Verbose business cards

Learned from Kellypuffs that linkedin users can get 50 free MOO cards. Enter Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle (and a bit of javascript).

A simple way to manage Firefox privileges

If you are familiar with the 'enhanced abilities' Firefox security prompt, and you ever clicked on the 'Remember this decision' check box

you may want to check http://firefoxprivileges.tiddlyspot.com.

When this prompt appears as a result of loading a file from your hard drive, you may not be aware of the exact meaning of the 'Remember this decision' check box. While you probably mean "I trust this file and I don't want you to annoy me anymore", Firefox understands "I trust every html file loaded from the hard drive". This broad trust is not a good idea from the security point of view.

This tool allows to easily cancel that effects of "remember this", and tell Firefox that you only trust some specific files (per-file permissions). Before hacking it, I used to have to mess with the user.js file, much less convenient.

The tool is implemented as a TiddlyWiki plugin. If you are not familiar with TiddlyWikis (super cool wikis in a single file), this is a good chance to get to know them.

Edit:
Some strings to make this post googleable for the right people:
UniversalXPConnect UniversalBrowserRead UniversalBrowserWrite UniversalFileRead CapabilityPreferencesAccess UniversalPreferencesRead UniversalPreferencesWrite
netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege signed.applets.codebase_principal_support

Calendaris!

El Compact Calendar de David Seah és ben mono, i sembla molt pràctic; és un excel per imprimir. Hi ha adaptacions, amb els dilluns on toquen i les festes d'aqui, en Excel i en Open Office.

Aqui altres calendaris ben macos, però amb aquestes extranyes semanes de cap de setmana partit.

Tanta il·lusió que em fan els calendaris, i tan nerviós que em posen.

Jazz in the hood

Martin Espinach, coffee machine and lunch mate, gave yesterday a very nice internal talk about how his previous project used bugzilla and Mylyn to help them plan, assign and track team tasks. Although they were initially excited about Mylyn's task-focused UI, none of the team members ended up using it; they did love Mylyn's ability to get notifications from bugzilla. It looked like a neat solution.

When his very detailed talk was almost done, he told us that, for their recently started new project, they are using IBM Rational Jazz. I felt like killing him, but I then I would have missed the chance to complain about his talk during every afternoon coffee in the next weeks.

And Jazz? So far, they are loving it. I'll have to ask him to demo it to our team.

cmd.exe goodies

Googling to remember again the key that allows a command history window to be opened in cmd.exe (F7, in case you care), I found the misstitled Stupid Command Prompt Tricks post. Nice. Things that I did not know and that I'm going to use often:

• dropping a file/dir on a console writes its full path in it
• console settings (window/buffer size, fonts, quickedit...) are tied to the title, not to the shortcut that is used to launch them.
  cmd /c start "MyCmd" cmd /k ...
  will launch a command prompt that will use the settings associated to MyCmd. If there are none, just go to 'Properties' and create them
  

SendTo Clipboard coolness (TiddlyWiki links to your files)

The SendTo folder is a simple and powerful tool to customize Windows Explorer to simplify some recurring tasks. If you often want to link to files in your PC from your TiddlyWikis, you'll like this hack. It creates two new items in the "Send To" menu:

• clipboard - file url: Copies to the clipboard the file: url of the file or folder that was showing the "Send To" menu
• clipboard - new tiddler javascript url: Copies to the clipboard a javascript: url that, when pasted into the address bar of a Firefox tab showing a TiddlyWiki, will create a tiddler with the contents of the file that was showing the "Send To" menu
  

You can jump and just download and run the thing, a small .hta file, or take less than three minutes watching it in action in one of the lamest screencasts ever:

SendTo Clipboard Screencast from Xavier Vergés and Vimeo

Using it

• Just download the .hta file and open it. No, wait! Never open .hta files unless you trust its author or you have taken a look at the code.
• Provided that you trust me or that you have checked the code, you can now open it. Maybe a double click will be enough (your Windows associates .hta files to mshta.exe, a version of IE with high security privileges in your machine). Maybe you need to use the command line and type mshta path2twlink.hta.
• Follow the simple steps described in the .hta file, and you can start using your new shinny Send To menu items.
• You are expected to edit the file to customize what gets copied into the clipboard. It should be easy. You may get ideas to push the sendto+clipboard+javascript urls concept further; adding them to the tool should not be too hard.
• You are also expected to do some dancing, since this is DanceLikeMattHardingWare.
  

Lessons learned while hacking

• I initially wanted to use just a .js file. Getting access to the clipboard from a .js file is hard, so I went for an .hta. It turned out to be a good thing, because it ended up providing a way to avoid to the users the trouble of creating the shortcuts by hand and to me the trouble of documenting the recipe.
• The problem of using an .hta file is that I found no way to keep it invisible, that it has an unusual way to receive its params, and that I had to warn you about its dangerousness.
• I think that I've spent more time recording the lousy screencast and comparing video hosting services that coding. The number of times that I rerecorded the #@%! thing will remain undisclosed; I have my pride. Regarding the hosting services, after reading about them, I posted the video to google, blip.tv and vimeo.
  I still have no winner, but google's video quality was awfull, so I had to drop it despite its super cool feature of letting you link to a specific point of the video. Update: looks like the winner is http://viddler.com: links, comments and tags on specific points of the video, plus the best player of all (in full screen mode, showing the original size, the quality was just perfect): http://www.viddler.com/explore/xdexavier/videos/1
  

Bookmarking things within gmail

Restoring a Firefox session accidentally told me that, when you open messages/chats in a new window, you get an url that you can bookmark/copy to another file. Nice.

Exploring things a bit further showed that gmail uses frames, so you can use the url of the inner frame to bookmark contacts, labels, filters, searches or any other thing that does not have the "New Window" link. In Firefox, use the popup menu, and "This Frame > Open frame in new tab".

Very handy for those of us that run our lifes in tiddlywikis.

Of course, Google is perfectly free to change these misterious urls not likely intended for public consumption...

Tiddlywiki YourSearch bookmarklet

Want to use the terrific YourSearch plugin even when visiting a TiddlyWiki that does not have it installed?
A bookmarklet will make it simple.

Google Video/YouTube->.mp3

Update: Does not work any more.
http://convert.viloader.net