Flapping Head

I just opened gvim on my Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) box and found there was no menu bar (File, Edit, etc).

After messing with some guioptions and getting nowhere I ran gvim as root (using sudo) and the menu bar was there. The answer came from a forum post by “Marko”:

Delete the file ~/.gnome2/Vim

It will be recreated when you run gvim again. With luck, the menu will be displayed again.

Andrew and I spent a few days this week putting together a new Django project.

It’s called Layoff Talent and it’s a place for people in the tech industry who have been laid off and are looking for a new job. They can add a simple profile and then hopefully be picked up by employers looking for new talent.

It’s similar in some ways to Django People or the Djangogigs developer listings, but specifically for people who have been laid off and not restricted to Django developers.

There’s nothing ground breaking from a development point of view, but it’s another example of how Django makes it easy to put out a full-featured site in a short time. Of course, we’ll be adding more features as the site gets popular.

If you know someone who has been laid off, please tell them about layofftalent.com.

Getting selected text in a Firefox extension

I’m developing a Firefox extension for a client which does something with the currently selected text in the browser window.

The standard way to get the selection is with window.content.getSelection().

Selection is empty in Gmail

Some users reported that selected text in Gmail messages wasn’t being found by the extension. I suspect the issue is with content added using JavaScript, but I haven’t investigated.

An alternative way to getSelection

The standard Search Google for “whatever” contextual menu item does work in Gmail, so obviously it gets the selection another way.

I found a function getBrowserSelection() in the browser.js file in Firefox’s chrome. It is used by Firefox for the contextual menu search.

This is how it gets the selection:

var focusedWindow = document.commandDispatcher.focusedWindow;
var selection = focusedWindow.getSelection();

I don’t know what the difference is, but I am now using this code in my Firefox extension and it is working well.