Just for Kicks

Opera 10.01 and above has an internal autoupdater that persists in checking for updates and updating you automatically. It prompts you and gives you to chance to decline. The prompt also has a checkbox that seems to give you a chance to prevent it from auto-updating in future. But the browser insidiously ignores whatever you select in that checkbox. In fact, it even tried to update by itself without asking me, and was stopped because I refused to allow the Windows 7 UAC to give permission to the auto-updater. I never thought I’d say this, but you gotta love the UAC.

The way to get rid of the auto-update notice is to go into Opera’s Tools < Preferences < Advanced < Security and select “Do not check for updates” in the Auto-Update box.

I suppose this bug of the browser ignoring your setting in the auto-update dialog prompt may be fixed in 10.10, which is the current version. But 10.10 crashed twice on me so I had to revert my system back to 10.01 using an earlier system backup. I’ll probably wait for 10.11…

I got an error “Warning: array_reverse() [function.array-reverse]: The argument should be an array in [deleted]/wp-includes/rewrite.php on line 790″ in my Dashboard after upgrading to WordPress 2.9. It disappeared after I deactivated a plugin, and reactivated it without doing anything else, so I suspected that it would have disappeared whether or not I did that. I deactivated that plugin because I wondered whether it was at fault, but since reactivating it has not caused any problems, I guess it wasn’t. Anyway, according to the error message, the problem appears to be in rewrite.php in the main WP 2.9 codebase.

I googled this error, and it looks like I’m not alone in getting it. If you get the error click the Dashboard link on the side again to see if you still have the error. Maybe it’ll go away like it did with mine.

I don’t get it. Why are more and more laptop manufacturers going for a 1366×768 screen? Why is it that so many new LCD screens created nowadays have fairly acceptable horizontal resolutions but such sucky vertical resolutions?

Back in the old days, we had a vertical resolutions like 480, from the 640×480 screens, then it progressed to 600, from 800×600, then 768, from the 1024×768 screens. Then came the very high resolution LCDs, which on small laptops were virtually impossible to read without adjusting the font size: 1680×1050 and 1920×1200. At least on those screens, the vertical resolution is decent. Unfortunately, you had to squint to read anything.

But why are we regressing again? Lately, I see a spate of 1366×768 screens in new models of laptops. Sure, words are more legible than on those 1680×1050 monitors. But why can’t we have more squarish laptops with screens like 1366×1024 or something like that? I want my vertical resolution back.