It’s been cold in Northern California lately… relatively cold at any rate… and pretty much only at night and in the early morning, but whatever. This is quite a dramatic change to most of November when the West Coast of the U.S. enjoyed some unseasonably warm and at times record-setting weather.

Looking at the jetstream’s flow is instructive in visualizing now the earth’s high-level winds (aka, the jetstream) can greatly affect surface-level weather. Here’s an image of the jetstream over western North American on November 22nd.

Classic jetstream pattern for great NorCal weather

The jetstream is shunting over the west coast of North America due the presence of a very strong high pressure system center over the “Great Basin”:1. Here’s a satellite image that better shows the Great Basin high pressure over northern Idaho (in addition to a high pressure area off the West Coast).

High pressure over northern Idaho

The presence of the Great Basin high powers strong north east/east anticyclonic (clockwise in the northern hemisphere) winds that howl through Northern California. Winds at this time can gust well past hurricane force especially on exposed places like “Mount Diablo”:6. In fact, these winds are know as “Diablo winds”:2, the less famous of California’s warm, dry “föhn winds”:7 (the more famous one being Southern California’s “Santa Ana wind”:3).

Today’s (2005-12-05) jetstream image tells a different story.

Jetstream directing cold air down from Alaska

With no high pressure in the Great Basin, high-level winds funnel cold air down the west coast of North America from the arctic.

Zoinger says, stay warm!

P.S. Props to Flickr user “gin_able”:4 for making photos available using the Creative Common attribution-noncommercial 2.0 “license”:5 (the opening frost-tagged picture).

[7(Wikipedia on föhn winds)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%B6hn_wind

[6(Mount Diablo state park homepage)]http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=517

[5(CCs attribution-noncommercial 2.0 license)]http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

[4(Flickr homepage for gin_able)]http://www.flickr.com/photos/ginable/

[3(Wikipedia on Santa Ana winds)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_wind

[2(Wikipedia on Diablo winds)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_wind

[1(Wikipedia on the Great Basin)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin

As part of upgrading to Firefox 1.5, I ended up downloading and reinstalling all of my Firefox extensions. I’m glad that I did, because the new version of “Tabbrowser Extension”:1 (the _best_ tab option extension… something that should be built into Firefox) has been substantially upgraded.

One of the biggest improvements to Tabbrowser is the addition of a “Tree Mode” for displaying tabs. Here’s a view of what it looks like:

View of tabs in tree mode
(Note tabs are displayed vertically, not the default Firefox horizontal)

Notice how some of the tabs are indented? An indent signifies that the tab is a daughter tab — that is, it is a page that was opened in a _new tab_ from a link on the parent page. If you open a link in a new tab from a daughter page, the new page is indented twice and so on (the default maximum number of indents is three, but you can change this if you like).

This visual display really helps you keep track of your tabs and their origins. Great when you’ve got dozens of tabs open at once. Note that I’ve modified my @userchrome.css@ file to change the background color of the active tab to yellow. I discuss this further in “this”:2 post.

To setup your tabs to display in tree mode, select “Tree Mode” from Tabbrowser’s options category. This will display this option set:

Options page for tab modes

Tabbrowser Extension is one of the most powerful (and complicated) extensions for Firefox. To get a feel for all of its options, I recommend playing around with it for a half hour or so. You’ll really be surprised at the things that you can do with it.

[2(Zoinger on userchrome.css mods)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/07/09/firefox-extension-tabbrowser-extensions-using-the-default-settings/

[1(Tabbrowser Extension homepage)]http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en

I finally got Firefox 1.5 installed and working. How I actually fixed things, I’m not really sure. As with a lot of debugging with Windows, things just kind of randomly started working.

Earlier after giving up on getting 1.5 to work, I switched back to my previous install of Firefox. This worked great for a while until I started getting the error @The program must close to allow a previous installation attempt to complete. Please restart@ every time I tried to start Firefox. I searched on the text of the error message, and found “this page”:1 on MozillaZine discussing issues with Firefox not starting up.

The MozillaZine page suggested deleting @xpicleanup.dat@ which I did. This worked and allowed me to get my old version of Firefox working again. On a lark, I decided to try and reinstall 1.5 again just for kicks. Whatthefuckever, it worked!

[1(MozillaZine on Firefox not starting up)]http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=Browser_will_not_start_up&redirect=no