Blog: November 2017

Most of these posts were originally posted somewhere else and link to the originals. While this blog is not set up for comments, the original locations generally are, and I welcome comments there. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Oops

2017-11-19 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Tech

My Mac has been bugging me to let it install some updates for several days now (requiring a reboot), so since I was going out for the afternoon anyway, I let it do so.

I completely forgot that this would cause Firefox to update to version 57. Oops. (At work I both turned off automatic updates and did some prep work to update to add-ons that will continue to work in 57. I hadn't gotten around to updating add-ons at home, and I forgot that I hadn't turned off browser auto-updates.)

I've lost my Stylish CSS overrides. Some I shared between home and work (or between Firefox and Chrome at home), so those ones I have, but some sites I only visit at home so I didn't have those at work. I found some stuff about how to find them on a Windows machine, but the filenames mentioned there don't exist on my Mac.

For the most part I'm going to just live without them and migrate more of my browsing activity to Chrome. The main reason I limit Chrome is that the tabs display is totally unreadable if you have too many tabs, unlike Firefox which sets a minimum size and gives you scrolling and a drop-down menu to see all of them. I just found a Chrome extension that provides that drop-down menu, so I can at least find stuff, though I haven't yet found a way to get Chrome to stop trying to show all of them anyway.

I also found these instructions for doing some of the things that Classic Theme Restorer did.

I've updated my earlier post about Firefox 57 with other workarounds I've found. For userscripts, I installed TamperMonkey, which I'm already familiar with from Chrome. For both scripts and CSS, I decided that at home I'll just do all my Stack Exchange stuff in Chrome -- I mostly was anyway, and now that it'd be actual work to get those scripts and styles back, time to just commit to it. Firefox is now almost exclusively for blog-reading (mainly Dreamwidth and those few people still on LJ), and everything else I do in Chrome. (That's at home; at work I do a lot more in Firefox.) I tend to have a lot of DW tabs open, so keeping that activity in the browser that handles tabs better makes sense.

Firefox breaking many add-ons soon

2017-11-08 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Tech

I found out today, via a notice provided by one of my add-ons (Stylish), that the next version of Firefox (57) is going to break most add-ons, which they are now designating "legacy". Firefox, like Chrome, automatically updates itself (I'm not sure that can be turned off any more), and these changes are coming "in November". I found this blog post from Mozilla from August, but I never received any sort of notification as a user and I don't make a habit of seeking out blog posts from vendors of software I use.

Why the hell didn't I get some sort of notification from Firefox? Is this news to you, too?

So now, the hunt for replacements commences. Gee thanks, guys.

Here's what I've found so far, untested unless otherwise noted:

  • Stylish replacement (notice pushed by Stylish, apparently): Stylus. Listed as beta. I don't know whether styles will just work (after being manually imported, it appears) or if changes will be needed. ETA: I needed to rework one style, which had several blocks applying to different sets of (related) sites. I had to break that up. The style I was using to make tooltips bigger doesn't work (not supported by Mozilla's new API), but I found a workaround. The day after I got all this migrated to Stylus, I got a Stylish update -- but it couldn't read my existing scripts either, so I would have had to migrate to it in exactly the same way I'd just migrated to Stylus. (The UI was even the same.) So I punted that; I've already got Stylus working.

  • Greasemonkey: Google led me to ViolentMonkey. Ditto about not knowing if things just work or require adjustments. ETA: ViolentMonkey is slow and times out about a third of the time for me, but TamperMonkey (which I already know from Chrome) exists and works fine. I had to manually add each of my scripts (to either), but I didn't need to modify them.

  • NoScript: it looks like they're migrating, but I don't know if I'll have to do anything. *ETA:** Seems to be broken in 57; supposedly they're working on it.

  • Session Manager: is this built into Firefox now? It's very important that when I restart Firefox, I get the tabs and windows I had before. Can anybody who doesn't use an add-on for that confirm whether that works out of the box now?

  • AdBlock Plus: this is my one extension not listed as legacy, so I assume it will keep working.

  • Classic Theme Restorer: um, I found this github repository; haven't waded too far into the readme yet. ETA: this page explains how to move the tabs below the URL/extensions bar where they belong. The other look&feel stuff it did isn't as critical. (One could make a good argument that the URL bar belongs below the tabs, but all the other stuff the browser puts in that horizontal slice is more global, and having those reversed confuses me.)

The city of S'dom (Sanhedrin 109)

2017-11-02 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Judaism

The mishna lists more groups that have no portion in Olam HaBa, the World to Come, all based on proof-texts (i.e. not derivation): the generation of the flood, the generation of the dispersion (from the tower of Bavel), the men of S'dom, the ten spies (who spoke against the land, leading to 40 years in the wilderness), the generation of the wilderness, the congregation of Korach. On today's daf the g'mara discusses the wickedness of the men of S'dom, which is about cruelty and corruption of justice.

In S'dom, if a man assaulted another's wife and bruised her, the court would say "give her to him that she may become pregnant for you". If one cut off the ear of his neighbor's ass, they would say to the neighbor: give it to him until it grows back. If one wounded another they would say to the victim: pay him a fee for bleeding you. If a visitor came, they told him to lie down on a certain bed and they cut or stretched him to fit. If a poor man came, every resident would give him a coin with his own name written on it, but nobody would give him bread. When he died, they each came and collected their coins. Whoever invited a stranger to a banquet was stripped of his garments. A maiden gave a poor man bread (hidden in a pitcher), and when the townsfolk found out they tied her to the parapet and coated her in honey so the bees consumed her. And this is why the torah says "and the cry of S'dom and 'Amorah was great". (107b-108a mishna, 109b g'mara).

The torah text about S'dom is widely misunderstood, in part due to the misderivation of the English word "sodomy". If you read Genesis 19, you'll see that the crowd gathering at Lot's door wanted to rape the visitors. Because the visitors were men, people read this as being about homosexuality, but that's not really the issue here. The men of S'dom were violent and cruel, to men and women.

This wasn't just a town full of evil people; this was a society that was corrupt to its core. Even Lot, who was rescued, was ensnared; he offered the mob his daughters instead of the guests! But there was some kernel in there that merited being saved anyway, that the rest of the city lacked. (My personal theory is that being Avraham's brother rubbed off on him some; Lot wasn't born and raised in wickedness like, possibly, some of the other residents.)

When God tells Avraham about the impending destruction of the cities, Avraham argues back: you would wipe out the righteous alongside the wicked? Shall not the Judge of all do justly? According to the talmud the Judge of all did do justly.