The Syncing Apple An Exploration of Technology and Devices

Firefox and Tooltips on Macintosh

I love Firefox and I hate Firefox. On the Mac, it's great and it's even better on my new MacBook- it's super fast. You are using the built-for-G4-G5-Intel builds over at Beatnikpad aren't you?

With all the Firefox goodness however, there has always been one thing that has driven me nuts: the ToolTips. I like to keep my Bookmarks Toolbar viewable, and I have all the bookmarks that I ever use arranged there. I never use the old Bookmarks menu anymore. And when I find a nice link to add, I like to drag and drop it into the Bookmark Folder there on the Toolbar. This works fine in Windows. On the Mac however, there has always been these blasted ToolTips that pop up and block you from dropping the URL onto the Toolbar Folder. So I had finally had enough of them and figured out how to kill them. It's easy enough.

Enter about:config in your URL area. That will open up all the configuration options for you. Use the filter to find toolbar_tips. Its value should be true (i.e. show the stupid tips) click anywhere on the preference and it will switch to false. Now save and close this and those useless tooltips are gone for good.

Also you should try using FoxMarks to keep all your Firefox bookmarks in sync, between computers.

VMware, Solaris9 x86 and Disk

So my Solaris sysadmin skillz are getting rusty, and I had to add a new virtual disk to a VMware Solaris9 X86 system (it's a long story) and I was drawing a blank....

bash-2.05# dmesg | grep ata
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris pcplusmp: [ID 637496 kern.info] pcplusmp: ide (ata) instance 0 vector 0xe ioapic 0x1 intin 0xe is bound to cpu 0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 640982 kern.info] IDE device at targ 0, lun 0 lastlun 0x0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 521533 kern.info] model VMware Virtual IDE Hard Drive, stat 50, err 0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 241969 kern.info] cfg 0x427a, cyl 16383, hd 15, sec/trk 63
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 674665 kern.info] mult1 0x8040, mult2 0x110, dwcap 0x0, cap 0x2f00
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 350272 kern.info] piomode 0x200, dmamode 0x0, advpiomode 0x3
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 245087 kern.info] minpio 160, minpioflow 120
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 435839 kern.info] valid 0x7, dwdma 0x7, majver 0x1e
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 640982 kern.info] ATAPI device at targ 1, lun 0 lastlun 0x0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 521533 kern.info] model VMware Virtual IDE CDROM Drive, stat 50, err 1
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 241969 kern.info] cfg 0x85c4, cyl 0, hd 0, sec/trk 0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 674665 kern.info] mult1 0x0, mult2 0x0, dwcap 0x0, cap 0xf00
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 350272 kern.info] piomode 0x200, dmamode 0x200, advpiomode 0x3
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 245087 kern.info] minpio 120, minpioflow 120
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris ata: [ID 435839 kern.info] valid 0x6, dwdma 0x7, majver 0x1e
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris pci: [ID 370704 kern.info] PCI-device: ide@0, ata0
Jun 6 17:44:48 solaris genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] ata0 is /pci@0,0/pci-ide@7,1/ide@0

That all looked like crap... what the hell do you do again for X86 type disks in Solaris? Luckily Xwing at Kernal trap.org has a killer howto that answered all my questions. So if you need that, there it is.