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Greasemonkey etiquette
In Meme tracking with Greasemonkey, Jon Udell introduces a userscript which grabs the number of references from del.icio.us and bloglines and appends that information to the top of every page you visit. To be fair on Jon, the version he has released defaults to only doing this for pages on Infoworld.com but modifying it to run on every web page is trivial.
[... 252 words]Flickr without the Flash
One of my favourite panels at SxSW this year was the Flash vs. HTML Game Show, in which a team of HTML/JavaScript gurus took on a team of Flash gurus showing off pre-prepared solutions to tasks set for the panel. One of the challenges was to come up with enhancements to Flickr using the team’s assigned technology.
[... 353 words]Enter the hedgehog
The Ubuntu community have released Hoary Hedgehog, otherwise known as Ubuntu 5.04. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, it’s an excellent Linux distribution based on Debian with a strong focus on desktop usability. Unlike most Linux distros, Ubuntu comes with just one desktop manager (Gnome) and one obvious default application for each of the essentials: Firefox for browsing, OpenOffice for office work, Evolution for mail.
[... 209 words]Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary
In The architecture of intermediation, Jon Udell discusses the need for a mechanism for a high-level tool for adding custom features to web applications. In Jon’s case, he wants to add a private bookmarks feature to del.icio.us. Jon thought about using a web proxy to intercept and modify del.icio.us pages, but ruled it out as too low-level.
[... 354 words]PyCon observations
I’m back from my two week stint in the US, and currently suffering from vicious jet-lag (my body wants me to go to sleep at 5am and wake up just past noon). Herewith some observations on PyCon, SxSW and the differences between the two.
[... 791 words]Choice SxSW quotes
My American adventure is ongoing; I’m still in Austin at the moment, but I’ll be off to Washington D.C. in a few days and there’s a small chance I’ll get there via Dallas. This doesn’t leave much opportunity for online shenanigans, but there were a few things from SxSW that really needed a mention. The conference, as ever, was awesome—if not for the panels then certainly for the socialising. If anything I stretched myself too thin this year trying to keep up with the Brit Pack, the WaSP crew, some ex-colleagues from Lawrence and the people I met in San Francisco back in May.
[... 383 words]Fixing Paul Graham’s Footnotes
I’m a big fan of Paul Graham’s essays, the latest of which is How to Start a Startup. There’s just one niggling problem with them: Paul makes extensive use of footnotes, but provides no way of jumping from the reference in the text to the footnote at the bottom of the page and back up again. Instead, you have to manually down to the bottom of the article and back up again every time you hit a footnote reference.
[... 172 words]Problems with Trac? Switch to FSFS
I’m head over heels in love with Trac, and have been for about 6 months now. It really is best-of-breed software: it neatly integrates a wiki, a simple bug tracker and a Subversion repository browser with clean markup, a nice default design and a learning curve for new users that can be measured in minutes. No wonder it’s started to show up all over the place.
[... 350 words]LugRadio Live
The guys over at LugRadio (nice new site, see Stuart’s blog for gnarly implementation details) have announced the details of their long hinted-at Linux event, LugRadio Live. I’m pretty excited about it; word on the grape vine is that they’re booking some really cool speakers, but they’re completely committed to keeping a grassroots feel to things. The 15 minute lightning talks should be a lot of fun (I’ve tentatively offered one on Firefox extensions) and it sounds like the atmosphere will reflect that of the show—irreverent, fun and with a trip to the pub afterwards.
[... 128 words]Google cruft
New Google feature: Google Movies. Displays aggregated movie reviews (like Rotten Tomatoes), looks up local movie times based on your zip code saved in Google Local (more evidence of the fabled Google cookie), and even handles recommendations.
[... 120 words]Do Content Management Systems really work?
Have you considered trying a Wiki? In my experience, the more permissions / workflow / etc you have in a CMS the more likely it is that people won’t use it. Wikis may be a little unconventional but the barrier to entry is fantastically low and they can work extremely well (I like MediaWiki or TaviWiki myself).
[... 143 words]Google Maps and XSL
I’ll probably write more on this later, but it seems that Google Maps is using XSL. I spotted it loading the following pages while sniffing its activity with LiveHTTPHeaders:
[... 174 words]Don’t build web apps that only work in IE
This is a rant, for which I will make no apologies. The wonderful thing about web applications is that they free you from being tied down to a specific platform. A well written web application is accessible from any platform that can run a web browser. Netscape and Microsoft both realised this back in the mid-90s, which is why Microsoft pulled out all the stops in winning the browser wars; they knew that the browser as an open application platform was a direct threat to their Windows lock-in. It’s not inconceivable to argue that this was the main reason they added so many weird little proprietary DHTML extensions to IE in the following years—and it’s those that are the root of the problem.
[... 311 words]New eclipse downloads page
Back in November I had a bit of a whinge about how hard it was to find the right file on the Eclipse download page. The Eclipse project have unveiled a prototype of a new, friendlier page and it’s an enormous improvement, thanks mainly to the invaluable new “Looking for Eclipse?” box:
[... 95 words]rel=“nofollow”
Reading between the lines (which in this case isn’t particularly hard), this and this (don’t forget to view source) suggest that Google are soon to announce that they won’t be calculating PageRank for links with a rel="nofollow" attribute. Finally, an official way of fighting the economics of comment spam by denying PageRank on user-submitted link content. Sam Ruby points to Mark Pilgrim’s prediction that spammers won’t care—they’ll spam anyway, on the offchance that they hit somewhere undefended. I’m optimistic—if the major weblog (and wiki) vendors get behind this one it could help stem the tide.
I need a new backpack
I’m a big fan of eBags.com for this kind of thing, because it lets you pick the model of your laptop and then tells you which bags it will fit in. I bought a bag from there last year and the e-commerce / delivery side of things was flawless.
[... 62 words]Fixing MSDN with Greasemonkey
Site specific browser customisations have been a a recurring theme on this site over the past six months. Thanks to the ever inventive Aaron Boodman that problem is pretty much solved. Greasemonkey is a plugin for Firefox that lets you create user site customisation scripts (.script.js), easily install them in Firefox and then set which sites they should be run on. Michael Moncur has a handy tutorial on getting started.
map.search.ch
Forget about Google Suggest; if you want to see some really impressive dynamic web content go and have a play with map.search.ch. It uses XMLHttpRequest and a bunch of other tricks to let you smoothly pan and zoom over an enormous and detailed map of Switzerland, based on satelite photos (so you can zoom right in to individual streets and see the houses). Even better, it supports hackable URLs letting you link directly to cities or even street addresses.
[... 166 words]Some notes on Wikipedia
I’ve been driving myself crazy with coursework over the past couple of weeks, and since it’s always good to have something to take your mind off things I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time lurking around the beautiful Wikipedia. Here are a few things about Wikipedia you may have missed:
[... 509 words]Google Print
I’m probably late to the party on this one, but I just noticed that Google Print results are now included in any Google search that starts with “books on”. I can’t say I like the lousy discoverability of the interface much—a search box at print.google.com would be a welcome addition—but the results are pretty impressive. It’s also a shame that they’re using a nasty obfuscation technique to disable copying and printing (based on serving book pages up as background images), if only because it will fuel yet more questions from newbie web developers asking how to do exactly that. Still, with today’s announcement that Google are to team up with five leading libraries to scan more books this service is going to get a whole lot more important over the next few years.
Casting out getters and setters
Python Is Not Java by Phillip J. Eby (via Ned) is the most useful article on programming I’ve read in ages. If you have any interest at all in either language, go and read it. It’s all good, but the part that really struck a nerve for me was this:
[... 221 words]Blogmarks on del.icio.us
I’m horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of ’flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I’ve been playing with del.icio.us as part of my research in to web annotation. The connection between the two isn’t particularly strong but it’s clear that something very exciting is happening over there.
[... 276 words]Eclipse download hell
One of the many thing the Mozilla/Firefox team have got right is the fantastic ease with which the application can be downloaded. Visitors to www.mozilla.org are greeted with a nice big “Free Download” link, aimed straight at the version for their (automatically detected) operating system hosted on a mirror geographically close to their IP address. It’s hard to think of any way they could improve on this.
[... 527 words]No EU Software Patents
It would be nice if someone with some serious design credentials would knock up some more aesthetically pleasing banners.
[... 119 words]The Register hit by XSS
Here’s a nasty one: popular tech news site The Register was hit on Saturday by the Bofra exploit, a nasty worm which uses an iframe vulnerability in (you guessed it) Internet Explorer to install nasty things on the victim’s PC. Where it gets interesting is that the attack wasn’t against the Register themselves; it came through their third party ad serving company, Falk AG.
[... 262 words]Mumps!
I’ve become yet another statistic in the Bath Mumps epidemic of 2004. I’m quarantined until next Monday, and this afternoon we had a camera crew from ITV West come round to film some doom-and-gloom footage warning students to get vaccinated. Amusingly the camera man hadn’t had Mumps and took suitable precautions to avoid infection. I’m told that the piece will go out on ITV news for the south west at 6pm this evening.
Usability blunders
I stumbled across this today and thought it was just too good not to share.
[... 62 words]Open source license help needed
Every now and then, I get an e-mail asking me to clarify the license associated with code that I’ve posted on this site, such as my date parsing script. I’m looking for an open source license that I can start slapping on things to ensure people that they can use it for whatever they want, but wading through the list of licenses is no fun at all. Here are the features I’m looking for:
[... 294 words]Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom
I’m about to hit the sack, but current indications are that Bush has won Ohio by a couple of percentage points and thus has been re-elected as President of the United States.
[... 122 words]