taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

So, if you use Google Reader, read your news with the “All items” page, and are subscribed to hundreds of feeds, it can be pretty overwhelming. I’ve found a better way to deal with this.

Select a ‘most important’ subset of feeds. For each of those, click through to the feed details page, hit the “Feed Settings…” menu, and select “Change folders…“. Put the feed into a new “top” folder (creating it if necessary).

Now go to “Settings” -> “Preferences” and check out the “Start page” preference. By default, it’s set to “Home“; change it to “Folders and Tags: top“.

Hey presto — now, when you load Google Reader, it’ll come up with your “top” items. You can get through those quickly enough, and get on to other more important tasks. When you’re bored and need something to read, though, just hit “Navigation” -> “All items” (or even just type ‘ga’), and every other feed is now there for your delectation. Sweet!

Tags: atom, feeds, google, google-reader, hacks, lifehacks, productivity, reader, rss, ui

Hey Gmail users! If you’re using Tasks, there’s a slightly annoying bug in Gmail right now — you may see the “Use this link to open Tasks” tip window appear every time you access the inbox page.

Several other people have reported it, and apparently the Google guys are ‘working to resolve it’ at the moment. In the meantime, though, here’s a way to work around the issue without losing Tasks (you will, unfortunately, lose the offline-gmail functionality, though). Simply disable Offline Gmail (Settings -> Offline -> “Disable Offline Gmail for this computer”), and the bug no longer manifests itself.

You can allow Gmail to keep the stored mail on your computer if you like, which will be handy for when the bug is fixed and Offline can be re-enabled — hopefully sooner rather than later.

Tags: bugs, gmail, google, offline, tasks, tips, ui

Check out what happens when you visit https://www.google.ie/ :

Clicking through Firefox’s ridiculous hoops gets me these dialogs:

Good work, Google and Firefox respectively!

Tags: fail, firefox, google, https, ooh-scary, security, ssl, ui, warnings

• 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

• Hitwise and Compete: the user data ISPs do sell : it’s true, the “clickstream” companies are getting away with almost the same shit that Phorm, NebuAd et al are being pilloried for. use HTTPS where you can
  (tags: clickstream privacy nebuad phorm hitwise compete http security web)

• Hochbahn U4 : explore the innards of a gigantic tunnel-boring machine in plan projection, using an astonishingly good Flash visualization. brilliant, in a very German-engineering way
  (tags: german engineering projection plan technical-drawing flash visualization tunnel boring machines cool ui)

• Dr. Nicholas and Mr. Hyde : the insane bacchanalia of Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas, who built a massive hookers-and-coke-filled dungeon under his Laguna Hills mansion, and spiked his customers with Es. great article from Vanity Fair (via My Pepys)
  (tags: dungeons broadcom omgwtfbbq bizarre laguna-beach orange-county bros ecstasy dot-com)

Tags: bizarre, boring, broadcom, bros, clickstream, compete, cool, dot-com, dungeons, ecstasy, engineering, flash, german, hitwise, http, laguna-beach, machines, nebuad, omgwtfbbq, orange-county, phorm, plan, privacy, projection, security, technical-drawing, tunnel, ui, visualization, web

• valhenson: Focus follows mouse on Mac OS X: Only $14.95! : more on the OS X FFM mess
  (tags: focus-follows-mouse focus x11 macos mouse ui)

• Stevey’s Blog Rants: Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate : if I’m to consider using OS X, this needs to work; I’m a FFM zealot
  (tags: zealotry focus-follows-mouse focus ui osx mac x11 window-management)

Tags: focus, focus-follows-mouse, mac, macos, mouse, osx, ui, window-management, x11, zealotry

• 2 Stage Transfer Drawing (advancing to a future state) on Vimeo : some great performance art from Irish artist Joan Healy; the installation appears to be a kiosk with a screen, and a touch pad. The pad itself is supposed to have a warm, soft, fleshy feel that ‘adds to the bond between people and machines’. However — in reality, it’s the artist’s back; she’s inside the kiosk, Mechanical Turk-style. Super-creepy
  (tags: art creepy cool ireland joan-healy performance-art touchpads ui interface hci video)

• The Daily Show’s TiVo setup : cool details on how TDS captures the news networks’ TV output every day; they use TiVos, not MythTV. what they have works well enough, and that’s good enough for them (via Waxy)
  (tags: mythtv tv the-daily-show tivo via:lhl)

Tags: art, cool, creepy, hci, interface, ireland, joan-healy, mythtv, performance-art, the-daily-show, tivo, touchpads, tv, ui, via:lhl, video

• The Evolution of Pre-Launch Gmail In Screenshots : fascinating! They really did a good job improving the UI, early revs were quite uninspiring
  (tags: gmail google history email web ui)

• SealSkinz : waterproof socks and gloves — come recommended by Dublin’s cycle-couriers to avoid wet feet in all this bloody rain. lots and lots of good testimonials
  (tags: dryness feet comfort clothing rain weather cycling outdoors socks gloves)

Tags: clothing, comfort, cycling, dryness, email, feet, gloves, gmail, google, history, outdoors, rain, socks, ui, weather, web

• Emergent Chaos: Certifiably Silly : Adam Shostack tells the truth re Firefox 3’s stupid self-signed cert bug. ‘imposing yet another security tax, based on a static analysis of attackers and some certificate authority pixie dust, isn’t going to help things for very long.’
  (tags: firefox firefox-3 security certificates ssl tls ca pki adam-shostack ui usability)

• Image Cerberus: a SpamAssassin plug-in against image spam : a new plugin, subject of a paper at this year’s CEAS conference it looks like
  (tags: plugins spamassassin anti-spam image-spam images ceas conferences)

• Twitter drops SMS-notification support for EU users : interesting, I haven’t received the mail, and it claims to still be sending updates to my Irish mobile (update: I’m not actually *getting* any updates, though)
  (tags: twitter phones mobile sms ireland eu uk)

Tags: adam-shostack, anti-spam, ca, ceas, certificates, conferences, eu, firefox, firefox-3, image-spam, images, ireland, mobile, phones, pki, plugins, security, sms, spamassassin, ssl, tls, twitter, ui, uk, usability

• The Trifecta of FAIL : ah, the hazards of monkey-patching core classes illustrated perfectly; a Ruby point-release upgrade broke Rails (via chromatic)
  (tags: ruby rails monkeypatching ouch programming coding oo subclassing apis)

• best intranet form ever : ‘The software my employer uses for booking holidays has recently been “upgraded” and we now need to specify an absence reason.’ there are several hundred reasons, including ‘Abortion’, ‘Stroke’, ‘Warts’, ‘Dementia’, ‘Rectal Problems’, ‘Manic Depression’ and, um, ‘Wax’. best of all, this is for booking time off in advance…
  (tags: intranet funny inept hr wtf daily-wtf bureaucracy pto holidays)

• Sup : ‘a console-based email client for people with a lot of email [..] The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere.’ Looks like they’ve nicked a few ideas from GMail, too (via Luis)
  (tags: via:tieguy console linux unix sup mail mail-readers ui apps)

Tags: apis, apps, bureaucracy, coding, console, daily-wtf, funny, holidays, hr, inept, intranet, linux, mail, mail-readers, monkeypatching, oo, ouch, programming, pto, rails, ruby, subclassing, sup, ui, unix, via:tieguy, wtf

O2 Leaking Customer Photos (updated) the JBoss/Tomcat install leaks the “secret” URLs through it’s default status page. this is the 3rd helping of FAIL for O2’s web team; 2 previous occasions in the last year exposed customer data through “secret” URL manipulation

Avant Window Navigator “a ‘dock-like’ (cough) navigator bar for the Linux desktop” (via Danny, again!)

trickle ‘user-space bandwidth shaper’, ie. like nice(1) for network bandwidth (via Danny)

RFC 5218 - What Makes For a Successful Protocol? ‘Based on case studies, this document identifies some of the factors influencing success and failure of protocol designs.’ (via spicylinks)

Tags: bandwidth, collaboration, cool, dock, fail, gnome, http, jboss, kde, linux, mms, mod_jk, net, networking, nice, o2, protocols, rfcs, security, software, standards, tcp, tomcat, traffic-shaping, ui, urls, via:danny, via:spicylinks, web

Google Calendar has a nifty feature, “Quick Add”, where you can enter a natural-language string like “lunch with Justin, 1pm 20/4/08″, it parses it, and adds an appointment to your calendar. However, the link in the Calendar UI can’t be bookmarked; you have to go to the Calendar page, wait for it to sloooowly load all its AJAX bits, hit the link, and only then type the appointment details, by which time I’ve forgotten it anyway ADD-style. ;)

Elias Torrez came up with a Firefox extension to use the Quick Add feature in one keypress, but in my opinion that’s overkill — I don’t want the overhead of another extension, the upgrade worries, and I don’t want it using up a keyboard shortcut either. I’d prefer to just have this as a Firefox Smart Keyword – and thankfully the trick is in the comments for his blog post, from someone called Bjorn. So here’s the deal:

Name: Google Calendar Quick Add

Location: http://www.google.com/calendar/event?ctext=+%s+&action=TEMPLATE&pprop=HowCreated%3AQUICKADD

Keyword: newcal

Description: add a new event in Google Calendar

enjoy!

Tags: bookmarks, firefox, google, google-calendar, quick-add, smart-keywords, ui

This should be in the running for “least informative dialog ever”.

(The information in question was that Firefox had been upgraded by the Ubuntu Gutsy Update Manager app, if you’re curious…)

Tags: crap, informed, ui, wtf

Tobias DiPasquale notes that the iPhone’s dictionary can correct the word ‘f***ing’ right out of the box. Handy!

The vagaries of various companies’ autocompletion dictionaries are always worth a comment. I’ve noticed that swearing is generally omitted, presumably for prudish reasons to do with tabloid PR fears. But as an Irishman, I find it particularly galling that Nokia’s T9 dictionary cycles through the following entries for “pints”:

• Shots
• Pious
• Riots
• Pints

When I type “pints” (which happens a lot), believe me, I never mean to type “pious”. Stupid phone!

Tags: dictionaries, ireland, nokia, phones, swearing, t9, text-input, ui

Since it’s been turning out to be really quite useful, here’s a Firefox extension version of the Stretch-to-fit Textareas Greasemonkey user-script I wrote a few weeks back. In other words, Greasemonkey not required!

Tags: extensions, firefox, hacks, mozilla, textareas, ui

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

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