taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

For years now, I’ve been collecting bookmarks at delicious.com/jm — nearly 7000 of them by now. I’ve been scrupulous about tagging and describing each one, so they’re eminently searchable, too. I’ve frequently found this to be a very useful personal reference resource.

I was quite pleased to come across the Delicious Search Results on Google Greasemonkey userscript, accordingly. It intercepts Google searches, adding Delicious tag-search results at the top of the search page, and works pretty well. Unfortunately though, that searches all of delicious, not specifically my own bookmarks.

So here’s a quick hack fix to do just that:

my_delicious_search_results.user.js - My Delicious Search Results on Google

Shows tag-search results from my Delicious account on Google search pages, with links to more extensive Delicious searches. Use ‘User Script Commands‘ -> ‘Set Delicious Username‘ to specify your username.

Screenshot:

Enjoy!

Tags: delicious, google, greasemonkey, hacks, search, software, userscripts

• Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey : nice hack
  (tags: hacks greasemonkey ui us-politics election)

• Xen/VPS hosting reviews : good list from Russell Coker. Gandi’s product is amazingly cheap at EUR6 for super-low-end nodes (UPDATE: that’s because the page is wrong! in reality it’s EUR10+VAT)
  (tags: gandi xen vps linux hosting reviews)

• Make-Believe Maverick : ‘A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.’ amazingly vicious hatchet-job on John McCain from _Rolling Stone_
  (tags: rolling-stone articles toread vicious john-mccain expose maverick tim-dickinson)

• Spam Volumes Plummet After Atrivo Shutdown : MessageLabs indicates a ’significant drop’ in spam/botnet activity, due to loss of C&C networks located at Atrivo
  (tags: messagelabs atrivo spam botnets cutwail mega-d securityfix)

• Marshal reckon the Storm botnet has dried up : ‘Spam originating from the Storm botnet suddenly dried up in mid-September. Since that time we have not detected a single Storm spam in our traps.’
  (tags: storm spam botnets malware marshal)

• Django test fixtures : handy; load initial test data into the database from JSON files. must start using these
  (tags: fixtures testing django web-apps sql json)

Tags: articles, atrivo, botnets, cutwail, django, election, expose, fixtures, gandi, greasemonkey, hacks, hosting, john-mccain, json, linux, malware, marshal, maverick, mega-d, messagelabs, reviews, rolling-stone, securityfix, spam, sql, storm, testing, tim-dickinson, toread, ui, us-politics, vicious, vps, web-apps, xen

Twitter has this nasty habit — if you come across a tweet in your feed reader containing a URL, and you want to follow that link, you can’t, because Twitter doesn’t auto-link URLs in its RSS feeds. Instead, you have to click on the feed item, itself, wait for that to open in the browser, then click on the link in the new browser tab. That link will, in turn, open in another new tab.

Here’s a quick-hack Greasemonkey user script to inhibit this second new-tab:

twitter_no_popups.user.js

Tags: greasemonkey, hacks, software, twitter, userscript, web

Here’s another quick-hack Greasemonkey user script I wrote recently.

Stretch-to-fit Textareas is a user script which improves the usability of editable textareas; it causes them to “stretch” vertically to fit their contents, as you type. This behaviour was inspired by that of textareas in FogBugz.

It can be inhibited by turning off the small checkbox to the right of each textarea.

Update: it’s worth noting that this is different from the Resizeable Textareas Firefox extension. Whereas the latter allows the user to resize the textareas by hand, this user script does that action automatically, based on the contents of the field; no manual resize-handle-searching and dragging is required. On the other hand, this user script will only stretch textareas vertically, whereas the extension allows them to be dragged in both dimensions. In fact, the two are complementary — I’m running both, and I suggest you do too ;)

Update 2: here’s a Firefox extension version — Greasemonkey not required!

Tags: greasemonkey, hacks, html, javascript, software, textareas, ui, user-scripts

Here’s a new Greasemonkey user script which fixes a minor annoyance in the Bugzilla user interface. When viewing the ‘Create a New Attachment’ page, this will transclude the previous comments onto the bottom of that page, for reference while editing: bz_see_earlier_comments.user.js

Thanks to Jesse Ruderman for the nifty AJAXish iframe-transclusion trick it uses.

Tags: bugzilla, firefox, greasemonkey, javascript, mozilla, userscript

I’ve updated the Urban Dead HUD Greasemonkey userscript; it now offers inventory sorting, inspired by Ikko’s userscript (albeit a little different in implementation). Here’s a screenshot:

Right now, UD is reasonably interesting — our team of plucky survivors have been helping out with the defence of Caiger Mall, a major mall towards the north-west of the city. We’ve repulsed the Church of the Resurrection’s attempts to wipe us out, but that seems to have made us quite a juicy target; there are now no less than three separate Zombie groups ganging up on us. For now, we’re still holding out.

Tags: games, greasemonkey, hacks, mmorpg, software, urbandead

I’ve been playing a bit of Urban Dead recently. Urban Dead is a very low-key, web-based MMORPG — you play a 3-minute turn once every 24 hours. It needs some rebalancing and some new features, especially given the organised nature of some of the bigger marauding zombie hordes, but I’m still finding it fun.

To scratch a couple of itches, I’ve written a Greasemonkey user script for UD called the Urban Dead HUD. It adds several nifty features to the user interface:

• keyboard accelerator access keys for the action buttons, and your inventory — very handy when you’re attacking an enemy repeatedly;
• an on-page long-distance map of the surrounding squares;
• a distance tracker, which tracks the distances to “important” locations for you

There’s screenshots on the download page, so you can see what I’m talking about.

Greasemonkey is a fantastic tool, as is Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Greasemonkey, which has repeatedly turned out to be an excellent, well-written reference while hacking this. Thanks guys!

Tags: games, greasemonkey, javascript, mmorpg, ui, urban-dead, web

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