http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2004/12.php .
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In the past couple of days, I've experimented with several different background colors for my Firefox browser's active tab, using the method that I described two days ago. I think I've pretty much settled on pale yellow, which stands out even better than bright white did. If you want your active tab to really stand out, try setting its background color to rgb (255, 255,0), which is a really intense yellow.
For the past several years, this Web site has been ranked about 1,237,xxx out of all Web sites by
Alexa.
Then, a few weeks ago, it suddenly jumped up to number 949,832. That means that ComputerBob.com is now one of the top one million
most popular Web sites in the world. At this rate, it'll be one of the top 100 sites in a little more than 4283 years. Tell your
friends!
Regular readers know that I've been happily using Mozilla's free, fast, customizable and secure
Firefox
Web browser since November 10. Unfortunately, for the past several weeks, when I've had multiple browser tabs open at the same
time, I've often closed what I thought was the active tab, only to discover that I had closed one of the other tabs instead.
That's because, by default, all of Firefox's browser tabs have the same gray background, and the only thing that distinguishes the
active browser tab is that its name displays in bold text. I've often wondered if there was an easy way to make the active
browser tab visually stand out from the inactive tabs. Well, I did some searching and today, I discovered
Firefox Tips and Tricks, a page
that describes how to customize many of Firefox's settings. I changed the color codes in that page's
active tab tip
to give my active tab a bright white background, and give my other tabs a darker gray background. Now my active tab stands out very
clearly from the other tabs, even when I have many tabs open at the same time. If you're using Firefox, be sure to check out that
tips and tricks page.
Yesterday was really fun. We went to Jim and Linda's house for a dinner of deep-fried turkey with all the trimmings. Then we
visited for awhile, before driving around together for a couple of hours, looking at Christmas lights. Then we went back to their
house for dessert. This was the second Christmas Day in a row that we had turkey dinner at Jim and Linda's house. Last
Christmas Day, we arrived in the Sunshine State with our moving truck, and they helped us move into our first mobile home, and
then served us a turkey dinner. Regular readers of this Journal may recall that Jim and Linda are my wife's sister and
brother-in-law, but they're such wonderful people and have been such a blessing to us in so many ways that I think of them as
my brother and sister.
Merry Christmas! And by that, I don't mean that I hope Santa Claus brought you all of the Christmas presents that you
wanted, or that you'll have a White Christmas, or that your Christmas dinner will be delicious, or that your Christmas lights will
be pretty. What I mean is that I hope and pray that the redemptive, life-changing power of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, will
be born again in all of our hearts every day, and that, no matter what our circumstances, our lives will be joyful, faithful
reflections of God's love and peace and power and glory. Merry Christmas!
I got a big surprise yesterday morning, when FedEx brought me a large envelope from Buy.com. It was a big surprise because I hadn't ordered anything from Buy.com, and because the envelope contained no clues as to who had ordered or paid for it. The only thing inside was a 128MB U.S.B Flash Drive that was smaller than my thumb and only about 1/4 inch thick. It only took a few seconds to plug it into my computer and copy this entire Web site to it, which used only about 1/4 of its storage capacity. I've never had a flash drive before, but I can tell that it's going to be incredibly convenient to quickly transfer files between two computers, and to store some utilities on it, to use when I'm troubleshooting other people's PCs. I made some calls today, but I couldn't find anyone who would admit to having sent me such a nice present. If you sent it to me, please accept my sincere gratitude for your thoughtfulness and generosity. And please write and tell me who you are.
UPDATE: I wrote to Buy.com's Customer Support department late last night, and they wrote back this afternoon
to tell me that my secret Santas were my brother-and-sister-in-law, Neal and Beth, from
University Heights, Ohio.
Thanks again you two, for one of the best gifts I've ever received.
Lethality Indicators is now the 40th piece in this site's Abuse Information section.
Yesterday, I began receiving counseling at the same shelter that has been a big help to our houseguest for the past five
months. I was raised in a very abusive family, and even though I always told myself, "I'm never going to be like him," I've
always had to consciously and carefully struggle against some of the same demons that my abusive father was never able to defeat.
And now I realize that the feelings of hurt and anger that I was never allowed to express toward my father, are the same feelings
that still try to come out now, all these years later, misdirected at others when they say or do things that make me feel the way
I felt when I was a kid. So, I'm getting help to learn how to actually be the person that everyone thinks I am. Please
pray for me.
Are you the type of person who believes every multiply forwarded email message that you receive? More importantly, are you the type of person who immediately forwards every "forward this message to everyone you know" email message that you receive? Finally, and most importantly, are you the type of person who thinks you're doing me a favor when you forward all of that junk to me? If you answered Yes to any of those questions, then please do everyone you know a favor by reading Top 10 Net Hoaxes and Urban Legends of 2004. And afterward, please read my article, How To Stop Internet Hoaxes.
Saturday night, we went to Jim and Linda's church to see a set of live, drive-through Nativity scenes that portrayed several
different events from Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. The line of cars was so long that it took nearly an hour to get from
the end of the line to the first scene. Volunteer workers gave each car either a CD or a cassette tape that provided music
and narration for each scene. Jim played a soldier in scene 5, and just barely turned his eyes to glance at us when I called his
name from our car, while Linda played a shepherd in scene 3 and broke character enough to unobtrusively wave at us when we called
her name.
This is a really fun time to live in the Sunshine State. Everything is decorated, just like up north, but the decorations here
are often fancier, probably because people can decorate as much as they want without fear of frostbite. Last night, we went to a
Gulf Coast island to see our next-door neighbors, Mike and Annamarie, ride their
Harleys
in a motorcycle parade. Annamarie wore her black leathers and a Santa hat, while Mike wore an entire Santa suit, and his bike was
covered with Christmas lights. Afterward, we all went to an island restaurant where we had a perfect view of a Christmas
Boat Parade of highly decorated boats and yachts. One particularly funny yacht showed this year's 4
hurricanes blowing palm trees, Santa's reindeer and Santa off the back of the yacht.
Today, I put up red, white, and multi-colored Christmas lights on the front of our dream home. My wife and I haven't owned any
Christmas lights since we gave all of ours away before moving to the Sunshine State last Christmas day. And, due to our current
financial condition, buying new Christmas lights was not a priority this season. So, imagine my surprise when my next-door
neighbor and buddy, Mike, came over this morning to offer to loan me several brand new strings of lights that he and Annamarie
aren't using. Doesn't that sound like the plot of a Hallmark Christmas special? We sure love our dream home, and it makes it even
better that we have such great neighbors.
This month has witnessed several possibly major medical breakthroughs. On December 11, I told you about a possible new cure for
asthma. The next day, researchers in Texas announced that
they may have discovered the cause of psoriasis.
That same day, researchers in New York announced that they've developed
a simple scratch-and-sniff test
that could help doctors identify the early stages of Alzheimer's disease in patients. And researchers in New Jersey have developed
a combination of drugs that they believe can destroy the HIV virus that causes AIDS.
Thanks to Uncle Dom for telling me about the psoriasis story.
Here's
an electric guitar that would've
been perfect for The Grateful Dead. Insert your own pun here.
On November 19, I recommended that, due to many problems reported by its users, you should wait as long as possible to upgrade your computer's free AVG antivirus software to the newest AVG Free Edition v7.0. A day or two ago, I received a notice that there was an update to my (previously buggy) copy of AVG Free Edition v7.0. The update included fixes for the AVG software itself, so I installed it. Now, AVG Free Edition v7.0 (build 296) appears to be working correctly on my Windows 98 SE computer.
If you're a regular reader of this Journal, you know that, for the past couple of years, I waited for
open-source software developer, Mozilla, to finish creating ready-for-prime-time versions of its powerful and free
Firefox Web browser and
Thunderbird email software. A
few weeks ago, Mozilla released version 1.0 of Firefox, which I've been very happily using ever since. Then this past week,
Mozilla released version 1.0 of Thunderbird, but I'm not going to switch from MS Outlook to Thunderbird yet. I still see many
complaints about unfinished features and reports of minor problems in the Thunderbird support forums. In fact, several forum
posters suspect that Thunderbird 1.0 may have been rushed to market in order to be released right after Firefox 1.0. I think I'll
wait a little while longer, and switch to Thunderbird when version 1.1 is released.
For years, the Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser has been plagued with a myriad of security holes, requiring MS to almost constantly issue security patches and updates for it. As a result, in the past several months, many computer security companies have urged people to switch to more secure browsers. According to Information Week, this past Wednesday, Penn State University issued an alert, urging its more than 80,000 students to stop using MSIE and switch to safer, more secure browser, like Mozilla's Firefox or the Mozilla Suite or Opera or Apple's Safari.
If you or someone you know has asthma, you're going to want to read about
a new vaccine
that not only stops allergic asthma, but also reverses the lung damage that the disease caused, both in monkeys and in mice. Of
course, much more testing will have to be done, to see if it will work on humans. Theoretically, research like this could open
many doors for researchers to learn how to control or reverse the effects of other diseases. Thanks to Uncle Dom for telling me
about this story.
In another medical first, four people have learned to move a computer cursor in two directions with their thoughts, while wearing a thinking cap that holds 64 non-invasive electrodes against their scalps.
Happy Birthday, Cousin Wayne! As always, this is
a date which will live in infamy.
Almost everyone who tries the new Firefox 1.0 browser notices that it browses much faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Well, it turns out that users have discovered several ways to make Firefox even faster. All you have to do is:
On my computer, I copied the lines marked
Common To All Configurations, and then, because I have a fast computer and I'm on a dial-up Internet
connection, I also copied the lines marked Fast Computer, Slow Connection. On your computer, you should copy the
lines marked Common To All Configurations, plus whichever additional lines are appropriate for your computer's
speed and Internet connection speed. I can verify that the tweaks worked on my Windows 98 SE computer, making Firefox noticeably
faster than it already was. By the way, if you use this method to tweak Firefox, but it turns out that you don't like the results,
just delete the user.js file that you created, and Firefox will revert back to its original
settings.
For the past several years, I've loosely followed medical advances in the area of using the human mind to control a computer,
so I was really happy to see a news item about two patients with brain implants who were able to play a simple electronic game
just by thinking about it.
Further research may someday allow severely disabled patients to communicate or even regain lost movement.
If you print anything from this Web site, you may notice that now, the
URL
of each document (except my home page) appears
near the top of the first printed page, under the ComputerBob logo. I accomplished that by finding and figuring out how to use
a line of PHP code that
automatically displays each document's URL, and then I used the CSS display: none property to prevent the URLs from
appearing when the documents are viewed onscreen. Last night, I did a Google search and easily found a small JavaScript that
displays a Web page's URL, but I wanted to find a PHP solution, so that it would work even if my site's visitors don't have
JavaScript-enabled browsers. It's the type of thing that any PHP programmer could probably write in less than a minute, but I'm
not a programmer, so I had to search the Web for several hours to find that one line of PHP code. Oh well, live and
learn.
