Richard Lennox
- @mirajavora nice!
- Evolving the role of a Sys Admin: http://t.co/Iyo0kK09
- Deep fried ear - Glasgow's new delicacy! http://t.co/VH61MD19
Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category
Productivity Part 3: Firefox Extensions
In Part 3 of my mini series on Productivity, here are my top Firefox extensions.
Firstly why Firefox?! It is my browser of choice, it is more standards compliant at the moment, offers a great tabbed browsing environments and an extremely good view of most of the web sites out there. OK, Firefox 2.0 is not exactly resource friendly, using an amount of memory that it shouldn't. The biggest effect is the open add-on and extension model. None of the other browsers offer the same level of support for third party extensions that Firefox offers. When I am staring at my web browser for much of the day, I need some of these tools to help me get on with things.
Here are my top Firefox extensions:
- All-In-One Gestures – It is extremely difficult to browse the web these days without the mouse. In fact, try it on something like the BBC site, to see what I mean. Often, no amount of pressing "tab" will get me to the right place and even with Shift+"tab" taking me backwards it doesn't work. Some keyboard commands help but simplest of all is the use of this plug in. Right click and a flick of the mouse opens new windows or tabs, views the source (funny how often this is used just to be nosy!), refresh or close the current tab. Everything could be done but my top commands all use this mouse gesture command line.
- Google Reader Notifier -I subscribe to maybe fifty RSS feeds and keeping up to date can be a problem. But Google reader notifier highlights how many articles I have to read. I don;t usually take time out to read unless I have 20 which I can comfortably process in less than 30 minutes.
- IETab – for those sites (named and shamed to be mainly Microsoft sites including Windows update!) that simply refuse to work in Firefox, this opens up and IE 7 tab in my Firefox. A button in the status bar lets you toggle between FF and IE7, great for a quick check of rendering when changing any CSS. It also has a built in store of URL's to always open initially in IE7 – windows update then works when my default browser isn't IE7!!
- Tab Mix Plus – gives an additional functionality to the tabbed browsing experience!
- URL Link – Don't you just hate it when you see a web address that isn't a link! By selecting it and right clicking I can open the link as if it were a hyper link!
- Web Developer tool bar – this is definitely one for the web developers out there – priceless in the various browser check you need to do.
- Firebug – debugging Javascript is a real pain, this at least takes some of that pain away, as well as giving you DOM based analysis and CSS handling and live editing!
- Del.icio.us sidebar extension – this is brilliant as I manage all my bookmarks here. I get them all, nicely tagged anywhere.
- Live PR – displays the current Google Page rank for the page you are on! Nothing but information but something interesting none the less.
- Fireshot – want to capture the image of a web page and annotate it? This makes it really easy, however doesn't quite support Flash!
- Colorzilla – an eyedropper for the we, to select color information.
- Measure IT – a pixel ruler for measuring across web components. Useful in my line of work.
I use others but this I guess is my top 12, those I couldn't do without. Although one not on the list that maybe should be is GMail Notifier, letting me see an outlook style notification when I receive new email (as my Emails are powered by Google Mail) in the Office.
I am sure there are those who will have a different list to this and if any one can suggest others feel free to do so!
Re-CAPTCHA anti spam
I have just installed the WordPress plugin from the guys at Re-Captcha as part of my ongoing attempt at blocking spam. For those of you who do not know a CAPTCHA (or Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are the little images you see on the end of forms with blurred and distorted sequences that you have to enter to correctly complete the form. It is an anti-spam technique as these tests are supposed to prevent automated spamming software from completing the forms meant for humans.
As a WordPress user, I use Askimet as my main anti spam techinque, however I wanted to augment this with a CAPTCHA for a bit more security. I heard about re-Captcha in an article or blog post somewhere and think it is great. It uses the same principles of a CAPTCHA and puts it to good use helping to digitise books. The digitalisation of books (particularly those from before the digital age) uses Optical Character Recognition to parse a scanned image of a book into its constituent letters and words. However OCR is not perfect particularly when the scanned characters are distorted or not uniform. This is why a CAPTCHA is a good anti spam technique (at least for now!).
The digitalisation has many many unknown words and re-Captcha helps solve this. This special CAPTCHA gives you two distorted words, 1 known word and 1 unknown word. The likelihood of a person entering both words correctly increases dramatically if you enter the known word correctly making this an ideal way to help in the digitalisation of books. Add a comment to see the CAPTCHA in action and visit re-captch for your own plugin at http://recaptcha.net.
Olga’s Blues
As a Carlisle United fan, I had been trawling the web for a proper fans blog for the football club. I regularly keep in touch with news and opinions about other clubs in this way. I couldn't find one so I have gone ahead and developed one. Please step on over and look at Olga's Blues.
Now for those who don't know Carlisle United, Olga (acronym of Goal!), the fox, is the club's mascot. It used to be the stuffed fox, placed on the centre spot before every home game, usually accompanied by a man in a funny suit. However in more modern times Olga the Fox is a much "cuddlier" mascot
and can be seen parading around Brunton Park before home games. Carlisle United play in blue and there we have it the origins of the blog name.
As I am based in Edinburgh, and do not make many a game, Olga's Blues is looking for some loyal Blue's fans and volunteers to provide match reports and opinions on the goings on at Brunton Park. If you know of anyone or want to volunteer your writing skills drop me an email. It is unpaid obviously but if the Google Ads cover more then the cost of the hosting, then I am more than wiling to share it out.
On the technical side, just like this blog, Olga's Blues is powered by WordPress. I found a good design that matched the blue from N.Design Studio which I was able to edit and make into what you see on the page.
Internet Radio Day of Silence
Today we got a feel for what internet radio could be like in the near future….silence!
Listening to internet radio for at least an hour occurs at least 5 days out of 7 for me. I enjoy an eclectic mix of music, most of it through Pandora or my iTunes catalogue and IPod, as I can easily match my mood and get a full playlist to match what I want.
Pandora, as an internet radio, has taken part in the "Day of Silence" for internet radio stations, highlighting what it may be like in the near future. The case seems to be that in the US, where most of these stations are based, the costs of playing a track over the internet will be so great (due to extra royalties and alike) that it will put them out of business.
I am not against the artists getting a fair amount of royalties but I know for a fact there are more than a few albums I have bought having heard some tracks on Pandora. A degree of fairness and compromise should be agreed.
As I am not in the US there is little I can do about supporting the save net radio campaign except spread the word…
Busy, busy
I have been really busy at work recently, too busy to really concentrate on anything else, even during my own time. It is funny, like most things, when I take a step back from things I can often see them much clearer and is during my own time that I often have good ideas on how to do something or solve that problem that has had me in knots for several hours. This gets my head straight back in there and often I need something to pull me back! Is this a sign that I am working too hard? I'd like to think not!
I do really enjoy the work despite some frustration at times. It is sometimes a really interesting project to work on particularly when I implementing new features that are innovative and exciting. It is great to see the application moving forward and improving, ensuring good quality on which to base their business.
SK Chase [the clients!] have also been making a bit of a splash in the press recently. You can find articles in The Scotsman here and The Sunday Herald here. They have also managed to get themselves on a business promotion reel on STV (Scottish ITV) running for the next few weeks between the regional and national news programs.
Domain spoofing
It seems that spammers are yet again spoofing my domain to send out spam emails. This is really annoying but unpreventable apparently.
What happens is that the spammers send out loads of emails having modified the "FROM" address to appear as if it came from an email on my domain. They then obfuscate the email headers to hide their actual location making it very difficult to trace them. Imagine someone handwriting hundred of letters and signing someone else's name and address and sending them out. It would almost be impossible to prevent that, and domain spoofing is a similar concept but with emails.
A decent spam filter will more than likely prevent the spam getting through. My apologies if you have received spam from this domain, I am doing what I can to prevent it.
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