• MSN Search
• Google
• Search.com
• Myspace Search
• My Excite
• Yahoo! Search
• Yahoo! home page
• Go.com
• IMDB.com
• AltaVista

This is interesting in a number of ways.

First, Google is not first on the list. I hope that this right there helps to show people that Google’s algorithms for page ranking don’t really include buying positions. If they did, wouldn’t they just always put Google.com first?

It’s interesting to see that of the top 3 search engines, Yahoo! is ‘ranked’ the lowest in the result listing. However, it seems to have 2 different pages vying for position.

I don’t regard the high ranking of Search.com all that intriguing considering that the URL contains the term. Also ’search’ shows up 7 times in the web page title and snippet shown by Google.

There are some surprises on this list. In retrospect, seeing Myspace.com search up there isn’t too strange but it was a shock at first glance. IMDB.com’s place on the list is another testament to the place of authority it has attained.

The remaining URLs are all search engines that I wasn’t even sure if they still existed. Go.com was a failed experiment from many years ago. Perhaps it remains up so high because it’s a top-level domain for most ABC/Disney traffic. Excite.com must be one of the last remaining late-90’s style web portals. And finally we come to AltaVista, which harkens back to the days of Lycos, HotBot, and other “first-generation” search engines. My guess is that AltaVista is still there for the only reason I ever go there: translation.
ome-like nature

I do this solely in my work email account. Like many people, I am subscribed to many email lists within the company that send mail that I don’t need to respond to immediately, if at all. I belong to lists about IT, general facility information, and the like. What I do is use the under-used Labels function of Thunderbird, in conjunction with a special filter.

First, I like to edit the color for the pre-defined label “Later” to make it a little more muted. Do this by going into Tools > Options > Display > Labels. I like to use the light grey third from the top on the far left. Click the image to see a larger screenshot.

Now, any mail messages that are labeled “Later” will appear in the light color you can see behind the dialog box in the screenshot.

The next step is to create an email filter that labels messages that aren’t for you. In my case, there are certain mailing lists that are very important to me and I should treat them as directly to me. Therefore I create the mail filter to label messages that aren’t to me or to any of these special lists. To do this, go to Tools > Message Filters and hit New…. The following screenshot shows a sample of what my filter would look like. Click the image to see a larger screenshot.

Combining this approach with keeping the Inbox relatively clear can do wonders. Not only do you actually see a smaller amount of messages, but the ones aren’t that really needing attention don’t grab it as much.

Hope someone enjoys and can use this!

Next up was to learn a little procmail magic. I had a little fun getting the DreamHost end of the it all working because they seem to prefer that you use the web interface. After messing around and looking up many online resources and samples, I came up with this script.

:0c
* ! ^X-Loop: sms_procmail
| (formail -X "Subject:" -X "From:" 
-I "X-Loop: sms_procmail" -X "X-Loop:" 
-I "To: 8005551212@mmode.com" -X "To:" ; 
echo "--Body Removed--" ) 
| /usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t

I’ll try to describe it line by line. The first line is just procmail syntax to start a ‘recipe’, a mail processing directive, and do the recipe on a message copy. The next line (”* ! ^X-Loop…”) says to ignore any email that has the header ‘X-Loop: sms_procmail’. This is to prevent email loops caused by repeatedly sending the message around and around. This shouldn’t happen, but everyone says it’s good practice. The lines that start with a pipe (’|') are actions to perform. The ‘formail’ command does work on the incoming mail. The ‘-X’ options tell which email headers to include (extract) from the original. The ‘-I’ options insert headers, overwriting previous headers. The whole formail command brings just the subject and adds the correct To: field and the loop-preventing field. The echo line is partially to tell me that there will be no body added. However, I found that I had to put something there otherwise the subject line wouldn’t show up in the resulting SMS message. The final line is actually send the message using sendmail.

I sent a few testing emails and it works great! The lag between sending the message from GMail and a notification on my phone is generally under 20 seconds. Not too bad, considering all the loops that are being leapt through.

My next idea is to try to trim the body and possibly send the actual body if it’s less than 100 characters. I’m not sure how interesting that would be though. How many emails really only have 100 characters in the body? I don’t think that many. But then again, how many people really need to have an immediate SMS update of an email? I don’t think that many. I actually don’t even think I’m one of them .

I decided to go down to a Cingular store with my phone (now completely dead) and my charger. After a few minutes the salesperson got to me. I explained the problem and he wanted to try one of their chargers. They don’t sell the V551 there, but they do sell the V557. The charger for the V557 worked perfectly. I also noticed that there was an audible snap when the charger clicked in. That wasn’t there when I used my normal charger. I asked the salesperson about it and let me compare the two chargers’ connectors. There was a slight difference in the design, evidently enough to make the new one work.

Luckily I got the phone less than one year ago and I was able to swap my old charger with the new one for no extra charge. I got home and was able to charge the phone with no problems. The new charger would have been $20 if I was to purchase it and I think it probably would have been worth it. I hope that this helps someone else with a similar problem.

One of the first things I did when I got the machine was to install RealVNC so I could get to some of the other computers. After about the fourth or fifth crash I noticed that it was always crashing while I was using VNC. Eventually I realized that I could make it crash within a minute or so if I opened VNC and moved the mouse around really fast. My next test was to run the machine for awhile without a network connection, which it handled just fine.

I downloaded and installed Azureus to test running a lot of data through the USB adapter. Again the computer crashed within a few minutes of starting some torrent downloads. To remove the next variable I connected the laptop to the router with a cable and ran Azureus again. This time it ran well for hours. I also tried the Linksys WGA11B wireless bridge again with nothing but success.

I did a few Google searches to find out if anyone else had these kinds of problems. I did find a few people that mentioned crashes while using P2P applications. There were also some Amazon customer reviews that were talking about some problems. I did check there before I bought it but there was a pretty good mix of good and bad. The reviews talked about the adapter overheating and losing connection all the time. One guy even said that he couldn’t maintain a connection unless there was a fan running pointing at it all the time! They were all complaining about losing connections, but nothing about crashing. I almost wonder if I should post a review.

I haven’t finished with this yet. Next up is to check if I have the most recent driver and firmware for the adapter. If it still fails though, I may undertake the project to install the internal wireless antenna and Mini-PCI card. That still looks like it may be a fun time.

I hope that this will help someone else and would love to hear if it does.

I have had a few stability problems. I thought that it could’ve been the off-brand memory, but I don’t think so. It has blue-screened on me twice! Neither time did I manage to write down the relevant information because it reboot so fast. I don’t know if it’s a “feature” of XP so that it comes back fast, or if I was just typing at the time that it crashed. Either way, I need to try to figure that out.

The fact that this one is widescreen is kind of interesting. I do with the resolution was little bigger. Right now it’s 1280×800 and my old laptop was 1600×1200, so it is a change to get used to. It’s working out fine for now.

The other big change is that I’m trying to be nicer to this laptop’s battery. I know some people will say that it doesn’t matter because you’ll have to buy a new battery anyway in a short amount of time. But my older laptop had a battery that would last for maybe five minutes off of AC power. With this one I’m taking the battery out of the machine when it’s on AC power, which is the most frequent use. That should extend the battery life significantly by preventing it from going through recharge/discharge cycles.

An interesting sidenote, Dell didn’t give me any sort of operating system or driver reinstall disks. Good thing I still have some XP install CDs because you always have to reinstall when you buy a new machine. There was so much junk on the machine that it’s always better to start fresh.

Not only are quick searches useful for searching the web for specific information, but they can be useful for interacting with other web sites. I use del.icio.us for online bookmarks with tagging. I found a set of quick searches tag allow me to search for things I’ve tagged but also to actually tag the current page I’m looking at. I find this much faster and more useful than bookmarklets or the del.icio.us extension for Firefox because I can use all from the keyboard.

The list below is the current list of quick searches that I use. To add one as a quick search, you’ll have to right-click and bookmark the link. Afterwards you have to go into the Bookmark Manager, find the bookmark, right-click to get properties, and enter the keyword. There are no restrictions in Firefox as to where quick search bookmarks must be located, but for my convenience I have a separate folder called “Quick Searches” that I have all of them in.

Searches

• g: Standard Google search. Most people have this one.
• imdb: Lookup on IMDB for movies, actors, etc.
• dict: Lookup the definition for a word. I also use it to get to the thesaurus which is available on the top of that page.
• q: Lookup a stock quote on Yahoo! Finance.
• acr: Lookup what an acronym could be from AcronymFinder.
• wiki: Lookup an article on Wikipedia.
• jd: Lookup the JavaDocs for a class from javadocs.org. I find this one to be very useful because it looks in both the J2SE and J2EE JavaDocs. Also you don’t need to provide the class package, simply type “jd Vector“. You can type the full class and package name to get to a specific class.
• amazon: Search for something on Amazon.

Interact with del.icio.us - both of these will need USERNAME replaced with your del.icio.us username.

• d: Search for bookmarks I’ve tagged with something. This was slightly modified from a version I found earlier (sorry, can’t locate original author to credit). I did make a modification that allows you to search for “d tag1 tag2” that will find bookmarks tagged with both tags.
• tag: Tag the current page with the given tags. While browsing a page, hit CTRL-L then type “tag interesting” and hit ENTER. It will tag whatever the current page is with “interesting” for you under del.icio.us. This was slightly modified from a version I found earlier (again, sorry that I can’t locate original author to credit). I did make a modification that allows you to tag pages with multiple tags. For instance, “tag tag1 tag2” will tag the current page with both tags.

Interact with Google Maps

• dirs: Get directions from your address to another address. You will have to edit this bookmark to put your address in as the starting address. Then you search for “dirs 456 fake street, springfield, ky” to get directions from your place to that address.
• map: Search for the given string on Google Maps. For instance, “map subway near san francisco, ca“.

I find the monthly view to be most useful for me, especially because it shows details of the events at the bottom of the page while keeping the month view pretty clean. However there are a lot of unneeded controls that waste space. I created a new PHP iCalendar template and a top-level script to use the new template. PHP iCalendar template files are in ${CALENDAR_ROOT}/templates/default and have the extension ‘tpl’. I based mine off of month_desktop.tpl by trimming out some of the unneeded sections.

To install this, download both files linked below. Copy the month_desktop.tpl into the template directory listed above. Copy the desktop_calendar.phps file into ${CALENDAR_ROOT} and rename to desktop_calendar.php so it will be interpreted. You should test it by going to the normal calendar path, but use desktop_calendar.php instead of the default URL (as in http://machine/calendar/desktop_calendar.php).

• month_desktop.tpl
• desktop_calendar.phps

To add it to the desktop, go to the Display Properties (either from the Control Panel or by right-clicking on the desktop). Next click on ‘Customize Desktop’ and hit the ‘Web’ tab (on Windows XP). Add a new web page by using the URL to your desktop_calendar.php file.

I resized mine so that the entire monthly view is available without scrolling and then event details (full name and time) are below and can be seen by scrolling. A handy trick to show/hide the calendar is to use the WINDOWS-D shortcut. It acts like a toggle, showing the desktop then restoring your windows. I find it better than WINDOWS-M, which only minimizes all windows. Here are some screenshots:

• Monthly calendar
• Scrolling to Event Details

Update 1/29/2006: Another way, without using Active Desktop.

Based on a comment from itsoweezy, I added a way to do this without always having the calendar on the desktop. There is an additional HTML file to download and place in the same directory as desktop_calendar.php. When you load desktop_launch.html, click on the link to open a new browser window with minimal controls on it showing the desktop calendar page. With an application that allows you to minimize to the tray, the window can be always accessible and out of the way.

• desktop_launch.html (right-click to save HTML file)

I tried using TrayIt, and it worked out very well. I set the TrayIt option so a single click will bring the minimized window out of the tray and it was very usable. Launch the calendar page and control-click on the minimize button to put it in the tray and a single-click will bring it back to the front. Thanks itsoweezy!

• ColorZilla - Useful for web developers and anyone who wants check on colors in web pages. It puts a small color window in the status bar that you can access the “eyedropper” and color information.
• DictionarySearch - After selecting a word in a web page, you can right-click to search an online dictionary for the word. It opens up the definition in a new tab in the current window. Uses The Free Dictionary for definitions.
• Download Statusbar - Shows downloads in a little section like a statusbar or task bar at the bottom of the browser. You can see how the downloads are progressing and access the downloads directly from there. The bar disappears when there’s nothing there. I think it’s much better than a separate Downloads window.
• Forecastfox - Most people know of this one. It shows a customizable view of the weather forecast for your area. It can show small radar maps and popups for severe weather alerts. The only thing I don’t like about this one is that is uses Accuweather.com for the weather information.
• Greasemonkey - This is one of the most powerful extensions I’ve seen. It lets you install scripts that can be run on individual sites. There are tons of scripts available here.
• Image Zoom - Adds an entry to the context menu of images to give the ability to zoom in and out the image. It doesn’t sound all that useful but I use it all the time.
• Linky - Gives extra power for handling links on webpages. Lets you open links in tabs or windows.
• Resizeable Textarea - Lets you resize any textarea on webpages. Very useful for many sites that give very smal ll textareas.
• SpellBound - Provides spell checking capabilities inside any form text area, accessible from the right-click context menu. It’s very useful if you do a lot of blog posting.
• User Agent Switcher - Lets you change what the browser tells web servers that it is. These are a dime a dozen. It’s useful for some sites that require IE or an older Netscape, but still work with Firefox. There are less sites like that around anymore, but it can still come in handy.
• Url Link - You can select a URL, even URLs broken by a newline, and right click to open them in a new tab or window. This saves a little bit of time, rather than copy/pasting the URL. It’s more useful when a URL spans a couple lines.
• Web Developer - Adds a menu and a toolbar with a ton of very useful features for web developers. You can determine structure of the HTML document, validate URLs, fetch information about the page, etc. It’s an incredibly useful tool.

That’s the list of extensions that I currently use. Feel free to post any other useful ones below. I’ll try to update this list as I find new and better ones.