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!

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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Saving your movable type permalinks when moving to Wordpress is as easy today as it was in 2004; just convert the underscores to dashes, make sure your permalink structure matches otherwise, and you’re done!

In testing this out, I have found great reverence for wordpress. If you request a page, and the URL isn’t quite right, it will actually figure it out and deliver the best guess. For example, on my old site, the following was a link:

www.dreich.info/blog/archives/2008/12/highbridge_jume.html

This is automatically redirected to:

www.dreich.info/2008/12/highbridge-jume

…which isn’t actually a page on my new site. Instead, wordpress corrects it to:

www.dreich.info/2008/12/highbridge-jumel-house-city-college-bike-ride/

and you get the right page! (Really: try googling jumel dreich.info and note what google gives as the link, and what it actually is. This will probably go away soon when google recrawls the site.)

In the course of futzing with the mod_rewrite, I found out why none of my rewrites ever work: you can’t have a leading slash on the URI. It isn’t there; your rule will never match anything.

I put a link to my NYC Facade blog on Facebook (now that I have enough posts to feel like it’s not an embarassment). I got this reply from a friend of mine from college:

Hope you don’t mind that I sent the artists on my game team your link. They’re plugging away at creating “Empire City”. One of them asked that you take some straight-on shots next time for easier texture reference .

Tee hee, my work is helping a video game!

Also, after sampling about 4 RSS feed importers, I seem to have one that is working (miraculously, because I thought I deleted all of them just as quickly!). Having now dealt with facebook’s app interface, I can say I really hate it. You can’t tell whose site you’re on; everything comes with an ominous warning that they are going to look at all your private data; you can’t find anything once it’s installed; and you can’t seem to uninstall anything, either.

I just had my first real experience with wordpress’s PHP functions. I’ll say right now that I don’t like their documentation. The reason is, let’s say you are looking at the documentation on the get_posts function, as I was. The examples there mention lots of other functions and properties in their examples, such as “$post->ID”. However, there is no link readily available to find out the other properties of “$post”! My best guess was to google suggestive names (like nice_name), which gets you to the page that describes this object (I can’t even find it now!).

But that gripe wasn’t my point. I wanted to point out some new features on my NYC Facade blog: more dynamic pages. The most expedient way of creating, say, lists of links to begin with was to simply use a sidebar widget. But that’s stupid, because I want people to use the sidebar for navigating within the site; you’ll only hit a link once, but you’ll have to stare at it for every page you visit!

So as you can now see, I created pages that show you Newest, Complete List, and Links. I did each of these by assigning to a blank page a Wordpress Template that I created in the Theme Editor (is there any way to create a new template through the web inteface without manually creating a file in the theme directory first?). Then I went crazy with the PHP functions by modifying the theme files I already had and also by looking into plugin source. I can share it with you if you’re curious, although it’s really easy stuff.

One thing I’d still like to do is add tags to the Complete List, but I can’t seem to make that work (it’s not possible that the “get tag” functions only work in The Loop, is it?)

What an awesome idea for anyone with two computers, or who is crazy about having their files backed up: Dropbox. The skinny: you have a folder on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux!), changes to which are tracked. Any time a file is added, deleted or modified, the changes are immediately reflected not only on the company’s online server, but also in any other computers that are connected to your account. To improve the speed, only the fragments of files that are changed are actually transmitted. Furthermore, all of your files as well as a backup of every modified version is available online through their interface.

Other features they provide: you can make files publicly available and provide people a link to download it (no more clogged email messages with too-big files); you can upload a file to your dropbox through the web interface, so again, no more emailing files to yourself when you’re away. They have a video on their website which demos all the features. They give you 2GB free, or 50 for $99 a year (if you like to move around media files, or large amounts of word documents, I guess).

I got set up yesterday — it pretty works as advertised, syncing files between my Ubuntu linux laptop, and my Windows XP desktop. There was an extra step for me on Ubuntu — I installed their dpkg, but I had a problem where it wouldn’t sync, and I had to download another dropboxd package (I can’t find the forum link now, but if you search for the exact error message on their forums, you should find it).

As a side note, Foxmarks has probably the best & smartest support site I have ever seen. Ever. It seems to be run by a company getsatisfaction.com.