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I was amazed that the top hit in Google for this was the Mozilla source code (which was helpful, but not very user-friendly) so I’m writing up a bit on this confusing error message.

This is a Mozilla (Firefox, Seamonkey, Ephiphany, etc.) exception that gets thrown when you try to set the selectedIndex of a select element out of bounds of its options. The error message (from Firebug) looks like:

uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIDOMHTMLSelectElement.selectedIndex]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: http://www.example.com/test.html :: testSelect :: line 8" data: no]

This is not your standard JavaScript error. It’s not informative, useful, user-friendly, and barely gives you a line number to work with.

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Today was a release day for a few projects, Ubuntu (see previous post) and now Thunderbird.

Get Thunderbird 2

I’ve been using the Thunderbird 2 nightlies for a while now and they’ve been nice and stable. I’m a little pissed that they haven’t done anything about the Tag organization window—you can basically create them and assign them colors, but that’s it, though it is an improvement on what came before.

Still, Thunderbird is a great e-mail client and I’m using it every day without any trouble. The 2.0 release is generally better than the old 1.5, and doesn’t have the same bloat that Firefox 2 had over 1.5 (I’m still disappointed about that, can you tell?). So give it a shot or upgrade! It’s a good one.

I’ve recently gone back to booting Linux every other day or so when I don’t have any pressing graphical or… er… “gaming work” to do. It’s been really slick, especially on my new hardware (nVidia graphics cards are SO much easier than ATi/AMD, sadly. C’mon AMD, open-source those drivers).

Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn was released today right on schedule, and it’s the closest thing yet to a usable desktop Linux OS. It’s still in the nerd camp for some reasons, but I’d go so far as to say my mom could use it (hi mom!) without too much trouble, and that’s saying a lot.

There’s a great review up here, and also great news that Java EE5 and the Java 6 JDK will be included in the main Ubuntu repositories! I’m glad to see Java integrating cleanly with Linux and under an open-source license. I remember just a few years ago when it was hard to even run a Java app on Linux, and now it’s just an apt-get away.

And if you want to impress your friends, check out Beryl, also newly in the main repository. It allows for insanely cool 3D effects and multiple desktops on a spinning cube, which is surprisingly useful and a helpful visualization concept as well as being an absolutely SWEET effect. I’ll post some screenshots a little later.

What are you waiting for? If you’ve interested in Linux and what it can do (a lot, now), grab an Ubuntu live-cd and see if you like it. [Note: if you can’t get into the main Ubuntu site because their servers are swamped, try this list of torrents]

It seems there’s finally a way to integrate Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning (the Mozilla Calendar project) with Google Calendar in both directions, using the Provider plugin. There’s a great tutorial on it here that worked perfectly for me.

The Calendar project (Lightning) still has a ways to go before it can compete with Google Calendar in usability and user interface quality—a canonical example might be the “Add task” pane, which scared me to death when I opened it…

It’s a generic form interface of course, but man is it cluttered and complex. Adding a task is usually needs only one line of text—“File my taxes by April 16th” (a reminder for all you Americans ;-), or “Go to the store and get milk.”

Less often you add a deadline or date, and even that could be extracted from one line of text, making the interface both simple and powerful. Google does this for adding calendar events and it works marvelously.

Rarely do I complexify my tasks beyond that, so I don’t want to always be forced to look through all these options! Even clicking the “<< Less” button (you might have noticed) leaves all the fields above the description box, and the dual date fields are enough opportunity for confusion.

Obviously there’s a lot of power once an interface like this is learned, but I believe it’s possible to keep all the power of a complex interface while simplifying it following principles of good interface design. On this screen, if the title field was larger than the rest and bolded to signify it’s the most important bit of information, I would be much happier, as my eye would be led to where it needs to go most often and for the best reason. Suddenly the purpose of the interface becomes obvious, all the secondary options get a secondary appearance and thought, and it becomes much less confusing. Simple. And there are dozens more simplifications and improvements that could be made to every interface that looks like this.

I only care now because the Google Calendar link means I’ll be trying to use Thunderbird/Lightning for my main calendar now, so the interface better be on the same level or I’m going back to the web!

Any thoughts? What would you do to this screen?

I just bought an X2 5200, and now it’s $50 less! How disappointing. Prices were cut sometimes almost in half today as AMD struggles to compete against Intel’s Core 2 Duo, arguably the better processor by a small margin.

I said this in my review of my new processor on Newegg—no one will ever notice a difference between the Athlon X2 and the Core 2 Duo in even the most strenuous computing tasks. Games will still play wonderfully (that mostly depends on the graphics card anyway), any OS will love the blazingly fast dual cores, and the biggest performance bottleneck will still be the quantity and speed of your memory!

Whether the processor is AMD or Intel makes only a slight unnoticeable difference, so I see a great advantage in supporting the underdog. Here’s why.

Competition from AMD very likely caused the C2D’s existence: the Athlon and Athlon XP’s lead in the market for several years and made Intel basically abandon the megahertz race (and NetBurst’s idiotic long pipelines in the process), then AMD was first to the punch with dual cores, which Intel had to counter and do better. The competition probably made all that development much faster and much stronger, and we have more powerful computers than ever because of it.

As a consumer, and not a microprocessor engineer, the best thing I can do to support this competition and the ensuing innovation is to help keep AMD alive and be proud of it. They’ve always given me quality stable systems, from my K6-2 (333MHz), to my K6-3 (550MHz), to my Athlon XP’s (first 1.4 GHz 1700+, then 2GHz 2600+), and now my Athlon 64 X2 5200. Even this very server is powered by four 2GHz Opteron 270 cores (thanks Slicehost!).

I see no reason to add a measly 10% of performance to any system if it only supports monopoly and stifles competition. Intel will always survive, trust me, but if you want to force them to make even better processors, support AMD. The lowered prices are in, and it should be a no-brainer when the top-of-the-line dual-core chip is only $249. Jump on it.

Simple directions from San Francisco to Paris on Google Maps. Makes sense, right?

Good to know they still have a sense of humor. See for yourself!

The recent upgrades to Google Maps are quite good! I like the subtle light building outlines now in the plain Map view, and the new Traffic overlay is real useful.

Interestingly enough, Japan’s maps look quite a bit better than ours, with location icons and other neat options we don’t see on our maps. Any idea if this kind of thing is coming to US maps anytime soon?

Lots of stuff been going on with me recently, best covered in list form:

• I took a small vacation last weekend and went Kayaking on Folsom Lake. It was fun. Much more upper-body exercise than I normally get


• I thought of a fun little new site and I need some opinions on it—it would be a repository of CSS style sheets that work with any well-formed XHTML page without modification. Real simple, real useful. Tell me what you think.


• Zenphoto 1.0.9 should be out soon, it just needs more testing. Check out the SVN and get to work! After that it should be no more than a couple months before 1.1 is fully ready, finally. Whew.


• My new computer is awesome. It’s incredible to have 2GB of RAM and practically never run out. I am satisfied.


• I got a featured picture on Wikipedia! Sweet!


• Anyone know of any good albums out recently? I’m getting tired of what I’ve been listening to and need something new…

Yep. That’s pretty much it. More interesting reading later!