February 2004

Drupal Bookmarklet for Safari

February 9, 2004

I finally got around to putting together a Drupal bookmarklet for Safari. Replace www.example.com with your server and make sure the rest of the path is correct and it should work for you.

javascript:t=window.getSelection();void(window.open ('http://www.example.com/node/add/blog?edit[title]= '+escape(document.title)+'&edit[body]='+escape(t)+'', '_blank','width=710,height=500,status=yes,resizable=yes, scrollbars=yes'));

Drag this to your menu bar and edit the website and it should work.

What to tell Microsoft

February 9, 2004

Dave Winer asks for suggestions of features that he should bring up with the Microsoft IE team that would make IE better for blogging. My request is more one for Dave, something I'm pretty sure he would do anyway, but please publish the list of suggestions. There are lots of other great browsers out there and I'm sure there are folks who will pick up on the tips and help make all kinds of blogging interfaces (and not just web browsers) better.

MySQL Count() Problem on OS X

February 8, 2004

I've been running Drupal on OS X server and it works well. However I've had a problem that has been reported on the Drupal site as well.
SELECT mode, COUNT(*) FROM users GROUP BY mode; causes problems. The count returned is way out of bounds.
It returns a count of 864691128455135232. While a
SELECT COUNT(uid) FROM users ;
returns 12 - the correct number. The problem is that there are some places (in the import module for example) where there is a COUNT() instead of a COUNT(DISTINCT). For example in the import module the following change will resolve the issue. Change: Read more about MySQL Count() Problem on OS X

You don't exist, go away

February 7, 2004

IBM Developerworks has a good article about error checking and how programmers and designers need to be careful to ensure that the checks they make are checking for not only probable answers or situations but also possible. Imagine a web form asking for the name of the President of the US when you were born. The form asks for the middle name, but denies input when you enter "S" as President Truman's middle name.

There is comment that the author gives companies their own customer comment line when they ask for a phone number. I've been known to use the same technique for email addresses. Read more about You don't exist, go away

Search engines vs. directories

February 7, 2004

With the increasing power and reach of search engines there is an ongoing debate about the benefits of search engines and human edited directories. The big search engines are locked in battles with web developers who are in search of the all-powerful first place in search results. If one does a Google search on "horse AIM icons" for example the first several results that are returned are all advertising for various drugs.

So here's an idea. Why doesn't google implement an API interface that could allow web users to indicate that the page results are deceptive. By requiring people to sign up for an API Id and limiting the number of sites that can be reported in a day they could help reduce malicious use of the service. Perhaps there is ultimately a human that reviews the top offenders and does a blacklist of sorts to remove them from the top of the results. Read more about Search engines vs. directories

Stanford Center for Internet and Society

February 6, 2004

Stanford's Center for Internet and Society brought their student blogs on line just before Thanksgiving last year. They are still growing and have not yet become as regularly published as the blogs at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It is encouraging to see so many sites for people to discuss law coming to the net. There are those at schools, and sites like Groklaw. I wonder if West Law will start indexing blogs? Is law a better subject for academic blogging than other possibilities? Does the course of "open peer review" (i.e. Read more about Stanford Center for Internet and Society

iFile

February 6, 2004

Last month Tidbits published an interview with Bruce Horn on the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh. In the article Bruce talks about what he is doing today and discusses iFile. The article is important because it talks about transforming the way in which file systems store information. Not in the sense of how bytes are organized, although that is important as well, but in the sense of how users interact with the filesystem.

Life Balance

February 6, 2004

This week's Tidbits has a review of Life Balance. It looks interesting. Jeff Porten's review does, however, point out a common failing of technology. He says "Making this software work for you requires you to figure out its philosophy, and then integrate your own way of doing things into that structure."

I've seen this more times than I can count. At the office instead of producing high quality information on a consistent basis the team of very talented people often get wrapped up in and consumed by using the technology. Instead of being information workers the team gets sucked into being technology workers trying to figure out how to fit the information into the philosophy of the technology and then how to get the desired results back. Read more about Life Balance