Monthly Archives: May 2005

MacOSX: First Impressions

OK, so it’s not my mac, but I guess I’m gonna be the one using it the most. Work just bought a Mac mini, and it is so quiet! And of course, it runs MacOSX, that sexy smart OS.

After some initial oversights (Didn’t have any USB keyboards), I got it up and going with my existing CRT monitor, mouse and keyboard. First things I learnt: Home and End go to the top and bottom of your document, not the start and end of the current line. Just to clarify:

Document Navigation Keystrokes
  Windows MacOSX
Start of line Home Command + Left Arrow
End of line End Command + Right Arrow
Start of document Ctrl + Home Home
End of document Ctrl + End End
Start of (previous) word Ctrl + Left Arrow Option + Left Arrow
End of (next) word Ctrl + Right Arrow Option + Right Arrow

But I should get used to all that. I guess I wish I had a real Mac keyboard, but I did find DoubleCommand, which I have yet to try, but looks promising.

I did however, try Quicksilver! I really like this tool — it lets you do things you might do quite often all from the keyboard, things like start applications, upload files. If I was going to replace my Windows box with the Mac as my desktop machine, I’m sure Quicksilver would definetely become handy 🙂 It’s like a command prompt on de-obfuscation pills!

The main reason we have the Mac is for testing websites in Safari and IE5Mac. Safari is quite good, but as many of my web designing and developing friends out there will likely know, the bane of our existances is Internet Explorer, and IE5Mac triplely so. So I stand to learn a lot about the inadequacies of crappy browsers… as if IE6Win wasn’t enough… 😛

Webfroot is looking smart in Safari — the one-liner doesn’t render correctly, but hey, can’t win them all. Haven’t tried looking at inner.geek yet… will do that tomorrow.

Getting to know the ins and outs of a highly polished, well thought out operating system is an exciting prospect. I’ve tried several KDE and Gnome installations over the years, and they don’t have squat on MacOSX.

If I wasn’t saving to go to WE05, I’d be all like saving hard core for a Mac… I have been dreaming of a Mactop to call my own for a while now…

Can anyone out there recommend good freeware apps a Windows Poweruser “switching” to OSX should look at?

Hardware Romance Work 2 comments

WordPress Plugin: Mycroft Search Plugin Generator

I was at work, and an idea hit me: Firefox search plugins are just text files. They also contain a lot of stuff that WordPress stores in it’s database. Why not make WordPress generate a search plugin for itself? Why not make a plugin that will work on any WordPress 1.5+ install? So I spent the rest of the day making the Mycroft Search Plugin Generator plugin!

Try it at the bottom of the sidebar on this site, or in the Meta section of the sidebar on Webfroot!

Blogging Coding Internet Software WordPress Plugins 6 comments

The ESV Online Edition

Colour me impressed with the ESV Online Edition… I’m still geeking out about it… They have put a lot of effort into the web development of this site.

The site is valid XHTML, they provide various RSS interfaces, including Bible in One Year feeds and various other daily devotionals, a Web service (SOAP and REST/HTTP-GET) interface for doing verse fetches), favelets, A Firefox search plugin, integration with OpenSearch initiatives such as A9.com, Javascript syndication, and even search-by-email! Talk about spreading the Word of God!

I also really enjoyed reading the Technical Introduction to the ESV Online Edition, which included a report of a usability study of their own and other bible search engines, expected behaviour and implemented behaviour, caveats of search ambiguity, how their whole bible is in XML and is transformed into XHTML, what they did for older browsers, popular bible book query patterns, and strangely enough, MySQL database definitions and PHP source code for viewing (not borrowing) of how their search works. I learnt a lot.

Wow… It’s so geeky, it almost makes me proud to be a Christian 😀

Oh, and the translation itself is good too 😀 They even have the entire audio version available to listen to, and if you search on something, you can listen to the results too 😀

Christianity Coding Internet Reading Software 2 comments

Smart Unread Comments WP Plugin updated to 1.3

I’ve just updated the Smart Unread Comments WordPress Plugin to 1.3. Finally, it uses your permalink structure in it’s links!

Also, I’ve changed a couple of the defaults; $limit now defaults to 5 and $output_when_more_unread_comments_than_limit now defaults to TRUE.

If you want to keep the old defaults, update your template’s command to this:
<?php echo get_smart_unread_comments(10, TRUE, FALSE); ?>

Also, I've moved my wordpress plugins to their own pages now

Get the new version now!

WordPress Plugins 1 comment

HOWTO: Save nearly any multimedia file in your web browser to your hard drive

Ever wanted to save that video or flash animation that you found on the web to your hard drive? Well, if you’re using Mozilla Firefox, it’s actually pretty easy.

This tutorial will not work with anything streamed or encapsulated (e.g., streaming videos and quicktime trailers like on trailers.apple.com). Capturing those is beyond the scope of this howto (read: I’m lazy)

Also, remember to respect other’s intellectual property: Saving a copy to your hard drive is fair use; taking that and publishing it on your own website is probably not. Check to see if there’s a Creative Commons licence, or get permission from the media’s owner before you distribute someone else’s works.

Enough with the warnings! I’ll assume you have installed Firefox, and get on with the tutorial:

  1. Open the page that contains what you want to save

    Here we have a movie on NewGrounds that my friend Andrew Kepple made. It’s a flash movie, so it’s embedded on the webpage. There’s no link to the file that I would normally be able to right-click and save from.
  2. Right-click the page anywhere except the video and choose View Page Info

    This will open the Page Info window. Tools > Page Info will do the same thing.
  3. From the Page Info window, go to the Media Tab
    On this tab is a list of all the embedded resources on the page, including images, ads, and convienently, Flash animations and other video files.
  4. From the Media list, find your resource and click it
    If you know what you’re after is a video, try looking at filename extensions for AVI, WMV, MOV, DIVX, and such. Flash animations end in SWF, and music files are usually MP3.
    Chances are that what you’re after is quite large, so you could just go through each item in the list looking at the Size field below, and when you find one that’s bigger than the rest, that’ll probably be your file.
    You could also check the resource’s MIME type, which might have the word flash, video, movie, sound or the like in it, tipping you off.
  5. Click the Save As... button
    Then save your resource like any other file. Remember where it is.

Done! It’s easy when you know how! Happy repetitive watching! If you have any suggestions on improving this howto, please leave a comment 🙂

Update: Hi to all visitors from digg.com and the diggnation podcast! Hear Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht talking about this blog post on diggnation podcast #002 between 06m50s and 09m01s

Update: Welcome to those visiting from Lifehacker!

Internet Movies 62 comments