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Firefox on Win+B with AutoHotkey

A great thing about the Windows key is that no application other than Windows creates shortcuts involving this key. So you can bind most combination like Win+B (and Win+T for Thunderbird) to custom actions, provided you have a Free Software tool doing that for you like AutoHotkey. Making it open Firefox the way I want (with focus in the location bar) is tricker than it should be though. This part in my config seems to work well:

#b::
{
    SetTitleMatchMode, 2
    IfWinExist, Firefox, ,Thunderbird,
    {
        WinActivate
        Send {Ctrl down}{l}{Ctrl up}
    }
    else
    {
        Run Firefox
        Loop, 20
        {
            IfWinExist, Firefox, ,Thunderbird,
            {
                WinActivate
                Send {Ctrl down}{l}{Ctrl up}
                return
            }
            Sleep, 100
        }
    }
    return
}

The Thunderbird in there is to workaround an occasional confusion with the Thunderbird window. No idea why it's happening.

Stripping down Songbird

I wanted to hide a few controls from the Songbird GUI and found out it's possible already, through an extension called Pane Buttons. This is how my Songbird now looks like:

These are the plugins influencing what you see above:

Songbird 1.0.0

The recent release of Songbird 1.0.0 adds a great player to the set of cross-platform Free Software audio players. It's not my personal 1.0 yet but for now it pushes Rhythmbox back to the substitutes bench.

Official screenshot from the Songbird front page I like about Songbird:

  • Free Software
  • Cross-platform
  • Library-oriented browsing
  • File system-based browsing (through a plugin)
  • Last.fm tracking (through a plugin)
  • Not ugly

I still miss:

  • CDDA playback
  • XSPF support
  • Visualization plugins
  • DSP effect plugins
  • Official-tree Gentoo ebuilds

Eqnarray or not

Today I learned that some people think the LaTeX environment eqnarray should be avoided. Check out Avoid eqnarray (PDF) by Lars Madsen for details.

Bye Akismet, hello Defensio!

Let's see how Defensio is performing. The amount of "obvious" spam slipping through Akismet just reached the no-longer-bearable mark.

uriparser 0.7.3 released

This release offers a wild mix of things. Mainly it makes uriparser build on Cygwin (packager wanted!), fixes a small bug with parsing reported by Sezai Tekin, and adds Qt Compressed Help (.qch) output for viewing the API documentation in Qt Assistant. This release is both source- and binary- compatible.