, but I've found it to be an amazing surfing tool.) 
Vimperator mixes in .vimrc-like key mapping and JavaScript and so right 
now I'm more likely to play with writing Vimperator scripts than 
GreaseMonkey ones...

> That said, I believe that Brother Jon has made it clear that he is not  
> a technophile, and even some heavy-duty technophiles find GreaseMonkey  
> a bit daunting to grasp what the heck it is and what it's doing.

I agree, but I have seen/helped newbies install "script ready to run" GM 
scripts.  Plus someone told me that it isn't that far of a leap from GM 
script to "real plugin".  I mentioned the one script that I found in the 
raw possibility that someone on this list was "Monkey"-enough to help 
him through the grease and get at least some small world of help...

Of course, I didn't realize that Jon was using Safari and I know nothing 
about Safari other than the opinion that I don't think that I like it.

(I am not a Mac user...  I liked Macintosh, some, pre-OS X, but never 
felt like paying the price to buy one, but I think it's gone in entirely 
the wrong directions to hold my interests.  I'd rather use Windows, 
frankly.  Right now I'm using a lot of Ubuntu.  I've got Gnome's 
Nautilus in Spatial Mode (!), which was one of the few things that I 
admired about the Mac and that I missed from OS/2 (!)...  OS X dropped 
it why?  It was one of the few things that separated Mac and Windows and 
Mac and Unix and now Unix is the only place to find it and the Mac is a 
boring BSD clone with a bunch of closed source and a ton of eye candy 
stapled onto it.  The Mac screams to me that it is for nothing but ADD 
hipsters that don't mind paying more for "design aesthetic" and think 
that a computer should be a work of art off the factory floor.  I just 
find the Mac world goofy and out of touch and I don't seem to understand 
Mac culture at all anymore.  There's too much ego stroking for my 
tastes...  "My iPhone makes waffles and it makes me a special VIP member 
of society because I can overpay for my status symbols."  "My Macbook 
cures cancer while I write my pretentious code in Objective C that no 
one but a fellow Mac user could possibly 'get' so I'm not even bothering 
making it portable."  Blech.  Maybe it is "computers for dummies", but 
that doesn't seem to be the actual case, because you throw a rock out 
your window and hit an urchin willing to buy you a turkey and fix your 
Windows machine for a few pennies, even if you and/or they "hate it"...)

> I did not find anything about IE that would help anybody, under any  
> circumstances. As a Web developer, I believe that Microsoft should be  
> fined many hundreds of billions of dollars for all the Web developers'  
> and end-users' time that their turd-in-the-punch-bowl of a browser has  
> wasted.

Microsoft was fined billions of dollars for IE, if you think that most 
of the anti-trust case revolved around IE (it sort of did).

Up until the Vimperator discovery I was (by choice) using IE8 more and 
more often in Windows.  I found that it was sometimes more responsive 
than Firefox, at least on Windows, and it isn't all bad.  I would 
absolutely use IE8 before I ever touched Safari on Windows.  With as bad 
as Quicktime and iTunes run on Windows I can't even imagine attempting 
Safari.

Supposedly IE9 will be standards-tastic and may offer some healthy 
competition to the rest of the pack.

As a Web Developer I find that IE7/8 is close enough to Firefox's 
rendering when I have good semantic XHTML (verified by Firebug) that I 
don't spend any time worrying about IE.  Admittedly I cheat a tiny 
amount by using YUI these days, but that's useful enough even without 
its cross-platform concessions.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/

Look Ma, Pretty Special Effects in Ubuntu Without Paying For Steve Jobs 
to Eat My Soul Maru