I really hate it when websites don’t give you any warning of links which will open in a new window. A lot of sites provide a little icon, or a small superscript comment, or even a tooltip. However, some don’t.

The one site that really annoyed me was Google’s GMail. I always like to keep the left-most tab in firefox on my Google Personalised Home. When a message arrives, I click the GMail header and am consequently presented with the GMail Inbox. Perfect.

In the top-left corner of the GMail homepage is a link back to Google Home (whether personalised or not - it ‘knows’) which opens in a new window. Which is very frustrating if you have lots of tabs open in the current window. After looking for an ‘Open in this tab’ extension and failing to find one, I decided to create my own.

Enter thisTab! - a Mozilla Firefox extension to override the behaviour for a link which uses the target=’_blank’ parameter to open a new window. Note that this won’t work with javascript popup links.

As this is my first foray into any kind of ‘plugin’ development, I’d love to know what people think.

The Sitening Blog led me to the Websites as graphics tool, created by Aharef. It’s a great little tool, which produced the following image:

This is a map of the jamesbooker.co.uk homepage with its associated tags mapped out. Here’s a legend (pulled from sitening.com - hope they don’t mind!)

• blue: for links (the A tag)
• red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
• green: for the DIV tag
• violet: for images (the IMG tag)
• yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
• orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
• black: the HTML tag, the root node
• gray: all other tags

Well, I’ve been saying I was going to stick some flavour of Unix onto my laptop for a while now, and yesterday I finally did it. I’ve read about the two releases of PC-BSD, and since I’ve always had Linux before I decided to go with a BSD distribution this time to see what all the fuss was about.

Getting it to like my laptop was fun, I kept getting this message:

acd0: WARNING: SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE transqueue timeout - completing request directly

Except the problem is, it didn’t ‘complete [the] request directly’ it just repeated the message. So after half an hour and still no luck, I started playing. As PC-BSD boots up, it gives you about 2 seconds to hit a key after the kernel modules have loaded before it starts booting the Operating System.

The command ’show’ will show a list of environment variables - this is what was causing my problem:

hw.ata.atapi_dma=1

Changing this to 0 with the command:

set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0

Enabled me to start the operating system. I’ve eventually got my wireless working, although it seems to get disconnected after a while, although that may be my crappy router, which has been on its way out for a while.

This post has actually been written in Konquerer on PC-BSD, so I must have done something right!