About two months ago I got a new Apple Macbook Pro. I love it, it’s rad, I love using it etc. But something that’s been bugging me no end is that I don’t know the shortcut key to jump to the address bar (where you type http://…etc) in Firefox. In Windows you just do Alt-D and you’re there, I think that works in Linux as well, but on OS X it’s no go.

Well, I’ve just found out the shortcut keys for not only the address bar, but the search bar as well (and also in Thunderbird!):

jump into the search bar in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird

Cmd-K (Mac), Ctrl-K (Windows)

jump into the address bar in Mozilla Firefox

Cmd-L (Mac), Ctrl-L (Windows)

Mozilla.org has more juicy keyboard shortcuts.

This is super good news because now I can use basically the same key combo on Windows and on OS X. My life just gets better and better, friends.

Something else that’s kinda annoying about Thunderbird is that it’s not GMail. I love GMail and all my mail goes through it so that:

1. tons of spam gets filtered out by GMail’s awesome spam filtering
2. I can access a copy of all of my mail from anywhere on the internet (except work who block GMail…argh)

But not only does my mail all go through GMail, I download it all via POP3 to my Thunderbird mail client. This is because:

1. I then have a backup copy of all my email on my own computer and am not just trusting Google to never go broke/lose my mail/start charging me to access it/something else unforeseen
2. I can access my email when I’m offline, eg on a plane or a train or whatever

But as I was saying, Thunderbird is not GMail and despite being a proper rich, fat-client desktop application, it doesn’t have the great shortcut keys that make GMail so quick to navigate and move messages around. Plus it doesn’t have that whole “archive and forget, then search later” philosophy, it has the old-school “carefully choose category-based folders for your messages and then take forever to find them later” philosophy, which is so 1998 and lame

But what I’m getting at is that now thanks to GMailUI Thunderbird works like GMail, adding j,k and other shortcut keys to navigate messages as well as a really cool “Expression” search mode that lets you search just like you do in GMail.

As I said, my life just gets better and better.

After you install some Windows Updates, Windows earnestly insists that you have to restart your computer as a matter of urgency. Apparently urgently enough to popup a dialog box that takes the focus from any other windows you may have open and sets the default focus to “Restart Now” so that if you press Enter (like say, if you’re typing and the dialog pops up and you press Enter for a new line), your computer restarts.

30sec left.

So yeah I could press Restart Later now, but then this would just annoy me some other time.

Edit:

In all the excitement (the floor in our office was being vacuumed and I had to move my chair with only 1 minute to go!) I forgot to attach the screenshot:

A mysterious, anonymous friend, co-worker or miscellaneous associate generously extended me the warmth of sharing with me a Larvatus Prodeo blog post about an upcoming British TV event dubbed “Wank Week”, involving hundreds of Poms gathering in a hall in London to wack off apparently to aid some charity.

They can do whatever they need to so that they feel justified about rubbing one out, I say. Who am I to judge?

To me, the most disturbing issue in this whole matter is that “Kim” of Larvatus Prodeo (what is that anyway?) managed to start her blog post about a large number of people masturbating and a lot of people having a “debate” without writing “mass debate”. Truly a sad story, Kim has really let herself and the Australian blogging community down here by not taking this most blindingly obvious of opportunities to indulge in high-school humour.

This emoticon’s story is also quite interesting because it went through several stages of evolution, as seen in Fig. 1 above.

Here you can see the emoticon graduated from its first inception as a static emoticon which MSN displays very small and boring in the chat window. Clearly, this is not the effect we were after with this emoticon so more work was needed. In the unlikely case that you want to download the boring version, it is provided for you as a normal static GIF file below. It does look the same enlarged size as the other emoticons but don’t be fooled — MSN will shrink it once you convert it to an emoticon.

The next version was the first animated one but it also failed to impress us with its predictable, even keeled and slow wagging side to side. If this emoticon was a dog, you wouldn’t assume that it was particularly happy to see you, would you? It is more of a dog that is begging for a biscuit at the side of the table but doesn’t really believe it will get a biscuit, yet it can’t leave the table lest it misses out. Thus this emoticon failed in its task of conveying the “Gold!” emotion successfully as well.

Finally, we struck gold (hah!) with the next iteration. This version was named “Goldy” because of either a mistyped filename or for some equally inane reason. Nevertheless what it lacks in name it makes up for in spirit, because you can’t deny what this emoticon conveys — wacky comedy gold! And that’s what it represents. So next time your friend says something hilarious you don’t need to just say “oh that was gold my friend, yes indeed you certainly have a sense of humour don’t you”…you can just slap this emoticon into his window and show your gratitude for his comic genius.

1. you can appear offline and still talk to people (this was a feature of ICQ about 8 years ago I think), which is cool if you’re trying to get something done but you still want to be able to talk to one or two people on your list.
2. you can click a single button on the conversation window to hide the display pictures, and it remembers this when you open a new window! Finally this has been added, the big waste of display picture space was annoying to me before; you really don’t want to look at a person’s display picture the entire time you speak to them and it just makes the conversation window even bigger.

I’ve still patched my version with APatch as well, because it does a bunch of other useful stuff like removing ads and useless crap I don’t want to use. You can download my APatch settings if you want; I’ve done all the hard work of deciding what’s necessary and what’s not and of course the way I use software is the best so you’ll definitely want to use my settings.

You should be able to turn off StickyKeys by pressing Shift for 8 seconds or more, then a dialog will pop up and you can press Cancel and you will be cured of your StickyKeys woes. If, however you have somehow turned on FilterKeys, it’s a little bit more tricky than that.

To turn off FilterKeys, hold down shift, press F7, then push they other shift key three times. Thanks to Fred Taylor who kindly left a comment and his phone number (!) on David Weinberger’s blog.

Good luck and be kind to your keyboard.

But tonight I’ve found something to remedy this disappointment being endured the world over. It’s called Beep and it’s written by the crazy kids at Nullsoft, the creators of Winamp, and it makes a low pulsating hum with bleeps and bloops galore whenever text gets added to the screen. It’s pure gold and makes you feel like your computer skills are top shelf.

Go get it now before boredom destroys your soul.

But what if you didn’t just leave your account signed in accidentally, but actually managed to remotely log somebody in to a Google account you’ve created using just a crafted URL that you send to them on the pretext of showing them some cool/interesting/funny web page? That would be more interesting, wouldn’t it? (Say yes).

If you did this and that somebody didn’t realise, you would be able to gradually log that person’s search history and learn their searching habits, possibly leading to greater insights about that person. Sound good?

OK well since you’re so keen, here’s how to do it. So that this is all a bit more friendly and relaxed (I love relaxed), we’re going to name our person whose life we want to invade by tracking their search history “Bob”. Here’s what you do:

1. Create a Google account. Well you can use an existing account, but you do run the risk of losing access to it if Bob finds out the password to it, which they may. You can create the account using any e-mail address, although it will most likely end up being visible to Bob so you will want to use something like a fresh Gmail account I would imagine. Make sure you leave ticked the checkbox labelled “Enable Personalized Search”, or this whole thing is pointless.
2. Find a cool/fun/interesting/funny web page that you want to Bob and others whose search habits you would like to learn. The funny link I’ve provided there is hilarious, sure, but also it’s on Google’s Video site. This is potentially good because the several Google URLs that will soon flash across the address bar may raise less suspicion.
   UPDATE: You can only use Google addresses as the target URL eg the “funny” Google Video example just above. BUT you could also use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to redirect to other sites (http://www.google.com/search?q=feeling+lucky&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky).
3. URLEncode the URL of the web page that’s so awesome you just have to show Bob. Yep, just paste the URL into the Plain textbox there, press the URLEncode button and copy the resulting URL from the Encoded textbox. Voila, you have the encoded URL in your grubby little clipboard.
4. Here’s the (slightly) tricky bit. You need to construct for yourself a URL that does the job of:
   1. Logging Bob into your new Google account so that their searches will be added to your new account’s Personalized Search History
   2. Redirecting Bob to the page with the super cool content on it that you’re purportedly showing him.

   Your URL will be like this:

   https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?Email=[emailAddress]&Passwd=[password]&continue=[URL]

   Take out the square brackets, and replace the fields in square brackets like this:

   1. emailAddress: The email address for the new Google account you’re using. If it’s a GMail account, you don’t need the @ or anything after it, but for any other mail account you do need the @ and the domain part (examples: mynewgmailaccount, anotheraccount@freemail.com).
   2. Password: The password for the Google account you’re using.
   3. URL: Your URLEncoded funny/interesting/awesome web page for Bob to see.
5. OK, so you’ve plugged all that info into the URL and you have a big-ass string with lots of crazy % symbols and numbers etc. What you have to do now is make it presentable so Bob doesn’t get confused or suspicious or bewildered. We do that with TinyURL, a cool service that will redirect a URL like http://tinyurl.com/6mpq to a big, stupid URL like the monstrosity you have just created.
6. All you have to do now is give Bob your new TinyURL, and let the web weave its mystical magic. You might want to test your TinyURL first, or the big monstrosity URL or both. Just paste the URL into your browser’s address bar and you should be delivered right to the stupid/crazy/wacky site you are showing Bob. Then go back to Google Homepage where you should be logged in as the account you created. If not, check the email address and password from step 4 were correct.

So that’s it! All you need to know. Some ideas for using this are putting the TinyURL in one of those stupid email forwards where everyone puts in their name and “needs” so that Google tells them what they need — this way you get the name of everyone who’s fallen prey to your evil plan. You could also just send it to people you’re suss on or just joke around with your friends, or your Mum! So much fun to be had.

So what’s got me going on about this?  Today I signed into my Google Personalised Homepage to see what search terms were in my Search History after a friend brought it to my attention.

I have looked at my search history before and it freaked me out a bit to see all the stuff I’d searched for, but today when I went to look, I noticed some searches in there that I definitely hadn’t done. They were…my MOTHER’s searches! Obviously what’s happened is that I have signed in to one of Google’s services on my Mum’s computer and now her searches are being recorded as mine.

How easy would it be to get on your friend’s (or enemy’s!) computer and sign in to the Google personalised homepage as some Google account you have created for the purpose, and then let it track everything that person searches for until the end of time (or until they realise or delete their cookies or get another browser…), you sure could get some useful and/or embarrassing information I bet.

I’d like to do a SecurityFocus kind of investigation into this, I think there could be some privacy issues here — I wonder if there’s a way to send people a link to sign them into a Google account you desire.

Well now I’ve come to my senses, and I realise that it’s for communication, fool! When you work in a team, you need some name to refer to things by. Saying “the USA server” works OK, until you have two servers — then you need to say “the new USA server” or “the USA server with client X on it”. Or a software project like a web service to link two systems, you can call it “the inter-department synchronisation project” but that gets a bit tedious when you’re trying to refer to it several times in a conversation. It’s easier to say “Project Nimrod,” named after the guy who designed the database of the legacy system you’re trying to integrate with, or call a server “Maggot” after the virtual infestation of crufty rubbish that clogs its hard disks.

The important thing is that you have some easy to remember handle to use to share with other people what object or idea you’re talking about. It could be thought of as a level of abstraction, a bit like a variable name in software source code. Actual product names are thought out carefully as a sound, a word or a few words that evoke some idea or thought so that you feel as though the product will do what you want it to and improve your life. All a codename has to do is be a handle you can pass around to refer to something. Unlike in software, it doesn’t need to be something that helps you remember what it’s referring to (eg totalShareholderDebt), it just has to be memorable (eg Project Enron).
So next time something new comes around, I’m not gonna feel bad about giving it some stupid but memorable name. Here’s my code name tips:

1. it doesn’t matter what the name is, but it’s better if it’s something with a sense of humour
2. using a stupid name is a lot easier than trying to think of how to describe whatever it is you’re referring to every time
3. it’s fun, and without fun, life sucks

Here ends today’s lesson.