beer planet » Technology

[Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard

Artem Russakovskii — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:13:00 +0000

There used to be a time when you couldn't imagine your life without Microsoft's Outlook – web email clients were pathetic and non-functional, Internet access was scarce, and access to certain advanced features was only possible with a desktop application like Outlook.

Then, Gmail arrived and exploded the whole notion of desktop email clients forever, almost overnight. It was fast, robust, logical, and integrated – many things Outlook still isn't to this day (Outlook 2010 + IMAP is pure hell).

Slowly, Google brought out more and more features that made the fine line between web and desktop emailing thinner and thinner, and today, it finally disappeared, at least for me.

The final nail in the coffin turned out to be something I'd desired for a very long time – taking screenshots and pasting them directly into Gmail in the browser window. Inline image pasting from the clipboard if you will.

Update #1: Hrm, I may have jumped the gun here. While the image appears perfectly fine in the Create interface and can be resized, moved, etc, it seems to be sent out with formatting errors that prevent it from showing up properly on the recipient's side.

Essentially, what happens is the image is encoded inline, but for some reason the encoding is done wrong.

Here is what Gmail shows this image was encoded as (via "Show original"). I don't know if it's Gmail adding these or not, but there are a ton of =\r\n characters along with "3D" in there that break everything.

Here is what this image is supposed to look like with those things stripped (it works in Chrome and Firefox just fine).

We're close, really close.

Update #2: HowToGeek investigated this new capability with Chrome and found that while it doesn't work with the clipboard, it does work if you copy and paste images within Chrome itself, and it doesn't suffer from the bug above.

After digging into it, I found that it only works because rather than create the image inline, like Firefox does, Chrome just makes an tag with the src parameter pointing to the original url.

This means the image in the email will disappear if it's deleted and simply won't show up if you tried to copy something that requires a login.

Update #3 (6/13/11): According to the Gmail blog, you can finally paste images directly into your emails, albeit in Chrome only at this time!

I take a lot of screenshots of my desktop or certain parts of it when doing reviews or reporting bugs (with OneNote or SnagIt), and having to save the image, find it on the disk, and drop it into Gmail, while relatively easy, was still too cumbersome. In that regard, Outlook was great – I could quickly pump out a few screenshots and send off an email with all of them inline with text in only a few seconds. If I attempted to do that in Gmail, I either got nothing or a little image basically saying how full of fail I was.

It all changed with Firefox 4 (at least that's my theory) – I am now able to take screenshots and paste them straight into Gmail, right in the browser. Let's take a look:

Amazing, isn't it? This does not work for me in Chrome 12 or IE 9 – only Firefox 4 at the moment. I'm not sure how it works or why it started working only now, but I'm sure one of you will eventually come here and provide a sensible explanation.

Goodbye Outlook, I hardly knew ye.

P.S. I'm using Windows 7 in case it matters.

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How To Fix ERROR_NOT_FOUND 0×80070490 During Windows 7 SP1 Installation

Artem Russakovskii — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:21:20 +0000

Well, this one took ages. And whenever something takes me ages, rather than write it down in my personal notes, I prefer to put it out online for everyone with the same problem to easily find and benefit from.

The problem I'm talking about today is trying to upgrade your Windows 7 installation to SP1 by applying Microsoft's update KB976932, called "Windows 7 Service Pack 1 for x64-based Systems" and getting nothing but a failure every time. The same problem may affect 32-bit systems as well, and I'm not sure what the update number for that would be, but the solution should work for either one.

The update starts just fine, chugs along for 10 minutes or so, then reboots the system and starts performing more operations, when suddenly one of them fails about 10% down the road, reboots, and reverts the whole process. You end up with this message (code 80070490) and a failure for which there are a lot of useless "solutions" on the web that just don't work.

Except for one. I can't take credit for it – all I did was spend a month weeding through the crap, retrying, and getting nowhere, until a genius by the name Ben-IS came up with exactly the right diagnosis and provided exactly the right solution. This solution, in my own interpretation, is below.

Step 1

We are going to use a utility called SFC (System File Checker or Windows Resource Checker), which is part of the Windows installation. It will help diagnose the problem.

Open up a command prompt (cmd) as administrator and run

sfc /scannow

This will run for a while and produce a file called CBS.log which you can find in %WINDIR%\Logs\CBS (usually C:\Windows\Logs\CBS). See this KB929833 for more info on SFC and CBS (Component Based Servicing).

sfc /scannow
Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.
Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.
Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

Even though there are no integrity violations, we should have enough info in the log to diagnose the problem.

Step 2

Unfortunately, Windows overwrote my CBS.log, so I'll go by the one Ben-IS provided.

Open up CBS.log and look for something like Failed uninstalling driver updates or 0×80070490 – ERROR_NOT_FOUND.

If you have this line, which you should if you're reading this post, you should also see lines similar to these a few lines above:

2011-04-14 12:02:33, Info CBS Doqe: q-uninstall: Inf: usbvideo.inf, Ranking: 2, Device-Install: 0, Key: 598, Identity: usbvideo.inf, Culture=neutral, Type=driverUpdate, Version=6.1.7600.16543, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, ProcessorArchitecture=amd64, versionScope=NonSxS
2011-04-14 12:02:33, Info CBS Doqe: q-uninstall: Inf: sffdisk.inf, Ranking: 2, Device-Install: 0, Key: 599, Identity: sffdisk.inf, Culture=neutral, Type=driverUpdate, Version=6.1.7600.16438, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, ProcessorArchitecture=amd64, versionScope=NonSxS
2011-04-14 12:02:33, Info CBS Doqe: q-uninstall: Inf: sdbus.inf, Ranking: 2, Device-Install: 0, Key: 600, Identity: sdbus.inf, Culture=neutral, Type=driverUpdate, Version=6.1.7600.16438, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, ProcessorArchitecture=amd64, versionScope=NonSxS

One of these .inf files is the culprit, and we're going to find out which one in the next step.

Step 3

Now open up a different log file located at %WINDIR%\inf\setupapi.dev.log (normally c:\Windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log).

Look for a line that contains Failed to find driver update or FAILURE(0×00000490).

Note the exact path to the .inf file that failed. In my case, it was:

sto: Failed to find driver update 'C:\Windows\WinSxS\amd64_usbvideo.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16543_none_8a1a2513d42628c3\usbvideo.inf' in Driver Store. Error = 0×00000490

Step 4

This is the key to the whole operation. Open up the command prompt again (cmd) as administrator and run

pnputil – a INSERT_FILE_NAME_FROM_STEP_3

For example, I ran

pnputil -a C:\Windows\WinSxS\amd64_usbvideo.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16543_none_8a1a2513d42628c3\usbvideo.inf

You should see the following dialog:

Choose Install this driver software anyway.

The end result should be something like this:

pnputil -a C:\Windows\WinSxS\amd64_usbvideo.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16543_none_8a1a2513d42628c3\usbvideo.inf
Microsoft PnP Utility
Processing inf :            usbvideo.inf
Driver package added successfully.
Published name :            oem69.inf
Total attempted:              1
Number successfully imported: 1

Repeat this step for any failures found in step 3.

Step 5

Apply the SP1 Windows Update again – it should now install successfully.

And voila – enjoy your SP1!

Microsoft has failed to fix this incredibly cryptic problem, leaving it up to the users to figure out why their SP1 updates are not installing. Thanks to people like Ben-IS, solutions no longer involve head-banging, postal rage, and f7u12.

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Amazon Posts The Deal Of The Century: Ultimate Ears TripleFi 10 & 10vi Earphones – $99, Down From $399 – Amazing Value, Perfect For Mobile Phones

Artem Russakovskii — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:21:03 +0000

Today Amazon posted a Goldbox superdeal on the stunning Ultimate Ears TripleFi 10 And TripleFi 10vi earphones. The price drop is absolutely mind blowing – they now cost $99 instead of $400.

I've been watching these earphones for 3 years and I've never seen them drop to even $250. Even Black Friday couldn't even dream of a deal like this. After seeing today's deal, I'm upgrading from SuperFi 5 to TripleFi 10vi.

So why am I so excited?

Because:

these earphones are some of the best you can buy, even at full price. I've owned their "younger brother" Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5 for the last 3 years (see my review of those) and I still can't stop raving about them. I've influenced many people to buy them and every single one has had nothing but positive things to say about their purchase
the sound quality is stunning – I remember putting them on for the first time and hearing sounds and instruments in my music that I never imagined were there all along. Even though they have a small size, they sound just as good as those BIG professional studio hearphones
the sound isolation – crying babies? A train passing by right by your ears? I can't hear any of those because these insulate the sounds so well. At the same time, I don't feel like they go too deep into my ear – in fact, they're very comfortable
sturdy cord – it is thicker and sturdier than any other cord I've ever seen. This means it won't rip, break, or strip easily
the cord is replaceable - cord damage is the #1 reason for throwing away your headphones. With Ultimate Ears, you can just snap the cable off and replace it with a new one. Replacement cords cost $20 but so far all I had to do was email or call Ultimate Ears and ask them for one – and they sent it to me for free.
best customer service in the business – any time I dialed the customer service number, my call was answered by a live person within 30 seconds. All my problems were resolved at no charge and in a very polite manner.
got an iPhone, Android, or another mobile phone? Get the TripleFi 10vi model because it actually has a built-in microphone, which means you can use it with your phone as a headset. I specifically bought the 10vi model to use it with my HTC Hero.
compared to the SuperFi 5, TripleFi 10 has an extra driver (3 drivers total!) which means better bass and clarity. I could really tell the difference when I was comparing the 2 models.

Conclusion

So my advice for you is: try them. If you don't like them (which is impossible), send them back.

I am rarely *this* excited about a product. Ultimate Ears earphones, however, brings out the jitters in me even today.

Do you own UltimateEars or are you considering getting them? Have questions or comments? Feel free to share below.

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StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts

Artem Russakovskii — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:40:22 +0000

What Is This All About?

If you, like me, love StackOverflow, SuperUser, ServerFault – the community programming/software/sysadmin Q&A sites built by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood and you are an active member of these sites, you owe it to yourself to install this underappreciated and unadvertised greasemonkey script: StackOverflow – User Info Aggregate. I really think it should get more attention. All credit goes to Jon Erickson.

(What? You've never heard of the sites mentioned above and you call yourself a programmer? Shame on you – go check them out immediately!)

Once you install the script, the top bar that normally shows only single site statistics, like so:

will turn into a multi-site bar, with all your stats at a glance, like so:

Each icon is hyperlinked to your account on the respective site, which makes navigating between all of them very easy.

Installation

Here are the steps required to get the script up and running:

Install greasemonkey for Firefox.
Install the StackOverflow – User Info Aggregate script.
Right click on the greasemonkey icon and select Manage User Scripts…
Select the script from the list and click the Edit button. This should open up your favorite editor or prompt you to select one.
Find the section with userIds and replace them with ones of your own (by default the IDs belong to the script author). You can get your own IDs from the user info page (click your name at the top of each site you have an account on).
Now save the script file and reload the page – you should have all the stats displayed in one place.

Credits

Big thanks to the creator of this script Jon Erickson.
Orginal Meta.StackOverflow post by Jon.

Enjoy.

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Impressions From The StackOverflow's DevDays Conference In San Francisco

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:16:48 +0000

I just got back from the StackOverflow's DevDays conference in the rainy (at least today) San Francisco.

I was really glad to see Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, and the whole StackOverflow team in person, as well as listen to great talks in the following topics:

9:00 – 9:50    Joel Spolsky Opening Keynote
9:50 – 10:45    Mark Harrison Python
11:00 – 11:55    Rory Blyth iPhone
11:55 – 12:25    Joel Spolsky Fogbugz
13:30 – 14:25    Scott Hanselman ASP.NET-MVC
14:25 – 14:45    Jeff Atwood Stack Overflow
14:45 – 15:40    Daniel Rocha Qt
16:10 – 17:05    James Yum Android
17:05 – 18:00    Yehuda Katz jQuery

My own favorite topics were in the following order of fun/usefulness level:

iPhone (though I'm interested in Android development myself but it's always good to check out the competition) – it was fun and not boring. Quirky, jittery, OCD all come to mind.
Joel's keynote (Hi, Joel, I'm @ArtemR ) – I welcome the discussion of simple vs feature rich, though Joel has talked about this on his blog multiple times.
jQuery – nice intro into history of jQuery and competition with other frameworks. The technical level of specific examples was quite basic.
Android – this is the topic I'm mostly interested in and unfortunately the main speaker got substituted by a guy who has obviously not presented in front of a large crowd before (sorry, I have to criticize – you'll do better and better each time! Just don't worry so much and know your stuff) and was pretty much a recent college grad from the looks of it. He did a pretty decent job at making the code run but a really poor job of marketing and explaining Android's weaknesses and strengths, as some people on twitter pointed out.
StackOverflow review – quite brief but fun. Thanks Jeff!
Python – very odd that it was even there – just a look at a few lines of code from the infamous Python google-like suggest algorithm.
Qt – didn't really care for it but sat through it. Nokia, meh. Next!
ASP.NET, Fogbugz – I skipped as I didn't care much for those

Overall, I feel like the information presented in all sessions was pretty basic but I guess that was the idea – a little bit of everything for everyone.

The absence of WiFi was pretty disappointing as I think it was advertised but I didn't care much for it. Kept everyone more concentrated anyway.

The free memory upgrades by Microsoft was an AWESOME move (though mine is already at 4GB and they didn't give out 4GB sticks)!

Lunch was decent – Boudin. Lots of drinks and snacks.

Well worth $99.

Twitter #devdays results.

Cross-posted to Meta-StackOverflow.

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HTC Hero Coming To Sprint October 11th! $179.99, Powerful, And Sexy. Here Is Why You Need To Own It

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:16:55 +0000

Well, it looks like the wait is over. I have been waiting for almost 5 years for a new phone that is good enough to make the switch from Samsung A900 (which has free tethering). Don't even get me started on the iPhone and its outrageous monopoly with AT&T. Android and the growing multitude of devices running it is, however, completely different business. Android offers unparallel freedom and I truly believe it will be the top phone OS within a few years as more and more Android phones are introduced to the market.

But where was I? I have been closely following Android news since its inception, then the introduction of the first phone – T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream), followed by G2 (aka T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, HTC Magic, Google ION), the introduction of the app store (Android Market), and noticing throughout all this time that Android was still not quite there, not appealing to the masses, and not picking up speed. But then…

The Hero

I believe the market perception of Android is about to change because of the newest Android phone – HTC Hero. Thanks to Phandroid (my favorite Android blog) for the announcement.

Why

Hero has a super sexy Sense user interface. Just check out this video of the European version of Hero running Sense (the US version looks slightly different):

Hero also has:

Flash support (!) – the one from Adobe, not the one that helps taking photos. That means playing flash games, videos, etc, which iPhone does not support and is not planning to support in the near future.
First Android phone to support multitouch. It also has a trackball.
Lipophobic coating – special coating to repel fingerprint oils.
A speedy 528Mhz Qualcomm processor.
5MP camera with autofocus – 5 megapixels is a step up over most of the competition, except maybe Nokia.
GPS.
Digital compass.
MicroSD slot for expanding memory.
WiFi 802.11b/g.
Accelerometer.
Audio supported formats: MP3, AAC(AAC, AAC+, AAC-LC), AMR-NB, WAV, MIDI and Windows Media® Audio 9.
Video supported formats: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 and Windows Media® Video 9.
And of course, it runs Android applications.

Check out this comparison between HTC Hero, MyTouch 3G, Apple iPhone 3GS, and BlackBerry Storm:

When

Hero is already released in Europe and is coming to the US to Sprint on October 11, 2009.

How Much

$179.99 after a mail-in rebate and a 2 year agreement with Sprint.

Speed/Lag Concerns

Initial reviews of the Hero reported occasional lag, especially with a lot of widgets activated on the home screens. However, it looks like the latest firmware updates may have fixed the lag issues. We will see very shortly.

The Chin

The US version of the Hero does NOT have the "chin" like the European version does. Compare the picture of the EU version (below) with the pictures of the US version (further down in the Media section).

Pictures Of The US Version

I'm extremely excited about the Hero. It is the strongest Android contender on the market. Can you feel the excitement? Go out and get yours on October 11th!

Relevant Links

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Delicious.com [Quietly] Rolls Out Domain And Url Searching/Filtering. Finally!

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Introduction

I love Delicious. It allows me to store my bookmarks, tag and search them, and, best of all, have access to them from anywhere on the web.

Searching bookmarks by keyword is easy – just enter a bunch of keywords into the search page and off you go but what if you want to confine your results to a certain domain? The main reason I wanted to do it personally is so that I could see all pages of my site bookmarked by Delicious users and the corresponding number of bookmarks. However, the only url based search Delicious offered was a full url lookup:

This search is very limited – it accepts only a full url to the page in question.

Such limitations were unacceptable and prompted me to file a suggestion/idea on the Delicious forum earlier this year to allow searching for *all* bookmarks in a given domain. To my pleasant surprise, Delicious rolled out these new search features within the last month (very quietly for some reason, are they in alpha?). There was no mention of them on their blog or anywhere else on the web really.

So how does the new search/filter work?

Check it out:

site:yoursite.com allows searching by domain

For example, site:beerpla.net currently returns 104 results and I can see all of my sites' pages and their bookmark numbers on a single page:

Moreover, you can combine the site: query with tags

Like so: site:beerpla.net hidden php to filter the results further.

You can also search part of a url using the url: construct

For example, url:beerpla.net/2009/ finds bookmarked blog posts from 2009 only:

I'm not really sure why one would use site: if they could just use url: – it seems like the latter can do everything the former can do and more. Perhaps Delicious can clarify that.

Also, doing something like url:hidden-features-of doesn't bring back any results, even though I thought url: is supposed to search parts of the url. A bug or a feature?

Conclusion

Thanks to Delicious for following through with the search improvements and listening to your users. Special thanks to Delicious's own britta for being on top of things and responding to an 8 month old forum post.

Now perhaps someone will write a plugin to figure out the TOTAL number of bookmarks for a specific domain or modify an existing one (*cough*, ImprovingTheWeb, *cough*)?

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2 Gmail Tricks I Bet You Didn't Know About

Artem Russakovskii — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:00:00 +0000

OK, maybe you did know them – just see for yourself.

Introduction

The tricks I am going to describe allow you to create unique gmail addresses that still hit your existing gmail inbox, without actually making new gmail accounts.

This can be useful in a variety of situations when you need to use multiple email addresses without having the pain of maintaining them, such as

using unique emails while registering for the same service more than once (say, paypal)
giving out a unique email address to see if you start getting spam to it later – that way you know exactly who to blame for it
more generally, easily create email rules to sort incoming emails into folders, delete them, mark as important, etc.

The hints are not new by any means but it seems like most gmail users are not aware of them. So, without further ado:

Gmail Ignores Dots In Gmail Addresses

Did you know this? I sure didn't, until today, when I read a blog post by a fellow Russian blogger streetmakarov. Apparently, gmail completely ignores dots, so you can insert them anywhere you want in your email address.

Thus, foo.bar@gmail.com is the same as foobar@gmail.com, which is the same as f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com, etc – they will all arrive in the same inbox.

This begs the question – what if I registered foo.bar@gmail.com while someone else already owns foobar@gmail.com? Well, some digg and arstechnica users got their panties in a bunch over this a while ago, just to realize that gmail doesn't allow registering accounts that would clash in any way – so if I already own foobar@gmail.com, nobody can register foo.bar@gmail.com or any other combination.

You Can Append a "+ANYTHINGYOUWANT" To Your Username

I think this trick is even more awesome and flexible than the previous one. If your email is foobar@gmail.com, then you can use foobar+blabla@gmail.com, foobar+monkeybananas@gmail.com, etc and those will still land in your original inbox.

This makes it even easier to track the addresses you give out. For example, when I register new twitter accounts, I enter my email as myrealemail+mynewtwittername@gmail.com and then set up a filter in Outlook to filter those out to a separate folder. Simple, painless, and effective.

The only downside to this method is some sites foolishly (or purposely) disallow plus signs in email addresses. Oh well, you can use trick #1 for those.

Conclusion

Do you know other tricks related to "uniquefying" your gmail address? Feel free to share in the comments.

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How To Fix Palm Pre's "Error Sending Mail" Problem

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:53:37 +0000

The Problem

My fiancée Emilie has had her Palm Pre for about 2 weeks now, and one specific problem that started showing up last week has been incredibly annoying, causing us all kinds of trouble.

After Emilie got the phone, she added 3 email accounts – Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. One day, after sending an email through the Pre, a popup showed up that said "Error sending" followed by the subject of that specific email. Swiping the error away didn't help – it just came back 5 minutes later. In fact, it has been coming back every 5 minutes of every day since, lighting up the screen each time. Thus, not only it was annoying, but it was running down the battery like crazy – a full charge lasted between 1/2 and 3/4 of the day with very mild usage.

I deleted the problematic message from the Outbox a long time ago. The error didn't disappear and kept popping up. Additionally, whichever Outbox clicking on the annoying popup led to was having trouble refreshing, even though it wouldn't display what the error actually was – just a yellow exclamation sign would show up. Refreshing the folder didn't help and would take an unusually long time.

Well, finally, I got sick of waiting for Palm to update its OS with possible fixes and set out to find one myself.

Turns out a ton of people are having the same issue, as evident in all Palm Pre forums. For example, Palm.com forum or Precentral.net forum. I really didn't like the common suggestion to delete and re-add the problematic account because

that just most likely temporarily pushes the problem back as I'm sure it would come back again to haunt me
this could potentially erase or disconnect all contacts associated with that account
my engineering mind would be left puzzled
I wasn't sure which account was having the problem (later it turned out the culprit was Yahoo)

Surprisingly, I found the clue that led me to the solution on Yahoo Answers – yeah, that place where nothing intelligent is allowed to exist (with certain exceptions).

The Solution

To make a long story short, Pre messed up Yahoo's outgoing mail settings. My particular problem was the SMTP (that's the outgoing mail server) port was set to 995, which is in fact an incoming POP3 mail server port. I don't know how it happened or if it even worked in the first place but the fact is: the right outgoing port for secure (SSL) SMTP connections is 465. Also, for some reason the SMTP username was blank but the password was filled in. WTF, Pre?

When I changed SMTP port to 465 and entered the username, as specified in that Yahoo Answers post (without the @yahoo.com part), the error message went away and the Outbox refreshed just fine. BTW, my Pre has the incoming mail server set to POP3, while the Yahoo Answers post was set to IMAP – again, why the differences? I'd frankly prefer IMAP anyway.

To get to your mail account settings, open up your email application, go to the Email menu in Pre's top left corner, tap Preferences & Accounts, then tap the offending account, scroll down, and tap Change Login Settings. When you are done, just swipe back (half swipe from right to left in the gesture area). Here's a handy screenshot I took of the relevant area:

Confused by all the technical definitions, like SMTP, IMAP, POP3, SSL, incoming and outgoing accounts? Have a look at this helpful FAQ page, hopefully it'll clear things up.

In the meantime, here's a handy excerpt with port numbers for various connection and server types:

110

143

465

585

993

995

If you are experiencing the same symptoms, check ALL your mail settings, not just the ones I mentioned. Who knows what else your Pre may have messed up?

Update: if you are having trouble sending your mail only while on WiFi, it is possible that your home broadband router is blocking the needed ports. Try to edit the router configuration and open the ports used by your Pre's mail configuration – hopefully the problem will be solved.

Conclusion

Palm, are you hearing us? We are not happy with the bugs and the unhelpful error messages (or lack thereof altogether)! 3 measly updates in the last 2 months is quite pathetic. I hope you are working on a much bigger update behind the scenes.

Looking for a new home broadband router? Broadband Genie allows you to compare broadband deals and offers in an unbiased environment.

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How To Properly Set SVN svn:externals Property In SVN Command Line

Artem Russakovskii — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:01:26 +0000

Introduction

Every time I have to deal with svn:externals in SVN, I forget the command line syntax. Every single damn time. Normally, I use SVN GUI clients, such as SmartSVN, which make it very simple to add an svn:externals property. But for command line, it always takes looking at 25 different sites on google, which are all incredibly unhelpful for this question for some reason. Trying "svn help propset" on the command line was bloated and equally useless.

So this time I needed to write it down and make sure everyone who needed help with svn:externals would find exactly what they need here. I hope this page will soon come up on top of all the unhelpful results on google for "propset svn:externals" and other related queries.

The Problem

I want to set a simple svn:externals property in one of my project's directories, lets say 'plugins' (talking about WordPress here). The outcome would be a directory called 'akismet' within 'plugins' that points to a remote svn url.

Various combinations of trying to do it produced pathetic results, like

svn propset svn:externals akismet http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk
svn: Setting property on non-local target 'http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk' needs a base revision

svn propset svn:externals . akismet http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk
svn: Error parsing svn:externals property on 'akismet': '.'

svn propset svn:externals akismet http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk akismet
svn: Setting property on non-local target 'http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk' needs a base revision

The Solution

Finally, thanks to this post, I found the right command:

svn propset svn:externals 'akismet http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk' .
property 'svn:externals' set on '.'

Note that dot at the end of the command and the quotes around the directory name and url.

Now commit via

svn commit

and then

svn up
Fetching external item into 'akismet'
A    akismet/akismet.gif
A    akismet/akismet.php
A    akismet/readme.txt
Updated external to revision 127962.
 
Updated to revision 16.

There, was it that hard, forum gurus and blog fiends?

Edit: in order to set multiple directory/url pairs in a single svn:externals property, you should put the individual dir/url pairs into a file (let's call it 'svn.externals'), like so

akismet http://svn.wp-plugins.org/akismet/trunk
all-in-one-seo-pack http://svn.wp-plugins.org/all-in-one-seo-pack/trunk

and then apply the property using

svn propset svn:externals -F svn.externals .

You should also just check in 'svn.externals' to easily keep track of it.

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Proof That God Does Exist – You Can Finally Block Those Insanely Annoying Facebook Quizzes For Good

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:45:00 +0000

WTF

I don't know about you, but I'm incredibly sick of Facebook quizzes. Yeah, shit like this which occupies 90% of my news feed:

And to make matters worse, Facebook provides no means to block these quizzes and rid your profile of them forever. The only thing you can do is block each individual quiz. But just like weeds in your backyard, when you block one, three more rise up in its place. I know I am not alone here – there are literally billions of people searching for a solution to the plague.

So, what does the tech community do when it is not happy?

Runs to mommy, crying.
Drinks heavily, passes out, and comes to work with a keyboard faceprint, dressed as Koolaid.
Ignores the problem and lives with it (pussy).
Takes the matters into its own hands and develops a solution.

The correct answers are:

1. 2. and 4.

Enter a true geek at heart by the name of Steeev with his Facebook Purity greasemonkey script that was created with the sole purpose of BLOCKING THE FUCKING QUIZZES. Go ~~Steeve~~ Steeev!

Solution

Installation is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
Install the Facebook Purity script

That's it. Now go to your Facebook page (make sure you access it via www.facebook.com or www.new.facebook.com and not YOURUNIVERSITY.facebook.com (like ucdavis.facebook.com)).

Check it out – all quizzes are gone, the script even tells you how many quizzes were blocked:

Pure bliss. Rest quizless now, everyone.

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Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions

Artem Russakovskii — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:13:00 +0000

Introduction

Welcome to part 2 of the Essential Firefox Extensions And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide series. In this article I’m going to describe a number of time saving pragmatic extensions that make me a better, faster, more efficient browser user (browserer?).

Pragmatic Extensions

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures introduces customizable gestures for all kinds of actions. To perform a gesture, hold the right (by default) button and move the mouse in the specified direction, drawing the needed shape.

Btw, I believe Opera has gestures without any extensions, so Opera users should feel right at home using All-in-One Gestures.

I use it mostly for 3 things: history back/forward and close tab (see below). Once you start using gestures, there is no going back.

Download Statusbar

Download Statusbar is a handy extension that will show your downloads on a dedicated bar right above the status bar. It also adds a much needed “Delete from system” option to each download (why, Firefox, would you not give me an option to delete my downloads at all?). The Download Statusbar only shows up if there’s at least one download not dismissed yet. Double clicking on a finished file will both launch and remove it from the bar.

OpenDownload

Running downloaded files without saving them is probably the only Internet Explorer feature I actually missed, until I found OpenDownload that is. This extension will give you an option to launch a download upon completion in addition to just saving it. I don’t have to worry about finding and deleting it from my system later as it goes to Firefox’s temporary folder.

Tab Mix Plus

This extension is very powerful and versatile. It controls various aspects of the browser tabs, windows, session, and mouse. Here are the settings I find useful:

open links that open in a new window in a new tab instead
open all javascript popups in tabs (I hate popups)
in fact, I enable the single window mode, in which all attempts to open a new window – by webpages or by you, including starting a new Firefox – will be redirected to a new tab
highlight unread tabs, which would italicize the tab titles of pages that had something new loaded since you last opened them
show progress meter on tabs
close tab button on all tabs (instead of a single one on the right side)
hide the new tab button that occupies extra space
customize the tab menu options

Here are some option screens:

Google Toolbar

The google toolbar is historically sort of a must for me. It adds a couple of nice features on top of the default search box and frees the latter, so that I can set it to another search engine (IMDB in my case). With the amount of searching one does on google daily, the sheer number of clicks and keystrokes saved will be in the thousands. Daily. I search a lot, OK?

In addition to providing an always present search bar, the toolbar carries a number of useful features, such as live search suggest, instant PageRank (unneeded if you install SEO Toolbar or SearchStatus), search Gmail and News buttons (and many others), clickable search terms good for in-page search, highlighting of the said terms, a simple autofill (though I use an irreplaceable AI Roboform instead), spell check (Firefox has one built-in now), translate (I use the gTranslate extension instead). All in all, one can do without google toolbar, depending on the needed functionality.

Don’t be afraid to install more toolbars than you need at any given time as you can always hide the ones you don’t want to see by right clicking the top menu bar:

Linkification

Linkification is a really pragmatic extension. It hyperlinks any url-looking strings that aren’t already hyperlinked. Take a look.

Linkification off:

Linkification on:

The extension has a variety of options to satisfy even savvy users but I found that defaults work really well. If for some reason you want to momentarily turn off linkification, just tap the button in the tray and the page will revert to its original form. By the way, if you really want to put it to the test, install it and head over to the comprehensive test case list.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is the most versatile extension available for Firefox, as it’s essentially a whole framework for scripts that can manipulate any aspect of any page. Head over to userscripts.org and take a look at the myriads of scripts written and submitted by other Greasemonkey users.

Still not clear what these can do? Let me list some that I use and their brief functionality:

Digg Top 10 Direct – automatically rewrites the digg’s top 10 links to go straight to the articles, instead of the digg comment page. Clicking on the digg icon still goes to the comments page though, and I think this is the ideal functionality.
Google Image Relinker – rewrites google image search urls to go directly to the corresponding images rather than the page they were found on.
YousableTubeFix – adds a small smart menu that dynamically shows which qualities a given youtube video is available in and automatically picks the best one, adds download links to the each quality (FLV and MP4), resizes the player to your liking, and a few other things. It is also quite customizable.

The now world famous Troy's Twitter Script that I reviewed a few week ago – it does everything Twitter currently doesn't, including Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, and more.
AideRSS Google Reader Integration – adds AideRSS feed rank to each entry in Google Reader, which allows eyeballing more important articles within a few seconds of seeing a feed. Also available as a separate extension for those not using Greasemonkey.

Show MyIP

Show MyIP does exactly what it says: it displays your current IP. What I like about it is that it queries for it on demand, after you left or right click the icon. This approach avoids unnecessary queries going around.

-> ->

What I don’t like about it is that there seems to be no way to copy this IP to clipboard. Ideally, a right click option would work great (that’s the way the next extension ShowIP does it). I left a comment about this fact on the extension’s page, so hopefully the author will implement it shortly.

Also, if an error occurs, be prepared for some good old German cursing:

ShowIP

ShowIP, in contrast to Show MyIP, actually displays the IP(s) of the website I’m currently on. It then allows me to copy it (or all of them) into clipboard and provides quick information links, such as whois, ip2country, and traceroute.

ShowIP is useful for both developers who want to know which dev server they’re currently working on as well as regular users who are interested in the location or whois of a site they’re visiting.

If only the country where a site is hosted is needed, then you are probably better off using Flagfox, described in part 3 of the series.

iimmgg.com Tools

iimmgg.com is a picture hosting site similar to tinypic.com and photobucket.com. Generally, it allows quick picture uploading with thumbnail creation. This extension makes this process insanely simple, I can’t say enough praise how good my user experience was with this extension. Check this out.

The extension has 2 modes:

1. If you right click on a picture, there’s a single option to upload it to iimmgg.com:

As soon as you click Upload, you are almost immediately redirected to a page on iimmgg.com with your picture and thumbnails already generated. Swoosh, that was fast. Internally, the extension sends the user to something like http://www.iimmgg.com/upload.php?u=http%3A//beerpla.net/wp-content/uploads/BenefitsofMUNI_1E7D/image.png&r=about:blank&s=1&t=, which then redirects to the final picture.

2. If you right click anywhere else on the page, there are now 3 ways to capture an image to iimmgg.com:

Select either of the 3 options: Visible Page, Full Page, or Select Area. Let’s say I select Select Area. A resizable overlay that I can drag it around to select the area I want shows up. Brilliant.

After I figure out what I want to capture, I click on the Capture Selected Area button in a bar that just showed up (btw, the styling of both the bar and the selector are very reminiscent of the Web Developer extension):

The next and final prompt shows up with the Image Format selection (PNG – High Quality, JPEG – High Quality, JPEG – Medium Quality, and JPEG – Low Quality), SFW selection, and capture name:

Click Capture and upload (or save to disk, which is not as fun but also useful):

Voila – the picture is ready for sharing.

iimmgg.com doesn’t support hotlinking.

Remove Cookie(s) for Site

Remove Cookie(s) for Site does exactly what it says – removes all cookies that belong to a domain and all subdomains of the site you’re currently on. Right click anywhere on the page, click Remove Cookie(s) for Site and the taskbar will update with the number of cookies removed.

You can also pull out a nice little button to a location of your choosing, like so:

Oftentimes I don’t even bother looking for a logout button – deleting all cookies is a lot faster.

Signature

Signature, as you probably guessed, inserts a signature into a text form. It supports as many signatures as you want. The uses can be versatile, here are just some:

the obvious “first and last name” signature
a full signature with your site link which can help in site promotion. Mine, for example, is
disclaimers
coined replies to emails
various addresses
repetitive urls
any other frequently used set of strings that you have to continuously copy-paste

Don’t use a mouse when inserting a signature. Due to the fact that Insert Signature conveniently places itself at the top of the menu, it’s much quicker to use the keyboard button that simulates right click (most laptops and keyboards have it), click down, then right, then select signature, and press Enter.

QuickRestart

QuickRestart adds a Restart Firefox option to the File menu. This is quite handy, especially when you have a lot of extensions and it may take Firefox 30 seconds to shut down.

~~The only downside of this is that it seems to lose the protected and locked tab properties set by Tab Mix Plus. Shutting down Firefox and starting it manually does not lose such properties.~~ This is no longer a problem in the latest Tab Mix Plus version.

Resizeable Textarea

Ever seen a comment box this big and got annoyed by the idiot who designed it?

Fear not, as Resizeable Textarea adds resize capabilities to any text area. Move the cursor to the bottom or right borders, or the bottom-right corner, and drag all you want:

TryAgain

TryAgain is a great and very simple extension. It retries loading a failed page up to 5 times instead of just sitting there. This screenshot explains everything:

View Cookies

View Cookies is a simple extension that adds a Cookies tab to the VIew Page Info box. The tab allows viewing, removing, and copying cookie info for the site you’re currently visiting. There is a number of extensions that do similar things, like Firebug and Remove Cookie(s) for Site, but I install View Cookies anyway because its functionality makes sense.

Google Gears

Google Gears is a very useful extension, and it’s a shame that a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it does. Think of it as simply a secure local cache (developed by Google). Quite a few popular websites support Gears, and I think it is best to just give a few examples of actual usage.

One limitation of Gears that I am not sure can be overcome yet is you have to open a Gears-enabled site while you still have Internet connection. Once it is open, you are free to lose your Internet connection, and Gears will kick in. This is why I always keep a page with Google Calendar and rememberthemilk open.

gmail.com – gmail rolled out offline email support quite recently, which is the most useful implementation of Gears to date.
wordpress – if you host a wordpress blog, you can opt in to cache a few hundred files in Gears that will speed up the wordpress admin interface. WordPress calls this Turbo mode.
rememberthemilk.com – RTM, the most advanced and functional TODO list site, offers an excellent implementation of Gears. If you lose your connection, you are free to create, modify, and delete any tasks you want – all the changes will be synchronized when you go back online.
google reader – the reader can download feed items for offline viewing but the implementation is not very good – you have to explicitly go offline by clicking a button, at which point Gears will download 2000 items.

Installing Gears on its own will technically not do anything for you. You will need to enable support for each site individually. For example, Offline gmail is available from the gmail Labs by clicking on in the top right corner.

From a technical standpoint, Gears uses a local SQLite database for storage. The Gears security model is described here.

gTranslate

GTranslate translates selected text into a language of your choice. It can be set to autodetect the source language or forced to a specific one. I must say so far it worked very well and detected the source language automatically without flaw.

Once the translation is received, gTranslate shows it and links to the google translate page:

Additionally, if the selected text is in an editable field, gTranslate will offer an option to replace the selection with its translation:

SearchStatus

SearchStatus is a useful and relatively simple SEO extension. It shows a quick roundup of page rankings for the current page from Google (PageRank), Alexa, and Compete. This lets me quickly check how popular [or lame] the site I’m on is and keep tabs on my own online properties. Right clicking each metric grants access to a few useful shortcuts and for the lazy pragmatic, right clicking the little symbol has such links as Show Whois, Show robots.txt, Show sitemap.xml, and others.

Another not so obvious but useful feature of this extension is the ability to mark rel=’nofollow’ links. You rightfully obsessed SEO junkies can quickly see which parts of your site leak the valuable link juice and which ones don’t. Take a look at these nofollow links that SearchStatus marked with light red background:

SEO Toolbar

This toolbar is probably going to be useful for relatively hardcore SEO fiends as most people would do just fine with the above SearchStatus extension. The toolbar seems a bit bulky and slow but has a ton of SEO related functionality. It is, of course, free. It shows Google PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo page links, DMOZ directory, Yahoo directory, Best of the web directory, Archive.org, Compete uniques, and SEMRush traffic value:

It also links to a bunch of tools, like quantcast analysis, google trends, and alexa:

For a quick, more in-depth, exportable overview, press the info button :

However, the 2 most useful to me features are probably the Rank Checker :

and Compare Sites :

I customized the toolbar and removed the useless search box and a few pointless buttons by dragging them out:

End of Part 2

This marks the end of part 2 in the series. I expect this page to update pretty often, whenever I find new extensions, so bookmark it using your favorite method by clicking the button below.

The next part in the series (available soon) will describe a number of useful web development extensions.

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How To Make Your Site Lightning Fast* By Compressing (deflate/gzip) Your HTML, Javascript, CSS, XML, etc In Apache

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:02:00 +0000

* Lightning Fast is a blatant exaggeration. Got you to look though, didn't it?

Introduction

Whether you are a web developer or a self-hosting business owner, the only excuse for not activating compression capabilities of your web server can be that you didn't know about it. And now that you are reading this, there is no excuse left at all.

Here is how big a single page of this blog was before compression was enabled on CSS and Javascript files (computed by YSlow):

And here it is after compression:

As you see, the difference is quite substantial – almost 30% savings.

Compressing your HTML, XML, Javascript, CSS, etc pages will mean less data transferred between the server and the client which:

reduces the bandwidth usage.
provides faster page rendering which in turn leads to less user frustration, higher conversion rates, lower bounce rate, etc etc etc.

Compression is especially important for users with slow connections as every kilobyte of your code is that much more painful to them.

Compression can be very effective – you can easily shrink your text, code (HTML, XML, Javascript, CSS, etc) to 10% of the original size (of course, your mileage may vary). 100KB page that needs only 10KB to transfer? Sign me up!

So, before I talk about the solution, let me describe what exactly happens when compression is turned on and how it affects older browsers that don't support it.

Are you using jQuery?

Did you know that a minified jQuery file is 55KB? In order to achieve the advertised 19KB, you would still need to compress the .js file using the methods listed here.

Compression Mechanism Explained

In order for compression to work in the first place, the web server (Apache in my example) needs to support it. This is achieved by enabling one of Apache modules called mod_deflate. The server will then be able to compress the data to the DEFLATE standard using either the zlib (also known as deflate) or gzip implementations. Yeah, DEFLATE is both the standard the one of its implementations, for those confused. I know I was. This is best described in this Wikipedia article.

The following mechanism is used:

the server with a compression extension enabled is able to serve either compressed (smaller) or uncompressed (larger) pages, depending on what the client supports.
the client (that is, your browser) sends a special header called "Accept-Encoding" listing the DEFLATE implementations it's capable of decompressing. For example "gzip,deflate".
the server picks the best compression supported by the client (if any), compresses the files, and sends them over to the client.
the client receives the compressed files and decompresses them.

Are you using a load blancer?

If you are using a load balancer, it may already be configured to compress pages that pass through it. In that case, there is no need to separately configure compression on your web servers. In fact, it should be off to save CPU.

Are Your Pages Already Compressed? Test Them!

If you are not sure whether you are already serving compressed pages or not, test them! My favorite way is by using Charles HTTP Debugger. Another option is by downloading Firebug for Firefox and installing Yahoo's YSlow or Google's Page Speed. Just look at the response headers to see if compression is on (look for the Content-Encoding header). Here are some before and after examples:

Theme CSS

Before:

After:

jQuery

Before:

After:

Solution

Create a .htaccess file in the top directory of your site with the following contents:

# DEFLATE by type - html, text, css, xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/xml
 
# DEFLATE by type - javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript text/x-js text/x-javascript
 
# DEFLATE by extension
AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css htm html xml

Alternatively, you could put these lines into your Apache config within the Directory directive.

The AddOutputFilterByType directive adds DEFLATE filters to certain MIME types. I tried to assemble some of the common ones but feel free to add more, as each server may be configured differently and give out MIME types different from mine.

You can find your own server's MIME type definitions in the file that the TypesConfig directive is pointing to (mine is /etc/mime.types).

The AddOutputFilter directive binds the DEFLATE filter to specific file extensions, just in case they are not served with a proper MIME type. Feel free to add to this list as well.

Caveats

1. In order to use this whole compression/deflate/gzip business, your Apache server must first have mod_deflate enabled. Without it, you will get the HTTP 500 error (Internal Server error). You can check which mods you already have enabled by checking with the output of phpinfo() function.

In order to enable mod_deflate, uncomment the line with "deflate_module" in your Apache config file. The location of this config file is highly dependant on your system. Some examples include

/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
c:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf\httpd.conf
some other place where your system stores Apache config files (read the special note below for OpenSUSE).

Here's what you should have:

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

On OpenSUSE, you actually enable modules a bit differently. Go to /etc/sysconfig/apache2 and look for APACHE_MODULES=. Then add "deflate" to the list, if it's not already there.

Now, restart Apache and check the output of phpinfo() again.

2. Adding AddOutputFilter and AddOutputFilterByType to .htaccess requires such overrides to be authorized by the main Apache configuration for that directory, otherwise it will return error 500 as well. The option you are looking for is called "AllowOverride" and mine was set to "AllowOverride AuthConfig" which wasn't enough. Changing it to

AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo

or just

AllowOverride All

fixes the problem. You can find more info about AllowOverride here.

3. In WordPress, if you are using Google Gears (Turbo mode) for caching some core WordPress files, they will not show up compressed. That is because they're not served by the remote server but rather reside locally (think of it as permanent cache). I was very confused at first when I didn't see jQuery.js in the HTTP log and YSlow reported it uncompressed.

Are you a WordPress user?

If you are a WordPress user, don't assume WordPress is going to automatically compress your pages. In fact, as you install more and more plugins, the payload becomes larger and larger with those additional CSS and Javascript files.

You owe it to yourself and to your users to immediately enable compression on your blog.

Here is what happened after I enabled compression on this blog.

Before:

After:

Bonus – WP Minify

For even better results, I suggest you have a look at my good friend and talented WordPress master Thaya's plugin called WP Minify. It preprocesses and aggregates all or most of your CSS and Javascript into just 2 files, thus saving on the number of HTTP requests. It also minifies content to achieve smaller size.

My blog before WP Minify:

After WP Minify:

That's all folks. Let me know if something was unclear and I'll be glad to clarify it.

A few references that pointed me in the right direction and allowed me to provide a more complete solution:

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Lenovo's And Dell's Laptop Return Policies In The US

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:27:00 +0000

I've been looking for a new laptop and started looking at Lenovo Thinkpads (W500) and Dell Latitudes and Precisions. I was worried that I might not like the look and feel, so I tried looking up their US laptop return policy.

Dell's return policy was found in about 5 seconds.

Lenovo's site, google, bing, or any other resource, however, proved to be useless while looking up their US return policy (all I could find was their Australian policy for whatever reason). Lenovo tried VERY hard to bury it, and I was only able to find it after tweeting at lenovosocial, which at first gave me the wrong policy by mistake (it was a 30 days, no questions asked guarantee). So, after I pointed that out, in the 2nd tweet @lenovosocial provided the correct link. In a few days, this post should float to the top in searches for "lenovo return policy", "lenovo laptop return policy", and "lenovo notebook return policy" and save someone a good hour of looking for one.

You can find Lenovo's return policy here. The relevant part, as of 7/24/09, is:

Return products
Lenovo will accept the return or exchange of a product in its original, sealed package for a full refund in cases of Lenovo error. Returns allowed for any other reason will be subject to a restocking fee equal to 15% of the purchase amount. All returns must be initiated within 21 days of the invoice date. Lenovo does not provide refunds or credits for portions of a packaged offering provided at a single price or for preloaded programs installed by Lenovo. For service and warranty issues, contact warranty support at 1 800 426 7378. For inquiries relating to third party (non Lenovo) products, contact the third party directly.
To initiate a return, contact 1-866-428-4465 to obtain an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization). Any authorized return must include the product and all accessories in the unopened original packaging, along with all documentation (including invoice, RMA and original shipping label), and must be received at the Lenovo National Return Center within 10 days of obtaining the RMA. Incomplete returns will not be accepted for any reason. Returns that do not follow these steps may be refused by Lenovo, and customer assumes risk of loss and damage for packages returned without an RMA. Please allow 8-10 business days after the item is returned for the processing of your credit.

So, there you have it, folks – both Dell and Lenovo charge a 15% restocking fee and give 21 days to return, from the invoice date (which, as I found out, is defined as the shipping date)? Pretty bad, considering business laptops are not sold in any retail location I could find and I can't see or touch them before I have to pull the trigger. What's your take on this?

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Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips

Artem Russakovskii — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:32:00 +0000

Introduction

In this article I’m going to discuss a number of useful Firefox extensions and tips. This list is not a “COMPLETE GUIDE TO FIREFOX!!!111!” but a collection of some, albeit many, extensions and techniques I find useful, with detailed descriptions and illustrations. I try to make my reviews as personal as possible and express my own points of view, so I will not be using any boring official descriptions altogether. Short, concise, and useful – that is my goal.

Right now I use 53 extensions in total. If you think that’s a lot, you might be right. However, because Firefox is so mature and new extensions come out every day, it is not as crazy of a number as it was 2 years ago. Firefox gets faster, I download more extensions, and the end result is I’m happier as a user because Firefox suddenly provides me with a lot more features at approximately the same running speed. I plan on continuing to increase this number.

Note that if you have a limited amount of RAM, installing so many extensions might start overflowing the memory and will significantly slow down the system if you run out of it.

Here’s a quick slightly obsolete screenshot of the extensions I’m using:

Firefox Tips

Before describing extensions, I wanted to mention a few tips about Firefox itself. If you are interested in extensions, proceed to part 2 right away, however I urge you to read these too.

Using the bookmarks bar and shortened names

You can fit a lot of quick bookmarks on the little bookmark bar if you shorten the names to 1 or 2 characters.

Using keywords for bookmarks

A little less known trick is to use the keywords property of your bookmarks. For example, here I assign a keyword ‘d’ to my digg.com bookmark. Then I can just go to the url bar, type in ‘d’, Enter and voila – digg starts loading.

Protecting and locking tabs

Protect a tab will prevent you from closing it.

I use this functionality on my most frequently visited sites – so frequently that I never want to close them. They include the iGoogle homepage, Google calendar, Remember The Milk TODO list, my Trac tickets at work, and a few other things.

These protected states are saved even if you close and open Firefox (but unfortunately, not if you use QuickRestart described in part 2). Protected windows are marked by a symbol.

You can protect a tab by Shift-clicking on it and lock it by Alt-clicking (these are customizable in Tab Mix Plus settings)

Locking a tab is similar, but instead of not being able to close it, you are not able to change the url. Any url change attempts will produce a new tab. I personally never use this feature but some may find it handy. Locked windows are marked by a symbol.

Note that you need the Tab Mix Plus extension (described in part 2) for these tricks.

Restoring sessions

While Firefox 3 now has a built-in session restore feature, it’s not very robust. That is why I still use the Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2) session restore feature set. TMP’s session manager remembers protect and lock statuses, tab history, selected tab, and everything else about the session. I will describe TMP in more detail later.

Using keyboard shortcuts

In my experience, keyboard shortcuts are primarily used by power users, while the rest of the population uses a mouse. However, shortcuts are immensely effective time savers and, if you mouse a lot, will provide a relief for your wrist. Let’s take a look at a few easy and important ones.

Ctrl-L and TABs

Ctrl-L will put the focus on the url bar, no matter where you are on the page. It is equivalent to F6 in IE, except it’s actually robust. So, when I’m ready to type in the name of the site, my fingers are already on the keyboard. Ctrl-L doesn’t even require extra movements.

TAB (the key, not the Firefox tab) once after you’ve pressed Ctrl-L and you’re in the Firefox search bar (the one I set to imdb a bit later in the article). TAB twice and you’re in the Google toolbar, if you have it installed.

Ctrl-Enter and Shift-Enter

Ctrl-Enter is a tremendous time saver. It appends “.com” to whatever you have in the url bar and prepends “http://www.”. Type in “google”, press Ctrl-Enter, and voila, you’re at www.google.com. Similarly, Shift-Enter, appends “.net”.

Ctrl-T

Ctrl-T opens a new tab.

Ctrl-Shift-T

Ctrl-Shift-T opens the last closed tab(s), in the order they were closed.

Ctrl-Alt-T

Ctrl-Alt-T duplicates the current tab. Yet again, this is a feature of Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2). Oh how much I love you, TMP.

Ctrl-TAB, Ctrl-Shift-TAB

Ctrl-TAB is probably the most frequently used key combination. It cycles between tabs forward while Ctrl-Shift-TAB does it backwards.

Ctrl-W

Ctrl-W closes the current tab.

Space

Pressing space is a quick way to scroll down one page. It’s a lot of times more convenient than finding the small PgDn button, especially if you have fat fingers.

Setting the Firefox search bar to IMDB

Because I already use the Google Toolbar (one of the most useful toolbars out there) there is little point keeping Firefox’s default search box set to Google. I prefer IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) myself but you can easily set it to another search engine.

End of Part 1

This marks the end of part 1 in the series. Proceed to part 2.

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The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:49:56 +0000

Introduction

Let’s face it – the majority of the population doesn’t understand twitter. They don’t get its true value – all they see is an obnoxious social network full of exhibitionists tweeting about millions of mundane things of every minute of their lives.

Except, twitter is much, much more than that. In addition to all the wankers talking about themselves 24/7, of course. Twitter is what you make it to be. You can follow boring, uninteresting people with interests in growing cactuses (cacti?) and collecting fur balls. But you can also follow people sharing piles of interesting and useful information (see bullet points below). Just do me one favor and repeat after me: twitter is not only for publishing your detailed crapping schedule. Get over it, step over your prejudice, delay arriving to conclusions until after trying it yourself.

Don’t get me wrong – I was one of those people before and resisted joining twitter for many months, even years. I didn’t understand it either and didn’t want to voluntarily sign up for just another source of distraction. Here are my findings after joining twitter 2 months ago.

Real Reasons To Use Twitter

1. Most up-to-the-second updated search engine on things going on now

This is invaluable. Plane crash? Digg,com down? Searching twitter would yield instantaneous results because somebody somewhere is tweeting about it. And I’m not talking about biased and edited media – just real people.

Here is the perfect example of something that happened while I was writing this article. I was sleeping happily when some shaking woke me up. I couldn't figure out if I had just dreamt about an earthquake or one just actually happened. There was no more shaking, so I stumbled to my computer and did a quick twitter search for “earthquake”. Within seconds I knew it was indeed an earthquake, and within minutes what the magnitude was. Do you see value in this? I do.

2. Following important people in your field

Whatever your field is – web development, brain surgery, economics – anything, you will find colleagues whose ideas are interesting to you. You can also just follow plain geniuses, like Matt Cutts of Google or Om Malik of GigaOM. Believe me, a smart and interesting person makes sure to be interesting and smart on twitter as well, otherwise their audience drops off. Either way – you are in control. X and Y too boring for you? Stop following them and start following Z.

3. Keeping up with the latest news and updates

You can use twitter as pseudo-RSS by following, say, @cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News), new posts on FML @fxxxmylife, or jQuery updates at @jquery. As events occur, you get instant notifications in your twitter feed.

4. You can talk to companies directly, in a public, open way

For example, I’ve gotten personal replies from Comcast (@comcastcares) and Hulu (@hulu) within minutes of tweeting to them. Because the tweets are public rather than private the way emails would be, there is more pressure to respond to everyone and do it faster. Got a problem? Chances are twitter can help. I also noticed that everyone is inherently polite on twitter – there are no dumb flame wars.

5. In my experience, you will actually get a lot fewer “taking a dump” messages on twitter than on Facebook

… especially with Facebook’s new design. Let me tell you a little secret about your friends – they are not all geniuses and their comment rate seems to be inversely proportional to their brilliance. So before you say that twitter is useless, think about your Facebook account.

6. I’m not one to care much for following celebrities or famous people

… however I still think it’s fascinating that more and more celebrities and prominent people get on twitter, seemingly bridging the difference gap between themselves and regular folks. For example, Ashton Kutcher @aplusk constantly tweets and takes pictures with his phone (mostly of his wife Demi Moore, who is also an avid twitterer @mrskutcher). The fact that you can tweet @ Ashton and he’ll undoubtedly read your message and maybe even respond is kind of cool if you think about it. What kind of a fan club gives you such proximity to your favorite celebrity? What kind of fanclub is better than twitter for celebrities themselves?

Twitter is what you want it to be. Twitter is what you make of it.

140 Characters

Twitter’s 140 message limit, is it a curse or a blessing? My opinion is that it was an absolutely crucial element in site’s appeal and remarkable growth – an average person wants to skim through headlines and read in detail only what seems interesting. Too much information = information overload, even if it’s only a few more characters. I don’t think twitter would have picked up, had it not had this harsh character limit.

What do you think? Did you even have enough attention span to read the above 3 sentences?

Want To Make Twitter More Fun?

Check out my cleverly named Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More article.

Use Digsby, Tweetdeck, and other apps to take twitter with you to your desktop. See Top 10 Reasons Why Digsby ROCKS for more info on Digsby.

Check out this greasemonkey script that augments your google search results with Twitter ones:

Twitter Prediction?

Will my twitter predictions come true by the end of 2009? Read them here (hint: they already have, see below).

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Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:14:36 +0000

Recently I read an article on the Six Revisions blog that discussed 10 seemingly simple improvements to the twitter interface. They included such things as nick autocomplete, mentions, groups, and more.

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
Install the Troys Twitter script

Greasemonkey is the most versatile extension available for Firefox, as it’s essentially a whole framework for scripts that can manipulate any aspect of any page. Head over to userscripts.org and take a look at the myriads of scripts written and submitted by other Greasemonkey users.

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

Before:

After:

Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

Before:

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Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

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Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

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Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

Before:

(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

After:

Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

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Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

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Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

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User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

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Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

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Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

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Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

Before:

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That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

If thinking of how to pass 642-845 then 642-825 online training is best option to achieve your goal in days and get 650-177 certified.

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Random Questions and Thoughts. Password Protected Garage Door Remotes, Twitter Security, MUNI Drivers, Burgers, etc

Artem Russakovskii — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:00:00 +0000

From time to time my, still curious, mind accumulates a variety of questions and concerns which it has to spill onto the pages of this blog. How random are these? Pretty damn random, and I need to see some answers, quick. Oh, and I’m deliberately not searching Google, as I want to facilitate discussion. What fun would it be if I just looked up all these?

Password Protected Garage Door Remotes

As a paranoid person and a recent homeowner, I started to wonder how safe I actually am in my house. Consider this likely scenario that nobody seems to be concerned with:

I park my car outside for one night and don’t take out my portable garage door remote, the one with a single open/close button. Or, even worse, the remote code is programmed into one of those garage opener buttons built into the car. A car burglar comes along, breaks the window, and trashes my car. Wow, an added bonus – a free entrance into the house!

Needless to say, this is bad already. How many of you lock the door between the house and the garage? What if you forget to do that as well? Is there a spare house key laying around in the garage? You may say “but I’ll hear the garage door open” but does it actually make you feel better? You will be present with an intruder in your house, which will scare the living shit out of you non-governator types.

So here’s my question to you, Internet, is there a garage door remote I can buy that has a programmable keypad, so that a password is needed for the button to work? In fact, it would be almost the same as the one that mounts next to the garage door. And can it not cost $100?

Twitter Security

This part is not about computer security, as you may have thought at first, although I did recently discuss it in the Clickjacking article. I also know that I’m not the first one to bring this issue up but I think it’s worth discussing some more. Consider this scenario:

You’re a cheerful, outgoing snowboarding enthusiast with 3000 twitter (plurk, facebook, or another social network but twitter is the most relevant example) followers. Or maybe you have 3 followers. There’s a 99.9% chance that your profile and updates are public (if you have 3000 followers with a private profile, you must be some sort of a chump. And yes, I did just make the stats up, want fight about it?).
So, on Friday night, you send the following tweet: “Gone snowboarding for the whole weekend. But not before getting piss trashed Friday night at the casino. Wooooo”.

Since anybody can watch your tweets absolutely anonymously and it’s extremely easy to dig up an address knowing very little about a person, what you just said was “If you are a burglar looking for the next opportunity, just drop everything and come on by Friday night. I will be far-far away but my house (located at 123 Main St) will be available for your robbing pleasures. You only have 2 days before anyone is home, so feel free to crash on the couch and eat my food. Don’t forget to feed the cat. Kthx.”

Is this a likely scenario? Not really, unless twitter raises the tweet length to more than 140 characters, but otherwise you see where I’m going with this. Don’t be stupid – avoid advertising exact details of your whereabouts, vacation plans, etc. There are plenty of uses for Twitter without giving up most of your privacy. Ask yourself: would you post a note with your whereabouts on your door every time you leave the house for a while?

How Do Trains And Buses Know Where They Are?

If you live in a relatively large city, you have seen relatively accurate bus and train arrival predictions and, in some cases, almost exact locations of each vehicle. For example, here in San Francisco we have MUNI stations with live maps of trains’ whereabouts and bus stops with bus predictions on small electronic displays.

What is the technology behind it? It cannot be just GPS, because trains go underground where there is no reception. If it’s a combination of externally mounted sensors, are they also placed outside, once the train gets out into the street? Or is it some sort of a 2-way GPS (a conventional GPS device is just a receiver) underground that switches to sensors above ground? I don’t know but I want to.

Train/Bus Drivers And Bathrooms

While I’m on the public transportation subject, here’s what I want to know: if you are a train/bus/trolleybus driver, what do you do if you NEED to go somewhere when you are half way down your route? All of us had such moments at least once, and sometimes you just HAVE TO drop the bomb, sink some submarines, drop the kids off at the pool, release the chocolate hostage, plant some potatoes, give birth to a VB programmer, down the proctoscope, bake some brownies, you know what I mean (if you don’t, you’re a senile muppet, what are you doing on the Internet?).

They can’t just leave the train in the middle of the street, can they? Have you ever seen one run out in the middle of the street? I’m really curious here.

All Of Dilbert

~~Is there a Dilbert collection somewhere that has every Dilbert comic in an easily browseable manner, ideally with ratings I can sort by? 100 Dilberts per page would be ideal.~~ Ah, looks like the new Dilbert.com finally made it a reality: all Dilbert comics sorted by votes, 49 per page.

Where Can I Buy A Circus Tent?

Who sells them? The ones where elephants and clowns could fit. It could also double as a portable office.

Who Gets To Eat The Most Delicious Burger In Burger Commercials?

And where do I sign up? I’m serious.

● ● ●

Yeah, so that’s pretty much what’s on my mind right now. What’s on yours?

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Artem’s Top 10 Tech Predictions And Ideas For 2009 And Beyond

Artem Russakovskii — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 08:05:39 +0000

Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, it’s a new fad. It’s like you’re not cool anymore if you don’t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldn’t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone else’s ideas – it doesn’t mean I ripped them off, it just means we share the same opinions and they’re more likely to come true.
awesome.

What this post is not:

predictions I pulled out of my ass, like “the market will bounce in August 2009” because some random douche said so.
a collection of stolen ideas. I have reserved a separate post for that purpose.
a raptor on hoverboard.

Things That Need To Happen

1. Socially Editable Maps

With the advent of the GPS technology in the last couple of years and GPS prices falling (my originally $800 Garmin Nuvi 660 now costs about $200), the biggest frustration I have now is the accuracy of information. In the world of Google Maps and Wikipedia, why is it that I have to wait a whole year for map updates that are obsolete by the time they come out? The Bay Bridge repairs change the roads on an almost monthly basis, for example.

I want to know about road changes as soon as they occur.

The next big thing will be a company, either existing, like Google, or a startup, that will introduce the social aspect into the mapping technology. It will do for maps and GPS what Wikipedia did for text, using the same approach. The details are of course to be worked out.

After this concept becomes successful, GPS companies, will need to support such updates over the air, with a push of a button. This ties in closely with prediction #2 and #4.

2. Open Source GPS Goes Mainstream

Google, the father of Android, needs to get behind this one as well. In fact, an open source GPS device would really be a subset of Android’s functionality, in a dedicated device, so it shouldn’t be that hard. In the far future, it will be built into automobile dashboards but I don’t foresee that happening in the near future.

Combined with prediction #1, this will be a killer device. I really believe that free, open source software is the wave of the future, the natural direction of where software development is heading. Look at Linux in the past few years. Look at Android now. Release one and I’m be #1 in line for one. Those who know me IRL know that I can’t go anywhere without a GPS anymore. I once forgot a GPS at home and ended up in Chili.

3. Photo and Video Cameras Will Go Wireless, Anywhere You Go

Photo and video cameras will be able to post pictures and videos to your home computer, sites like Flickr and YouTube, or email themselves directly to your friends… as soon as you record them, over cellular and Wifi networks.

Cell phones with cameras? Think cameras with cell phones. Some Wifi enabled cameras already came out, like this Canon SD430 (DP review here), and this freshly announced at CES 2009 Sony G3, and now it’s time to go cellular.

The next prediction is a generalization of this concept.

4. Wireless Connectivity Everywhere, In Every Device, Anywhere You Go

Cell phone carriers will sign an increasing amount of deals with companies that want to build devices which connect to the Internet or private networks anywhere you go: GPSes, cameras, digital picture frames, cars, fridges.

The future is completely wireless. People are sick and tired of cords, clutter, and Rick Astley – I know that for a fact and digg says so.

5. Android Will Become Hugely Successful

Alright, I’m dead tired of all the posts about how Google’s Android is going to flop in 2009. I sincerely feel that people with that point of view have never experienced Google and open source, played with Android itself, or realized what exactly an open source phone OS means to developers, manufacturers, and consumers.

Android will become a platform of choice in the next couple of years as everyone starts to realize its limitless possibilities, the OS matures, thousands of new apps get written for it, and new Android phones flood the market. The only Android phone released so far, HTC’s G1, has already received praise from consumers, as well as my friends (even the females ones are excited. And yes, I have female friends).

Motorola announced a few months ago that its new phones are going to run Android and Windows Mobile exclusively. If a company with an R&D department as big as Moto’s stands behind something, you bet your ass they’ve done they’re homework. And what’s not to like? They can now:

take something that’s supported by the biggest Internet company in the world and the community, for free.
stop worrying about writing and maintaining their own OS – BAM, tons of money saved.
concentrate R&D on the hardware.
if need be, freely develop the features they want that Android doesn’t support yet and contribute them back. Everyone wins, except maybe Symbian developers that don’t have a job anymore.

Android is going to be a revolution. Apple and Android fighting it out will be the best thing that happened to us since the invention of sushi.

Update: An Android desktop phone was just released at CES. By end of 2009 we will be flooded with Androidness.

6. Open Source HDTVs

The open source revolution will continue and start penetrating the HDTV market.

Personally, I think set top boxes are a waste of effort, time, and money but give me an HDTV that can run Youtube, Vimeo, LastFM, Pandora, and any other site through some sort of a plugin or browser, with a build in Media Center that connects to my computers and goes Wifi, that uses open source, upgradeable software (most likely Linux based), and I will buy it in a heartbeat.

Yes, what I’m saying is if my TV and HTPC did something dirty, I would totally dig their offspring, and so would millions of other people who don’t want/need/care/understand HTPC. TV in general holds a special place in my heart, and make it an even better experience, people.

Update: In fact, Vizio just made an announcement at CES 2009 that their TVs will have built-in support for Netflix, Blockbuster, Amazon, Yahoo, and more.

7. Twitter’s Popularity Will Explode

Now for some social media. Twitter will continue dominating the microblogging arena, similar to YouTube dominating the video space. The site will grow extremely fast, much faster than now.

Competitors, like plurk, will probably secure certain small niches but nobody will be close to touch twitter.

Twitter’s Google PageRank (PR) today is 8 out of 10, which is considered very high.

It has the Alexa 3 month average rank of 599, 1 week average of 414, and 1 day average of 351.

I predict that by the end of 2009, Twitter will move into the top 50 Alexa.

Twitter’s significance in the business world for will be revolutionary. It will become second nature for every company to have one or many twitter accounts as means of connecting to consumers on a personal level. Think an opportunity for mini press releases, many of them, daily, not boring ones, the ones people are actually going to read.

Twitter is already being used by some companies, like Comcast (@comcastcares), for monitoring and responding to customer comments.

8. Social Media Jobs Will Be In Increasing Demand

SEO, social marketing, and viral campaigns are very cost effective ways of brand promotion, and every company will want to jump on board.

As more and more of them realize this, they will start needing more people with marketing skills of John Chow, Chris Brogan, Nicky Cakes (this dude is hilarious), Jeremy Schoemaker, and the like.

9. YouTube Will Continue To Dominate

This one is easy:

Biggest user base.
HD. My favorite greasemonkey plugin YousableTubeFix exposes hi/lo FLVs, MP4, and HD MP4 options. Better quality equals better user experience.
Chromeless player. YouTube is the only company I know of that has a Javascript controlled chromeless player, which can be embedded in any other flash player. Combined with already existing millions of embeds all over the Internet, YouTube’s popularity isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Google backed. Anything is possible when you Google owns you. Competition releases a good feature? YouTube has the resources to one-up it in no time. Need for more servers? YouTube will just buy a few thousand more with the $1.65Bln Google gave it. Traffic explosion? No problem – YouTube has been mooching off the Google CDN for months now.

At the end of 2007, I predicted that in a year we will experience unprecedented HD quality online video. This prediction came true when Hulu and fueled by its success CBS, ABC, NBC, and pretty much every other TV network released their free online TV sites. YouTube launched HD a few months later.

So, my YouTube prediction for 2009 is it will sign deals with major TV and movie networks to finally start showing legal TV episodes and movies. It will become the biggest legal TV and movie hub on the Internet.

10. PostgreSQL Will Gain Popularity

Sun’s buyout of MySQL in 2008 surely sent some shockwaves around. However, I predict that the following factors will contribute to PostgreSQL gaining momentum:

certain features of MySQL were moved to Enterprise only. Open source enthusiasts don’t appreciate an open source project going partially closed source, so they will be looking for alternative software, like PostgreSQL.
having spent years with MySQL, I am incredibly frustrated with certain quirks that should have been worked out a long time ago. As software architects look for stable, mature, cost effective, and easy to maintain databases, they will find PostgreSQL increasingly attractive.

Don’t take my word for it. I highly suggest taking a look at this whitepaper comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL. here are some highlights:

Online operations and reorganization. This is my biggest beef with MySQL. Almost any ALTER table command will prevent writes to the table while it’s being altered. This operation requires double the table size because an ALTER simply makes a copy of the table, a rename, and then drop of the old one. This takes FOREVERRRR. PostgreSQL, on the other hand, supports a lot more online operations that will not take down the table. MySQL promised to support online ALTER TABLE by 2009. Will they keep their word? I highly doubt it.
PostgreSQL supports function based and partial indexes.
PostgreSQL supports nested triggers.
PostgreSQL supports user defined datatypes.
PostgreSQL has an IP address datatype (woot!).
MySQL’s default engine doesn’t support online backup and recovery (*cough*, MyISAM, *cough*). Don’t even get me started on MyISAM, which doesn’t support referential integrity, transactions, of any other ACID properties. Yes, I know, there's InnoDB. It’s a lot better. But it’s still not good enough.

If you have spent time interfacing with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, I’d like to hear from you. Everyone I talked to so far who had used both, preferred PostgreSQL.

For all the MySQL fanboys, I was and still am one of you, I use MySQL every day. I’m only trying to open your eyes so you can see the rest of the world.

Did you know PostgreSQL was a lot more mature than MySQL? Postgres was started in 1986 (or 1977 if you count its predecessor Ingres), while MySQL was initially released in 1995.

In fact, I think the only reason MySQL is so much more popular than Postgresql nowadays is luck and marketing by MySQL AB (hey, it sure paid off, I’m not saying anything).

So, here’s to PostgreSQL having a bright future.

Bonus

As a bonus, here is a collection of links to other interesting predictions for 2009:

http://www.pr-squared.com/2008/12/social_media_predictions_2009.html – a great list of social media predictions.
http://battellemedia.com/archives/004772.php – 14 online predictions as well as analysis of past years’ predictions.
http://news.cnet.com/5-predictions-for-2009/ – 5 CNET Digital Home predictions.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/01/predictions-for-2009/ – Engadget’s predictions.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/predictions-2009 – 38 predictions freedom and technology related predictions.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2009_predictions_across_the_we.php – ReadWriteWeb’s predictions across the web.

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Basement hackers compete to best Netflix recommendations $1M

Artem Russakovskii — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:06:39 +0000

This is a great read by NY Times. An article on 6 pages rarely gets my full attention but this is one of them (though I detest the usage of "basement hacker").

Basement hackers and amateur mathematicians are competing to improve the program that Netflix uses to recommend DVDs — and to win $1 million in the process.

"THE “NAPOLEON DYNAMITE” problem is driving Len Bertoni crazy. Bertoni is a 51-year-old “semiretired” computer scientist who lives an hour outside Pittsburgh. In the spring of 2007, his sister-in-law e-mailed him an intriguing bit of news: Netflix, the Web-based DVD-rental company, was holding a contest to try to improve Cinematch, its “recommendation engine.” The prize: $1 million.
Cinematch is the bit of software embedded in the Netflix Web site that analyzes each customer’s movie-viewing habits and recommends other movies that the customer might enjoy. (Did you like the legal thriller “The Firm”? Well, maybe you’d like “Michael Clayton.” Or perhaps “A Few Good Men.”) The Netflix Prize goes to anyone who can make Cinematch’s predictions 10 percent more accurate. One million dollars might sound like an awfully big prize for such a small improvement. But in fact, Netflix’s founders tried for years to improve Cinematch, with only incremental results, and they knew that a 10 percent bump would be a challenge for even the most deft programmer. They also knew that, as Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, told me recently, “getting to 10 percent would certainly be worth well in excess of $1 million” to the company. The competition was announced in October 2006, and no one has won yet, though 30,000 hackers worldwide are hard at work on the problem. Each day, teams submit their updated solutions to the Netflix Prize Web page, and Netflix instantly calculates how much better than Cinematch they are. (There’s even a live “leader board” ranking the top contestants.)
In March 2007, Bertoni decided he wanted to give it a crack. So…"

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