Solved: Firefox Downloads Window Empty

Finally found a fix for a problem that's been bugging me for a while. Some time ago my Downloads window stopped showing anything.

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Searching around, I came across a widely acclaimed solution, which was to delete the xml file which stores the information I was supposed to be seeing; supposing it was corrupted. Well, I did that, and there was no effect. I started monitoring that file and noticed it was being updated sanely, so I kind of gave up on that solution.

There is a preference setting choosing whether to always save to one folder, or to ask me each time.

When you have it set to always save to the same place, there's a button at the bottom of the Downloads window that will take you to that place. I had it set the other way, and I noticed that there was still a button, but it was blank. This is a benign side-symptom of my problem.

My solution was to change the preference so that I always save to the same place. The Downloads window was fixed! Then I changed the preference back again, to what you see above, and the window was still fixed, and now there was no blank location button.

This also fixed another problem I was having, where “right-click and Save As…” was not working, and I could only download things that were accessed through a link. Of course, if I'd been looking for the solution to that problem, I would have found the solution much sooner: Unable to save or download files -- Reset download folder.

In most software programs there are parts of the program that manage the data, and parts of the program that allow us to interact with the data. In my case, the interaction/display of the files downloaded was probably short-circuited because it was having trouble displaying the corrupted download location preference.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080418 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.14

Moose south of Waubaushene

Moose in Ontario seem to be ranging further south. Ontario has about 5% of all the moose in the world. My wife Jackie and her sister Sheri hit one in the dark on Hwy 400 south of Waubaushene - they're lucky to be alive and not in hospital. Thank God that the moose was sitting down, having just been clipped by a car in the next lane. The police later found the moose dead in the ditch.



Now, why have I never seen one of these signs up there? The paramedics said that they see these accidents often enough to dread the calls. It seems the Ministry of Natural Resources has no data to publish on how many moose there are in that area, however there is a Moose Program Review underway - deadline for comments is June 30. The review is targeted to hunters. Where's the review for Ontarians who want to try to avoid these beautiful 1000 lb creatures?

Dory the Cactus

Dory the Cactus, originally uploaded by Michael Barkowski.

Okay - doesn't anyone think this looks like Dory, from Finding Nemo? I can just hear it saying, "P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney."

Taken at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Centre, near Austin, TX, home of Freescale Semiconductor.

GameCube NHL 2005 HOWTO: Get the highest penalty killing average

Ever since my brothers and I got addicted to NHL '94, my main source of what little hockey knowledge I have comes from Nintendo. When I say hockey knowledge, I'm talking about rules and basic details of players. Whereas, the following is really in the category of gaming knowledge.

Achieving the highest season penalty killing average in the league is one of the toughest season goals in NHL 2005's Dynasty mode, and occurs usually 3 or 4 years into the campaign. The key is that your penalty killers have to be the best players on your team.

Here's my HOWTO:

1. Make lots of trades to create a team with incredible Toughness and Checking. Enough guys with 80+ overall and with 90+ in each of these categories to cover the 4 and 3 man penalty killing lines, with spare players in case of injuries and suspensions.


2. Make sure to use a Center in the center position (to win faceoffs), and move around the defencemen to get decent chemistry (50-60). Keep checking over and re-doing these lines every couple games, because the coach never wants to keep the best players on penalty killing.


3. Get a great goalie, like Fleury, one of the best goalies in my Dynasty in 2010-2011.


4. Set the Practice to Bag Skate, except when morale drops a bit, then set it to Light Skate for a couple games.


5. Use Passive Box penalty killing strategy, and probably set overall pressure to Conservative, or close.


6. Set the ticket price to keep the stadium full.

With these strategies, I was able to Sim every game of the season, and came out with a 0.1% lead over the next best penalty killing team. My percentage started at around 96.5% and went down to 93.3%, the next highest was 93.2%.

I previously posted this on ehMac.ca.

Selling my digital piano on Kijiji and Craigslist

I'm selling my dear Roland HP-7 digital piano - this because I'm inheriting an acoustic grand...



I'm putting ads on Kijiji, Craigslist and others.

This is the first time I've actually used Kijiji, and it seems to be a very promising site. I found it much easier to use than Craigslist, since it has a proper WYSIWYG editor and snappy image upload widget, so I've ended up revising the ad many times there, while the Craigslist post got left alone. Eventually I resorted to viewing the source of the Kijiji ad and copying the description's HTML over to the Craigslist post.

The only downside is the large amount of crufty sponsorship ads and junk on the page. I imagine it's not so nice to visit on a mobile device.

Craigslist has been in the news lately as even Microsoft has bowed out from competing with them. People have been talking of it going IPO at least as far back as 2004, but there seems to be no indication that they will.

Update: In the end, it was Craigslist that sold the piano, over Kijiji, Musician's Adpost, BuySell.com, Now Magazine, local TV bulletin board, and a Toronto Star print ad.  I hereby declare Craigslist the Google of all bazaars.