February 2003

Bookmarklets.

I’ve been talking about bookmarklets, and my father (who turned fifty today, happy birthday to him!) reminded me that not everyone knows what they are. So here’s the quick Xian version.

Bookmarklets are little chunks of JavaScript code that you put in with your normal bookmarks. When you click them they run. The cool part is that when you run a bookmarklet it has access to the page you were looking at when you clicked it.

A cool example is the Movable Type bookmarklet. When you click it, it opens up a new window with a new entry to the blog of your choice, and in the body of the new entry it creates a link to the page you were viewing when you clicked the bookmarklet, and copies over any text that you had selected on that page. You can get your own by simply clicking on the “Set up bookmarklets” link on the right side of the Movable Type main menu.

Here a some other bookmarklets that I use all the time. Remember, don’t click them. Drag them to your toolbar:

• Tinyurl.comHas a bookmarklet that turns the url of the page you are looking at to a tinyurl.
• Google.com offer a bookmarklet that will do a google search for anything you have highlighed on a page.
• And there is a huge collection of web development bookmarklets at Favelets.com.

Update: Bookmarklets removed from this post because they weren’t working correctly. Go to the sites themselves to get them.

Xian 11:04 PM - p-link - talk (0)

Plan chosen for the new WTC.

New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this morning that they have officially selected architect Daniel Libeskind’s proposal for rebuilding of the World Trade Center. The plan includes a space designed to catch a “wedge” of sunlight every year on September 11 from the time the first plane hit until the time the last tower fell.

Bloomberg said Libeskind’s plan fit the three main goals of the rebuilding project: to poignantly recall what happened on 9/11, to remake the area as a center of global culture and commerce and to integrate it into a revitalized lower Manhattan.

Libeskind’s plan beat out this plan from a group called THINK

Xian 01:36 PM - p-link - talk (0)

2Real.

Cool 2B Real, the new site from America’s Beef Producers™ is helping teen girls keep it real. With real poll questions like “What type of beef do you most like to eat with your friends?” Real teen girls can even enter not yet existant contests to win real prizes.

How did this happen? Paul ford of the morning news gives us a look inside great minds behind the site And remember. “Real girls are ‘keepin’ it real’ by building strong bodies and strong minds… and they’re feeling great about themselves!”

Xian 02:00 PM - p-link - talk (4)

Even more hot Grammy action.

Ryan Mcgee strikes back with his own Grammy write up. and Boston.com delivers the photographic goods.

Xian 02:37 PM - p-link - talk (1)

Pop-up blocking and bookmarklets in Chimera. At the same time.

While reading through the aptly titled Bug 155351 on Bugzilla I learned that you can make bookmarklets work in Chimera without disabling pop-up blocking.

Simply edit you prefs.js in your Chimera profile folder and change the line that reads:
user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000);
To read:
user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 0);
Of course. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

Bookmarklets working, I wanted to make sure pop-up blocking still worked. So I dusted off IE in search of evil pop-up pages. So I typed in the first thing that came to mind. http://popupad.com/. Sure enough there is a page there with pop-up ads. It bothers me to know that someone thought that would be a good idea.

Anyway, it all works. And this post was brought to you by a Movabletype Bookmarklet that I haven’t used in a very very long time.

Xian 04:14 AM - p-link - talk (1)

The Grammys.

You can blame this on my new wireless router which lets me compute in front of the TV and Ryan Mcgee’s write up of last year’s MTV Music Awards. He does this better than I do.

The full write up is getting long and I don’t even know if I like it. So it has been banished to the extended entry. The quick wrap up is:

• Norah Jones sings.
• No Doubt’s dummer pops out of a tube.
• Norah wins a Grammy.
• Nelly falls from the ceiling.
• Norah wins a Grammy.
• John Leguizamo says “witnessify”.
• Norah wins a Grammy.
• Bruce Springsteen rocks the hiz-ouse.
• Norah wins a Grammy.

Xian 07:36 PM - p-link - talk (3)

1,632 is a lot of stairs.

In exactly seven hours my good friend Roni Smith will be hustling up the Hancock. Good luck!

Xian 12:31 AM - p-link - talk (0)

Dot coma relic.

It's sad that Go.com, the much hyped network including Disney, ABC, and ESPN that was supposed to bring great and new things to the web has ended up looking just like a misspelled domain squatting "search site".

Xian 12:14 AM - p-link - talk (0)

Much rejoicing.

Chicago Uncommon Photography has finally added thumbnail images to it's RSS feed.

And The Morning News has added full article text to theirs. Awesome.

Xian 01:01 PM - p-link - talk (0)

Funny things:

• Microsoft joins acquisition support group.
• DJ Format's music video We Know Something features dancing rapping plush animals.
• Marathon Computer's installation instruction .pdfs are some of the funniest, easiest to read technical manual's I've ever read.
• Theological thermodynamics: Proof that heaven is hotter than hell.
• PerversionTracker: Busy finding useless OS X software so you don't have to.

Xian 12:19 PM - p-link - talk (0)

Getting to live in japan for free for a year isn't quite fair.

But I guess I'll get over it. Anyway Kristen has a mintblog now. Check out her adventures with japanese snowpeople.

Xian 04:33 AM - p-link - talk (2)

I just tell myself that everyone does it.

It seems everytime I talk to my father he asks me something like "Hey, didn't you used to have a weblog?" I think he is just gloating because he is actually writing on his consistently and I'm not. It's usually the other way around. Regardless, I vowed to not go to bed tonight until I posted to my sad neglected weblog.

Of course I decided that before I posted I should really finish figuring out how to use authorization keys to automate ssh connections. So I read Damien Miller's wonderful SSH Tutorial .pdf. I followed the instructions. It didn't work. I did it again. Still no go. So I did some digging, and find that file-permission on the key files and the folders they are in must be set correctly. I fixed that. It worked. Now I have to get ssh-agent running so I don't have to type in any passwords. The instructions for doing this in the tutorial .pdf do not work on OS X. But eventually I found sshLogin which sets up all of your ssh stuff when login to OS X. It installed correctly but it required a restart. And that's where I faltered.

You see. Turning off my computer actually makes me feel guilty. It wasn't always like this. I used to restart my computers all of the time. But I didn't really have a choice. But this is different. Rupert is different. He has a name for one thing, which probably doesn't help the situation. He even has his own subdomain on mintchaos (link might not work if Rupert is closed. :-). I never turn him off. I will leave work open and come back to it days later. It will still be there. He doesn't crash. I wouldn't even close him for a while. I've gotten over that, I have a router now that keeps his ip/domain from getting all screwed up if he goes fully to sleep. Ann wants a dog. I don't need a dog. I have a computer. It's not as silly as it seems. Would you restart your dog if you really didn't need to?

I did it though. And now I can work with mintchaos almost as if it were an extension of my computer. It was worth it. I even wrote a shell script to grab everything on mintchaos and download/compress it into an archive on rupert named with the current date. One little command is all it takes. Nifty!

Xian 04:26 AM - p-link - talk (0)

Quickies.

A a few things worth mentioning before I'm of to bed.

• The bank still wont let us use our money. Groceries would be nice. Ann tells the story here, and here.
• Todd has the computer I want.
• Darren shows off his dune buggy.
• Joe Thompson crashed his car, flew out of it, and dangled from power lines until he was rescued.
• It is perfectly legal to fly without any ID. More annoying. But legal.
• To do: Install Zoe. A web-based email management program that runs on your own server and works tirelessly to index and cross reference all of your email. Surf your email Google style.
• To read: Cory Doctorow's new book Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is out and he has released the entire text for free online.
• If anyone knows anything about colocation server hosting let me know. I'm very interested in the self-owned server game.

It's late and I've got to get up early. Goodnight.

Xian 01:43 AM - p-link - talk (0)

It was bound to happen.

A random non-pi generator.

Xian 05:46 PM - p-link - talk (1)

Dave Berry needs a RSS feed.

Dave Berry desperately needs a RSS feed and he knows it. Well more accurately I need Dave Berry to have a RSS feed so I can keep track of his blog. Oh, and Dave Berry has a blog now. It's funny and it supports continuity.

Xian 12:27 AM - p-link - talk (0)

I'm all PHPed.

Todd alerted me to a wonderful little Mac OSX utility called PrePHP which lets you process batches of PHP files into static .html files with drag and drop simplicity. Which is wonderful as PHP files are endlessly easier to maintain than .html files and most clients don't have PHP enabled hosts. It also gives me a wonderful excuse to use PHP enough to really learn it.

Update: I've played around with PrePHP a bit and it works as promised. It will even switch all of your file extensions from .php to .html and update all of your links. It will only process 5 files at a time unless you register, but well worth the $15 if you do this kind of thing professionally.

But I didn't have PHP on my machine. So one self-installing binary and a small httpd.conf edit later I was in business. But then I decided I wanted PHP 4.3 instead of 4.1.2. So I grabbed Marc's version and installed that instead. And it works. (Note: The preceeding link won't work if my computer isn't on my desk. Laptops are funny like that.) The total elapsed time for all of this: about 15 minutes. And I even took a dinner break. I love OSX, and I love all the crazy people who do the hard work to build tools so people like me can make them dance.

Also, the wonderful Kung-Log tool I use to post has been completely rewritten, graduated to Cocoa from AppleScript, supports syntax colo(u)ring, saving posts as drafts and other niftiness.

Xian 07:04 PM - p-link - talk (20)