This storefront is across 14th Street from our apartment. We’ve lived here a little over three years. When this new restaurant opens, it will be the sixth restaurant in that time. First there was a small italian place (never ate there), then a Middle Eastern place, then a different Middle Eastern place (both excellent), then a latino place (uninspired, hard to figure out what they were trying to be), then Westville (we loved it), and now a place called The Burgher something-or-other. It’s going to be a vegetarian only burger place Curly’s Vegetarian Lunch.

I really thought Westville was going to be the one which broke the curse. It was usually crowded, at least on weekends, and the food was always great. Their burger had one of the best charred beef flavors I’ve ever had and they were really good at anything fried or broiled. I think the long winter might have done them in. The space is small and impossible to heat with a crappy door that froze everyone inside when opened. And this was an endlessly cold winter.

At any rate, I hope the new place is better than it sounds (vegetarian burger place? What’s the point?) and I hope they can make it work. I also hope they serve meat someday.

Talking about this yesterday with Al from Bagel Zone, I hit upon another theory about the demise of Westville. The attitude of the place was too “West Village”. The East Village has a different vibe, as anyone living in either place knows well. Westville was always very relaxed, possibly too relaxed. They tended to take a long time to get food on your table. I think East Villagers don’t like to be made to wait. We’re perfectly happy to sit around for hours after a meal, but we generally want to get started right away. This could probably also be described as selfishness, but ultimately we just want to be in charge of our time. Serve us quickly, then let us sit around, don’t make us wait too long to get started sitting around.

Just for posterity’s sake, I grabbed the reviews from Google’s cache of MenuPages (they’re fast, Westville East’s page was already gone)

Food: (4.5 stars)
Service: (4.5 stars)
Value : (4.5 stars)
Atmosphere: (4 stars)

Posted by Benny McB on 11/12/2004
Welcome to the ‘hood…
At last, a restaurant 14th Street can be proud of! My wife and I are fast becoming addicts. Everything we’ve tried has been delicious– regular faves are the mac’n’cheese with bacon and a Cobb salad to die for. Service has been friendly and efficient (although we live so close that we’ve been ordering to go more than eating in.) All in all, a real winner, and a welcome addition to the Upper East Village.

Posted by Laura on 11/01/2004
The best turkey burger!
The best turkey burger I have ever had. It was not dry at all, perfectly seasoned — just delicious! Refreshing fresh brewed iced tea and a side salad made this the perfect Saturday lunch. I’ll definitely be back, although service was a bit slow…

Posted by nicoandwade on 10/28/2004
Great little spot!!
My boyfriend took me there for brunch on sunday and I loved it!! Food was great, went thru kitchen to go to the bathroom!! Will definitely come back!

Posted by Lulu on 10/11/2004
Excellent food!!
This unassuming little place will surprise you with it’s EXCELLENT food. Everything is good..from the burgers to salads to specials to brunch…the desserts will blow you away. Try the butterscotch pudding or home-made oreo if you’d like your mind blown. The service was great. I can’t recommend this place more. I love it!!

Posted by Anonymous on 07/10/2004
Great brunch!
We stopped in for brunch today. The food was quite good — my baked challah french toast wit strawberries was perfectly crisp, and my juice was fresh-squeezed. My dining companion said that his homemade granola was a trifle overcooked, but that it was neither oversweet nor over oily, and it went beautifully with the yoghurt and fruit. The decor does leave a bit to be desired, but the service was friendly and we’ll definitely be back.

There’s still the original Westville, but it’s a bit of a hike for a burger, and if I’m going to walk that far for a burger, Corner Bistro is hard to pass up. Walking for a burger makes me think of Shake Shack, but I could probably walk to the West Village and eat lunch and get back home in the time it takes to get through the line.

• getSelection() Workaround for Safari 1.3 and Firefox 1.0.3
  tags: DOM bookmarklet favelet firefox getSelection javascript safari +
• Safari Passes the Acid2 Test Congratulations to Dave Hyatt for being first to pass Acid2 and for making everyone else look silly.
  tags: browser css html safari webdev webstandards +

• The Iraqi-American auto mechanic from St. Louis who pulled Saddam Hussein out of a hole. Amazing story.
  tags: history iraq +

• Hamster MIDI Something to hook up to Motion…
  tags: MIDI hack hamster +
• Trader Joe’s *may be* Coming to 14th St! I so hope this is true, the Palladium is less than a quarter mile from my front door. Trader Joe’s is the reason I didn’t starve to death in college, now I just want the crazy foods.
  tags: 14thstreet cooking food nyc traderjoes unionSquare +
• Del.icio.us trackbacks I’ll enable this someday if my traffic goes up.
  tags: del.icio.us plugin trackback wordpress +

Talking to the cabbie during my taxi ride to the airport before leaving Las Vegas, it came up that Ben Maller is my brother. Of course the cab driver listens to Ben’s show.

The day I got back from NAB, my father-in-law called. He was being filmed for something related to USRF, his videographer knew of me, Joe’s Filters, and was even at NAB. And it gets better: The company the videographer was with, Beckman Coulter, was my one of my father’s first jobs out of college when it was Beckman Instruments.

update 2: These workarounds also work with Safari 2.0 in Mac OS X v10.4 .
update: There’s a simpler fix, jump to the bottom.

Yesterday morning I noticed a change to the JavaScript/DOM getSelection() behavior in the new Safari 1.3 (in 10.3.9) and the most recent version of Firefox 1.0.3.

I’ve been using this method for years to pull selected text from web pages for several of my bookmarklets. The one I use most frequently generates a link from whatever text is selected. If nothing is selected, it grabs the document’s title. The change in getSelection() broke that bookmarklet, no selected text was recognized.

After a bit of research, I found Mozilla’s Safely accessing content DOM from chrome page which describes the security fixes behind the modification and detailing other problems the changes had caused. Based on Mozilla bug 290777 and this post by Buzz Anderson, both browsers seem to have problems with the change. Despite those bugs, I managed to find the simple workaround as described below.

What Safari and Firefox now seem to be doing is creating a DOM selection object from getSelection() instead of treating it as a simple string. The result is that getSelection() appear to be a string, but few of the string manipulation functions work without additional considerations.

The following examples are all intended to be tested as bookmarklets, drag them to your bookmarks bar for testing:

• getSelection() test 1
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();
alert(d);

  Works as expected in Safari 1.2.4, Safari 1.3 and Firefox 1.03, popping an alert containing the selected text. Trying to measure that returned string fails in Safari 1.3 and Firefox 1.0.3 but works in Safari 1.2.4:

• getSelection() test 2
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();alert(d.length);

  The older version of Safari returns a character count for the string of selected text. Firefox and Safari 1.3 return “undefined”. There are quite a few other problems:

• getSelection() test 3
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();
alert(d.toString());

  Works in Firefox and Safari 1.2.4 but not in Safari 1.3.

• getSelection() test 4
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();
alert(d.toString().length);

  Getting the length after toString works in Safari 1.2.4 and Firefox.

Further inconsistencies between Safari 1.3 and Firefox 1.0.3:

• getSelection() test 5
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();alert(d.type);

  Returns “Range” in Safari with a selection, returns “Caret” or “None” with nothing selected. Fails with “undefined” in Firefox. (I think the Firefox 1.0.3 DHTML regression bug might be preventing it from working in Firefox but I didn’t try any of the recent nightly builds.)

• getSelection() test 6
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();
alert(d.getRangeAt(0));

  Fails silently in Safari, returns selected text in Firefox. Safari dumps this into the Console log:
  [5956] :TypeError - Value undefined (result of expression d.getRangeAt) is not object.

• getSelection() test 7
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();
alert(d.typeDetail);

  Fails with “undefined” in both.

There is some good news:

• getSelection() test 8
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();
alert(d.isCollapsed);

  Works in both Firefox and Safari 1.3; fails in Safari 1.2.4 as “undefined”. This means (finally!) there is a workaround for my problem.

I was using the length property to determine whether a selection was empty or not, then fetching the title of the window if that value was 0. Knowing that length no longer works in Firefox and Safari, isCollapsed can be used as a conditional switch.

• getSelection() Workaround
  javascript:d=window.getSelection();
d=(d.isCollapsed||d.length==0)?document.title:d;
alert(d);

  That will return any selected text or the document title if there is no selection. Tested successfully in Safari 1.2.4, Safari 1.3, Firefox 1.0.3 and presumably Safari 2.0 as well.

Line breaks were added to visible code examples because my style-sheet choked on long lines and I can’t redo the CSS right now…

Update: After working through all of the above, I realized there is a far simpler solution: +''. The Safari problem seems to be that string methods do not work on the returned object from getSelection(). Forcing the result into a string by concatenating with an empty string fixes all of my bookmarklets. Concat() fails because it’s a method of string, use the "+" joining operator and an empty string '' instead.

• getSelection() Faster Fix
  javascript:d=window.getSelection()+'';
d=(d.length==0)?document.title:d;
alert(d);