I was wondering how the geekrant.org domain name propagated so fast. Turns out since September, DNS updates have been happening about every five minutes, instead of twice a day.

We also got a quick path on getting indexed by Google, courtesy of using Google’s AdSense, which evidently bumps you to the top of the indexing queue so they can serve more relevant ads.

Speaking of Google, for people in the US, there’s now Google via SMS.

I like Firefox a lot. I use it almost exclusively at home. At work it’s not so easy, as something in its password caching plays havoc with the corporate proxy, hitting it with an old password continually, and constantly locking my account. So IE6 rules the roost there.

But I do have one big problem with Firefox, and the way its development goes. My series of annotated photos on my blog uses little popups to describe things in the pictures. I wanted something easy* to implement, completely standards-based, don’t rely on any hyper-funky overkill technology like Java or Flash, nor on an external service provider like Flickr (which looks really good, but these things have a habit of going west after a few years, and I intend my blog to be online virtually forever, or at least until they prise my credit cards from my cold dead hands).

So I used the <title> tag in the hotspots of the pictures. But Firefox abbreviates long tooltips, rather than wrapping.

This is a known bug in Firefox. It’s been a known bug in Firefox for four damn years. Jeez. Is that a failing of the open source community, that sometimes it can take them so long to agree something needs to be fixed, write a fix, and then get it released? I call that pretty piss-poor. At least with monolithic corporations like Microsoft, some jackbooted Program Manager would have clicked their fingers and had it done by now.

By the way, if you’re playing about in Firefox, but some obscure option you’re looking for isn’t on the dialogs (like when I turned off the closing all tabs warning and couldn’t turn it on again)… then check try about:config in the address field. Very groovy.

*Easy as long as doing HTML hotspots is your idea of fun, or you have a tool that can do them for you.

Update 10/11/2004: This bug is still not fixed in Firefox 1.0. It can be cured using the PopupAlt extension, but that’s not the point. Firefox should work. It shouldn’t be up to individual users to go out hunting for a solution they have to download to get around a known Firefox problem.