Month: March 2012

Firefox, Ubuntu and middlemouse.contentLoadURL

Posted on by Andy

I use Firefox web browser, currently on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. For many years I have set the config option middlemouse.contentLoadURL to true so that middle clicking anywhere in the page (that does not accept input) will load the URL that is in my clipboard.

After restarting my web browser somewhere near the end of January 2012 I found my Firefox 3.x had been upgraded to Firefox 9.x. Also the middle click behaviour no longer worked.

Perusing about:config showed that the option had been set to false again. I set it back to true but on restart of the browser it was set back to false. A bit of searching about found various suggestions about forcing it in my user.js file, but none of those worked either.

Finally, in desperation, I did a search of every file beneath /usr for the string “middlemouse”. Lo and behold:

/usr/lib/firefox-9.0.1/extensions/ubufox@ubuntu.com/defaults/preferences/ubuntu-mods.js

…
pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false); //setting to false disables pasting urls on to the page
…

Commenting this line out once more allowed me to change the setting myself.

It seems this this override was discussed by Ubuntu as far back as 2004, but it only became something that I could not override upon the upgrade to Firefox 9.

I reported a bug about this, and one of the comments seems to suggest that the method Ubuntu uses to change these settings has changed because they were breaking Firefox Sync, and that this outcome (overriding middlemouse.contentLoadURL) is not as bad as breaking Firefox Sync.

Even so, I would suggest that this outcome is very confusing for people and that as middlemouse.contentLoadURL is a popular setting which is easy to change, it should not be overridden in some obscure file.

As of the recent upgrade to Firefox 11, the file with the override in it has now moved to /usr/share/xul-ext/ubufox/defaults/preferences/ubuntu-mods.js.

Dear System Integrators, a few words about screwing

Posted on by Andy

Right, System Integrators – those companies that buy components from Supermicro et al and build you a server out of them. You guys seem to have a bit of a fascination with screwing. Screwing things in as tight as you can. Please stop.

It’s 100% true that vibration of components like hard disks is bad. numerous studies have been done that prove that vibration causes performance problems as drives need to do more corrective work.

However, this does not mean that you have to screw in the drives to the caddies to the limit of what is physically possible. They just need to be tightened until a little force won’t tighten them any more.

When you supply me with a server that’s got four super-tightened screws for each drive in it, and I deploy that server, chances are that one of the first things that will break in that server is one of the disk drives.

During the years those screws have been there they haven’t got any looser. It’s likely that if you tightened them all to the limit of your strength and tools, by now the force required to unscrew them will be less than the force required to deform the screw head. Like this:

Stripped screw heads in a drive caddy

Close-up of a stripped screw head

No, this is not an issue of using the wrong driver head. Yes, you will strip a screw if you use the wrong driver head. That’s why I carry this stuff every time I go to a datacentre:

A selection of screwdrivers for your pleasure

There’s two exactly correct drivers in there, and several that should also work anyway despite being a little bit off. I have never had a problem unscrewing any screw that I originally put in. Probably because I don’t tighten them like I am some sort of lunatic. I can even unscrew them around a corner with the offline driver. Oh yeah baby. So far nothing I have screwed in with merely normal force has fallen apart.

And this is not an isolated occurrence! Nearly all of you seem to do this with every screw, everywhere. Stop it!

The drive in that caddy is a dead one, and luckily I had a spare caddy with me for the replacement drive to go in, otherwise I too would have been screwed beyond the limits of my endurance.

So, now I’ve got to drill those out just to get this caddy back to being useful again. Or more likely find someone else to drill it out for me as I don’t trust myself with power tools really.

ffffuuuuu