Guess and Check

A rap about CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider.

Written and performed by alpinekat, aka Katherine McAlpine. Beats by Will Barras.

Best rap ever.

Space Shuttle Endeavour launched earlier this morning, they’re going to assemble a giant robot up there.

It was brought to my attention that “those wacky NASA guys” are hilarious, case in point the informational text on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft seen in this image.

Via Ben.

So I saw a Wired news article about an automated parking garage in Hoboken this morning. This thing sounded really cool, so I did a little research and found out that while the whole idea of an automated parking garage is cool, there are far cooler ones than the Hoboken Garage. The earliest mention I could find was this Slate article that mentions there were only two in the United States at the time of publication in April of 2004.

Volkswagen‘s new storage facility and their transparent factory in Dresden are very high in cool-factor.

I’d totally park my car in an automated garage over a traditional garage any day.

One of the things that always bothered me about Google Finance‘s portfolio view is that it doesn’t have a percent value for the amount your portfolio has gained or lost. Yahoo! Finance‘s portfolio view includes this number, and I suppose I got used to checking it there.

So what do we do nowadays when a website doesn’t have something that we want? That’s right, we write a Greasemonkey script for it. I give you:

googlefinancegainlosspercent.user.js

Enjoy, and let me know if there’s anything I can improve or fix.

I decided to live on the edge (not yet the Edge) and go ahead and upgrade a few of my machines to Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake Release while it’s still in development.

Everything went smoothly, and I keep discovering new things in Gnome 2.14 that just make the experience even better.

For some reason, when I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 in Ubuntu, a middle click no longer closed tabs.

To fix it, I set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false in about:config.

Fun quote from The Register‘s recent “Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems” article:

Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that’s almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, … passionate, you haven’t met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it’s a religious crusade.

Via Slashdot.

Yesterday I upgraded my laptop’s Ubuntu install from version 5.04 “The Hoary Hedgehog” to version 5.10 “The Breezy Badger” Preview Release.

Now the few little things that I couldn’t manage to get working in the past few months no matter how hard I tried are magically working properly.

Right now I can’t even think of any reason for me to bother to boot into Windows anymore.

The W3C Markup Validation Service has a new look.

And apparently, it’s not just a new look:

2005-08-08 — 0.7.0 Release:
Stable release including all the fixes and improvements made in consecutive beta versions 0.7.0 Beta #2 and 0.7.0 Beta #1.

It was a little disconcerting to get a green bar when I was so used to the old familiar blue bar. But hey, it looks great.

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner can’t be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. You can even automatically retrieve data from other sites to make two sites more interconnected. #

Pretty much, a Firefox user would install the Greasemonkey extension which would then interface with separately installed “user scripts” that the user could either write himself or find in the repository.

The possibilities are mind-boggling for what an end user could do to improve their browsing experience.

You can find out more by checking out Mark Pilgrim’s GPL licenced book on programming with Greasemonkey, Dive Into Greasemonkey.

So I read somewhere in the past week that recent nightlies of Firefox will now have SVG support enabled by default.

Wikipedia says that Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated. It is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is also responsible for standards like HTML and XHTML.

(more…)

Slashdot reported yesterday on the WordPress spamming I noticed a month and a half ago.

Waxy.org has the full scoop.

Earlier today I was taking a brief look at de.lirio.us (via Matt). I clicked on the “wordpress” tag in the “recent tags” list and the fourth link there was for “Create a Website for Free” created by MacManX. I followed a link in that article for a “1and1 6 month Business Package Free Preview” and ended up signing up for a free test drive.

I got a call from a lovely robot ten minutes later. I told it the code they gave me when I signed up, and that was it. I now have six months of premium 1and1-brand hosting at my disposal. And when they say premium, they mean it. We’re talking about 2 GB storage and 50 GB transfer a month!

The site was ready to go and their place holder page was up in 15 minutes, and 3 minutes after that I added my own. Check it out at s122406133.onlinehome.us.

If I remember correctly, this deal is somewhere along the same lines as Jordan’s One sweet deal he landed a while back.

A sweet deal indeed.

Firefox 1.0.1 has been officially released by the Mozilla Foundation, with some important security fixes. An announcement and release notes are available.

Via Slashdot.

An Antec SLK2600AMB case purchased at J&R Music and Computer World for $76.02.

Did anyone else notice that Google now uses answers.com for their definitions instead of dictionary.com?

Here’s a news article Google News found on the subject.

Those of you who frequent the Homestar Runner Wiki may know I enjoy the “Show new changes starting from” feature of the Special:Recentchanges page quite a bit. Since I check over a lot of the edits, I always leave a tab open in Firefox with that page loaded so I don’t lose my place. It works great, and all the changes show up right how I like them.

The only time I run into a problem is when I view the Wiki on a different computer, and my trusty tab isn’t there. Since I use the Enhanced Recent Changes feature, I can’t simply look at the regular Recent Changes page, because edits that I have already reviewed that day will show up if another person has edited the page.

Therefore, I created a solution: a simple bookmarklet that asks me what time I want the page to display results from. It really just saves me from typing them directly into the location bar myself, but it’s still cool.

So I recently stumbled upon del.icio.us via Joey, and it is pretty nifty. He and Jordan even have link blogs running with it.

Basically what del.icio.us does is store your bookmarks for you. It’s handy so you can access your precious book marks from any computer you wish to browse from. It also allows you to categorize links with tags and share them with others. You can even see what links you have that other people have linked to as well. It’s pretty amazing.

Of course, don’t take my word for it, go sign up for a free account and see for yourself.

A fun thing I found (via Jordan‘s linkblog) is extisp.icio.us: a del.icio.us mapping script that provides a visual map of a users tags. Very cool. Mine doesn’t look too spectacular right now, but I’m sure it will someday.

My friend Melissa just noticed a rather interesting answer in one of the AOL FAQs:

Q: Can I create new accounts using AIM? Can I change the passwords on my current accounts?

A: Yes, if you select as signon screenname and click sign on, AIM will bring an instruction dialog for how to create a new account. (I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE PRECEDING SENTENCE MEANS. IT DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK THAT WAY. SHOULDN’T THEY CLICK “GET A SCREEN NAME”?) You can change your password and email address from the My AIM-> Change Options menu.

Sounds like someone is having fun over there.

Wow, usually I’m on the tail end of the blogosphere when it comes to interesting links. But not so! My post about Dan making the switch to WordPress was a full two days ahead of Matt’s bringing to the attention of the world.

I’m cool… or am I?