Category: Tips + Tricks

Foxposé — Exposé for Browsers

Carl finally showed me something I didn’t know anything about… Foxposé is a pretty awesome FireFox plugin that turns your opened tabs into minature thumbnails, creating an effect similar to Mac OSX’s Exposé. Now that’s pretty damn cool. Even Windows users can enjoy a small piece of Mac.

Foxposé in action

Remember a while back I decided to use Opera full time? Boy, what an experience. The interface took me a week to kind of get used to. I must say that Opera’s interface is not very intuitive at all, or as what UI designers would say, poorly conceived “affordance“. And then I had to deal with it sporadic crashes on random sites. Worst yet, I can’t download the latest build in hope they may have fixed the problem in one of the builds. That’s when one starts to appreciate Open Source software… You can always get nightly builds of your software of choice, and there’s always the chance one of the developers would have addressed the issue you are dealing with…

Armed with Foxposé, I installed SessionSaver .2 (for Firefox 1.5, install this version instead), Yahoo Companion (the feature I missed the most on Internet Explorer) and StumbleUpon, I am going to try to use Firefox 1.5 full time for a while to see how the new version fares on memory management. Carl swears by Camino (Mac only), but I just don’t see its value without all the cool plugins Firefox enjoys. I am also tempted to switch to Thunderbird since Apple Mail has been doing a piss poor job on filtering out the latest junk mails. Ah~ Open Source…

Email Time Capsule

Forbes.com is running an interesting story on “Email Time Capsules”. I wish I’d thought of something like this for my thesis project. It’s a cool article nonetheless.

It’s one thing to have a physical time capsule where you can access it later. But it’s quite different to preserve things digitally, mainly because technology changes quite rapidly that you just don’t know if the technology in 20 years is going to be able to access what you tried to preserve 20 years ago. Some museums are trying desperately to find ways to preserve their digital art collection. Wired also has an interesting article on the subject. Here’s another article on the subject of digital art’s longevity (or lack thereof?).

via [Forbes.com]

OSX Spotlight Hogs CPU

For the past couple of weeks, the fan on my PowerBook would just start spinning like crazy out of the blue. Checking the CPU usage didns’t really yield any satisfactory results. But I finally found the culprit — Spotlight.

According to Many Ayromlou, sometimes Spotlight does hog the CPU, most likely when it’s trying to index corrupted metadata. So I applied the fix suggested by the site:

1) Using the mdutil command-line utility in Terminal, turn off indexing for each of your drives. example:

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$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

2) Then use mdutil to remove the indexes from each drive

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$ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

3) Physically remove the .Spotlight directories from the root of each drive.

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2
$ cd /
$ sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

(do the same for your second or third drive) BE CAREFUL WITH THAT RM COMMAND! One typo could ruin your day.

4) Use mdutil again to turn indexing back on for each drive

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$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

5) Spotlight will now re-index all drives and should behave in a normal fashion. (No longer uses 60%-80% of your CPU)

As Spotlight tried to re-index my entire hard drive again, I snapped this shot…
Spotlight indexing

Even though it estimated 10+ hours to index all of 23GB of files on my hard drive, the actual time it took to index everything was more like 2 hours — a far more acceptable time.

All this was done while I was trying to feed Bryan, change his diaper, check my email, read the online forums from SCAD eLearning, browse through the news and send a homework-related mass email.

Safari Transparency

I accidentally found this “hidden” feature in Apple Safari 2.0.1 while messing with the “Debug” menu. For whatever reason, there’s a “Use Transparent Window” option under the Debug menu. In between page loads, the entire window goes transparent — a pretty cool effect.

To get to this feature, you first need to enable the Debug menu, which is hidden by default.

1. Quit Safari.
2. Open a terminal window.
3. Copy and paste

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 % defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

4. Launch Safari. You will find the new “Debug” menu option at the far right side of the menu bar.

You can read more about the Debug menu here.

Safari Transparency 1

Safari Transparency 2

Thirty-six Stratagems

“The Art of War“, a military strategy book written by the great military general, Sun Tze, has been re-interpreted to apply its concepts on business and fields other than military. It’s arguably one of the most famous literary exports of China.

However, there’s another collection of lesser-known strategies that are equally useful but perhaps easier to understand and apply in real life. They are often called the “Thirty-six Stratagems“. I remember growing up in Taiwan, the grown ups would often refer to one of the strategies in their conversations about work and about life.

Ancient China was basically a bunch of huge warring states. It’s no surprise that our ancestors took the brutality of wars and systematically came up with organized methods in order to win more frequently in battles.

Here’s the list with rough translations. Wikipedia apparently has the same list with brief explanations as well.

瞞天過海: crossing the sea under camouflage
圍魏救趙: relieving the state of Zhao by besieging the state of Wei
借刀殺人: killing someone with a borrowed knife
以逸待勞: waiting at one’s ease for the exhausted enemy
趁火打劫: plundering a burning house
聲東擊西: making a feint to the east and attacking in the west
無中生有: creating something out of nothing
暗渡陳倉: advancing secretly by an unknown path
隔岸觀火: watching a fire from the other side of the river
笑裡藏刀: covering the dagger with a smile
李代桃僵: palming off substitute for the real thing
順手牽羊: picking up something in passing
打草驚蛇: beating the grass to frighten the snake
借屍還魂: resurrecting a dead soul by borrowing a corpse
調虎離山: luring the tiger out of his den
欲擒故縱: letting the enemy off in order to catch him
拋磚引玉: giving the enemy something to induce him to lose more valuable things
擒賊擒王: capturing the ringleader first in order to capture all the followers
釜底抽薪: extracting the firewood from under the cauldron
混水摸魚: muddling the water to catch the fish
金蟬脫殼: slipping away by casting off a cloak
關門捉賊: catching the thief by closing his escape route
遠交近攻: befriending the enemy while attacking a nearby enemy
假途伐虢: attacking the enemy by passing through a common neighbor
偷樑換柱: stealing the beams and pillars and replacing them with rotten timbers
指桑罵槐: reviling the locust tree while pointing to the mulberry
假痴不顛: feigning madness without becoming insane
上樓抽梯: removing the ladder after the enemy has climbed up the roof
虛張聲勢: putting artificial flowers on trees
反客為主: turning from the guest into host
美人計: using seductive women to corrupt the enemy
空城計: presenting a bold front to conceal unpreparedness
反間計: sowing discord among the enemy
苦肉計: deceiving the enemy by torturing one’s own man
連環計: coordinating one stratagem with another
走為上策: decamping being the best

For you Chinese readers, explanations with historical context can be obtained here and here. For business-related application, some good examples (also in action in Chinese only).

via [不辣哥的 BLOG]

Mail Bouncer

Apple Mail Bounce Every morning when I fire up my favorite email client, I usually get in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 spam messages. And they just continue coming throughout the day. The upside is my mail server was setup so that 90%+ of the junk mails are appropriately labeled as “:SPAM:” in the beginning of the subject line by the time they reach me. And at home, I setup my Apple Mail to filter everything with “:SPAM:” in the subject to go directly to the “Junk” folder. It’s a nice setup. But It’d be nicer if the junk mail can just simply stop coming.

Recently I’ve been painstakingly using Apple Mail’s built-in “Bounce messages” feature. It bounces emails back to the sender, tricking it into thinking my email address doesn’t exist. The effort seems to be paying off. Now I get no more than 10 junk mails in the morning. And I have been experiencing a reduction of spams throughout the day as well.

Now only if Yahoo, Google and Hotmail can catch up and develop something similar, that would be great (in the voice of Lumbergh from “Office Space” ).

Vienna the RSS News Reader

It’s been a while since I wrote something technology-related. But then again, it’s been a while since I last read technology news and really have the time to reflect on it.

I discovered something today that’s blog-worthy. An open source RSS news reading application, Vienna. Its interface and functionalities are almost exact replica of NetNewsWire, except it’s free.

I just love having one app where I can gather all the news I need and just quickly glance through them every morning (or at least I used to prior to Bryan’s arrival).

via [TUAW]

Paypal Phishing

This week I must have received 6+ emails from crooks who pretend to be Paypal via those Paypal-official-looking emails which direct me to a fake Paypal site. The objective, of course, is to get me to provide my user name, password and other juicy information such as credit card numbers. I think I prefer the numerous “business offers” I’ve been getting from military generals in Nigeria and/or Congo (VERY attractive business deals, I must say).

Seriously, I think crooks like that should be put in jail for so long that even their mothers forget they exist. They are in the same league as spammers and people who sell your telephone numbers to tele-marketers.

Speaking of tele-marketers, Grace has been complaining about the number of tele-marketing calls we have been receiving. So I registered our number at the National Do Not Call Registry (U.S. only). The neat thing about the registry is that once it takes effect, for every call you receive from tele-marketers, you get to take down their information and report them. And you get to tell them that you are on the registry (and they’ll remove your name from their call list immediately). Each “Do Not Call” number they call, they get hit with a stiff fine from the FCC (or whatever).

I love laws that punish jerk merchants for making our lives less enjoyable.

WordPress Plugin — “Subscribe to Comments”

Carl requested to receive emails for people leaving comments on a thread he’d left comments on. I thought maybe others would also find that feature useful. So I did some digging and found Subscribe to Comments plugin for WordPress. Alright!

1. Fetched and unzipped the plugin.
2. Move

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subscribe-to-comments.php

to

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/wp-contents/_theme_of_choice/plugins/

.
3. Move

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wp-subscription-manager.php

to the root of the WordPress directory.
4. Activate the plugin in the admin panel. Done!

Now users can optionally opt-in to receive notifications when someone else leaves a comment on entries where they’d posted comments at. Cool.

Ajax It

Everybody is talking about AJAX (more explanation here) these days. It’s a combination of JavaScripting, css and XML and/or any text data. To find the most obvious demonstration of the technology, look no further than Google Maps. The advantage of implementing AJAX is that the user doesn’t have to refresh the web page to see the information he requested being fetched. Good stuff.

I found a site with some interesting sample codes for all you AJAX-programmer-wannabes.