Hacking Gmail

It appears that Wiley has put up a few excerpts from Hacking Gmail, a book for which I was the technical editor (also see Google Hacks).

Keep in mind that the selections Wiley offers don’t touch at all upon the real crux of the book, namely, the API and other code-related things that were Ben’s focus.

If you’re a Gmail “power user” and really want some neat, practical insight into the web service’s innards, I suggest you check out the book, which I’m told should be in stores before Christmas.

As an experiment, I started using Gmail exclusively about a month ago and have a lot to say about the experience (not the least of which is the fact that I’m still using it). Because I fear the post will be relatively long, I’ll likely wait until law school finals are over before writing something up.

Colored bubbles

Mike Haney’s got an excellent article up on Popular Science titled, The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles. It’s one of those inspiring feel-good stories that really makes you want to keep pressing on and producing, knowing that there are still problems yet to be solved and things yet to be created, and hoping to one day claim your well-deserved jackpot for figuring it all out. My favorite passages:

“I started with Jell-O, because I thought, ‘Well, it’s got pretty intense color.’ So I mixed Jell-O and Ivory soap. I got nothing.” Undeterred, he went back to the store and tried food coloring. Then hair dye. Then ink. Within weeks, he was taking Sherri on dates to the grocery store, where he would buy as many colored products as he could afford. Back in his kitchen, he’d dump the Fruit Roll-Ups or Juicy Juice into a pan, heat it on the stove until he figured the color was loosened up, and pour in the dish soap. Only clear bubbles emerged.
…
Color remained elusive, but his try-anything approach kept plenty of other strange bubbles floating across his kitchen. One exploded with a loud bang. Another gave him chemical burns when it popped. The best one bounced, just like a Super Ball. He thought he could have sold that one, but he couldn’t re-create it. He could rarely re-create any of his experiments. “I never wrote anything down,” he says. “I’d get too excited as I was doing it. But once I lost that bouncing bubble, I was crushed. I started videotaping myself so that next time I’d know more than ‘It was something on that side of the kitchen.’ “
…
Ask Kehoe now to describe the day the first colored bubble appeared, and the details are fuzzy. He remembers dipping his wand into a pot of blue solution (although they produced clear bubbles, most of his solutions were colored by then) and looking at the quivering film, thinking that this one seemed different. He blew, and a bubble floated across the room. It was blue. He tried again. The next bubbles were blue too. He called Sherri in to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. No, she agreed, it was a blue bubble. As far as they knew, the world’s first blue bubble. In his kitchen.

What the hell is up with PopSci’s pagination? That entire story should have been on three pages max, not 11! I get that they want to hike up page views and ad impressions, but their scheme is a bit overkill — I can promise you that if I haven’t clicked on an ad by page two, I probably won’t on page 11. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on ad period, but that’s beside the point, or is it?

Use CSS to place Firefox tabs where you want them

I actually hacked this up for myself a couple of months ago and the explanation of how I did it was sitting in the “queue” waiting to be posted here (like 30+ other things at the moment), but it seems that I’ve been preempted by mozillaZine, which I was just informed, has some instructions on the process.

I like everything on my computer to be on the right (tabs, system dock, application drawers, etc); for me, it makes perfect sense both from an efficiency standpoint (i.e., it’s usually the case that my mouse pointer “sits” on the right side of my screen) and a screen real-estate standpoint (i.e., my monitor, like most, is wider than it is tall).

Del.icio.us alternatives

Can anyone point me to a “social” bookmarking service that has everything del.icio.us has plus the ability to use markup in the comments you add? If there’s no relatively easy¹ way to import my del.icio.us links into whatever you’re recommending, then forget it, but if you think you know of something that might fit the bill, pray tell.

Of course all of this would be moot if del.icio.us would simply allow HTML in the comments. You listening Joshua? Come on man, make it happen; I don’t want to leave del.icio.us.  :)

I’m well aware of Furl and if I switch that’s likely what I’ll switch to, but there’s one thing about that service that really bothers me, namely, the fact that when you use it to put links on your site, those links are routed through their servers each time someone clicks on them (i.e., sites won’t see that I’m linking to them because the referrer will show Furl; not only does this perturb me personally, it frustrates the means and ends of search engines).

Cribcandy

I got turned on to Cribcandy, “bookmarkable stuff for your home,” a few months ago and can’t get enough of it. Every day its RSS feed alerts me to neat products that I can add to my “wist” (wish + list) with a single click. Nevermind the fact that I can’t afford 99% of the stuff I add — it’s there waiting for me when I can.

Perfect Blue Buildings

Just down the street from your hotel, baby
I stay at home with my disease
And ain’t this position familiar, darling
Well, all monkeys do what they see
Help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Down on Virginia and La Loma
Where I got friends who’ll care for me
You got an attitude of everything I ever wanted
I got an attitude of need
Help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Asleep in perfect blue buildings
Beside the green apple sea
Gonna get me a little oblivion
Try to keep myself away from me

It’s 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday
It doesn’t get much worse than this
In beds in little rooms in buildings in the middle
of these lives which are completely meaningless
Help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Asleep in perfect blue buildings
Beside the green apple sea
Gonna get me a little oblivion
Try to keep myself away from myself and me

I got bones beneath my skin and mister…
There’s a skeleton in every man’s house
Beneath the dust and love and sweat that hangs on everybody
There’s a dead man trying to get out
Please help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Asleep in perfect blue buildings
Beside the green apple sea
Gonna get me a little oblivion, baby
Try to keep myself away from me

From Counting Crows’ Perfect Blue Buildings

Chaos theory

I recently received the following e-mail from a good undergrad friend:

This link in your bits feed made it into lecture today after I sent it to Dr. Wu.

This is his reply:

“It is easy to explain why we see green dot. Since the pink dot moves fast, what we see is actually the complement color of pink, which is green. When the pink changes to grey (the background color), you will see green. If a monitor show R and G at different location, you will not see R and G, but yellow, as long as the lighting moves fast from R to G (faster than 30 Hz or so).”

He showed it in class and said he would ask how it works on the final exam.

Is this an example of chaos theory? The effect of including a link in your page alters the final grade of Dr. Wu’s students.

Hopefully no one in that class reads my site.  :)

32-inch LCD HDTV recommendations

UPDATE: I think I’ve settled on the Sony BRAVIA XBR.

Though I already have a few well-informed friends on the case, I thought I might as well ask the question here too: what’s the best 32-inch LCD HDTV for less than $2500?

It’s very likely that I’ll still do my usual over-the-top, leave-no-webpage-unread research on the subject, but I wouldn’t mind hearing from a few people who might be a bit more knowledgeable than I when it comes to this sort of thing.

Expansys and delayed shipping

UPDATE: Well, I’m fairly certain that I’m going to be going with the 8700c I mention below — currently Expansys is claiming that my order will not ship until Nov. 30th Dec. 11th Dec. 23rd!!! If it ships on that day (and it won’t), it will have taken more than three months to arrive at my doorstep. No thank you.

As I mentioned previously, I recently purchased an i-mate SP5. It still has not shipped. When I ordered it I was told that it would ship in six days. It’s been 30. Every time the “estimated shipping” ticker drops down a couple of days, it always seems to jump back up by four or five. Currently, it says four days, so assuming it actually ships this go around (unlikely), it will have shipped 34 days after I ordered it.

I’ve used Expansys multiple times without incident, but this is really starting to rub me the wrong way. I understand that the holdup is likely on i-mate’s end, but not once in the past month have I received an e-mail explanation from Expansys regarding the delay. Nothing.

I’ve been looking very seriously at the Blackberry 8700c and if it ends up coming out on the 21st as expected, I may very well cancel the SP5 order if it hasn’t yet shipped. Hell, I may just cancel the order out of principle — this is getting ridiculous.

Disabling auto-paragraphs in WordPress

If WordPress feels that a tag you are using needs to be wrapped in a paragraph tag, it will just go ahead and do that for you no questions asked. No thank you.

I first ran into this problem when checking the site for XHTML validation after coming up with a method for producing weblog footnotes using Textpander. The XHTML would not validate: there was a closing paragraph tag without a matching opening paragraph tag. Poring over my code again and again, I knew that I wasn’t doing it — WordPress was adding the rogue paragraph tag sometime subsequent to the calling of the_content(). After taking the issue up on the support forums (and finding agreement that it was indeed a bug), I noticed the problem again when I did the latest redesign, however in this instance it was adding an opening paragraph tag and not closing it, which compelled me to re-examine the issue.

After sifting through more code than I’d like to admit, I figured out a very quick and easy fix that doesn’t seem to break anything else (on my site anyway). All you need to do is open the /wp-includes/default-filters.php file and comment out the following line:

Logic would suggest that if you don’t currently roll your own XHTML, then this little hack probably isn’t for you, because, I’m assuming, that without this filter, posts that are typed up through the WordPress web interface are never wrapped in paragraph tags. In other words, don’t comment out the above line unless you know what you’re doing.