Friday, March 03, 2006
Get your Firefox extensions now: the winners
Firefox held a contest among writers of Firefox extensions. The ones I looked at were new to me. All, of course, are very interesting!
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
MoRU: extending Spotlight
Windstorm Software's MoRU is a GUI wrapper around the Spotlight search engine. Considering how crummy the Spotlight UI is, I'm surprised it's taken this long for serious alternatives to emerge.
I'll be testing this one. Launchbar's beta, btw, does provide a good simple alternative interface to Spotlight -- but it doesn't help with the crummy way Spotlight returns results.
I'll be testing this one. Launchbar's beta, btw, does provide a good simple alternative interface to Spotlight -- but it doesn't help with the crummy way Spotlight returns results.
Horrid bug with bullets in Blogger/Firefox
I'm not sure who to tag with this bug, but it's awful.
As of today, if you edit a blogger post with embedded bullets using Firefox the HTML is scrambled. The tags for an unordered list are replaced with dozens of [font] and [span] tags, which in turn produce html errors. You can't save your work until you manually clear out all the bad tags.
On the one hand I've seen enough problems with Blogger that I've come to think of it as the black sheep of the Google family, but on the other hand Firefox 1.5 has more than its share of bugs. A pox on both their houses!
As of today, if you edit a blogger post with embedded bullets using Firefox the HTML is scrambled. The tags for an unordered list are replaced with dozens of [font] and [span] tags, which in turn produce html errors. You can't save your work until you manually clear out all the bad tags.
On the one hand I've seen enough problems with Blogger that I've come to think of it as the black sheep of the Google family, but on the other hand Firefox 1.5 has more than its share of bugs. A pox on both their houses!
Deleting files from a stolen machine
This hint is likely to get turned into a service and a series of application: How to delete your files when your laptop gets stolen - Download Squad.
You need controlled acess to a server (example, Google web page authoring environment). If your laptop is stolen you create a file. Next time the laptop starts up in a connected mode a script finds the file and deletes whatever you want.
Of course things could go wrong, so backups are indicated. This would be a good complement to an encrypted folder. (XP supports encrypted folders, but I've found their implementation to be treacherous. I prefer OS X encrypted images.)
PS. Google uses a similar technique to validate ownership of a web site.
You need controlled acess to a server (example, Google web page authoring environment). If your laptop is stolen you create a file. Next time the laptop starts up in a connected mode a script finds the file and deletes whatever you want.
Of course things could go wrong, so backups are indicated. This would be a good complement to an encrypted folder. (XP supports encrypted folders, but I've found their implementation to be treacherous. I prefer OS X encrypted images.)
PS. Google uses a similar technique to validate ownership of a web site.
Getting around corporate IT lockdown
The article is short but useful: Geek to Live: Survive IT lockdown - Lifehacker. The comments add value too.
Evading corporate lockdowns is not necessarily a good career move. If the lockdowns interfere with the ability to do work they are a leading indicator of the need for a career change.
Evading corporate lockdowns is not necessarily a good career move. If the lockdowns interfere with the ability to do work they are a leading indicator of the need for a career change.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Winner of greatest kludge: Microsoft Access Macros
Today I did something using Microsoft Access Macros.
Words fail me.
I thought I knew what a kludge was, but Access continues to astound me. What a rat's nest of hacks, ancestral code, forgotten functionality and undocumented features!
I got it working, but only through ESP. Hell for a programmer must be working on the codebase for Microsoft Access. (Ok, so Word is likely worse and Outlook is perhaps just as bad).
Words fail me.
I thought I knew what a kludge was, but Access continues to astound me. What a rat's nest of hacks, ancestral code, forgotten functionality and undocumented features!
I got it working, but only through ESP. Hell for a programmer must be working on the codebase for Microsoft Access. (Ok, so Word is likely worse and Outlook is perhaps just as bad).
Blog Search - Advanced Options
At long last Google's Blogger has added Google-like advanced search to their blog search. Wow, that took a while.
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