Dinomite.net

My roommate ordered some wiper blades that Amazon had on sale. He did a single order and yet the blades came in two boxes, each easily large enough to fit both blades, even though the boxes shipped from the same warehouse.

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror made a very good point recently about browser shortcuts that make browsing the web quicker because they reduce your dependence upon the mouse. If you have any semblance of RSI caused by mouse usage, like mine is, then learning to maximize use of the keyboard in place of the mouse is paramount. Following on this I will share a number of smart bookmarks that I have found to be indispensible since I started using them way back when Galeon was my browser of choice and Firefox née Phoenix wasn’t even on the drawing board.

Smart bookmarks are bookmarks that you call with a keyword and an argument; the argument is shoved into the appropriate place within the bookmark and the resulting URL is then retrieved. Their function is similar to the manner in which a fresh installation of Firefox will automatically bring up a Google search results page if you type something that isn’t a URL into the address bar. To create a smart bookmark in Firefox, first bookmark a page such as a Google Search results page in the normal fashion.

Then, open the “Organize Bookmarks” window by selecting it from the Bookmarks menu in Firefox.

Select “Properties” for the bookmark you created and enter something into the “Keyword” field; for Google, I use the letter “g”. To actually make it a smart bookmark, you need to tell your browser where the string you pass needs to end up by placing “%s” (a percent sign and an “s”) in the appropriate place. For my Google search bookmark, the resulting URL string is this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Google+Search

What does this get you? Well, now you can select the address bar (Apple+L in MacOS, Ctrl+L or Alt+D in Windows & Linux) type “g foo” in order to search for “foo”. A lot of people use the search bar in Firefox to do just that already, but I find my method better because I have a ton of smart bookmarks for performing different searches. Alongside that one for Google, I have a Wikipedia smart bookmark (bookmark that link and add a keyword such as “w”) which will take me directly to the Wikipedia article for the string I enter, a Wikipedia search bookmark that does a Google search of just Wikipedia (”ws”) and a Google Finance search bookmark (”gf”).

Others that I use include:

• a - Amazon
• p - Ubuntu package search
• pc - Ubuntu package contents search
• d - Dictionary
• t - Thesaurus
• pd - Perldocs
• pm - CPAN
• y - YouTube

By far the ones that I use the most are those for Google and Wikipedia searching but having ultra-quick access to a thesaurus and dictionary greatly heightens my writing skill. Smart bookmarks are something where, once you start using them, you’ll wonder how others ever get stuff done while they waste time reaching for the mouse.

There are literally hundreds of lists of the best Firefox extensions yet few mention what I deem to be the most important: Tab History. A feature that I first became addicted to in Galeon, Tab History causes newly created tabs created by middle-clicking a link or clicking “Open Link in New Tab” to inherit the history of their parent.

That is, I can run a search, open a whole bunch of the windows in tabs and then close the windows with reckless abandon once I decide one of the tabs fulfills my needs. Later, if I find that the tab I’m reading doesn’t have the information I was searching for, I don’t need to ctrl+shift+t and sift through the tabs that I had prematurely closed searching for the web search that I had run. Instead, because the tab in question was spawned from said search, I simply hit ‘back’ and head right back to the original page.

Similarly, if I’m reading an article opening links in new tabs as I go, I will usually close that article’s tab before perusing the links that it contained. If I happen upon one of those new tabs and have forgotten what the context for it was in the article, I can simply hit the back button to find the answer.

Tab History really is the most important Firefox extension to me.

It was widely reported yesterday that Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million, thereby valuing the company at $15 billion. Sure getting in on such a huge cache of advertising-ready eyeballs and consumer data is worth a lot, but the bid puts a price of $357 on each of Facebook’s 42 million accounts. Marketplace’s coverage put that number at $300 dollars, which takes into account Facebook’s projection of 50 million accounts by the end of the year. Beyond that, however, is the fact that an account doesn’t necessarily mean a user; nothing stopped me from creating a Facebook page for the Pope and I know that Jesus isn’t actually my friend. Furthermore, not all registered users regularly use the site. I would bet that more than a quarter of my friends use facebook less than once a month, and even then only for a handful of page views (no, I don’t want to be your super-best-buddy). If we take my brash generalization at face value, leaving 30 million active users, they are each worth $500. Do you really think you see $500 worth of ads on Facebook?

I was having trouble with my Nortel Contivity VPN client disconnecting giving an error message, “The routing table cannot be altered after the Contivity VPN Connection has been established. The Contivity VPN Connection has been Closed.” This would happen after 10-20 minutes of being connected and would cause all of my SSH sessions to drop, which made it hard to get work done. After some searching, I found the solution to my problem, a simple registry addition. I added the DWORD named “PerformRouterDiscovery” with the value 0 to the key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters". After rebooting, the VPN works without the random disconnects. Download this .reg file and run it to add the aforementioned key.

Reading the Slashdot thread about PC-BSD someone mentioned that there was a VMWare image pre-installed for playing around with it. On the download page, in addition to being able to select mirrors, as one expects with a large file, there was a Metalink. Not to be confused with Oracle’s worthless support website, Metalinks are files that describe methods for obtaining a file, in this case, HTTP and FTP locations where it is available and hashes for pieces of the file. After first trying a couple of mirrors and only getting ~60Kb/s I grabbed the Metalink file and installed Aria2, a command-line Metalink downloader. I simply pointed aria2 to the Metalink file (it can also take the URL of the Metalink) and it started downloading from 15 of the servers in the list simultaneously. Needless to say, this resulted in a much faster download. More information about Metalinks, including projects that employ them, can be found at the Metalink website.

This guy has a very good tip on how to use Gmail to store arbitrary information. I’m sure everyone has at sometime used some web-based email as a method of either moving data or otherwise storing something, by simply sending a message to yourself. Well, he goes a step further and setup a way to automatically take emails sent to a specific sub address (yourname+something@gmail.com) and archive them away. Simply setup a filter to take anything sent to yourname+database@gmail.com, apply the label ‘database’ and archive it. When you come across something interesting on the internets, simply email it to yourname+database@gmail.com and it will skip your inbox but be held forevermore in Gmail’s coffers. To recall it later, just run a search for label:database keywords and google will search through your database.

Rubel goes a step further, using Google Toolbar’s ’send to Gmail’ function which takes the page you’re currently looking at and pipes it to an email. Just toss in your database address and send it to be stored.

Pandora is an internet radio service that also recommends new music, based upon what you tell it you like. You simple give it some artists that you like and it will start playing songs by those artists, as well as artists that Pandora thinks are similar. By giving each played track a thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote, Pandora learns what you like and tailors the ’stations’ that you make to your taste, all the while showing you new music similar to what you have given a thumbs-up. Check it out.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen evidence of a Year 2000 problem, but Amazon insists on this search page that an XML book was published in 1901.

My local NPR station, WAMU has been running an advertisement for IBM federal services and they mention the URL, which is spoken as “ibm.com backslash foo backslash bar,” which won’t work if you type it into your interweb browser. Really, no one uses the Windows command line for anything real, who still thinks with backslashes?