Guess and Check » Technology

Large Hadron Rap

Tom — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:52:57 +0000

A rap about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Written and performed by alpinekat, aka Katherine McAlpine. Beats by Will Barras.

Best rap ever.

Wacky NASA guys

Tom — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:22:12 +0000

Space Shuttle Endeavour launched earlier this morning, they’re going to assemble a giant robot up there.

It was brought to my attention that “those wacky NASA guys” are hilarious, case in point the informational text on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft seen in this image.

Via Ben.

Automated Parking Garages

Tom — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:42:15 +0000

So I saw a Wired news article about an automated parking garage in Hoboken this morning. This thing sounded really cool, so I did a little research and found out that while the whole idea of an automated parking garage is cool, there are far cooler ones than the Hoboken Garage. The earliest mention I could find was this Slate article that mentions there were only two in the United States at the time of publication in April of 2004.

Volkswagen’s new storage facility and their transparent factory in Dresden are very high in cool-factor.

I’d totally park my car in an automated garage over a traditional garage any day.

Google Finance Gain/Loss Percent Greasemonkey Script

Tom — Wed, 03 May 2006 22:50:11 +0000

One of the things that always bothered me about Google Finance’s portfolio view is that it doesn’t have a percent value for the amount your portfolio has gained or lost. Yahoo! Finance’s portfolio view includes this number, and I suppose I got used to checking it there.

So what do we do nowadays when a website doesn’t have something that we want? That’s right, we write a Greasemonkey script for it. I give you:

googlefinancegainlosspercent.user.js

Enjoy, and let me know if there’s anything I can improve or fix.

Early Dapper

Tom — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 04:24:20 +0000

I decided to live on the edge (not yet the Edge) and go ahead and upgrade a few of my machines to Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake Release while it’s still in development.

Everything went smoothly, and I keep discovering new things in Gnome 2.14 that just make the experience even better.

Firefox middle click won’t close tab in Linux

Tom — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 03:06:42 +0000

For some reason, when I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 in Ubuntu, a middle click no longer closed tabs.

To fix it, I set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false in about:config.

I’m a Wiki-Fiddler

Tom — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:05:51 +0000

Fun quote from The Register’s recent “Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems” article:

Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that’s almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, … passionate, you haven’t met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it’s a religious crusade.

Via Slashdot.

Updating Ubuntu a Breeze

Tom — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 03:42:50 +0000

Yesterday I upgraded my laptop’s Ubuntu install from version 5.04 “The Hoary Hedgehog” to version 5.10 “The Breezy Badger” Preview Release.

Now the few little things that I couldn’t manage to get working in the past few months no matter how hard I tried are magically working properly.

Right now I can’t even think of any reason for me to bother to boot into Windows anymore.

W3C Validator’s new look

Tom — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 16:17:08 +0000

The W3C Markup Validation Service has a new look.

And apparently, it’s not just a new look:

2005-08-08 â€” 0.7.0 Release:
Stable release including all the fixes and improvements made in consecutive beta versions 0.7.0 Beta #2 and 0.7.0 Beta #1.

It was a little disconcerting to get a green bar when I was so used to the old familiar blue bar. But hey, it looks great.

What is Greasemonkey?

Tom — Tue, 10 May 2005 21:43:17 +0000

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner can’t be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. You can even automatically retrieve data from other sites to make two sites more interconnected. #

Pretty much, a Firefox user would install the Greasemonkey extension which would then interface with separately installed “user scripts” that the user could either write himself or find in the repository.

The possibilities are mind-boggling for what an end user could do to improve their browsing experience.

You can find out more by checking out Mark Pilgrim’s GPL licenced book on programming with Greasemonkey, Dive Into Greasemonkey.