Web logs, dealing with bots, and an AutoHotKey tip

I've written about my site’s log files before, noting some strange activity and popular search terms. Every time I check my log I find attempts to break into an admin area on my site or to post something, even though I don’t allow comments on my blog. Sometimes I take time to add offending IP addresses to a blacklist, although that’s like trying to plug a leak in a dike.

One such log entry that caught my eye today was one from someone looking for the page “/blog/tag-Whining Goto: Forum List "Attach a file ..." illumination&ct=clnk.” I do have a Whining blog tag but there’s no place on my website where people can attach files. This entry came from 192.69.90.198, which belongs to volumedrive.com, which seems to host a lot of spambots.

Another log entry was from 192.119.154.162, an Avante Hosting Services address assigned to Ryan Wilson. This entry had POST data for a spammy comment (“Me and my neighbor were just preparing to do a little research about this. We got a grab a book from our area library however I think I found out more clear from this post.”). I won’t include the URL but will mention that it was for a domain that is not even registered. Perhaps this spammer was just testing to see if a comment would go through, although a quick glance at this site would show that there are no comments.

Another set of interesting log entries were from IP addresses 95.160.18.178 and 95.160.105.174, both of which belong to the Polish cable company Vectra. Someone from Poland wanted to log into my website’s WordPress admin page but wasn’t able to. If you’d like to try, visit http://www.davidlauri.com/wp-login.php. Why don’t I care if you try to get into WordPress on my site? Because WordPress isn’t installed on my site. I do have a WordPress login page, but it’s just a dummy page I set up after I realized people were trying to hack into WordPress here. I don’t doubt that there are hackers who could get into WordPress if I had it installed, which is why they look for it, but it’s not really here to be found.

I used to block unwanted IP addresses using my site’s .htaccess with rewrite lines like:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} 192\.119\.154\.162
RewriteRule .* - [F]

but a couple years ago I switched my site’s DNS to CloudFlare, which blocks a lot of abusive bots and crawlers automatically and also makes it much easier to block additional IP addresses, either individually or by entire ranges (e.g., 95.160.18.0/24). CloudFlare offers free and paid accounts, but the free account’s been sufficient for my needs and has drastically reduced the amount of hits on my site from bots, although some, like the ones mentioned above, do still get through.

Images used in AutoHotKey macro I visit CloudFlare about once a week to block some more IP addresses. That’s often enough that I wrote an AutoHotKey macro so that I can press F1 on CloudFlare’s threat control page to activate the IP address field and then F1 again to click on the block button. If you have AutoHotKey, you can copy the macro below (click on the to expand it). You’ll also need to copy the two images to the right.

 myImageSearch(ByRef X, ByRef Y, X1, Y1, X2, Y2, options, image) {

myImageSearch(ByRef X, ByRef Y, X1, Y1, X2, Y2, options, image) {
  ; search for an image and exit gracefully if there's an error in the search
    optionsandimage := options . " " . image
    ImageSearch, X, Y, X1, Y1, X2, Y2, %optionsandimage%
    if (ErrorLevel = 2) {
      ; problem with the search
      MsgBox % "Error conducting image search: " X ", " Y ", " X1 ", " Y1 ", " X2 ", " Y2 ", " optionsandimage
      return -2
    } else if (ErrorLevel = 1) {
      ; just haven't found it yet
      return 0
    } else {
      ; found it
      return 1
    }
} ; end myImageSearch

$F1::
WinGetTitle, Title, A
if ((substr(title, 1, 14) = "Threat control") && (substr(title, -6) = "Firefox")) {
  ; make F1 the shortcut for the custom rule IP address field and the custom rule block button (depending on which is available)
  
  ; get window's width and height for image search
  CoordMode, Pixel, Relative
  CoordMode, Mouse, Relative
  WinGetPos, Xpos, Ypos, Width, Height, A
  
  ; first look for a blank IP address field (actually we're going to look for a greyed out block button)
  searchresult := myImageSearch(X, Y, 0, 0, Width, Height, "*10", "cloudflare-greyblock.png")
  if (searchresult = -2) {
    ; problem with the search
    CoordMode, Pixel, Screen
    CoordMode, Mouse, Screen
    return
  }
  if (searchresult) {
    ; found it, so click on it (to the left a ways because we actually searched for the block button)
    ; MsgBox, Found it at %X% %Y%
    MouseClick, Left, X - 100, Y + 5, 1, 0
    CoordMode, Pixel, Screen
    CoordMode, Mouse, Screen
    return
  }
  
  ; next look for red block button
  searchresult := myImageSearch(X, Y, 0, 0, Width, Height, "*10", "cloudflare-redblock-part.png")
  if (searchresult = -2) {
    ; problem with the search
    CoordMode, Pixel, Screen
    CoordMode, Mouse, Screen
    return
  }
  if (searchresult) {
    ; found it, so click on it
    ; MsgBox, Found it at %X% %Y%
    MouseClick, Left, X + 5, Y + 5, 1, 0
    CoordMode, Pixel, Screen
    CoordMode, Mouse, Screen
    return
  }
  
  MsgBox, Unable to find CloudFlare fields %searchresult% - %width% - %height%
  CoordMode, Pixel, Screen
  CoordMode, Mouse, Screen
} else {
  Send {F1}
}
return

Cleaning up a cluttered web page

Today’s post falls under both the tag Web design (bad) and the tag Computer tips. I’m going to show you a web site that has rather cluttered pages and tell you what you can do to fix it.

Annoying popups on NationalMemo.com

A friend posted a link to an article on NationalMemo.com. I went ahead and clicked the link because I was interested in the article, even though I absolutely hate NationalMemo.com’s website.

If you go to NationalMemo.com, you’ll encounter one of their annoying popups (click to embiggen) Why do I hate NationalMemo.com? Because of their stupid popups.

I might be more inclined to sign one of National Memo’s petitions if there were a link to it in a box next to the article, but by completely obscuring the web page, I am not only disinclined to sign their petition but I’m also disinclined to even visit their poorly thought out website at all.

And I’m not the only person who thinks this.

If you’re not a web developer, or if you think National Memo’s just not worth the bother, the solution is just that—no longer clicking on links going to NationalMemo.com.

However, tools are available to make NationalMemo.com stop its rude behavior, and doing so really doesn’t take long.

What do you need? Greasemonkey, an add-on for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to add your own bits of JavaScript to any web page you visit, in order to change its appearance or behavior.

If you use Google Chrome, you can try TamperMonkey; it’s supposed to be Greasemonkey UserScript-compatible, but I’ve not tried it myself. If you use Microsoft IE, you can try IE7Pro, but why are you using IE? (Yes, my NationalMemo.com screenshot was done with IE, but that’s because I have Adblock Plus (Firefox) / Adblock Plus (Chrome) installed in the browsers I regularly use, and so the popup National Memo tries to force on me is just blank in those browsers.)

Then you just need to create a quick UserScript for NationalMemo.com. Looking at the source of a NationalMemo.com page, you can see that they have a JavaScript function named lbx_show_lightbox_custom() that displays their popup (which they call a “lightbox”). With the power of Greasemonkey, we can replace NationalMemo.com’s lbx_show_lightbox_custom() function and no longer see their stupid popup.

To figure out how to do this, I googled around some for replacing javascript using Greasemonkey, and I found this very helpful page by Squak Mountain Consulting that explained how to do exactly what I wanted.

Using Squak’s example, I came up with the following UserScript:

// ==UserScript==
// @name DisableNationalMemo_lightbox
// @namespace http://www.davidlauri.com/
// @description Turn off the annoying lightbox that National Memo displays
// @include http://www.nationalmemo.com/*
// @version 1
// ==/UserScript==

// set up the javascript function we want to replace
var scriptCode = new Array();
scriptCode.push('function lbx_show_lightbox_custom(){');
scriptCode.push(' return false;');
scriptCode.push('}');

// put the script in a new script element into the DOM
var script = document.createElement('script'); // create the script element
script.innerHTML = scriptCode.join('\n'); // add the script code to it
scriptCode.length = 0; // recover the memory we used to build the script

// find the first <head> tag on the page and then add the new script just below it
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);

A hint for testing this script on NationalMemo.com is that you should find and delete your NationalMemo.com cookies. They only do their stupid popup once (per day? per week? I don’t know), so if you visit their site first and then set up the UserScript, you won’t actually know if it’s their site deciding that you’ve already seen their stupid popup or if it’s your UserScript disabling their lightbox function.

Was it really worth the time it took to deal with NationalMemo.com’s stupid popup? Probably not, but I had fun finding a solution.

How to improve a government form website (part 5)

The Greene County Recorder website (click to embiggen) is a marvel of intriguing web design Today’s government form that can be improved (see earlier improvable government forms) is actually not a form but rather a website, specifically the Greene County Recorder website, a site so rife with intriguing design choices that one might hardly know where to begin.

The document search page on the Greene County Recorder website, before and after
a tweak with Greasemonkey:

Before (with grey labels):

(click to embiggen)

After (with bold green ones):

(click to embiggen)

However, I do know where to begin, namely with the Document Search page. A co-worker came to me because he had a hard time seeing some of the result page’s labels, specifically those that are in light grey on a white background. This intriguing design choice isn’t just a matter of taste; it’s really rather difficult to read light grey on white.

Luckily the Interwebs offer us the ability to override web designers’s choices which we find “intriguing” (or with which we simply disagree). The tool that comes to mind for this job is Greasemonkey, an add-on originally for Firefox that allows web surfers to install or write scripts that change the look or behavior of a web page. Do you prefer Google Chrome? Greasemonkey user scripts are supported directly in Chrome. (Do you prefer IE? Why?! If you insist you can try this.)

You can find lots of Greasemonkey user scripts already written for popular websites, but I didn’t bother trying to find one for the Greene County Recorder website because, already having extensive experience with Javascript and CSS, I have no trouble rolling my own Greasemonkey scripts. This blog post is not intended to cover that topic fully (Google is your friend if you want to learn how) but rather is just to report on what I did about the Greene County Recorder website’s stupid choice of grey text on white.

An easy option for using Greasemonkey to change a web page’s appearance is to inject some custom CSS that overrides how certain elements appear. Luckily one smart thing the Greene County Recorder’s web designer did was to enclose each of the offensive grey labels in a SPAN tag tied to a particular CSS class: <span class="style1">. So all we have to do is change the CSS applied to the “style1” class. (Actually after I first tested this, I realized there was also one DIV with the “style1” class.)

So here’s a user script that changes all the style1 class SPANs and DIVs from light grey to bold and green (honoring the Greene County Recorder’s web designer’s overall choice of colors):

// ==UserScript==
// @name Fix grey labels on Greene County Recorder website
// @namespace http://www.davidlauri.com
// @description Change formatting of style1 class SPANs on Greene County Recorder website
// @include https://www.co.greene.oh.us/recorders/*
// @include https://co.greene.oh.us/recorders/*
// ==/UserScript==


(function () {
//EDIT ME

var newstyle = "span.style1, div.style1 { color: #006400 ! important; font-weight: 900 ! important; font-size: 105% ! important; } ";

//END EDIT ME

var ss = document.createElement("style");
var t = document.createTextNode(newstyle);

var root = (document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0] || document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]);
ss.appendChild(t);
root.appendChild(ss);
})();

If you too use the Greene County Recorder website and dislike their grey labels, you can install this Greasemonkey user script on your computer. If you”d prefer the grey labels be some color other than green or formatted in some other way, you can copy the script above and modify the line between the lines that say “EDIT ME” and “END EDIT ME.”

Why I love my

(part 4) or

I’ll pick my own wallpaper, thank you very much

The default user interface that comes with the Kindle Fire is this bookshelf, with all your stuff jumbled together If you’ve been following my posts about my Kindle Fire, you know that I rooted it and sideloaded some apps that Amazon thought I didn’t need, like Gmail (see part 1 and part 2 for more info). I’ve also ditched Amazon’s stupid bookshelf UI for an alternate launcher, and I’ve taken control and chosen my own wallpaper — no, Jeff Bezos, you do not get to decide what I look at when I turn on my Kindle Fire!

The default bookshelf UI is fine if you want to browse the content on your Kindle Fire or if you want to see what books or videos you’ve read or watched recently or—and this is why Amazon makes it the default UI—if you want to browse Amazon’s store for new content to buy, and I do still sometimes use the default bookshelf (if you look at the screenshot of my replacement launcher, you’ll see an icon in the upper left for “Launcher”—this is my shortcut to Amazon’s default bookshelf UI).

Instead, I use the GO Launcher, and I use a wallpaper of my own choosing. However, if you want to launch a particular app quickly or use widgets that you’re familiar with from your Android phone, the bookshelf UI doesn’t cut it, which is why so many techies have ditched the bookshelf for an alternate launcher. If you look at the default screen on my Fire, you’ll see I wanted quick access to The New Yorker app (see part 3 to understand why), to Gmail (and not Amazon’s lame email app), to Dolphin (and not Amazon’s silky default browser), to a real Facebook app (and not Amazon’s less than helpful shortcut to Facebook Mobile), and to some other apps I use frequently. The launcher I’ve chosen is a popular one, the GO Launcher EX, but basically any launcher that lets you place icons where you want them would have worked for me.

If you do decide to go with an alternate launcher, something that will quickly drive you crazy is that Amazon in their Apple-like wisdom changes the wallpaper on your Kindle Fire to one of 21 fun different photographs each and every time you turn on your device. If you’re using their default bookshelf UI, you see that wallpaper only on the unlock screen and so not being able to customize it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if you use an alternate launcher, you see the wallpaper every time you go back home, and some of Amazon’s choices just do not work well as backgrounds to put icons on top of. You can override the wallpaper, but that’s only temporary—the next time your Fire goes to sleep you’ll be back to a default Amazon-chosen wallpaper as soon as you hit the power button, unless you jump through some more hoops to impose your own will on the hardware you’ve purchased.

APK Multi-Tool runs from the command line, but that shouldn’t scare you Luckily, someone at XDA-Developers came up with the steps you need to follow to choose your own wallpapers for your Kindle Fire—actually these instructions are laid out more clearly on this page from Samsung-Tablets.com. If you haven’t rooted your Kindle Fire, you can’t change your wallpapers, and also you’ll need the APK Multi-Tool. I say “wallpapers” plural because you have no choice but to have 21 wallpapers for
My Kindle Fire’s unlock screen now has my contact info on it the Fire to choose from each time it awakens, but I actually just used the same exact image 21 times, all of which had to be named exactly what the Fire expects: wallpaper_01_2422.jpg, wallpaper_02_1953.jpg, etc.—see the instructions pages above for the exact names.

I had two goals for a wallpaper for my Kindle Fire, and I was able to meet both of them. I wanted my contact information on my wallpaper. I don’t think that I’ll ever set my Kindle Fire down someplace and forget it, but if I do, I want my name and contact info to appear when someone turns it on. And I wanted a nice neutral background that wouldn’t interfere with the icons for my apps. I got what I wanted, despite Jeff Bezos’s Steve Jobs-like insistence that he knew best for how I use his product, and that’s another reason I love my Kindle Fire.

Why I love my

(part 3) —

edition

New Yorker app on my Kindle Fire
The New Yorker on the Kindle Fire is optimized for its screen size and includes icons for extras such as audio and video. One of the things I’m loving about my Kindle Fire is the New Yorker app, and I’ve also found that when it came to the New Yorker app my newfound experience sideloading apps from my Droid to my Fire came in handy in reverse.

I’ve been a long-time reader of The New Yorker and a subscriber for several years now. My uncle Bill always gave me his copies of The New Yorker after he was done with them, and after he died, I got my own subscription to the print edition. It’s a great magazine, useful, of course, for planning trips to New York City, but also containing great reporting and great fiction writing. Part of what makes a subscription so valuable is that in addition to getting current issues you also get online access to every issue they’ve ever published. The web version of their archived magazines is clunky, but you can view every page just as it was printed. [I dislike their unwieldly Flash-based archives website so much that when I access it, I do so only to print the pages of an issue to PDF, and then I just view the magazine at my leisure in Adobe Acrobat Reader.]

If you’ve read The New Yorker in the last year or so, you’ve probably noticed them touting their wonderful iPad edition.
Sorry, the Android version of the New Yorker app, isn’t available on the Droid (or is it?—see below) And then earlier this year the Intertubes were abuzz with the news that Condé Nast was releasing an Android version of their New Yorker app. That made me excited because I had a Droid, but alas, as The New Yorker’s apps page points out, their tablet editions are available only on iPad, Galaxy Tab and now on Kindle Fire. So no New Yorker app for me, until now.

I didn’t buy a Kindle Fire only for the New Yorker app, but it was one of the reasons, and the app is quite nice. At no extra cost over your print subscription you get all the article in the print edition but formatted nicely for the Fire’s screen. You can swipe left and right to switch between articles, and in an article you can swipe down and up to advance in an article or go back to previous parts of the article. And a bonus of the New Yorker app is that you often come across icons for special features—for example, when viewing a poem, you can often listen to its author read it aloud.

The staff of The New Yorker seems to be taking special care to lay out the magazine especially for its tablet editions. In addition to the articles being specially formatted for viewing on tablets so too are the ads. I noticed because I happened to have the hard copy of the November 21 edition beside me as I started exploring the Kindle Fire version, and I saw that the ads from that issue for Banana Republic and Buick were similar but different in print versus on the Fire. Having a somewhat different Buick ad made sense because in the print edition it was a two-page spread, which would have to be adjusted for a tablet, but even though the Banana Republic ad would have fit with some cropping, the tablet version, although it features the same models, uses a completely different image (click images below to embiggen):

Print edition of the Buick Enclave ad
Kindle Fire edition of the Buick Enclave ad
Print edition of the Banana Republic ad
Kindle Fire edition of the Banana Republic ad

So I learned when I first got my Kindle Fire how to sideload apps onto it (see part 1 and part 2 for more info), and today I thought, hmm, Condé Nast doesn’t want me to use their New Yorker app on my Droid 3, do they? Well, let’s just see about that, shall we? And it turns out that the same process to back up an app (such as Twitter) on my Droid and then install it on my Fire worked for backing up the New Yorker app on my Fire and then installing it on my Droid. When I fired up the New Yorker app on my Droid, it did require me to install Adobe Air (that makes sense) and the Amazon Appstore (why does it care about this?).

Installing New Yorker app on my Droid 3
The New Yorker app won't run without the Amazon Appstore being installed
New Yorker app running on my Droid 3

I understand why Condé Nast doesn’t really want people running their New Yorker app on smartphones as opposed to tablets. The text is a bit small, although I still found it legible, and the app is a bit slow on my Droid 3 compared to my Kindle Fire, although it was okay. I won’t be doing the majority of my New Yorker reading on my Droid because it’s so much nicer to read it on my Fire’s larger screen, but it’s nice to have options. Although I often have my Fire with me, I don’t always carry it, but I always have my Droid with me no matter where I am.

Why I love my

(part 2) or How Amazon drives me a bit mad

So if you read yesterday’s post, you know that I like my Kindle Fire because of the freedom I have with it. That freedom comes in part because Amazon didn’t batten down the hatches so tightly on the Fire that adventurous geeks couldn’t sideload apps on it or root it. It does drive me a bit mad that Amazon decided to go all Apple-like, trying to tell Kindle Fire users what was best for us in terms of which apps we should and shouldn’t have access to (No Gmail app, Amazon? Really?! No Twitter app?), but if you can follow instructions you can get around Amazon’s strange paternalism and put what you want on the Fire.

If you buy a smartphone or a tablet running the Android operating system (made by Google), it wouldn’t be unreasonable for you to expect that it would include the app for Gmail (also made by Google). But if you’ve read about the Kindle Fire, you know that while it runs a version of Android, the version of Android that it runs has been customized by Amazon for various reasons. One of Amazon’s customizations is that the Kindle Fire does not come with a Gmail app. Just a sucky generic email app through which you can download email from Gmail, but without all the cool features (like labels and archiving) that Gmail users have come to expect. Why, Amazon, why? (Greg Knieriemen of The Register was so dismayed by this that he wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos about it.)

Luckily since I followed the steps to root my Kindle Fire (see yesterday’s post), today I was prepared to jump the hurdles placed in front of me by Amazon and get the Google apps that should come with any Android device installed on my Kindle Fire. XDA-Developers.com has step-by-step instructions for installing the
Fuck you, Jeff Bezos—I’ve got the Gmail app on my Kindle Fire despite you! GoogleServicesFramework.apk, the regular Android Market, and the standard Google apps that you want including Gmail and Google Books and Google Maps (and even Google+ — does anyone actually use Google+?).

Another app, in addition to the standard Google ones, that I wanted on my Kindle Fire but that Amazon doesn’t seem to want me to have is the Twitter app. Even though you can find the official Twitter app for Android
Amazon claims that the Twitter app is incompatible with the Kindle Fire for free in the Amazon Appstore for Android, if you try to install it that way on your Fire, you’ll be greeted with Amazon’s fuck you message that says, “Twitter is incompatible with your device.” Oh, really, Amazon?

The side loading of apps that I wrote about yesterday came in handy in proving Amazon wrong about this.

First, I went to ASTRO File Manager on my Droid 3 and backed up the Twitter app that runs perfectly fine there:

Then the Samba Filesharing that I’d installed on my Droid 3 and on my Kindle Fire made it very simple to copy the backed up Twitter app APK from my Droid 3 to my Kindle Fire:

Then a tap on the Twitter APK on my Fire let me install it, and presto! I had the official Twitter app for Android on my Kindle Fire, despite Amazon’s having claimed that it wasn’t compatible. What does Amazon have against Twitter? Why not just let us install the app, since it clearly does work?

But that’s the beauty of the Kindle Fire. Even though it may seem that Amazon wants to be Apple and dictate to its customers what we may put on the hardware we’ve purchased, Amazon used Android as the basis of its Kindle Fire, and thus all the techie types who buy Kindle Fires can make them do what we want. We can even replace Amazon’s stupid bookshelf UI with an alternate launcher (but that will be another blog post).

Why I love my

(part 1)

I have joined the Amazon Kindle Fire craze. I’m not opposed to Apple iPads—if you have an iPad and like it, good for you—but I’ve had my Kindle Fire for a few days now and am loving it. One reason I like it is because of the freedom I have with it.

I like that right out of the box the Kindle Fire can be connected to a PC via a USB cable and is then accessible as a external drive. No fancy iTunes needed—just drag and drop stuff.

I also like that you can sideload apps on the Kindle Fire fairly easily. Yes, by not including out of the box access to the Android Market, Amazon did take a page from the Apple playbook and tried to limit what can be installed to those apps that are found in Amazon’s Appstore for Android, but without even rooting your Kindle Fire, you can sideload apps on it (i.e., install applications not found in the Amazon Appstore). Laptop Mag has a decent page that explains how to sideload apps. PC Mag has a page that explains not only sideloading but how to make backups of apps from your Android phone to install on your Kindle Fire.

Dolphin Browser is one app that I sideloaded. Amazon Silk, the new browser by Amazon pre-installed on the Kindle Fire that uses split architecture to let Amazon’s servers pre-process web pages, is nice enough, but I’m used to Dolphin on my Droid 3 and wanted the option to use it too on my Fire.

It’s also cool that the Kindle Fire has been rooted so quickly. I’ve already rooted mine, using these instructions. Your mom won’t be rooting her Kindle Fire (unless she’s a techie), but she doesn’t really need to, but I wanted to because some apps I run on my Droid 3 require root access.

One app that I really like that I have running on my Droid 3 and now also on my Kindle Fire is Samba Filesharing. (If you didn’t already know, Samba is the Windows network file system.) With Samba on my phone and now on my Kindle they just appear as servers on my LAN. I don’t have to use a cable to copy photos off my phone to my PC or to copy videos to my Kindle Fire. So much easier!

ShootMe, which I also have running on both my Droid 3 and my Kindle Fire, is another app I like. It lets you make a screenshot by shaking your phone (or Fire). I wouldn’t have been able to do the screenshot of my Fire with Samba running on it that you see above if I couldn’t do screen shots on it. (The developer of ShootMe pulled the ADK from Amazon Market, but you can find it if you google for it.)

RockPlayer Lite is another app that I sideloaded right away (this did not require rooting). I have some AVI videos that the video player pre-installed on the Kindle Fire could not handle, but with RockPlayer Lite I can watch any video I have.

I have not yet gone through the steps it will take to get Google’s apps such as Gmail installed on my Kindle Fire. The email client pre-installed on the Kindle Fire sucks, and I do miss Gmail. But I love that it won’t be all that difficult for me to configure my Kindle Fire exactly the way I want it, and not the way that Amazon thinks I should want it. I’ll be blogging more about my Kindle Fire as I make more changes to it.

You may have heard of bookmarklets, bookmarks that don’t bring up webpages for you but rather run some javascript (hence another name for them, javascriptlets) for you on whatever page you’re already on.

For example, one that I use often, made up of this javascript:

A bookmarklet I really like:

by

Of course to do what it does takes more than a single line of javascript, and if you go to the Readability page to get the bookmarklet for yourself, you’ll see that what the bookmarklet does is call a bunch of javascript stored in a file on arc90’s server that then strips the existing styles from whatever webpage you’re on and applies a new CSS stylesheet also stored on arc90’s server.

Also, if you try Readability for yourself on the page I used for my example above, you won’t get the exact same results; instead you’ll see icons for three tools at the upper left of the page and the Readability and arc90 logos at the bottom of the page. I didn’t like seeing the icons or the logos, nor did I like running a bookmarklet that goes to arc90.com every time I want to make a page Readable, so I adapted their stylesheet and javascript for my own use, something you too can do if you have any javascript and CSS experience and if you have access to your own web server. Otherwise, you can make do with arc90’s originals and will still find reading things online a lot more pleasant.

Okay, today I'll take a break from Microsoft bashing but stick with the topic of new technology I'm slightly behind the curve on, in this case EVDO, Kyocera and D-Link.

Actually EVDO I wasn't behind the curve on but was a fairly early adopter. EVDO, if you don't know, is (fairly) high speed wireless broadband offered by cellphone companies like Verizon and Sprint. The idea of having Internet access wherever you go (and not just where there's WiFi) excites geeks. Back when I was rich and worked in corporate America (and before there was WiFi even) I paid a high monthly fee ($75/month, if I remember) to a company called OmniSky for CDPD service on my iPaq Pocket PC. That service was only 19.2Kbps and unreliable, not really worth the money, but my EVDO is about 412Kbps down/128Kbps up (EVDO Rev. A promises to be even faster), fairly reliable, and a money saver: $60/month (less than OmniSky), and I don't pay for DSL or a cable modem, nor do I have to pay for WiFi when I travel (a double bonus because many hotels that do charge for WiFi nevertheless don't have good access in all their rooms).

If you've visited my classes page lately, you'll have noticed that I'm taking Hebrew this quarter.

Although it's not part of the class, I've spent some time figuring out how to set up my computer to type Hebrew. It wasn't all that difficult — you have to go to the Languages tab on the Regional and Language Options control panel, check "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages," and then click "Details" where you can "Add" the "Hebrew" keyboard layout. You need your Windows XP installation CD. After a reboot, you'll see a new Language taskbar, and you'll be all set to type in Hebrew.

Before you reboot, though, you might want to activate some keyboard shortcuts to make switching between languages easier. You do that on "Key Settings" in the dialog box where you add keyboard layouts. Check "Switch input languages" and then choose whether you want to use CTRL + SHIFT or Left ALT + SHIFT to switch languages. If you don't do this when you first set up language support, or if you want to change this afterwards, you have to reboot for the changes to take effect (ugh @ Microsoft).

Click on
this every
time I want
to switch
languages?
No!

So I brought up language settings again, switched the hot key to Left ALT + SHIFT, rebooted, and was happier. But not completely happy. I don't think ALT + SHIFT is part of any other shortcut I use, but I still would find myself suddenly with Hebrew as the active keyboard layout when I hadn't intended for it to be. Not a horrible big deal. Look down at the language bar, confirm that yes, HE is showing, press Left ALT + SHIFT, see it switch to EN, backspace over stuff and start typing again.

But today, after a couple weeks of it, I figured I couldn't be the only person annoyed by it. One solution is simply to turn the hotkey off for switching languages, but that would mean having to use the mouse when I did want to type in Hebrew, not something I find acceptable (I really, really like being able to use the keyboard to do things). Luckily, after some determined Googling, I found that in fact Mike Matsnev (a student or a professor in the Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics department at Moscow State University) was so annoyed by all this that he wrote a utility that lets you set up any key to be the hotkey to toggle languages. I went one more time to language settings, turned off the hotkey, rebooted and then typed "lswitch 19", and presto, my Pause key, a key I never use for anything ever and won't accidentally hit, switches me between English and Hebrew. Beautiful!

Of course just because it's easy to switch between English and Hebrew keyboard layouts doesn't mean that it's easy to type in Hebrew. Besides the fact that I'm learning a whole new alphabet (alefbet)...

Sorry, while I'm on the subject of the Hebrew alefbet, if you're not familiar with it, you may have heard that it has only 22 letters. The English alphabet has 26 letters, you might say to yourself, how hard can it be to learn the Hebrew alefbet? Well whoever says Hebrew has only 22 letters is misleading you. First there are 5 letters that have a different form if they fall at the end of a word. Then there are 3 letters whose pronunciation changes if a dot is added to them. That makes 30 letters by my count. But these are just consonants. Modern Hebrew omits vowels. But if you're learning Hebrew, in particular Biblical Hebrew, which includes vowels, you have to learn additional "letters" or "points" (Niquid) for the vowels. There are over 16 combinations of those points for vowels. So by my count the alefbet has over 46 letters.

But that's not all. Just as some letters in English appear differently when printed as opposed to when written in cursive handwriting, so does Hebrew. To my mind (just now grappling with learning Hebrew), the differences between Hebrew printing and handwriting affect just about every letter, so that's almost double what I have to learn.

... I have to learn the Israeli keyboard layout, which is designed for the convenience of native speakers and typers of Hebrew, not for American English speakers. (For example, to type a Bet including its Dagesh dot, I have to type [with caps lock on] SHIFT-C SHIFT-=.) There are some helpful sites that have charts of how to type Hebrew, but I didn't find any that had everything. Plus I found a font for Hebrew handwriting, Shalom, which lets me prepare cheat sheets, etc., as they'd appear if I'd written them out. The deal with Shalom, however, is that it's mapped differently than the Israeli keyboard, with letters mapped to keys based on how they sound (to type a Daled in Shalom you press "d" instead of the "s" you'd press in the Israeli layout).

View the whole chart...

• Select a menu, any menu: On Windows, sure there are special accelerator keys defined for certain items, just as on Mac, but you can get to any item even if it doesn't have an accelerator key by pressing <ALT> and the appropriate keys. On Mac, there are a lot of accelerator keys defined (a lot! — who can remember them all?), but if there's a function that doesn't have an accelerator key defined, you're shit out of luck.
• Jumping to the next word, the previous word, the beginning of the line, the end of the line: On Windows <CTRL> plus left or right arrow keys will jump forward or back a word and with <SHIFT> down will select text; <HOME> and <END> will do the same to the beginning and end of lines. Office programs such as Word on MacOS work similarly (thanks Microsoft!), but try to do the same in say, the address bar or a form field in Safari, and you get nothing.
• Speaking of form fields, on Firefox and IE in Windows, you can <TAB> to the next field, including radio buttons and checkboxes, which you can then select with the <SPACE> bar. On Macintosh even in Firefox, you can <TAB> between text input fields, but it skips blindly past checkboxes, which you can't check without a mouse.
• Apple can't claim to be too good to copy from Microsoft since they did implement <COMMAND>-<TAB> to switch between running programs, but their implementation of that Windows 3.1 feature has broken the ability to insert a tab character within a table cell in Microsoft Word. You do this with <CTRL>-<TAB> on Windows, but on MacOS neither <COMMAND>-<TAB> nor <CTRL>-<TAB> works (yes, Mac keyboards have <CTRL> keys, something the original Mac's clunky keyboard lacked, but MacOS doesn't make much use of them). I ended up copying and pasting a tab from another cell.
• MacOS does have the latest version of Firefox, a great browser whose fame comes in large part from its tabbed browsing experience, but if you want to switch easily between tabs in Firefox on MacOS, don't try <CTRL>- or even <COMMAND>-<PAGEUP> or <PAGEDN>. The blame for this falls not on Apple but on the Firefox developers, but the great shortcut chosen to switch tabs is <RIGHT COMMAND> plus right or left arrow. That's the <RIGHT COMMAND> button only, not the <LEFT COMMAND> button — what contortionist thought of that? Clearly a Mac user who prefers the mouse.
• Googling around I did hear tell of a MacOS feature called Univeral Access, through which I'm supposed to be able to press <CTRL>-<F2> to access menus, like <ALT> in Windows (so I guess Apple wasn't too proud to copy from Microsoft yet again), but I couldn't get it to work on the iMac at school, even after pressing <CTRL>-<F1> to turn it on and even after digging up the Universal Access control panel. Accessing menus with the keyboard is something so special that it can't be turned on by default, co-existing with mouse access?

My blog now uses permanent URLs

What kind of URLs did it use before?

What's a permanent URL?

RewriteRule ^blog/(200[2-9])/([0-1][0-9])(/)?$ /blog/$1-$2 [NC,R]
RewriteRule ^blog/(200[2-9])-([0-1][0-9])(/)?$ /blog/index.php [NC]

Why does it matter?