Updates from April, 2004 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Danny Dawson 1:11 am on Friday, April 30, 2004 Permalink | Reply  

    The one where I watch too much TV 

    For reasons I will not currently delve too deep into (health-related, but probably not serious in the long term), I have been unemployed and penniless for the past two months, with no prospect of employment between me and the visible horizon (at least another two or three months). Because of this, I have been spending most of my time (read:all of my time) bouncing between couch, toilet, fridge, and porch, with occasional yet infrequent trips to bed and doctor’s office.

    I am most productive on the couch and on the porch (and occasionally on the toilet, in more ways than one), where I perform my computer-related activities. These mostly include catching up with the News and the Weblog World, but occasionally involve work on the new website design, once I work out the kinks and the too-obvious security flaws. Currently, I’m working on the integration of Geeklog, MovableType, Gallery, and phpAbook. [rant style="defensive"]This happens to be incredibly similar to the setup over at Cementhorizon, which I do visit daily, but I swear that it is purely a happy accident. I came upon each piece of software by googling for scripts which provided the functionality I desired, and only once, with Geeklog, did I find it on the web and say “Hey, Gene uses this” before installing it on my own server.[/rant]

    The rest of my time on the couch, sadly, has involved TV. Now, I had been anti-TV for several years, so my first impulse (while I still had money in the bank) was Netflix. The problem is that the movies just don’t come fast enough, and with my attention span dwindling, as well as my mental state not always allowing for the intensive concentration that the computer requires (Thank you Percocet), I find myself tuning in to regular programming. We’ve never, in all my life, subscribed to cable or satellite TV, so I have very limited options.

    My typical day (start and end times vary, as do programming choices, occasionally):
    Today in Florida; Family Feud (twice); The Price Is Right; News at Noon (lots of station flippage here); Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; Frasier; King of the Hill; Break for half an hour; Archie’s Weird Mysteries (or Sabrina the cartoon); Astro Boy; Static Shock; Millionaire (again); Pyramid (I hate this show); The Simpsons (twice); Seinfeld (twice); Friends; Everybody Loves Raymond (but hates his voice); Prime Time Television (tonight it was Friends [twice, or maybe three times] followed by Will & Grace); News for a bit (more flippage); Will & Grace; Friends; Raymond; Will & Grace; Spin City; The Drew Carey Show; Dharma and Greg; The Tonight Show (second airing, usually I’m on the computer by now, moving towards the idea of sleep)

    As you can see, I have a full schedule. I also find it a fully repulsive schedule, but hey, it passes the time, and when you’re in a drug-induced daze (for more than six weeks) or you’re coping with opiate withdrawal (as I have been for the last week now, Thanks again Percocet), that’s all you really care to do. Some of the Primetime programs I watch (all WB, the Relive Your Teenage Angst Channel) include Smallville, Everwood, One Tree Hill, and Angel. Keep in mind I am proud of NONE of this (and I bold things sparingly, remember).

     

  • Danny Dawson 1:41 pm on Friday, April 16, 2004 Permalink | Reply  

    I, Robot Now; or, How Urination Changed My Life 

    This is an embarassing story to tell, and when people ask me about it I often evade the truth in order to save face, but I’m tired of the lying and deception. A little over a month ago, I had an accident. It was the middle of the night, and I had to go. I mean I really had to go…badly. So badly, in fact, that I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. That’s the truth, kids: I had an accident.
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    • didofoot 12:01 pm on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 Permalink

      I’m confused. You broke your wrist in your zipper?

    • Danny Dawson 12:06 pm on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 Permalink

      I guess I should have stated it more clearly: I was standing on a ledge. I fell off the ledge.

      When I came to, I did not remember the process of falling. The memory returned about 36 hours later.

    • didofoot 12:11 pm on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 Permalink

      well I think it’s all worth it for the harry potter scar. that is hard sex currency. in the under-twelve set anyway.

    • Danny Dawson 12:43 pm on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 Permalink

      I’ve never had a problem with the preteen sex appeal, but prison sex just isn’t what I’m going for.

    • claudine 10:13 am on Wednesday, November 23, 2005 Permalink

      i’ll cut your dinner into bite-sized pieces *anytime,* darling. you don’t even have to fall oit of a parking garage …

  • Danny Dawson 7:11 am on Saturday, April 10, 2004 Permalink | Reply  

    Higher Capacity Context Menu Searches 

    Well, if that isn’t just the spiffiest entry title, I don’t know what is.

    Jaap A. Haitsma has published Dictionary Search 0.5, an extension for Mozilla/Firefox that makes it easy to perform follow-up research on a webpage you might be reading. Just use the mouse cursor to highlight some text, right-click, and select the engine/website you want to search. I use it to search IMDb, Netflix, and Amazon for information about books, music, and movies (not respectively), to do further research on google (search, news, and images), salon.com, metafilter, and slashdot, as well as find definitions (surprise!). It’s incredibly useful, and it can be configured to search the databases of just about any website that uses GET headers in their search technology.

    The only problem I ran into: Jaap’s default compilation only allows for four search engines to be configured at once, which isn’t quite enough for me. So I delved into some source, did a little tinkering, and upped it to eight: Download the updated installer here. <Updated 4/19/04 for bug fixes>
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    • Sam 10:11 pm on Thursday, April 22, 2004 Permalink

      Hi Danny, Everything is “Search Heaven” now! Thanks again!

    • Danny Dawson 5:48 pm on Monday, April 19, 2004 Permalink

      Sam: Apparently Jaap had omitted the help xul from version 0.5. He corrected this on Saturday with version 0.5.1, and I updated it with my mods to become 0.5.1d. Download at one of the links above. Glad I could be of assistance. Hve fun with it.

      Hey Chris: My current stylesheet is a direct rip from Movable Style. I give them a little nod in the bottom left of the index page. When I get embarassed enough, I’ll whip up something more original.

    • Oi! 1:39 pm on Monday, April 19, 2004 Permalink

      If I understood any of that I’m sure I’d be really impressed; not wanting to criticise but could you post something less technical for simpletons like me; like the new layout by the way.

    • Danny Dawson 9:37 am on Sunday, April 18, 2004 Permalink

      Sam:

      I hadn’t posted anything yet because none of the code modifications I tried were successful once I lowered my screen resolution, but given your problem with a higher res, one solution I tried might help you. I’ve dropped a “window.sizeToContent();” into the onload event handler and omitted the fixed pixel size. This doesn’t fix the problem with lower screen res’, but it’s worth a try for your situation. Download here

      I still don’t know how to add scrollbars or resize ability to the Dialog box. I’ve tried many things: all unsuccessful. You’d think that having those turned on would be the default behavior (at least the resize ability), and I would only have to look for something in the code to delete or turn off, but alas…

    • Sam 12:36 pm on Monday, April 19, 2004 Permalink

      Hey Danny, just downloaded and installed your A18 mod and it works great! Thanks!

      There is a “Help” button now also visable, but it produces a tiny scrunched “window”, with only the Title Bar present. I don’t know if this differs, as this is the 1st time I have been able to view this lower area of the GUI, let alone click “Help”. It doesn’t matter to me, but I thought you might want to know.

      Now I can work on figuring out the proper Search strings for AllTheWeb, RottenTomatos, and a couple of others, as well!

      Good luck on the job situation, I know what that is like!

      Thanks again!

    • Sam 9:04 am on Sunday, April 18, 2004 Permalink

      Hi Danny,

      Thanks for your quick response. Screen resolution is 1280 x 1024 on a 19″ CRT. I checked lower settings, and this didn’t change the amount of the truncated area of the GUI much at all, but this certainly was an area ripe for investigation, and thanks for the suggestion.

      I had restarted FF a couple of times prior to noticing the lack of extra searches in about:config and Preferential. The good news is that interestingly, they are all there now. I do not know if that only occurred subsequent to my making entries for them. At least they are there now, so I can make any future changes there.

      I will check back to see if there have been any developments in the Sizing/Scrolling department. I never understood why folks make GUI’s at a set and unchangeable size, but then again, I have no idea what is involved in coding to make it configurable either!

      Thanks again for your great mod, and assistance!

    • Danny Dawson 11:15 pm on Friday, April 16, 2004 Permalink

      I’m guessing this has to do with your display resolution. I’m running at 1024×768, and have found that running under 800×600 or 640×480, the GUI is cut off either just above the OK, Cancel, and Help buttons, or somewhere in the middle of Entry #7, respectively.

      I’m currently looking into the code to see if I can figure out how to add scrollbars or resize ability to the Settings dialog. This would/should solve the “Truncated GUI problem” that you’re seeing.

      Unfortunately, I’m probably less of a code expert than you are, so it may take me a little while to figure out. (The mods that I made were done by trial and error combined with a little persistence.) Luckily, though, I’m currently unemployed and I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ll be working on this tonight.

      As to why the extra added searches aren’t showing up in about:config or the Preferential extension, I can’t explain. They show up in about:config for me, but I don’t use Preferential, so I can’t check that. Maybe you need to restart your browser in order to refresh the user.js file?

    • Sam 8:25 pm on Friday, April 16, 2004 Permalink

      For Truncated GUI problem – System info: Win2kP v5-SP4; Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8 (Some Extensions – TBE, Compact Menu, Hide SearchBar, ToolBar Enhancements, AdBlock, Preferential, Optimoz).

    • michele 6:50 pm on Wednesday, April 14, 2004 Permalink

      this really has nothing to do with, um, this post. but in your links, the one to gene goes to jacob’s page. i am incredibly bored right now, can you tell?

    • Danny Dawson 9:35 am on Thursday, April 15, 2004 Permalink

      Fixed. Thanks.

    • Sam 8:18 pm on Friday, April 16, 2004 Permalink

      Great modification! This is exactly what I have been looking for. Thanks!

      Here’s a problem: For reasons unknown to me (a non-expert), with both the unmod and mod versions of Dictionary Search (v.0.5), the GUI is truncated, cut off before the bottom. With the Mod in place, this occurs midway down the URL field for Dictionary 7. There are no “OK” or “Save” or “Cancel” buttons (not sure what the proper names are, as I have yet to see them). I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the unmod Extension, with no change.

      My work around was to use either about:config or Preferentials to configure the extension. However, the Mod’s added searchs (#5-#8) do not show up in either, making this route unavailable.

      I have had some luck “tabbing” to the “Save” button, but ….

      Any ideas on what is causing the Extension GUI display problem, and why the mod’s added searches don’t show up under DictionarySearch in either about:config or Preferentials?

      Thanks for the great mod, and for your assistance!

    • Sam 3:49 pm on Saturday, April 16, 2005 Permalink

      Danny, I, and others, continue to rely heavily on your great 8 search Mod to the Dictionary Search Extension. Sadly, it seems the recent FireFox update from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3 seems to have broken it. The 8 searches no longer appear in the contect menu. They are all still present under about:config. Would you please update it so it will work again? Thanks very much! Sam [prefer not to have actual email published, but will provide privately]

    • Danny 9:20 am on Monday, April 25, 2005 Permalink

      Sam,

      I haven’t updated my DS mod since I started using the Context Search plugin in July of last year. I find it to be more robust and extendable without having to delve into modifying someone else’s code. Instead of having to parse the URLs of each new search engine you want to add, as long as a Mycroft plugin exists already, installing a new search engine is as easy as clicking a link. If the search engine you want to use hasn’t had a Mycroft plugin created for it yet (e.g. your corporate intranet), creating one is incredibly simple. Open up the “google.src” file located in your Firefox install’s “searchplugins” directory (usually “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins”) and alter the name, description, action, and input fields to match your own desired engine. I would be happy to do this for you if you needed; alternatively I would be happy to describe in simpler terms (maybe even with a blog post, you never know) what the various fields in a Mycroft plugin represent.

      If you’ve tried the Context Search plugin and you still think the Dictionary Search plugin fits your needs better, I could be persuaded to update my modification for you if you can tell me exactly why you prefer it. Just let me know.

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