Month: July 2008

Categories
firefox On the web

Spank my monkey

Found out that apparently flickr doesn’t allow you to save their pictures. They replace the path of pictures with this odd spaceball.gif picture. Luckily greasemonkey ones again comes to the rescue, and this time in a very nice way. Apparently some images on flickr can only be view in large for pro users or something like that, but this script adds back the all sizes and makes it easy to snatch high quality images from flickr 🙂

From this new found interest in greasemonkey, I decided to look for what other nice scripts there exists. If you use gmail you’ll like the change all mailto:// links to open in gmail and replace http with https (works for gmail, google calendar and a bunch of other sites).

Categories
Programming ruby

Beautiful code = proportionality, integrity and clarity?

Writing beautiful code is such an elusive subject. I’ve never been able to put into words what makes code great, it’s sort of these things that just is. I even read a book on it once, and while it had some quite tricks and hacks along the way, I never really thought I got closer to a definition of what beautiful code is.

I saw this talk about beautiful code yesterday. The talk is from a ruby conference and starts a little slow, but around 18 minutes in, it gets really interested. His main thesis of the talk is that beautiful code can be defined using only three measuring sticks: proportional – 200 lines to read a simple file (Hello C)?, integrity – does it actually do what it’s supposed to do and in a reasonable fashion (speed, memory usage etc.) and finally clarity – can you grok the code again quickly 2 years after you wrote it in the first place (Hello Perl). Each one of these must be balanced.

Can beautiful code really be captured by three such simple rules? Rules that individually seems to be far from beautiful, instead much more functional in nature.

Categories
On the web

I <3 del.icio.us

Sometimes a new technology comes along and completely changes the way you go about doing a set of things. del.icio.us has done that with information research for me. At first, I thought it was just stupid. I mean, it’s just a glorified online bookmark system. Who cares, really? But as I started using it I became addicted. Bookmarks in browsers just don’t work. It is not just that its a web app, it’s the folksonomy aspect of it that really puts it over the top.

Categories
firefox On the web

How to remove Experts Exchange from your google results

If you, like me, is sick and tired of sites that lure innocent googlers into registering on their site just to view content that is should be freely available. The worst of those sites is probably experts exchange with their stupid blurring technique. Luckily I’m not the only one sick and tired of this. The following greasemonkey script silently removes all links to experts-exchange.com from google results.