I think I have completed major moving activities, so it's about time for an update to the old blog.
The move itself was rather more epic than I had planned. Due to the never-ending stormy weather we are getting this year, and the fact that I was planning on moving water sensitive things in the uncovered bed of a truck, the loading process took about five hours longer than the planned one hour. This was because we ended up gift-wrapping all our furniture in 3.5 mil plastic (the kind you put in flower beds). Several rolls of plastic and several rolls of duct tape later, we had everything ready, but seeing as it was about midnight, and our original plan was to leave at 2am, we ended up leaving later and breaking the drive into two days. With a stopover at my cousin Hillary's house for the night, it didn't end up costing us much.
Beaumont is amusing.
My only major accomplishments so far have been unpacking my stuff and reading a 700 page book by the pool. The pool here is quite excellent, and it's hot enough I don't even miss having a hot tub around.
Tonight I decided to get Firefox 3 RC2 up and running, just to try it out. It took quite a while to make portage happy. The initial emerge only took about 12 minutes, but some of the packages were requesting revdep-rebuilds that were curiously downgrading Firefox back to 2.0.0.14. After about an hour of investigating, I tracked it all down, and feel like documenting all my fixes here for fun.
Added the following to package.keywords:
=www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.0_rc2 ~amd64
>=dev-libs/nss-3.12_rc4 ~amd64
>=dev-libs/nspr-4.7.1 ~amd64
>=x11-libs/cairo-1.6.0 ~amd64
>=x11-libs/pixman-0.10.0 ~amd64
>=net-libs/xulrunner-1.9_rc2 ~amd64
Added this to package.unmask:
=www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.0_rc2
>=dev-libs/nss-3.12_rc4
>=dev-libs/nspr-4.7.1
>=net-libs/xulrunner-1.9_rc2
And to fix that reversion issue... added to package.use:
app-office/openoffice -firefox
dev-java/swt -firefox
Also changed my xorg.conf ButtonMapping Option to use buttons 8 and 9 instead of 6 and 7.
The first two sets of changes were needed to unmask everything Firefox 3 needed to compile. The changes to package.use were needed to fix the reversion issue. Apparently both these packages depend on Firefox 2 when that use flag is enabled, and aren't smart enough to use Firefox 3. I'm pretty sure I can live without whatever integration that use flag offers, at least until they are updated to use FF3.
As for the mouse button mapping, I guess older versions of Firefox incorrectly used buttons 6 and 7 as forward and back buttons, even though they are supposed to be the horizontal scroll buttons. Many laptop touchpads and fancy new mice have horizontal scroll spots/wheels, and firefox was executing back/forward operations whenever those users accidently bumped them. The side buttons on a mouse are apparently really supposed to be buttons 8 and 9, and substituting those for where I had 6 and 7 before did the trick nicely.
FF3 itself is great so far. The new Firebug has lots of nifty things, and since you can disable the performance sucking parts, it doesn't seem to bite page loads as hard. The zoom functionality is much better than before. (I use this a lot so I can read long articles while reclining several feet away from my monitor.) It actually zooms the entire page, images and all, much like the iPhone browser does. The old Firefox just made the text larger, which could lead to weird layout issues. The alt text on images actually shows in it's entirety when hovering, which makes xkcd comics much more fun. Browsing is moderately snappier, and the new javascript engine shines. Gmail loads up about twice as fast as before, and heavy javascript pages don't seem to clunk and stutter like before.
On that note, the new jQuery release apparently improved mouse handling and events a ton. Using the demos on the documentation site, I can definitely vouch that dragging and dropping seems much much faster/smoother, so definitely worth updating. I love jQuery.
I have a whole book in this excellent trilogy left to read, so probably nothing too exciting until I'm done with that. I'll be sure to rant about these books later. Kathy seems to be digging the new job duties, and it's kind of weird staying home all day, but it still feels like vacation, so I can't complain.
Plus I have this to play with all day!
