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Filed under: Hacking — Thomas @ 13:31

2008-05-19
13:31

I've been a late joiner of del.icio.us, but have not regretted it.

I originally joined because, with the travelling back and forth, I was getting annoyed at having 3 main computers to work on, each with a different set of bookmarks.

Then it became incredibly handy for getting to sites on my N800 and my phone - you just set up the delicious page once on them, and then tag on your desktop to access it on your devices without typing URL's. It was a lot easier to install software this way for the N800.

I've tried various times the Firefox extensions, but never felt they were very useful. It ends up being very cluttered and I was never able to through them organize the bookmarks I really used daily (which I put in folders on a bookmark toolbar) in a way that matched my toolbar. For example, I have a dropdown folder called "gst" which links to GStreamer's home page, buildbot page, bug list page, ...

This weekend, after upgrading to Fedora 9 with its Firefox 3 beta I spent some time thinking it over again. I never noticed the Bundled Tags feature before, and was hoping this would be a way of combining tags so that they could be shown on my toolbar. For example, tag the pages I want in my gst dropdown with 'gstreamer' and 'toolbar'. But apparently, the Bundled Tags feature is OR, not AND, so that didn't help. (I'm not sure why AND behaviour in this case is useful to begin with, but hey...)

In the end, I decided to keep it simple. I'm now tagging all the pages I want on my toolbar with a tag starting with @

So, I have @gst for some pages, and then I use the Favourite Tags del.icio.us toolbar feature, and add it as a favourite tag. This allows me to decide the order, and decide the contents, and thus perfectly replicate the setup I had before, but do the same across all my browsers.

Now I can go on being a happy organised productive person!

Feel free to comment on how you organize your bookmarks across various computers for more ideas.

NOTE: Fedora 9 ships with firefox 3 beta 5, which is not yet supported by the offiicial Firefox extension. Get an unreleased beta here (you'll probably have to join the yahoo group though)

sabbat part 1

Filed under: Life — Thomas @ 13:16

13:16

So, I took a week off to get my life cleaned up a little and enjoy my new apartrment back in Brussels.

I've set myself some specific goals and gave myself a todo list. I'm also hoping to enjoy being on holiday, go see some concerts, and play some GTA4 (surely a bane of any good sabbatical).

Friday evening we went to Motek's CD release party. Not bad, but the songs I had heard on the radio were probably the best they had, so it was slightly disappointing.

I spent saturday making lists of things to do, we cleaned up the garage a little bit, and I reorganized my browser bookmark system. More on that in a separate post.

Yesterday was spent overhauling the garage completely, dealing with the wet floor, reorganizing it so we can find stuff and put more stuff in it, and cleaning the doors. We also took pictures of things we wanted to sell, and they're now on Kapaza (If you know of other/better sites to advertise furniture on in Belgium, feel free to let me know).

And Friday I noticed by accident that our beloved ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead was visiting my new home town, so I mailed to reserve a ticket and got my wish yesterday. A rock hard performance - though short - by the boys, and a very energetic crowd. I almost got hit by a microphone stand, and a cymbal stand ended up being thrown in the audience as well.

I also enjoyed the second opening band a lot, every song was good, doesn't happen often for me. They're Bellavista from San Francisco.

7 days of sabbat left.

Cuecat

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 09:13

2008-05-18
09:13

So I got some cuecats off of ebay. They actually just work straightaway, although it took me some time to figure out that there were no drivers to download and compile by hand :) All the documentation on the web seems outdated and seems to mention there are no 2.6 drivers, while they are just in the kernel.

So, I can now scan some barcodes, and they arrive as if they're typed by the keyboard. I guess that's useful for a POS computer, but for me it's a little annoying.

My question to you cuecat owners or Linux specialists - what should I use to programatically see that these digits are coming from the Cuecat device, so that I can intercept them without them coming in as keyboard events ?

One idea I'd like to implement is for my Elisa box to have a cuecat, and when I scan a CD I already own, it would start playing it.

Advantages of working from home #192381

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 10:22

2008-05-15
10:22

Being able to put on a Live DVD of a band you like (in this case, Mew from Copenhagen) and crank up the volume. It creates an excellent head space and atmosphere to get work done.

Next up - Jeff Buckley at the Metro in Chicago.

Funny - when the font chosen for the credits is so big that assistant grip gets shortened to "ass. grip" I don't know if it's the Danish sense of humour or just a funny accident.

fire shedding the bike box

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 11:35

2008-05-10
11:35

Every time I read the wonderful Dinosaur Comics, I'm reminded of a particularly excellent bike shedding case in the form of this Firefox bug spawned from this Seamonkey bug.

The actual bug is so wonderfully simple - some versions of Firefox (or, all versions before 3.0, which effectively means any stable version of Firefox ever) ellipsize the ending of "long" mouseover text on images. Pretty much all the DC comics have a longer-than-average sentence in their mouseovers.

Because the bug is so simple - and the natural fix is so straightforward - it's so easy to comment on this bug that everyone and their dog come up with several arguments to not do the natural fix, and the rest of the world comment on how stupid it is to not fix the bug.

Apparently this bug, that was open since 2000 and present in Firefox 1 and 2, is fixed for Firefox 3. Obviously it's not going to be backported to Firefox 2 because it's not a security fix.

I don't know who to sympathize with. I understand Mozilla wants to follow a process to keep its sanity in developing such a big project. And I'm sure there are excellent reasons why the straightforward fix never got implemented in those 8 years. So I don't want to either praise or condemn them for it.

But today I googled around a little for how other people deal with not being able to read their favourite comic - so I arrived at this long lines extension that I hadn't seen before. Now I can stop caring about the bike shed color and enjoy even more dinosaur humor.

And in today's batch, DC mentions a pet peeve: don't utilize utilize people. And this right after an hour session of GTA4 no less! Freak accident.

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