0 minutes, 16 seconds
A bit ago I posted about how Firefox 3.5 doesn’t have an easy way to reset all the cookies and cache files and the like. I stand corrected. Not only does it has this feature, it has an even better ‘clear for the last hour’ or ‘clear for all time’. Handy! I took some screen shots to show ya.
0 minutes, 41 seconds
I just got a new pair of running shoes and I wanted to take them for a spin. I have no idea how fast I run because I only run with an ID. I don’t have a watch, a GPS or anything else. Well, OK, I do have my first ever pair of running shorts. However, those don’t tell you where you are or what your mile splits are.
You know how to most easily track your route and distance (again, with out a GPS)? Gmaps Pedometer! It’s a google maps mashup that allows you to easily double click your local (or remote) running route.
After I had done this, and I had noted the time I left and returned, I had this math to do: 4.08 miles per 36.5 minutes to minutes per mile. I thought, heck, why don’t I drop it into google and maybe they’re that smart? Sure enough, they are. Thanks Google!
0 minutes, 45 seconds
Recently the SDHC card for our new camera went bad. All computers and the camera said that the card needed to be formatted and could not be read. Running windows “chkdsk” reported that “The type of the file system is RAW.” After googling around I found a great app called PhotoRec. This is an open source app for all OSes that focuses on recovering images and movies from a hard drive, USB drive or flash memory. It is DOS based, but is extremely easy to use and does not require you to install anything, just extract the zip contents and away you go.
It not only recovered the images that we recently took and wanted to restore, but also found EVERY photo we’d EVER taken. This, when I think about it, isn’t that surprising given how computers delete data, but I like that it worked so well. I gave a donation with in minutes of seeing my photos restored. I encourage you to download and donate today if you’re data is in peril!
1 minute, 6 seconds
I know that it’s not that hard to find out how to do it , but I am still disappointed two fold in how hard it is to reset Firefox 3.5. First, if you look at Safari, it’s super easy to reset it. Secondly, it’s not called ‘resetting’, it’s called ‘safe mode’. Further, your mom doesn’t want to do this on her mac:
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -safe-mode
Yeah, I guess for the most part your mom isn’t doing bleeding edge AJAX development that hoses her browser so she needs to do a full factory reset like I was today. But still, make it easier for me?
Sadly, the lil’ ol’ plip blog probably isn’t popular enough to give ‘reset ff3.5’ a higher ranking in google to turn up ‘use safe mode, silly!’
For those who read our Safari full time post of yore, you ask, “what’s the verdict?” The verdict is I use both. I would say that on a Mac, Safari is hands down an insanely fast browser. Faster that FF3 or FF3.5. However, firebug is the absolute no contest, pack it up and go home winner of JS debugging, DOM tweaking, ad hoc CSS styling, OMG there’s-another-feature-I-didn’t-know-about web developers god send life raft. Indeed. So, I use both. Yes, it does help to have a silly amount of screen real estate:
Update: Firefox 3 had the feature want, I just remembered!
Update 2: I’m wrong. Firefox 3.5 does have it.
4 minutes, 58 seconds
I’ve recently taken a serious look at the reality of theft of computers as well as ensuring privacy and reducing data loss should such a theft occur. Take a moment and and take inventory of where you store you data and how accessible and backed up it is. What would happen if:
With the sheer number of accounts we create at every new site we register with, we’ve become lazy and no longer want to remember passwords. Most folks either check ‘remember password’ in their browser of choice, use the same password for every site, write down the password or all three. Further, most folks don’t password protect their smart phones. Compliment with all personal data stored on a laptop or a desktop, this creates a recipe for catastrophic data loss, serious violation of privacy potentially leading to identity theft.
In this post, I’m going to outline a number of suggestions to help fight data loss and identity theft while protecting your privacy. I’ll give each suggestion a PITA rating of how hard and how long it will take to implement. A PITA of 1 is easy a PITA of 10 is, well a real PITA!
PITA: 1
If there’s one thing you actually do, do this one. I use both Thunderbird and Firefox. As I said, most folks are lazy and want all their passwords stored and remembered for them as needed. This is all fine and dandy until your laptop walks an the thief can use all your accounts with out ever touching the keyboard. Both Firefox and Thunderbird offer the ability to set a master password. Every time you open your browser or mail client and a password is needed, you will be prompted for a your master password once. Then all other passwords will be filled in for as normal. Note: close your browser and mail client often ; )
PITA: 1
A no brainer. Both Windows and OS X (video) have it.
PITA: 9, then less
When I first set a password on my phone it was a real pain in the ass. I had to enter it every time I wanted to make a call or check my email. I have a Palm OS phone (not a Web OS phone), so it’s not that sophisticated. I know that Android based phones have a quick pattern you can trace which is quite easy. The iphone has a number pad you can use. Any which way, over time, this becomes second nature, so the PITA rating will fade from 9 to a lower number.
PITA: 7
I’ll explain my backup technique in a sec, but take this one seriously. If your house were to burn down while you were out of town, how much data would you loose? I hate to be all doom and gloom here, but most folks don’t shoot analog any more, so all photos are digital. Maybe you upload to flickr or the like, but there’s nothing like have all your photos organized just so. I strongly suggest you look at commercial providers for this.
Our household has both local and off site backup. We start by backing up all devices (two laptops and a desktop) to our local qnap server via robocopy (think rsync for windows). The qnap is just linux, so it runs all sorts of great things like rsync and secure copy (scp). A friend has a qnap as well. We first connected an external drive to our own qnaps and made a backup of all our backups. We then swapped external drives and connected them to our respective qnaps. We now have a remote backup that we can rsync our data to over ssh and the initial gigs of data are already there.
PITA: 10
I have a subset of my data that is hundreds of PDFs. I generate them via my trusty and some what spendy sheet feed scanner. This guy creates searchable PDFs that have the OCR text embedded in them. Genius. In comes a bill, tax return or sensitive document, out comes a PDF and some shredded paper to recycle. Cross cut, of course.
This data set is a treasure trove. Should my desktop with hundreds of megs of PDFs walk out my front door one sunny afternoon in a thief’s hands I’d be up you know what creek with out a paddle. Data loss aside, it would be little effort to apply for a credit card after a little address change. Bad times indeed.
Enter Drop Box. This is an excellent free service (for the first 2 gigs) that allows you to do what I would call very rich man’s rsync. Store all your PDFs in this folder, and now they’re not only backed up, but remotely accessible!
Wait – what about the stolen desktop? The default behavior of Drop Box is to remember your password. Should someone take your computer and gain access to it, the PDFs on Drop Box are good as local on the drive.
Now enter the second layer: TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is the no-joke way to store data securely. They support both an encrypted boot drive as well as the spook spy stuff: plausible deniability. Ignoring the more advanced features, TrueCrypt’s quick start guide will walk you through creating an encrypted volume that’s encapsulated in a single file. This file can be any size, thus the drive can be any size. You could then store you hundreds of PDFs in a TrueCrypt volume in a file on Drop Box. True secure offsite backup.
I’ve even gone so far as to create a small TrueCrypt volume that has all my passwords. It’s the keys to the kingdom, but I’m going to be vigilant about protecting this file and only the one closest to my heart knows how to get in there.
I’m not a security expert, take my advice with a big grain of salt. There are ways of hacking the master password for firefox and thunderbird. OS Level passwords are trivial to bypass for a skilled IT professional or evil intentioned googlist. Even TrueCrypt can be accessed via social engineering or a sloppy operator who writes down their password.
Good luck and happy securing!
0 minutes, 56 seconds
I just spent some time trying to outrun my cobbler’s child-dom by using mod_rewrite to make the old URLs for contact, about and projects pages to drop the oh so late 90’s “.phtml” suffix. They turned out pretty great I think! mod_rewrite is worthy of a whole separate post, I’d say.
http://plip.com/contact
Along they way, I remembered that my contact page, simple as it is, was actually a target for spammers a couple times a week. Do they think I just fell off the radish truck? Silly geese. The solution of course is to use a captcha. There’s a number of them out there, but a while ago I stopped rolling my own and started using Recaptcha. Aside from being super easy to install and deploy, you’re helping their worthy cause. Sweet.
Now that you have your captcha stopping those geese from spamming you, you need to make it look like your site. Hours of hacking? Nope! Minutes of CSS stylings. Recaptcha is highly structured DOM with easy to reach classes for CSS. In just a few minutes I turned the the vanilla captcha into the the, well, even more vanilla plip captcha. OK, yes, I’m a geek who loves CSS. That’s me.
2 minutes, 31 seconds
After my friend over at The Worst Thing in the World (TWTITW) recently had a post about Radar charting a salad’s many axes, I thought it’d be funny to write a page that actually made the graphs. I’d been meaning to write a post about using Maxmind’s GeoIP library and data to do heat map of web activity, but this will be a good warm up. Behold the fully functional Plip Salad Tosser.
Let’s take a look at the components of the Tosser:
The Chart: I like using APIs that are easy, make me look good, and are well documented. That’s why I love Google’s Chart API. For this page I used a their radar chart and referenced which features are available at the handy chart feature matrix. A few nice touches were adding the dotted lines and the extra data point to complete the loop (is a that radar chart faux pas?).
Arrays and quick forms: Arrays are really handy. They make a form like these easy to change and you can implode them like mad for loop-less string creation of chart labels and the like. Further, you can bust out a quick loop to check for posted values or init random values for the form. WAY easier than hard coding the HTML and making edits over and over again.
Final Product: Here’s a salad radar chart made from step 3, Publish!
PHP: Here’s the top part of the page which does the actual form processing and image source concatenating.
// seed all options
$options = array(
'Architectural',
'Conceptual',
'Cultural',
'Financial',
'Gustatory',
'Logistical',
'Taxonomic',
);
// see if they want a random one
if (isset($_POST['No,_no,_wait____toss_me_a_random_salad!'])){
unset($_POST['d']);
}
// hand POST or init
if (isset($_POST['d'])){
// grab vals if posted, pull name into local
// and unset name for easy imploding below
$postedAxes = $_POST['d'];
$name = $postedAxes['name'];
unset($postedAxes['name']);
} else {
// init empty chart
foreach ($options as $axes){
$postedAxes[$axes] = rand(1,100);
}
$name = "Random Chart";
}
// seed drop down vals
$i = 1;
while ($i < 101){
$dropValsRaw[] = $i++;
}
// build up form HTML by looping through
// every axes
$formHTML = "";
foreach ($options as $axes){
$formHTML .= ' ';
$formHTML .= '';
// loop through evey axes value and check for
// posted value so folks can easily tweak graphs
$i = 1;
while ($i < 101){
if ($i == $postedAxes[$axes]) {
$formHTML .= "$i";
} else {
$formHTML .= "$i";
}
$i++;
}
$formHTML .= $dropValsHTML;
$formHTML .= '';
$formHTML .= '
';
}
// concat final img src and use
// implode along the way where needed
$imgSrc = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?";
$imgSrc .= "cht=r&chs=500x400&";
$imgSrc .= "chd=t:".implode(",",$postedAxes).",".array_shift($postedAxes)."&";
$imgSrc .= "chco=669933&";
$imgSrc .= "chls=2.0,4.0,0.0&";
$imgSrc .= "chxt=x&";
$imgSrc .= "chxl=0:|".implode("|",$options)."&";
$imgSrc .= "chxr=0,0.0,360.0&";
$imgSrc .= "chm=B,66993380,0,1.0,5.0&";
$imgSrc .= "chg=25.0,25.0,4.0,4.0&";
$imgSrc .= "chtt=$name";
HTML: Below the PHP I have some descriptive text and a few headers and then I output the fruit of our lil’ scripts labor:
Salad Maker
My friend over at The
Worst Thing in the World (TWTITW) recently had a
post about the
axes of salad complexity. Based on their findings of 7 axes*,
I wrote a lil' form to enter and toss your own salad. Read
up on the code behind this page over at yon
blog
.
Go forth, make your salad, rate it, and use this form to
publish your salad's findings (or is that finding your
salad?).
* - Subject to TWTITW's whim and research
Step 1: Data Entry
" />
Final Thought: Projects like this that take about two hours are fun and very gratifying for me. Leveraging existing code bases like Google’s Chart API is a great way to make a friend’s funny blog post into a fun educational experience that looks snazzy. Send in questions or comments!
1 minute, 26 seconds
Recently I needed a way of tracking PDF viewing on a web site. Google Analytics (GA) does a great job of tracking page views, but they require JavaScript to work. Further, a PDF download will not fire any JavaScript and is only tracked in the web server log, of which GA knows nothing about. What to do?
For starters, you could use GA’s tip: How do I track PDFs on my site? The big caveat with this technique is that the GA JavaScript takes a sec to load, and is generally best kept at the bottom of the page so the user experiences all your content loading “quickly” while the GA JavaScript can load “slowly” with no perceived slowness. Since most modern browsers are not really multi-threaded, moving the GA code to the top will give the user a slow, bad experience.
A better technique is to use JavaScript just like GA recommends, but instead of firing their page view code, fire your own in an iframe! I have a site wide JS file I use which I added this function to (JQuery required):
// way to fire a page request in hidden iframe good for
// doing Google analytic tracking for offsite links, PDFs etc.
function loadFrame(goto_url)
{
if ($("#loaderFrame").attr("id") != undefined){
$("#loaderFrame").attr("src",goto_url);
}
return true;
}
Now on any page that I want to track PDFs, I have a link that looks like this:
PlipBlogger
The net result is that:
On the /pdfTracker page, you would send the user’s browser a small payload include the GA JavaScript to track that this PDF was loaded. When you next got to GA you should see all your PDFs behind the /pdfTracker? URL. Handy!
0 minutes, 53 seconds
Let’s say you’ve edited a long HTML file and want find what’s changed against the original. If you were on the command line, you’d turn to ‘diff’, right? This is all fine and dandy, if not mundane and some what obfuscated as to what has changed.
However, if you wanted to view the entire files side by side, have the changes appear in context of the rest of the file and easily see where lines have been removed or add, you would use diff with the flags: ‘-yiEbwB’. Now that is a I can get used to.
Now if you had a massive file, say a WSDL (say “wizdull”) file from a certain CRM you use at work and you wanted to compare differences, diff to the rescue again. However because we’re seeing the entire file which is over 450K, the only way to parse through this is via ‘less’. If you couple this with increasing the width to 300 columns, it makes reviewing the changes a breeze. Further, you can search with in the diff by using the search features in less.
diff -yiEbwB --width=300 enterprise.wsdl enterprise2.wsdl |less
0 minutes, 14 seconds
I had a an old, powered mini-usb hub that stopped working with my webcam and USB scanner. I was about to toss it when I pondered if it still would would just send power to what ever was plugged in. Sure enough, I now have a wall wart endowed charger for my first gen iPod Shuffle. Handy!