Urban Adventures & More

For anyone who maintains multiple accounts with the same website, they know the pain of logging out and in again on the browser to check the other one. It is particularly painful when you are synchronizing two accounts to have similar settings, and you are constantly going in and out of them. It turns out there are four (really three) solutions I know of.

1. Use two different browsers. Most people have two browsers installed: Firefox and IE. Just open one account in one, the other account in the other. You’re done.
2. Use IE tab in Firefox. Simplify Window clutter by installing IE tab and doing #1 again, but this time without ever leaving Firefox. Just click the little Firefox icon in the corner of a new tab and now you’re using IE, but within Firefox!
3. Use Cookie Pie. This works pretty well by letting you set per-tab cookies, but there are a lot of conflicts with other addons (look at their blog page). Right now, I’m using it to log into two Dropbox accounts (by the way, Dropbox is amazing. I have referral codes that can get us both more space. Ping me in comments.) However, I have very irritating conflicts when using it on facebook, gmail, and Roundcube (webmail program).
4. Use CookieSwap. This doesn’t let you set per-tab configuration, but you can switch back and forth, which is pretty similar. This focuses on multiple computer users rather than a single multitasking user as Cookie Pie does, I think.

All options right now have their limitations, but I think #2 is the most reliable.

…because you’ll never be able to use an infix calculator again. (Same reason you should never use a Dvorak keyboard.) Having used the HP 12C for a couple years now, I instinctively enter my numbers before the operator, and… nothing happens! I can’t tell you how much lost work I have because of that.

Luckily, a good ole RPN calculator is only a click away!

Just wow. It is shocking that people thought the monstrosity that is Madison Square Garden and the horrible Long Island Railroad terminal could ever be an improvement over that grand building. However, the following quotes, taken from The Fall and Rise of Pennsylvania Station by Eric Ploksy, offer a window into the times. Continue reading…

Try searching for “phpbb” or “vbulletin” or even “wordpress” along with any old search terms. Many of those hits will be completely irrelevant to your search because google will match the “Powered By” link at the bottom of the page. This bug should be fixed by adding a “do not match” option )as distinct from the current “Don’t show pages that have any of these words” functionality); if one uses the current functionality to avoid “Powered by”, now you completely miss those sites with such text on the bototm, whereas my suggestion would simply overlook hits bracketed by (or completely matching) the offending text.

As an aside, I notice that “google” itself is maybe the 7th hit when you search for “search engines”. Is it possible that the crappier the search engine, the higher up it is on the list? Since search engines are so critical to using the web, the good ones would not be linked to as often as the mediocre ones because everyone already knows about the good ones.

As a second aside, I think google may have complete web domination. Quite a few browsers give the same hits as google does; which ones are actually using the exact same backend? One should definitely take a look at these alt search engines; they make an interesting case.

Suppose you developed a set of macros to be run on several different excel installations. Some may be different versions or, as is the case at my office, some have Bloomberg libraries and others don’t. This creates a problem because excel will get set to use certain libraries and give strange error messages when you don’t have them.

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If you use the rewrite hooks to create new permalinks on your blog and found that it broke your paging on those pages (a misnomer, because the paging may have never worked), I have the solution! But first, the problem.

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I just got done with a long programming binge figuring out how to improve navigation on my NYC Facade blog. I didn’t gain any wisdom about how to approach this problem, but I have a few observations.

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