jr conlin's ink stained banana

My darling wife and i have a "Free" checking account at Wells Fargo. i use quotes around that because like damn near every other "free" checking account, it requires a minimum balance. (This is like saying you get a "free" cup when you buy a coffee because they don't explicitly itemize it on the receipt, but that's another rant.) As part of this "free" checking, we get "free" checks.

Actually, strike that. We're supposed to get "free" checks.

Mind you, we do most of our bill payment online so we don't actually write physical checks all that often, but they do still have a place in our fiscal world so eventually we run low. Anne Marie, superstar administrator that she is, continually stays on top of such matters and requested a set of checks from Wells Fargo.

They didn't show up.

Being obviously concerned that they might have gotten stolen, she contacted Wells Fargo and was told that, no, they just didn't get the request but would be happy to fill out an order now. Ooh, and that we have a high balance with them and would we be interested in getting their financial services, Oh, and they've got a new low rate on a credit card we'd be eligible for, and they've few kittens for sale, and a nice bridge in Brooklyn, and…

Several kitten, card, bridge, and financial service free minutes later, my darling and now quite hoarse from screaming wife informed the bank that no she naughty words doesn't expletive want any how rude crap, she bozo no-no just wants some blankety-blank checks, you silly person!!!!!!

So, naturally, we weren't horribly surprised to learn that the latest batch of checks weren't delivered but instead "returned to sender" (Odd, no notes from the postman regarding attempts to deliver) and that after failed attempts to contact us (Odd, no record of such on my caller id), they were canceling our order pending further instruction from us.

Well, the instruction i'd probably give them at this point is oh dear!.

This, of course, proves an old adage that "free" only carries value when it's something you want.

For now, my wife is investigating alternative check printers who do not suffer the same sort of issues as Wells Fargo appears to, with my full support.

Right, moderate milestone reached. i can pick up here again.

So, you've probably done the Firefox tutorial where you add a box to the status bar, but what if you want to do more than that?

Well, turns out that you can (obviously) control damn near everything in the chrome from the protected chrome layer. The only trick is, of course, figuring out where things are.

First off, you probably need to realize that the .xul file generally describes and replaces things… except for some things. This is controlled by the "overlay" element inside of the chrome.manifest file. Chances are, you have a like like:
overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://flixo/content/flixo.xul
This tells firefox to look for the special ID names and merge what's in your file with what's in browser.xul There are root elements that Firefox will attach your defined .xul elements to which you're not going to be able to easily replace. This is a good thing, but it can be a bit tricky for folks to grasp, particularly when coming from a CSS/Javascript world where defining an element by a particular ID pretty much means replacing that item.

All of these can be found by sifting through the $MOZILLA_APPLICATION/chrome/browser.jar/content/browser/browser.xul file, but i'm going to annotate the main elements here. Here's a run down of the main "anchor" points for XUL:

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