A little teaser..

So here's a small screenshot of a filter. It's still lacking text labels and I'm not quite sure about the color scheme, but it's using the vector graphics library thingie.

The library itself needs a bit of tweaking before anything using it goes live. Maybe I'll release the library itself as well at some point, I don't know yet.



I was a bit worried about the performance, since it seemed to slow stuff down when redrawing a lot. That could happen for example when another window was moved on top of the thing. What was a bit strange though, was this would typically only happen after a while...

I was already going to write some bitmap caching logic to avoid doing the actual drawing unless something really changed in the window. Then my eyes caught something missing: I was leaking resources in my painting routine. Single line of code to fix that bug. Now it runs pretty nice just redrawing everything on the fly.

Firefox oddity

Ok, seems this a.t.timeout thing is stranger than I thought. Yesterday 0 caused no timeout. Today it means instant timeout??

I guess I should just get the source and figure out where the problem is, but I feel lazy. :)

Firefox preference bugs

I just love some of these Firefox preference bugs. There's a setting in firefox called accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeoutenable. When set to false, it's purpose is to disable hiding the typeahead find bar. This supposedly stopped working properly after version 0.10 or something like that.

Now, there's another setting called accessibility.typeahead.timeout. You'd assume that if you set this to some large value, you'd essentially have your bar stay visible? Nope, doesn't seem to work. What seems to work though, is setting the a.t.timeout to value 0.

Now, the funny thing is I can easily find several sources that tell me that a.t.timeoutenable is broken, but don't see the workaround mentioned anywhere. I remember wondering (and solving) this for multiple times now, so I'll put it here for future reference.

I'm still using 1.5 series Firefox at home, but if I'm not mistaken the situation is identical in 2.0 series. At least I remember fighting with it after oh-so-wonderful centrally-administered computer-management thingie decided to give me 2.0 on another computer.

edit: I guess it's worth adding that yes, there's an open bug since years now, still in state New, so probably no use trying to report this.