Bug of the moment 2006-06-12

Today, Firefox has decided to sport a little blue arrow in my menu bar:

… indicating (if I remember correctly) that there are extension updates available. Sure, why not, may as well add something else to the list of things I can’t have until I reload it. Beats me why they can’t do dynamic module loading and unloading. But anyway, this is the part that gets me:

Leaving aside the fact that they forgot to put a minimise button on the window, let’s get this straight: Firefox is looking for updates? Pray tell, Mr Firefox, if you have no idea what updates are available, how did you determine that it was time to display the blue arrow for me? The most astounding part is that Firefox just sits there doing nothing. “This may take a few minutes” is something of an understatement; I think it’s going to sit there like that for hours. I think it does. Surely the bit that made the blue arrow appear could already tell me all I needed to know?

What is the actual significance of the blue arrow?

Notice also that the Next button in the window has the control focus while disabled? This is the craziness you get when you build your own widget set from scratch and eschew that of the native system. Clicking it does nothing, but if you switch to another window and back and hit enter, you can invoke the button, to the tune of the following dialog:

I am not quite sure what I just asked it to do. I don’t suppose it knows what I just asked it to do. Certainly not cancel, as that simply closes the window straight out.

1 + 1 = 1

Someone just sent me an e-mail with an attachment which reminded me of this little bundle of joy. We’ve all heard of 2 + 2 = 5 (for extremely large values of 2), and 3 + 3 = 8 (eight whacks), but according to Outlook Express, 1 + 1 = 1. Just look at the size of the following e-mail and the attachments it contains:

Here are the two files in the Finder – the sizes are not even close:

Upon further examination, it seems that the IMAP part of Outlook Express 5 is effectively deciding at random that any mail with an attachment is one meg in size, and any attachment of that mail is one meg in size. (Contrary to what I wrote earlier, it seems to be wholly random). The mail in question also had a very weird attachment header line:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: image/png;
	x-unix-mode=0644;
	x-mac-hide-extension=yes;
	name="Picture 2.png"
Content-Disposition: inline;
	filename="Picture 2.png"

Apparently it’s trying to assert Unix permissions on me. Who is the “owner” of the mail, and do I personally count as group or other? If the permissions read “600” would I be allowed to open the attachment? What if they read “000”?

And Firefox is still looking for those updates. Would it help if I switched on the light?

Posted 12th June 2006 – Comments and questions?