Linkification Sometimes you see a Web page whose creator was lazy and did not wrapped displayed URL into <A href="..."></A> tags. In short, you see something like http://www.thinknostic.com/ instead of http://www.thinknostic.com/ (btw, if you have installed Linkify, you will see both as links). As result, you can see the link on the page, but you cannot really click on it. In order to follow the link, you must select the link text, copy and paste it into address bar and press Enter. With Linkify installed, you will always see all textual links as real links and can just click on URL as if the page would contain the proper <A> tags.
This is for Gabo, Derek, Steve and others who talked to me about podcasts and about which podcasts are worth listening to.
Since I bought Nano2, I spend lot's of time listening to podcasts. Pretty much all driving time, walking time and time in the gym is spend listening to wide selection of topics and to people producing them.
Here is my current list plus some additional recommendations:
1) TWIT and all around Leo Laporte.
Today's extension is about session management. Great news about Firefox is it's ability to use tabs and have opened many webpages at the same time. This impacts people's browsing habits - rather than following one path of the links and diving deep inside the Website, you explore many paths concurrently, jumping from one to another, adding more and more tabs at the virtual crossroads. As in real life, when you travel, bad things can happen - what in this case means that your browser may crash, leaving you in the middle of nowhere with no trace of how you have got there and what you have already visited. If you were using the Session Saver extension, this would be prevented - after Firefox restart you would end up with exact collection of open tabs as before the accident.
Technically, it was Sunday so rather than working or reading some serious stuff, I have decided to take a long walk (to catch up with lot's of new podcasts downloaded yesterday) and to surf the net just for fun. Here is some of the interesting discoveries:
There was a rumor on the net that some Indian student in Kerala discovered a way how to store over 450 GB of data on a sheet of paper. They say
Thanks to 6 hours difference, I usually read tomorrow edition of Slovak and Czech newspapers on the Net one day ahead. Most of them switches to new edition at midnight, which is 6PM our time. I am doing this for several years already. What is different between now and 2-3 years ago is what I read. While before it were mostly articles written by journalists and news industry professionals, now I read mostly blogs. On SME blog, there are few hundreds, maybe few thousands bloggers, and content they produce is usually much more interesting and readable that the content of official newspaper.
In previous FEOTD entries I have mentioned excellent tools that help you maintain the URL's of the pages you want to remember (del.icio.us) , and in case the URL is not enough, save the content of the Web page for offline access or archive. But what if the web page is not really what you are interested in, you just want download all files files attached to the page - and there is a *lot* of them.
I cannot help it, but it is awkward feeling when something that was part of your life, was so omnipresent is announced to be dead and disappear shortly. Exactly this is happening to video tapes and format VHS specifically. The news has been all around the net day or two ago: studio's stopped after 30 years production and distribution of the VHS media.
It does not seem to so many years ago when VHS was and new and struggling to survive against more technically advanced BetaMax (I still remember how great the BetaMax movies looked). Now the VHS is slowly disappearing and everything moves to digital format and DVD. One one side, it is better - higher quality, less compatibility issues (no more struggling with expensive VHS players that can play both NTSC and PAL tapes on NTSC TV (strangely enough, the other way is much easier and many players sold in Europe do play NTSC tapes OK, but require 220 Volt/ 50 Hz and PAL TV). Compared to this, the DVD "zones" create much smaller problem, especially since Linux folks gave us some very good tools :-). Even the DVD and medium seems to be approaching the beginning of the end of life - albeit it is very unclear who will win the BlueRay / HD-DVD war. Maybe nobody will prevail, consumers will wait until the live with live streaming and video on demand with PVR's will be practical alternative to physical distribution.
This was is out-of order extension (I mean there are several extensions that I use on daily basis and for that reason I planned to mention them before this one) - but it helped tremendously in my BI project, so here it goes.
Live Headers does one thing only and does it well - shows you HTTP headers of a communication between your browser and any Web site. As long as the browser is Firefox - but why would you want to use anything else, right ?.
Since the beginning of the biometric security project, we are using an excellent enterprise-level Wiki Confluence as knowledge repository and main team communication tool. I was not sure at the beginning, how will the Wiki approach work for all the people on the team, mostly because once before I already tried it and had not much success of introducing the idea. It was few years ago and the Wiki engine I used were nowhere in the same league as Confluence, but main problem at that time was probably the users' mindset. I am happy to report that this time it worked really really well. I am not sure whether it was because of the fantastic user friendly features and capabilities of Confluence, or because the general awareness shifted thanks to sites like Wikipedia and people got used to the idea of user created content ... The truth is that Wiki's are mainstream now - inside or outside of the enterprise space.
As mentioned before, thanks to del.icio.us bookmarking site and excellent Firefox plugin with the same name, I have almost perfect solution where to keep and how to organize my bookmarks. In theory, I will never loose anything interesting. Or will I ?
The good news and the bad news about bookmarks is that they are very dynamic. What you've stored in your favorites or del.icio.us may disappear without warning and never come back (actually, thank's to Google caching it is not so bad, but even Google cache will eventually expire). In situation like this, I always wish to have captured not only link but the whole copy of the page(s).