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Vic and I have just got back from a holiday where we went to Thredbo and Canberra with my parents. Like most holidays not everything went according to plan but we all had a lot of fun. I took some photos of the holiday.

Sunday

We left Sydney after church and drove to Canberra. We went to see the Egyptian Exhibition, which was fantastic, at the Art Gallery.

Monday

In the morning we visited the Australia Museum. The museum seemed to have an over representation of minorities and minority view points, however it was still very interesting and the presentation was excellent. After stopping at Cooma to buy supplies we pushed on to Thredbo.

Tuesday

We wanted to start with a gentle walk so we took the chair to Crackenback and walked down the Merrits track. It took us a little while to find the track. After we got back Victoria and I went for a swim at the leisure centre.

Wednesday

We planned to walk to Mt Kosciuszko however the chairs were closed due to fires (some 40km away). So we hired a tennis court and played for an hour. At this point the chairlifts were still closed. By 1pm we got a call from Thredbo village management that all non-residents were being evacuated from Thredbo due to the fires. This put rather a damper on the holiday but we arranged accommodation in Canberra. There were a lot of helicopters flying overhead, including a skylift helicopter.

Thursday

We hired some bikes for a ride around the lake in Canberra. With me in the lead, we carefully rode around the lake, going off track at regular intervals. The worst excursion was when we missed the turn off to the Kings bridge and went for a tour of the wetlands. After retracing our steps and crossing the bridge we got back to the bike hire place about 45 minutes late. We were all rather tired, I managed to get my left hand sunburnt and it didn’t feel like my legs would support my weight.

We went back to the hotel and Vic and I went for a swim, hoping that might ease sore muscles.

Friday

Gluttons for punishment, we went back to the lake for another ride. This went more smoothly and we got back in good time, also going for another swim. In the afternoon we went to Old Parliament house. The guide for the tour was Sir David Smith, an interesting person in himself. The tour was fascinating with a lot to see.

Saturday

On Saturday morning my father and I went to the War Memorial while Vic and my mother went to the Art Gallery. The War Memorial was rather interesting, I took a few photos.

I thought I might talk about some of the applications I love and use.

Topping the list would have to be Firefox. Firefox is in itself a fantastic tool. Tabbed browsing, great configurability, blocks pop ups etc. There are a few different of browsers that do this, however firefox has a killer feature that none of the others do: Hackability.

It is relatively easy to write extensions for firefox to extend or modify its behaviour, all that is needed is a knowledge of javascript. This means that there are a boatload of excellent extensions for firefox.

Great general extensions

ie view and ie Tab allow you to open a page in IE, for the few sites don’t display too well in firefox.

Flashblock is another fantastic extension. There are an awful lot of flash ads on the web. These ads are often obnoxious and cause excessive CPU usage. Flashblock stops these from running, simply displying a play button which you can click on to run the animation.

The Google Toolbar provides spell checking, quick access to a google search and autocomplete for searches.

Flashgot integrates with common file downloading tools (like GetRight).

Another fantastic tool is BugMeNot. This tool integrates with a website that stores valid registraion details for most common websites. This saves you having to regsiter with sites like smh, logging in with a single right click.

If you are a regular slashdot reader, you will love the Slashdotter extension. This uses ajax to load hidden replies and provides tools for making replies to comments easier.

Another great tool is the Google Browser Sync. If you use firefox on more than one machine (in my case 3), it can synchronise the bookmarks, cookies and history between the different computers. Way cool.

Web developer specific

Firefox is also the single greatest tool available in building websites. It is more than just a browser, it is a platform for testing and development. There are some brilliant extensions available.

HtmlValidator checks HTML and CSS as you view the pages. This makes it just so much easier to validate your code as you write it.

Another cool tool is ColorZilla, which gives you an eye dropper to pick colours off web pages and images. It gives colour constants in a number of formats, including RGB values.

LiveHttpHeaders is another indispensable extension. This can log the Http headers and is much less cumbersome than using a proxy server. This makes debugging form POSTs that much easier.

One of the most flexible tools available is GreaseMonkey. This allows you to inject custom Javascript into selected pages. While this may not sound like much, it is very powerful. This effectively lets you rewrite the pages. One real example of this is that a simple greasmonkey script we use a work automatically logs you into a web application we develop, saving time during testing & development.

WebDeveloper is another very handy extension that lets modify behaviour in web pages. It does too much to summarise here, suffice to say it is an absolute requirement for any web developer.