Michele Campeotto

After my SmackPad article, some people asked in the comments if I could port that to Windows. I don’t have idea where to start, but at least now I know that it is possible to do it (and quite easy, I suspect).

Thanks to the great work of Tatsuhiko Miyagawa you can literally fly over Google Maps with your ThinkPad. That’s amazing and far more amusing than switching workspace.

It would be nice to port this one to Linux too, but I think the only way would be a Firefox extension… any takers?

Don’t you find it annoying when sites set numeric access keys and when you press Alt-2 to change tab you get the side effect of also changing the page you was reading?

This is an old bug reported the first time for Mozilla, back when Phoenix Firebird Firefox didn’t even exist, but to date no fix has been released (eh, the wonders of multi-platformness).

My first greasemonkey script fixes this annoyance by removing the numeric accesskeys from the page.

Accesskeys are a strange feature in web sites: they are invisible, so you are not using them unless the site developer has been smart and displayed them himself, and they cause these kind of annoyances by triggering when you don’t expect.

The browser should show them in some way, maybe with an icon or a message in the status bar, or a (timed?) yellow notification like the one you get when popups are blocked.

Another tip like last one so that I can remember it. The Macromedia Flash plugin on Linux is stuck on using directly the /dev/dsp, so you’re left to either listening to audio from Flash or from anything else.

An hack is available but, as explained by the Ubuntu team, it makes Firefox unstable (but it’s still the plugin’s fault because it runs in the same process, but plugins should run in another process, bla bla bla).

Reading the comments in that bug, though, I found another workaround: install the alsa-oss package, wich wraps calls to /dev/dsp and routes them to ALSA, then edit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc or ~/.mozilla/firefox/rc (the latter takes precedence on the former, if it exists) and put FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" in there.

Then restart Firefox and enjoy. It looks stable for now on Ubuntu Dapper.