Signal Eleven

I’ve already been on the subject before, and I had promised a post about RSS.

Well today is RSS awareness day, and RSS advocates should promote and raise the global awareness of RSS as a tool.

Not this time. Remember ODE? Well, it’s time to try again and this what is going to occupy my labour day afternoon.

Instead, I’m gonna link you to a very informative post on “Avventure Planetarie”, hoping Paolo will forgive me for the recent content piggybacking (Voyager, now RSS…)

It’s in Italian, (and I know a few readers will be pleased), but for you non-italian speakers, check out RSSday, the website promoting the event presenting RSS using a nice video. (with an awful audio, though)

Oh, and I expect to see a definite increase in RSS subscriptions in tomorrow stats,  mmkay? :-)

Stay tuned, more to come.

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The curse of the tiny widescreen monitor strikes again. This might not be original, but I find it useful.

I created another script like Writing Room for Google Docs (<brag>featured script on LifeHacker!! </brag>).

This time is for iGoogle. Allows to get rid of the annoying (but pretty, with the right theme) header bar and the totally useless footer bar.

Should you need the header bar (e.g. for undo-ing a gadget removal), theres a convenient link on top, Writing Room style.

The default is NOT showing the headerbar, since I use iGoogle as a at-a-glance kickstart in the morning. (todo, agenda, mail….the usual)

Example? Sure, there you are.

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My previously published script Writing Room for Google Documents became a Featured Greasemonkey Script in the Lifehacker weblog, by all means one of my favorite blogs.

Check it out! 

Stay tuned, more to come.

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(no time to read my ramblings? Jump to the script here)

Heh. When procrastination brings productivity. I was working in Google Documents on my thesis, and felt that something wasn’t quite right. The header was taking too much space and on my 13.3” widescreen every vertical pixel is precious.

So I came up with this tiny Greasemonkey script that allows to toggle the header bar in Google documents, providing more room for working. Plus I wasn’t really feeling like working on the thesis ;-)
Example after the jump

…from this…

…to this…

You can find the script here.

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I recently found myself using Safari, Apple’s web browser, quite often, because it’s WAY faster than Firefox in both rendering and starting up.

But, issues with Wordpress’ post editor aside, I came back to Firefox for one simple reason. Addons.

I use a lot of Addons for Firefox. Some in order to gain functionalities, some to tweak websites the way I want. For example, my Gmail, with a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts, has a few extra buttons and menus that I ended up consider part of Gmail itself. And missed on Safari!

So I’ve decided to prune some unused extensions and keep only what I felt really important. Here’s what I kept, in no particular order:

• Adblock: controversial addon that filters ads from web pages. Not that I’m particularly happy about depriving the pages I visit of their source of income, but some flashy ads are terrible. It’s very configurable so you can “switch off” only that pesky banner that has been bugging you. I also use Adblock to avoid loading the Shinystat counter on Signal Eleven, so I don’t get counted (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! ;-) )
• Greasemonkey: allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using JavaScript scripts. There are scripts for a lot of websites. For example, a script for hiding “related videos” “director videos” and “comments” on youtube. Sure you can have them appear anytime, but not having the temptation of clicking on a “related video” is going to save you hours :-). Important: you don’t need to know JavaScript! Plenty of scripts here.
• BBCodeXtra: this adds a few context-menu options to quickly enter BBcode and Html in a web form. Handy if you happen to write on an online forum, like I do.
• Better Gmail: this extension adds over 25 additional features to gmail. Mostly Greasemonkey scripts, useful stuff like a “mark as (un)read” button, options to hide the spam count (it is a source of distraction for me. Gives me those extra seconds of procrastination), or to hide the invite box. Adds a search for date, save searches you make often etc… The italian version (you get it if you have Firefox in italian) has a couple of misleading translations. My fault, I’m going to fix it when a new version comes out.(Lifehacker)
• Better Gcal: same as better gmail, but for Google Calendar. It allows to collapse the header (where the gcal logo and the search box are) and the sidebar, wraps the text on full day events making them actually readable. You can obtain the same functionalities by installing the appropriate Greasemonkey scripts
• Foxyproxy: if you, like me, are a mobile user, and find yourself using your laptop in different areas such as university, workplace, home, cafes, etc. this is probably going to be useful. It’s basically a proxy configuration switcher, allowing you to change the desired proxy from a list, but it’s even more powerful, allowing you to define which proxy to use (or none) based on regular expressions, url patterns, and so on. Useful if you’re setting up a proxy and need testing, or need to access some pages directly.

Believe it or not, I’ve got more extensions to promote, some goodies for digital-divided users. But I’m going to save those for another post. Until then…

Stay tuned, more to come.

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Globalisation Institute - Brussels’ most popular think tank website - Unbundling Microsoft Windows

Yes, I did not comment on the fine issued to Microsoft by the EU.

But this is even cooler. An it’s not only because it’s Fall.

Apparently, some one is starting to realize that the de facto monopoly of MS in the PC OSs market isn’t good for the market, for the consumer….for anybody, and they are starting to talk about ways to break this situation. It’s not a natural situation, so the antitrust committee has some solid ground to work upon.

Stay tuned, more to come

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This had me scratching my head for a few minutes today, so I thought about sharing it here, and maybe gain some search engines traffic ;)

Somehow I managed to corrupt my Google Reader Google Gears database.

Whenever I opened Google reader, allowing Gears to kick in, I had the following 2 errors in the JS console (ok this is not the default console, it’s Firebug, I’ll talk about it in another post). Since I didn’t really care about the content, I wanted to reset the google gears database.

After removing and reinstalling Google Gears, without much success, I figured that that wouldn’t reset the database itself.

I googled for the documentation. The DB, on MacOSX, resides in Users/<username>/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/{profile}.default/Google Gears for Firefox

HERE the location of the files for other operating systems.

Went there, and simply deleted the whole directory named google.com. Then I reloaded Google Reader, and it created a new DB. Simple as that.

I hope this was helpful.

Stay tuned, more to come.

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It’s old news, but in July, the Chinook team announced on Science Magazine that they improved their draughts playing software to the point it won’t lose a single game.

What does this mean? Well, basically it means that it’s mathematically proven that a game without mistakes can’t end in anything else than a draw.

It took 18 years, and a discrete amount of computation to get to this conclusion.

I picked up on the net and on the media a great deal of criticism about this news. It’s ok. People love to criticize. I do that A LOT ;)

The main complaint is “Couldn’t they spend 18 years doing something useful instead?“. I smile to this kind of objection.

What’s so special about games? Why people spend hours figuring out algorithms to solve efficiently the Hanoi Tower, or the Canadian Traveller Problem (”Problema del commesso viaggiatore” for the Italians).

A game is nothing else than a model. You crack the model, and you cracked the reality that maps to that model. “What’s the point in studying the best path in a connected graph”, someone could have asked 50 years ago. Then the Internet came around. And routing problems.

I must admit I was a bit disappointed reading the editorial of the August issue of “Newton“, an Italian scientific paper magazine (yes! I read on paper! :-) ). The director, Giorgio Rivieccio, judge the research “a waste” and “something to be archived, and forgotten in a closet forever”. He adds that the prospective of a “universe”, like the draught universe, where nothing is left to discover “depresses” him. And thanks that life is much more complex than a draughts game.

Maybe he just wanted to be poetic, with the comparison between life and a game. But the tone is not what I would expect in an editorial of a science magazine.

Stay tuned, more to come.

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Vint Cerf, aka the godfather of the net, predicts the end of TV as we know it | Technology | The Guardian

Although non really tecnhical, this is a good example of what it’s like to be the “father” of a technology that changed our life and having a “vision” of the future.

I like what Vint says about TV. My family can confirm, having heard me saying the exact same thing over and over in the last few years, since I got a broadband access in my apartment. TV as we know it is nearly dead technology. When you realize that 85% of TV programming is NOT LIVE, it suddenly seem SO stupid that you have to sit on your couch at a predetermined time, for a defined amount of time, to watch something that is been recorded, edited, postproduct, and stored on digital media.

You must have the option to watch it when you can and want. And don’t “you already had the VCR” me. It’s not the same, even if that was a first step in the right direction.

To be coherent with my opinions, I ditched TV at home since January this year, and haven’t regretted it for a minute.

News? I can read them online, or listen them on the radio. Even better, radio on the web! And most tv news are streamed from the tv website on demand. Still regular TV, but the way it should be.

As for sports (yeah,of course, soccer. Is there something else in Italy? ;-) ), instead of paying a yearly subscription or a enormous fee of 5€+ per game, I grab my bike, head to the bar, have a beer and chat with other supporters. You know… socialize. Scary uh? :-)

Want a peek of what TV will become if things go the way they should? Check out www.joost.com

And if you need a beta invitation, feel free to ask in the comments. I don’t know if I got unlimited invitations, if not, first come first served.

I’ll blog about Joost in the future, so as always…

…Stay tuned, more to come.

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Have you ever used “apt”, or “rpm” under some flavor of Linux? O a portage system?

In case you didn’t, I’ll explain briefly what’s the purpose of a Package Management System.

A package management system is a solution that allows the automatic search, location, download (or retrieval from other media) and installation (or upgrade) of software.

Often, a PMS goes in pair with a Dependency Resolution solution, that allows to detect packages that are necessary to run the desired program and download and install them accordingly.

Believe me, once you get used to the idea, it’s hard to go back to regular “installations”, if not for special purposes.

Now, it’d be great if such a tool existed for Windows, as we all have to deal with that pain in the ass operating system every now and then.

win-get (http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/index.php) gets at least *part* of the job done

say you want the latest version of firefox: you just fire up your “run” dialog, or command prompt and command:

win-get install firefox

No, it won’t check for upgrades, see if you need other dependencies, or aid in the removal of the application, but it does download the installer of the latest version and fire it up for you to install, saving you the hassle of opening the browser, look for the program page, and dowload the installer.

It has in catalog most of the free (at least as in “free beer”, but also many free programs, free as in “free speech”) programs you might need, firefox, tunderbird, alchool…you name it, it’s probably there.

Go get your free win-get copy (and the wget utility it uses to download the programs) at the link above and slam them in your c:\windows for easy running from the run dialog.

I’m not encouraging anyone to keep using windows if frustrated by it lacks of feature, but as many of us must stick with it, let’s try to minimize the hassle!

Got any other trick to survive Windows mediocrity? Let me know in the comments!

Stay tuned, more to come.

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