Perforce is the best source control tool?
Friday, March 18, 2005
On the basis of my informal conversations with my colleagues, Subversion (abbreviated to SVN) is a better system than all the commercial tools except Perforce.
Which I guess makes Perforce the best overall. We use Perforce at work, and I find that very depressing.
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Citeable Blockquotes
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
I use some javascript to make the citations in my blockquotes clickable. It's all very well but it doesn't exactly help for general browsing.
So, with a little more Greasemonkeying, we have
Blockquote Citations.
It works by adding a link to the citation if it appears to be a url. It will use the blockquote's title as the link text or "source" if there isn't a title.
It will not add the link if there is already a visible link to the same URL - the idea being we don't want to make pages unreadable if people already have gone to the trouble of linking to their source either manually or with script.
This blog has the blockquote citations script inline, but you can test your installation of the script on this
handy test page.
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Life is Haphazard
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Spurred on by the total pain that was
teaching my Girlfriend's sister to fill her mp3 player, I have created a small application that was, erm, "inspired", by the iPod shuffle features in iTunes.
Motherload turns your tired old non-iPod mp3 player into a Shuffle of sorts.
It still won't be pretty and white, but at least filling it up will be a whole lot easier.
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Nice Titles in GreaseMonkey
Friday, March 11, 2005
In response to a request on the
GreaseMonkey Wiki and with the kind permission of
Stuart Langridge I've ported
Nice Titles to GreaseMonkey (actually this involves almost no work on my part).
They key differences between the original and my version are:
- No need for browser detection or background pngs - we're always in Firefox.
- I've added a 1 second delay on the Nice Title appearing since I prefer it that way.
Get the script
here.
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(Grease)monkeying about with nofollow
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
My latest toy is a
user script to strike through rel="nofollow" links.
I'm curious to see how widely used they are.
Update:
As it says in the comments, Scott Johnson has corrected an oversight of mine to do with multiple values for the rel attribute. Why not try his updated version.
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Vote Yes in the EU Referendum
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
It's come to my attention that some of my ads are for an anti-EU, "Vote No" website.
I've blocked them now, but I'd just like to say "Vote Yes".
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It's all just Rip, Mix, Burn innit?
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
The latest blog echo chamber whitterings seem to be on the subject of
AutoLinks in Google's new toolbar.
Given that this feature would have to have near magical qualities to induce me to start running IE again, I'm probably not best placed to comment on its utility.
But after yesterday's tremendous experience with
Greasemonkey, I think that it is worth pointing out that mangling the content in the browser is a stunningly useful idea. I may have only had it for a day and only run a handful of scripts, but the only way you're going to get Greasemonkey off me now is to prise if from my cold dead hands.
I've read a lot of bitching and moaning about the rights of content producers having their precious editorial mangled with, but honestly it doesn't wash. This is just Rip, Mix, Burn for the browser, and quite frankly it's been going on for ages. What do you think your popup blocker does? What does you Advertisement blocker do?
OK so this particular mangling happens to commercially benefit the company that's providing it. But so what? The users are still choosing to have the mangling. They aren't being hoodwinked, it's not some big phishing scam.
Nobody whines about Greasemonkey. Nobody whines about Firefox extensions, and clever bookmarklets, and web proxies that
Wiki up the BBC.
Scoble's and Dave Winer's
fatuous attempts to brand this evil and tar it with the
Smart Tags brush are just a smokescreen to frame the debate.
The whole "
if it's an evil idea, is it not evil because ..." rant is just ass backwards thinking. With Smart Tags, it was much more the case of "If it's useful idea, does it become evil if it's pimped to us aggressively off the back of a monopoly?" And of course you only have to look at IE itself to see that the answer is "yes". IE was a good idea and browser in its day. It was Microsoft's behaviour that made it evil.
Would I use AutoLinks? Probably not. Is the principal that enables them evil? Hell no.
Hmm, that all got a bit breathless. Fortunately
finer minds than mine have weighed in.
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