2010
07.22
In no particular order, this is a list of my favorite Firefox
extensions. They make my browsing experience awesome and I wouldn’t
trade them for anything in the world. 
- Live HTTP Headers. I’ve had this extension for years and it has
proved invaluable time and time again. I use it for debugging and
security testing. Very simple, very easy to use, very powerful.
- Firebug. This one is important for anyone doing web
design/development. It’s just an absolutely awesome tool. I can’t
imagine ever having developed HTML/CSS without it. It even comes
with its own extension system, which I haven’t taken advantage of
but which looks incredible.
- Web Developer Toolbar
- User Agent Switcher. Both #3 and #4 are made by the same
developer. These were two of the first extensions I ever installed.
I keep using them because of how useful they are for debugging and testing.
- View Source With. Allows me to view HTML in my favorite Windows
text editor, Notepad2
- BugMeNot. While it has grown less useful over the years (sites
are getting better and better at banning their accounts), it’s
always a good time-saver to have. It can’t hurt!
There are definitely a couple developers who I need to donate to. BRB!
2010
07.03
Recently at work, one of my friends ran into a problem trying to
integrate the Google Visualization API and jQuery. His setup
seemed fairly straightforward and it didn’t seem like there would be any
problems. He wanted the user to select an option from a dropdown box.
That selection would trigger a GET request to fetch some JSON (using the
getJSON function of jQuery) from his web server. The result of the
request would be passed via getJSON’s callback to Google Visualizations,
which would then display some nice charts.
Sounds easy, right?
Unfortunately, when he tested his code in Firefox, the visualization he
wanted never showed up. All he saw was an empty iFrame where his chart
should have been (Google Visualizations draws certain types of charts
using SVG in iFrames).
Puzzled, he started debugging. He quickly confirmed that the proper
calls to draw the visualization were being made. Yet somehow, they were
just returning an empty iFrame instead of one filled with data. Even
more puzzling, his code worked fine when he tested it in Google Chrome,
Safari, etc: Firefox was the only browser where it failed!
His next step was to try replacing his chart code with Google’s example
code, thinking that maybe the issue was with his data. Amazingly, that
chart also failed to display properly! However, it also led him to
another discovery: the chart drawing would only fail if it was attempted
from within getJSON’s callback function. If the chart was drawn before
or after, it would work correctly.
Finally, after several people spent hours wrestling with the problem,
one of our fellow employees came up with a solution. He created a
closure that would call the correct Javascript functions to draw a
graph. Then, he passed that closure to setTimeout with a timeout of 0.
It was a fairly elegant workaround: using setTimeout avoided the weird
scoping issue (we still don’t understand what the problem was!) and the
closure allowed the data to be passed out of the troublesome callback
and to the Google Visualization classes. Definitely not the cleanest
solution, but very welcome after several hours of wrestling with the problem!