taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Web: Now this is very cool stuff: ‘Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any webpage to change it’s behavior.’

In other words, you can rewrite any page viewed in Firefox, as it transits between the server and your client’s display; a form of transcoding.

Traditionally, transcoding is performed using a HTTP proxy which applies the transformation, or a specialised HTTP user agent which transcodes and outputs a whole new set of documents with the results.

That was all a little hacky for full-scale integration into your web browser, though, so Greasemonkey is a big improvement for that use-case.

Some good links:

• The Greasemonkey homepage
• The Greasemonkey script repository (wiki)
• Mailing list archives for greasemonkey users

And some demos:

• a good demo of using it to fix a Bloglines bug, by Michael Moncur
• an MSDN bug-fixing script
• a Boing Boing ad-blocking script
• truly awesome: persistent searches (think vFolders) in GMail!

Remember, these are single, sub-100-line JS scripts, running entirely locally in the user’s web browser. The last one gives you an idea of what coolness is possible…

My contribution: an ad-removal script for Metafilter. It took some 30 seconds of hacking to produce this — soooo easy. It’s a whole new world of site customisation and hackable filtering. You thought AdBlock was good, this is ever niftier ;)

Tags: boing, browser, extension, firefox, greasemonkey, http, script, stuff, user, web

Web: Urgh, I still have this damn cold I picked up in Ireland… sniffle cough etc. More vitamin C needed!

Anyway, just a quick plug for a very deserving Firefox extension, one I haven’t seen mentioned widely. It’s pretty common, when you wish to print out a web page, that you wish you could get rid of the obnoxious extra-wide sidebar tables, gigantic ads, or other extraneous parts of the page. Well, now you can:

Nuke Anything is a Mozilla/Firefox extension which offers two great features in the right-click context menu:

• Remove this object: this will remove the object you’ve right-clicked on — a table TD, paragraphs, images, IFRAMEs, etc.
• Remove selection: more usefully, this allows you to select exactly what you want to remove with a left-button drag, then right-click to remove it.

It’s really useful. I almost never print anything out these days without scrubbing off a few unwanted sidebars ;)

Tags: anything, cough, extension, firefox, page, plug, remove, sniffle, urgh, vitamin, web

A STORY thought to be a myth about a horse and cart being entombed during the building of an extension to the West Highland Railway Line over one hundred years ago has been proved to be true.

Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 10:51:31 -0000
From: “Martin Adamson” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Century-old rail ‘myth’ proved

The Times

THURSDAY MAY 10 2001 
Century-old rail ‘myth’ proved 
BY A SCOTLAND CORRESPONDENT 
A STORY thought to be a myth about a horse and cart being entombed
during the building of an extension to the West Highland Railway Line
over one hundred years ago has been proved to be true. After a 17-year
search Professor Roland Paxton of Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh,
has found the animal’s remains in the spectacular Loch-nan-Uamh
viaduct near Mallaig, Argyllshire. 
Professor Paxton said that his team found the almost intact remains of
the horse and cart on the weekend, using state of the art radar
equipment to probe the pillars. 
He said: “The cart is lying at the bottom of the 40ft pillar with the
horse sitting vertically on top, as though they had fallen in
backwards.” 
The accident in 1899 must have happened as builders began pouring
stone into the pillar’s cavity from a backed-up cart, he said. “It’s
quite difficult to reverse a horse and cart and it looks like this one
went over the edge and disappeared into the pier, dragging the poor
horse in after it.” 
The horse had probably died instantly, the professor said. “There’s
evidence the horse’s neck was broken, presumably in the fall, and that
the filling continued.” 
Professor Paxton first read about the accident 17 years ago, but the
myth and folklore that grew around the story made it difficult to know
where to search. It was not until he recieved a tip-off from local
man, Ewen Macmillan, 75, from Arisaig, Argyll, that he was able to
find the right location. 
Mr Macmillan said that he had first heard the story as a boy from his
father. “I was fascinated and the story stuck in my head ever since,”
he said. 
Sir William McAlpine, whose great-grandfather Robert McAlpine was the
building contractor on the eight-span viaduct, sponsored the search. 

Tags: building, cart, century-old, extension, horse, may, myth, rail, story, west