Jonathan Stott

Firefox 2.0 looks quite swish since I installed it earlier today, but the default tab close behaviour where every tab has it’s own close button is annoying. Enough so that I decided to try and fix it back to the way it was in Firefox 1.x. Luckily, it’s not hard at all to fix!

First, open up the config page about:config.

Then, find the browser.tabs.closeButtons preference from the list.

Right click on it and choose ‘Modify’. Change the number from the default of 1 to 3 and click OK. The change takes effect immediately

There are a few other values that you can use: 0 only displays the close button on the active tab, 1 displays a close button on every tab (the default with Firefox 2.0), 2 doesn’t have any close buttons (like, what’s the use of that?!) and 3 shows one close button at the right-hand side of the tab strip. There’s a little more info here.

Pelican swallows pigeon in park - BBC News

Pigeon is quite nice, but I don’t think I’d like to swallow one whole! Perhaps it’s just a slow-news day.

Someone inspired me on Friday night to get round to updating the design and operation of my EarthTools website. It’s taken about 48 hours of coding to put together but here it is:

As well as a swish new design, there are two big new features:

• New distance finder - use this to measure the surface distance between two points on the map.
• New My Places - store a number of places that you use regularly so that they are there next time you come back to EarthTools. You can drag the pointers around to change the location of your places and rename them to your liking.

I plan to increase the coverage of the height data to cover more of the world. The contour maps will also be regenerated in the near future to fix a number of small problems with them.

Last month I blogged about the problem I was having with myspace hotlinking to my photos on jstottphotography.com. Well now that we’re half-way through October, I can assess the success or otherwise of my strategy. Here’s an updated table of myspace referrals up to the 15th October:

So a resounding success I believe!

Canterbury Cathedral is crumbling and urgently needs £50m to replace the leaking roof to stop any further detioration.

The Cathedral was founded by St. Augustine back in 597 and is a prominent landmark for the city of Canterbury for miles around. It is the main draw for tourists from all around the world - the Cathedral gets over one million visitors a year and without urgent work, parts of the Cathedral may have to be closed to the public for health and safety reasons.

The BBC have an article which describes how much work is needed, including strengthening buttresses on the west towers, work on the lead roofs and restoration of some of the stained glass windows including the 12th century Oculus window.