Ed Bilodeau

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This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Friday, June 17, 2005

This morning I'm going to give getting Firefox to work on my PC another try.

A few weeks back, after McGill's IT department came by to set up my PC to run off of Active Directory, Firefox stopped working. The window and basic chrome would appear, but nothing would load and nothing (not even the chrome) was interactive. I've been using IE ever since.

Red Door

Working with IE has been fine, although it did take some getting used to. A few sites had funky layouts, but those were mostly weblogs from people who are probably not using IE as their main browser (and who are writing standard-compliant code). So its been ok, but earlier this week, when Karl was telling me about a neat RDF plugin that requires Greasemonkey, well, being stuck in IE-land has felt like a bit of a backwater.

So this morning I've rolled up my sleeves, and am going to give it the old college try. Updates will be appended to this post.

Update: Five minutes later, I'm done. Everything is working fine. The trick, I guess, was to manually delete all remenants of Firefox from my HD, and then reinstall. My guess is that the AD install required the creation of a new user account, and this messed up my Firefox profile. All is good now, although now need to rebuild my Firefox setup.