Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Ever since the introduction of the official Retweet button, I've wanted it to be a little more interactive. I usually want to add my 2 cents into the tweet I'm about to retweet but the default RT button just doesn't allow for it – Yes is the only option:

Troy's Twitter Script

Enter Troy's Twitter script for Firefox that I reviewed in detail a few months ago.

Troy's script added the RT button to my stream (along with inline picture and video embed, auto url expander and shortener, name autocomplete, and other things) way before Twitter introduced it.

It also allowed me to add a couple of words or rephrase the retweet to make it more relevant to my followers….

As a backend developer, I don't get to work with JavaScript much anymore. However, from time to time, a project would come along that uses JavaScript (specifically, AJAX) to load some backend data on the fly. Of course, nothing works 100% right away*, so I would often have to tweak this JavaScript and massage it until it does what I need.

Here's where Firebug comes in with its JavaScript debugger. I'm used to using a debugger in every language I deal with, so using Firebug is a no brainer. Since it supports breakpoints, stopping execution and inspecting local variables and the rest of the scope generally beats alerts and console.logs for me.

Here's what a typical breakpoint looks …

Well, this one almost escaped my attention but I'm glad it didn't: the best online news reader – Google Reader – just enabled favicon support for each feed you subscribe to.

Favicons are those 16×16 pixel tiny icons you see next to site urls in your browser and bookmarks. Not surprisingly, this was done as a 20% project, which is when Google developers get to work on anything they want, quite similarly to the monthly "haxo"s that Plaxo runs (that is where I work).

So now the previously boring subscriptions:

look like this:

Better, isn't it?

All you have to do to enable favicons is either click the down arrow next to Subscriptions and select "Use favicons":

or

Go to …

Updated: December 16th, 2009

It's not a secret that my Sprint HTC Hero has been having trouble keeping battery charge – by the time I came home from work, the battery level would oftentimes be at 10% or the phone would be simply dead.

One would give up and accept this futility but I had 2 reasons to keep trying to figure out why:

• my co-worker's battery would consistently hold twice as much charge as mine – by the time I was at 50%, he was at 75%
• a wide range of responses on Internet forums and blog posts suggested some people experienced excellent battery life, while others, like me, did not have as much luck

…

SimplifyMedia is an extremely useful program, which allows super easy song and playlist sharing via streaming between multiple computers. It also works as a Winamp plugin, so the shared songs simply show up inside Winamp's own media library – each computer sharing music appears under the special "Shared" tab. And the beauty is – there is no need to muck around with network settings, open ports, or even touch your router.

Here's a screenshot of how it's supposed to work:

The Problem

Since I recently installed Windows 7 64bit on my laptop, I wanted to set up SimplifyMedia on it and listen to some tracks in my favorite music player Winamp. However, after I downloaded and installed it and …

Introduction

Dear Skype,

you are great. You have the convenience of a nearby, well, convenience store and the UI that is acceptable to even an Apple fanboy (I'm not one, I'm just saying).

Skype also has a Firefox extension which finds all pieces of text that resemble phone numbers on web pages you are visiting and converts them into clickable Skype buttons . One click and you're dialing the number. The premise is great but the execution… When it comes to your Firefox extension, Skype – you suck. You really suck.

The Problem Bullshit

So what makes me say these mean things? Is it the fact that when simply searching Google for "skype firefox", one finds mostly blog posts …

In this article I will describe the problem I've had with Eclipse's handling of XML file formatting as well as the best way to fix it.

I use Eclipse to do my Android development for a few reasons:

• it's the only IDE fully supported by the Android dev team
• it has a visual Layout/Resources builder that transforms XML files into corresponding visual representations
• it's free and open source
• I've been using Eclipse for many years and am very familiar with it

The Problem

However, one thing about Eclipse Android development has bothered me for a while …

Updated: January 29th, 2010

Today I found out something entirely new about framebusting and specifically clickjacking protection techniques.

I was working with a site that was using frames. Suddenly, one of the frames (which was hosted on a domain that differed from the one it was embedded in) displayed the following message (in Firefox 3.5.4):

This content cannot be displayed in a frame
 
To protect your security, the publisher of this content does
not allow it to be displayed in a frame.
 
Click here to open this content in a new window

Updated: June 24th, 2020

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 …