I have a couple of unrelated topics to discuss today...
I’ve made several little updates to my website lately, most of which I have mentioned on the homepage. Most recently I’ve given the photos page a new feature, where each directory now has a thumbnail, made up of four photos beneath it. I’m still not totally pleased with the way it looks, and part of the problem is the dark background. I got the inspiration from this article, which produces some impressive results. Only problem with that method is that the height of the thumbnails will depend on the images involved, and I wanted them to be all the same size. I may just get over that, or write some code to crop the images. I’ve also encountered a problem where PHP crashes if I try to generate too many images at once. I think I know what the problem is, and in C++ I’d just use a pointer and be done with it, but I don’t know that PHP has those.
Firefox has been crashing a lot for me since the last patch, usually when I load several pages with Flash ads. Penny Arcade and Joystiq in particular would consistently crash Firefox. Has anyone else had this problem? It doesn’t seem to happen for me at home, but happens a lot at work. The only two differences between home and work are: 1) I leave my Firefox session open for about a week at a time, so that it will remain the first icon on my taskbar and so that I won’t have to reenter a bunch of passwords; and 2) I am going through a proxy server at work. I tried updating my flash player but that didn’t do anything. I did find an extension called Flashblock, which (you’d never guess this from the name) blocks flash content. Since I’ve used it I haven’t had any problems. I’d recommend it even if you’re not having problems.
One last question—does anyone have any recommendations for video editing/DVD making in Windows? I’d like to be able to create simple menus, just a jpeg in the background and a list of video clips to jump to. Nothing fancy really. I have just never gotten around to transferring our videos from the wedding and Hawaii to DVD, since my old PC just didn’t have the power to do it. I’ve used Adobe Premiere before, but I wasn’t very impressed by it. Any other suggestions?
August 28, 11:03 am
“One last question—does anyone have any recommendations for video editing/DVD making in Windows?”
Only Adobe Premiere...you could try Windows Movie Maker, but I think it will leave a lot to be desired. I think like Nero might have something that helps you make DVD’s too...
But the best solution I know of is iDVD. The iLife suite is amazing for that stuff; everything is literally drag and drop. :)
August 28, 8:46 pm
What version of Firefox are you running? I’ve got multiple copies of 1.5.0.6 and the 2.0 branch builds running with Flash, and I see no problems. You might try creating a new profile and seeing if the problem happens in it. My guess is that something in your profile has gotten corrupt.
If you use a master password for saving your passwords in Firefox, you won’t need to type passwords all the time. Just type one password (when you first encounter a login page), and Firefox does the rest for as long as your browser is open.
August 28, 11:25 pm
Yeah, I know DVD stuff is super-easy on a Mac, but I don’t have one. Also, I neglected to mention that the other reason I haven’t been motivated to make a DVD is that my DVD player won’t play any kind of burned DVD. Of course I think they give away free DVD players with cereal boxes and magazine subscriptions nowadays, so maybe I should just get one...
As for Firefox, I’m running 1.5 with the latest patch (from 3-4 weeks ago). After some more testing, I found I can crash Opera in a similar way. I have to load Flash ads. After a minute, I’ll get a prompt for my proxy password--coming from Flash player itself, not Firefox--so that the Flash player can look for updates. I always close those (takes at least three tries before taking the hint). Then if I load pages with Flash ads in 2 or more tabs at the same time it sometimes dies. That may sound like an unusual combination of inputs, but it actually happens quite often for me when loading Joystiq articles from a live bookmark (a.k.a. RSS feed).
Before the last FF update, having several tabs with Flash ads would slow the browser way down--like, 5-second response time to rolling the mouse wheel one click.
Anyway, I really think it is a problem with the Flash player and not FF, but this has led me to that nice plugin to block Flash, which is making my web browsing experience much more enjoyable.