Negatendo's Livejournal

Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel have published their Year in the Internet 2006, and I am a contributor.

So get to it and see what myself and a lot of other cool people have thought to be the best of the web this year. Also, don't forget you can contribute by tagging your own favorite links with bestof06 at del.icio.us.

I think we've all been there. That place where you have to manually change about a bazillion database records via a laborious web-interface. I was there today. I had to change the details of roughly 300 Flyspray bug reports and it wasn't going to be fun.

Here's what I had to do to make these database records right:

1. Click "next task" to move to the next record.
   
2. Click "Edit this Task" to edit the record.
   
3. Change the Bug Type drop-down from "Bug" to "Feature Request."
   
4. Change the Bug Status drop-down from "Unassigned" to "Assigned."
   
5. Change the Assigned To drop-down from "Unassigned" to my own name.
   
6. Change the Due in Version drop-down from "Undetermined" to version 1.3.
   
7. Click "Save Details."
   

So, that's 7 clicks per record. Let's see, 7 x 300 records = a recockulus pain in the ass.

By about the fifth record I started pining for some kind of web macro system to make this much easier. After much whining and bitching, I slapped my forehead - there is already one, and it's Greasemonkey, of course.

The script was ready in seconds:

// ==UserScript==
// @name Poopulator
// @namespace http://www.yermom.com
// @description A template for creating new user scripts from
// @include http://www.yermom.com/flyspray/?do=details&id=*&edit=yep
// ==/UserScript==

var type = document.getElementById("tasktype");
type.selectedIndex = 1;
var status = document.getElementById("status");
status.selectedIndex = 2;
var user = document.getElementById("assignedto");
user.selectedIndex = 1;
var version = document.getElementById("dueversion");
version.selectedIndex = 2;

Basically, when the edit page loads, find the dropdowns and set them to their right values.

Not even sure if the wildcard value for id query string variable in the @include area would even work, I gave it a shot. It did, as well as the rest of the script. It worked like a charm, in fact. Now, simply editing a task automgically sets all those dropdowns perfectly. It's not the most polished thing in the world, but it's probably going to save me hours of time.

It made me very happy. So very, very happy. Enough to go tell it to my LiveJournal.

A: So I hear World of Warcraft is broken. Finally you are getting the equivalent of what SOE does on a regular basis.
B: Yea it's pretty messed up right now.
A: How? 'splain to a noob.
B: It's World of Warcraft 2.0 Beta
B: And Blizzard broke the back-button.

"Little Superstar" is now full-fledged web phenom. Check out the blog.


[ via revgeorge, who is way too obsessed with this ]

There is nothing more geekcore than singing about a freaking Warcraft III map. That's all I have to say.

WAIT! No, there is. Singing about an IRC bot.

[ via ]

Netscape was one giant WTF, or as they called it back then, AOL. The company had grown so inept that "WTF" became just another thing we said each day, like "Hey" or "What time is it?" or "We just lost another 5%" or "Marketing wants to replace the Back button with an ad for Bowflex". In fact, as I'm sure you know, the Mozilla movement itself was born when Jim Barksdale looked at the old Netscape 4.x codebase and announced, with tremendous gusto and wondrous pride: WTF?

Read on for an amusing wtf related to pop-up "suppression" with Netscape 7. It's zen.

I'm not sure what it is yet, but it's gonna be SWEET!

Made with the Web2.0 Logo Creator.

By outbreak.

Many More Here.

SMS (Text-Messaging) Shorthand for Geeks Using Server Response Codes [ via ]

TheAOL Retention manual revealed:

Jason Watkins, an AOL Customer Care Consultant quoted in the manual says it best, "Consumers believe everything is a commodity, i.e. where can I buy the service for the least cost. My objective as a salesperson is to prove otherwise."

Click Monkeys.

I know this is old, but I just now saw it and it's definitely interesting: Web 2.0 in Japan.

Hello,

I'm really sorry, but I had to disable
/home/bretto/2xs-empire/flyspray/scripts/. I merely renamed the
directory. It looks like you were running a PHP-based daemon from this
directory, which is not allowed under our Terms of Service.

Thanks!

Terri

AGGGH!

And this, folks, was the last straw between me and Dreamhost.

This "daemon" is a reminder process for the (excellent and free) bug tracking software I use for certain projects.

Of course, do they tell me ahead of time that they are going to completely shut it down? Of course not! Its not like we're in the middle of a developer crunch right now. No, please, shut down our software without warning. No problem!

Oh yea, and how do I disable the daemon? Through the software. The software that you killed, Dreamhost.

Alright, I realize I've just outgrown them. I know. They've got to be limited and secure, I understand that. But it's just not working for me anymore.

Like, for example, I have some database software that searches on bookstores using MySQL's full-text search. Be default, full-text searches have a pretty restrictive set of stopwords. Many of these stopwords, believe it or not, appear in a hell of a lot of names for bookstores.

And, of course, god forbid Dreamhost lets me touch that stop word file.

And there are other things that have just been driving me crazy about them.

And their support has gone really downhill.

Bah. A customer for 6 years. Back in the day Dreamhost was the only hosting company that gave you a shell account. I'm sure that will go away soon too.

Virtual Private Server, here I come.

It's not you Dreamhost, it's me. I've moved on. I'm doing things now. Things that need daemons and altered stopword files. You're still just weblogging stoned on the couch.

Good bye, Dreamhost.

Today I shared my OPML with the world. I feel so dirty.

I think even I am denial that I read 208 feeds, and I've been doing some major pruning lately, although that's not nearly as bad as some people. Yikes!

(BTW, notice the slash in front of the apostrophe in my name. Tsk.)

I came across My Bloop today - a file sharing site that's just itching to get in all sorts of copyright trouble.

It's nothing too special but I did notice something a little funny. If you take a look at a few URLs for various files, you'll notice that they've chosen to obscure their record id scheme (ALWAYS a good idea to obscure your id scheme, by the way) via arrangements of the letters b, l, o and p. Not sure how smart that is, but funny!

PS: It looks like if you want to you can make your own message board out of a file page that hasn't been posted yet. Free private message board!

The Del.icio.us Lesson:

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

As people use Del.icio.us more, and in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later. Tagging isn’t even the primary function of Del.icio.us. Most of the tagging done on Del.icio.us is done secondarily, and for personal use.

The social value of tags on Del.icio.us is only a happy side-effect. Even though most of the ink spilled about Del.icio.us is about the social value, it’s really not the reason why people use it.

Cheers to that!

Sometimes The Daily WTF is too hard to believe. Amazing.

ZeFrank's The Show is awesome.

Update:

Still awesome four hours later.

[ via ]

RSSPECT is kind of a cool idea.

It allows anyone to create RSS feeds for their website by surrounding elements in their HTML code with various RSSPECT-specific markup tags.

I haven't heard of anyone taking this approach to syndicating websites before.

Countless. . . well, for lack of a better term, "old people" always complain to me that they can't stop using AOL because they don't want to lose their AOL.com email and/or go through the rigamarole of changing it.

Well, this morning I read about a solution:

Leslie Walker at the Washington Post clued us in on a little tip: if you leave AOL, you can continue to check your email indefinitely. Essentially, if you want to leave AOL, just go to AIM and sign up for an account. As Leslie explains it: “Messages sent to, say, Leslie!@aol.com can be automatically forwarded to Leslie!@aim.com. People can continue reading those messages even if they no longer subscribe to AOL. All they have to do is activate an AIM Web mail account before leaving.”

It's certainly better than nothing!