Alden Bates' Weblog

Making a Doctor Who anime, part 2:

Smashing work!

So Burger King, though they have the Revenge of the Fallen toys here, haven't introduced the BBQ Double Stackticon. Luckily my favourite burger chain Burgerfuel have come to the rescue with BURGERTRON.

The primary ingredients are a 1/3 pound Optimus Prime beef patty, Philadelphia cream cheese, mango, and prosciutto. I'm... not quite sure what those ingredients in particular have to do with Transformers, but what the hey. They're tasty.

I noticed that ever since I upgraded Firefox to 3.5, it would refuse to shut down properly. The Firefox window would disappear, but when I went to shut down my PC, it would report that Firefox was still running and "not responding".

So I tried a bit of an experiment — I started Firefox up, and then tried to shut it down again. Watching the process in XP's process manager, I could see that it had jumped from using 40MB of memory to 160MB, and hadn't shut down.

I then tried turning off extensions one-by-one. The problem persisted until I disabled Google toolbar. With that disabled, suddenly Firefox began shutting down properly again. "AHA!" said I.

So then I re-enabled Google toolbar, expecting the problem to return. It didn't. I re-enabled my other extensions. No problem, and now Firefox 3.5 seems to be behaving itself. That's mighty strange. Mighty mighty strange. I guess I'll keep an eye on it and see if the problem comes back.

I have found something awesome.

The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Already I have learned:

In New Zealand "The Public Health Department has exerted itself to improve the sanitation of native villages and combat the mischievous trickery of Maori wizards and "doctors"."

Of Maori: "That they were not indigenous, but had displaced an earlier Melanesian or Papuan race, the true aborigines, is certain."

London is: "the capital of England and of, the British Empire, and the greatest city in the world"

Obviously this is all true, because it was in an encyclopaedia.

I have a strange fascination with the season 3 Transformers episode Fight or Flee, not because it's a well written episode, even though it is well written, but because the variations in animation are so extreme. You'll go from a dynamic heroic shot of Rodimus Prime standing in front of explosions to a shot of a bunch of generic block robots all in the same colour. It appears as though an animation studio, possibly Toei started animating it, got about half of it done, and then ran out of either time or money. It's hard to say if the lower-quality animation that crops up in a couple of shots was done by another company, or it was just temporary animation intended to be replaced later when the proper stuff was done.

But I've found what I believe to be the worst shot in all of the original Transformers cartoon. Here we see Cyclonus welcoming his leader, Galvatron, to a newly conquered planet:

Unfortunately it appears it's not Galvatron at all, but merely a cardboard cut out.

I upgraded to the latest version of FireFox the other day. Unfortunately, as is usual with these major updates, one of my favourite extensions — Tab Mix Plus — hasn't yet been updated to work with the new version.

Using FireFox without it makes me wonder why the FireFox team made some of the decisions they did. Like new tabs opening at the far right of the current tabs. I find that behaviour confusing and conter-intuitive, and without Tab Mix Plus there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to alter it. Nor can I find a way to have newly opened blank tabs automatically show my homepage.

I presume there's good reasons for both those choices, but I have no idea what they are. I guess in the meantime I'll have to wait for my extension to be updated. :)