Firefox 3 will be abandoning the bookmarks.html file for the storage of bookmarks in favor of an SQLite file.
That might be cool for performance, but bad for those who occasionally tweak their bookmark file directly (say, to fix icons that Firefox gets wrong).
Anyone know of a good free SQLite browser for Windows?
I suppose I have the option of exporting the bookmarks, which will still support bookmarks.html and then re-importing.
The onload handler on a page’s <body> element is the place to do any JavaScript initialization that depends on the page being loaded to proceed. If you have some JavaScript and you’re sure it has no dependencies on the page structure, you can have it called earlier but generally it’s safest to call it in the onload handler. It might look like this
<body onload="ajax_subsys_init();">...
But just as you should use CSS to separate presentation from structure, you should separate behavior from structure as well. And you can do that in javascript by writing to the onload handler directly:
window.onload=ajax_subsys_init;
This is an example of when it’s OK to break the rule prohibiting execution of JavaScript before the onload handler runs. Obviously this must run before the onload handler is called.
This is great because the page’s JavaScript can then take the responsibility for initializing itself. The problem with this approach is, as pages get more complex behaviorally, you might have several overlapping bits of javascript that want to initialize themselves. Then you have
//from inside of ajax.js window.onload=ajax_subsys_init; .... //from inside gui.js window.onload=gui_widgets_init;
The gui widgets initialization routine overwrites the ajax subsystem initialization routine and when onload is called the gui widgets are initialized but the ajax subsystem is not.
So, actually, you can’t let the individual subsystems manage their own initialization, because the last one that does so is the only one that gets called. Your only option is writing your own initialization routine such as
//from inside of ajax.js
window.onload=ajax_subsys_init;
....
//from inside gui.js
window.onload=gui_widgets_init;
....
//inside your page
function page_init(){
ajax_subsys_init();
gui_widgets_init();
}
window.onload=page_init;
Well, that works but, you need to be aware of the initialization requirements of all the javascript libraries you include. If you add a new javascript library you need to change this initialization code.
It is possible to create a javascript class that will allow each javascript subsystem to take responsibility for it’s own initialization and yet not overwrite each other. And here is that class:
function onLoadHandler(init_fxn){
var old_init = window.onload;
var new_init = init_fxn;
window.onload = function(){
if (typeof(old_init)=="function"){
old_init();
}
new_init();
}
return this;
}
Each subsystem that wants to hook into the onload handler can use this class to add their initialization routine to a chain of initialization routines. Here’s how it can be used.
//from inside of ajax.js new onLoadHandler(ajax_subsys_init); .... //from inside gui.js new onLoadHandler(gui_widgets_init);
Now each javascript library can be included and can automatically initialize itself.
Last night I got home and found a message on my machine from Earthlink that said I should call them. This was 48 hours after I was told I would hear from them in 24 hours. I called to find out what progress they had made or what problem they found.
Instead I was connected to a guy who decided to test my line again, from India, and who told me my speed looked fine. This is after I went through all these speed tests on Sunday, with a different guy. This new guy asked me to run a speed test on my side again just to make sure. I went to the speakeasy speed test site but got quickly exasperated when the test page stalled half rendered because of my slow speed. I told the guy this was ridiculous, that my service is so poor the speed test won’t even come up and how can he seriously tell me that my speed is OK.
He said he’d escalate this to local support and I asked why that wasn’t done Sunday when we had established there was a problem. He reiterated that he’d escalate this to local support. I asked for the number of local support so I can make sure they don’t just sit on the escalation for another 48 hours. He explained that he can’t give me their number, that they would do the work and then report back to Earthlink and then Earthlink would report back to me.
I asked, then, when can I expect a response. He said 4 hours. Then he said, but we close in 2 hours, so call back at 11 or 12 tomorrow (my time). So that’s more than 12 hours.
I hung up but I was still angry that I had been waiting patiently for a response for 48 hours while they did nothing. So I called back and told them I didn’t want to pay for the 2 days during which they neither delivered the proper service nor worked on the problem. The woman I talked to told me that, at the rate I was paying, that would only come to about $5.00. I told them to do it anyway. I then complained that I wanted something done to assure that this problem would be worked on tomorrow and wouldn’t just sit is a queue for several more days. She transfered me to someone else and a friendly recorded voice informed me that the wait time would be about 33 minutes. I hung up and went to bed.
In the morning I checked out a couple sites and they seemed to come up fine. I then ran a speed test and got just a hair under 5Mbps. Ahhhhh…. it was like being able to breath again.
I still don’t know what the problem was or whether Earthlink (actually probably Covad at this point) fixed it or did a squirrel family that had been gnawing on a cable somewhere move on to gnaw on something else?
I’ve generally not had problems with Earthlink’s (or Covad’s) service but I don’t want to praise them just for doing what I pay them to do, which is deliver problem free dsl, and I haven’t decided yet whether to pursue this further and find out whether they fixed a problem or did the problem just mysteriously stop on it’s own with the danger of returning again just as mysteriously.
Now I’ve got to go through the headache of reconfiguring my system for use with the router to get all my PC’s back online.
I was able to get an indirect speed reading on my home DSL
I use a program called FolderShare to automatically sync a directory on all my machines. Then to transfer something from, say, my work computer to home I just drop it into my synced directory and eventually, all my other computers have it.
I happened to notice that FolderShare was busy and so I checked what it was doing. It was streaming an album (I had downloaded yesterday) to my home PC (the only one online since I can’t use the router until this problem is resolved). It gives the rate at which the file was being transfered
572bps – yes, bits per second.
So, it seems they still haven’t resolved the issue.
It’s been more than 24 hours since I reported my DSL speed problems to Earthlink and was told that I’d hear something in 24 hours. Not a word and the speed is still way down.
I was optimistic because as I left for work this morning I noticed guys with hard hats and ladders wandering through a neighbor’s backyard. I actually thought that was a quick response, but I guess it could have been unrelated.
I did a test this evening and got a down speed of LESS than 100kbps. It’s approaching dialup speed. I wonder if the problem is progressive and my speed has been dropping for some time.
If you don’t hear from me for a few days send a rescue team with spools of Cat5 and a crimping tool.
Since about Friday I’ve been noticing a slowing of download speeds. Finally today I ran some speed tests. When I first set up the account I was getting about 4-5 Mbps down. Today I’m lucky to get 600Kbps. Often I’m getting around 200Kbps.
I tried shutting off all the computers in the house but the one I was testing with. I tried the speed test on multiple computers. I tried shutting down the modem and router for several minutes and restarting. Finally I needed to call Earthlink technical support.
They had me strip down the situation to one computer connected directly to the modem – no router – and, seeing that the speeds were still slow, now admit that the problem is on their end.
They say a technician will be contacting us within 24 hours and seeing that it’s now Sunday, I expect that they’ll be calling tomorrow while we are both at work. I’m taking bets…. anybody?
In the meantime they don’t want me to reconfigure the system back to using the router which means only one computer online at a time. Luckily I ran Ethernet around the house last summer and so I’m not dependant on the wireless from the router but we will have to take turns using the Internet, manually switching cables to route the signal to my office or her office.
Ugh.
I’ve been looking to replace Juice, a podcast receiver, for sometime. It doesn’t work all that well for me (although still better than iTunes podcast support) and it seems that development on Juice has stopped. The recent announcement that feed demon is now free and supposedly has podcast support means I’ll be trying it out with a focus on it as a podcast catcher.
For an RSS reader, I’ve pretty much adopted Google Reader and like the idea of an online reader that’s accessible anywhere. Apparently feed demon has an online component so that wherever you have feed demon installed it will be synced with your other instances of feed demon.
We’ll see how this goes.
Trying last.fm Kindof a cool idea in general but it has one weakness that might kill it for me.
I have a lot of, I’m not sure what to call it, “Junk” audio on my iPod. Stuff that I like and listen to but that would not be interesting to many other people and would not help link my taste to others. Let me give you some examples.
I create my own music as a hobby and I have a lot of unfinished stuff, and alternate versions on my iPod. It’s part of the process. I start stuff, I load it on my iPod and listen to it over and over trying to figure out if I like it, if it’s any good, what should I change, etc. Those tracks have a lot of listens and they’re not available to anyone else.
I have a lot of weird novelty audio that I pick up at random places on the web such as the recent nasty recording of what’s-his-face, Baldwin, to his daughter, and various remixes people have made incorporating that audio. What’s the proper artist and album name for that?
There’s an LA radio personality, April Winchell that collects this kind of stuff on her blog. Well, I’ve downloaded a lot of that and it’s on my iPod with “April Winchell” as the artist and in a lot of cases I don’t even know who’s recorded this stuff. How likely will those tracks be to match anyone else?
I have a bunch of recordings of “numbers stations” that I downloaded from various sources.
I have a bunch of prank phone calls from different locations on the web.
I used to record a local college radio show “My Make Out party” run by a woman who went by the name DJ Whisper. I liked the music she played but also I got a kick out of her voice which was so high pitched I pictured her with a tennis ball sized head. Well, I’d often edit out the songs and just keep her voice as tracks on my iPod so that every now and then as I’m listening to music DJ whisper comes on to announce tracks that are all wrong.
What good is it to scrobble any of these?
So after a couple of weeks of scrobbling I’m finding this kind of stuff appearing as some of my most played tracks which I’m sure only interferes with the process of finding other users with similar interests to get recommendations from.
In one case I made up an artist name just to keep a bunch of similar audio clips together and the artist name I chose happens to match the name of an artist on Last.FM and so now it looks like he’s one of my favorite artists and I’m one of his biggest fans.
So the feature I really need in Last.FM is the ability to blacklist certain artists, genres, tracks, or something to tell Last.FM not to bother scrobbling this stuff. I know I have an opportunity with each scrobble to remove tracks but, I don’t want to do something – over and over again – that could easily be done one time.
Meanwhile, while it lasts, you can find my account on Last.FM here.
Late last Summer I got a new computer to replace the oldest of my two office computers and that meant I had to say good bye to a little device that was so good at its job that I never thought about it. My linksys KVM switch. It was great. Just a double-tap on the scroll lock key and switching was almost instantaneous. It emulated an idle mouse and keyboard well enough that neither computer ever recognized that the mouse and keyboard were missing.
Sadly though, my new Dell had only DVI out, no VGA and also no PS/2 keyboard or mouse connectors – only USB. The new Dell monitor had inputs for many types of video (VGA, DVI, s-video, etc.) so I had to make do with two mice, two keyboards and switching the monitor between its various inputs. What a hassle.
I had trouble finding a replacement KVM switch. It seemed that KVMs that handle DVI are very expensive. But then I discovered that DVI can be converted to VGA with a simple adapter. Then all I needed was a KVM that handled USB and VGA, which is more reasonable.
So I just bought a Belkin Flip and like almost all Belkin products I’ve had, it works but it’s just not quite what I want. Here’s some of my issues:
1 – It’s got a hardware switch to “flip” between the systems rather than a hot-key. They actually promote this cost enhancer as a positive. “no keystrokes to remember”. If you’re switch between systems rarely enough that you forget the hot-key, maybe you didn’t need a KVM switch in the first place.
2 – The computers sense that the keyboard and mouse have been removed. So when you switch you get a couple of bee-boop noises from the computer you’re switching from, indicating that it’s lost a couple of USB connections, along with the boo-beep noises from the system you’re connecting two, indicating that a couple of USB devices were just attached.
3 – and probably related to #2, switching is slow. It’s slow for the video to change and then you have to wait for the system you switched to to recognize that the mouse and keyboard are back.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be replacing this KVM switch with another one eventually – perhaps when linksys has one.
I heard some tech podcast and they seemed very impressed with this tool. It allows you to write your post offline and post later when you are online. I’m curious about what’s so cool about it. One clear advantage I can see is that you can write posts in a situation where you can’t be online, but that’s not the advantage they were talking about and it’s not such an advantage to me since I’m very rarely at a computer that’s not online.
Another advantage I can imagine is, if you have several blogs and they are all on different platforms, you can have one interface that works for all your blogs. I do have a couple of blogs but they’re both WordPress and I’m not considering any other platforms, so that’s not much of an advantage for me either.
Yet another advantage is, if your blog’s editor is poor, this does seem to have a nice, responsive and full featured WYSIWIG interface. Again, that doesn’t do much for me, the WordPress editor is pretty nice as well.
If you write your posts over a period of time and your blog platform doesn’t provide the ability to save drafts, Live Writer lets you save a local copy. WordPress does allow drafts.
This is what the interface looks like. I just inserted this picture of the interface. I’ll admit, if this works, it was much easier than putting a picture into a post with wordpress.
The text is wrapping and I just had to select a wrap option rather than going into the HTML code and adding a class to the img tag.
Another pretty sweet touch is, when you set it up, it attaches to your blog and pulls down information about your blog configuration. For example, it pulled down my blog’s categories and the list is available in Live Writer. Pretty sweet.
There are shortcut links on the right for inserting common items, such as pictures. Also hyperlinks, tables, maps (microsoft maps, not google maps), tags (but I can’t tell quite what they mean by tags) and video.
It’s free, but it’s windows only. So far I like it well enough that I’ll use it at least for my next post.
Powered by WordPress