Category: OnlineLife Net Webapps

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english OnlineLife Net Webapps Software

chromium icon hal edition…

Chromium Icon Hal Edition
Chromium Icon Hal Edition

Recently I’ve switched from Firefox to Chrome/Chromium (still don’t know which one to use). So far the browser is great. One of the reasons i switched was the HTML5 video capabilities of Chrome. Now i don’t have to indirectly support Flash any more. Another reason is the speed. It’s much faster than Firefox 3. Chrome still gives me the impression that Google is looking over ones shoulder. I know this is the case for every browser you use nowadays. Google Analytics, Google Docs, Gmail, Google font directory, etc. lets Google get a really good estimate of what we are doing. So it really does not matter what you use. you may as well use Chrome.

however the icons of chrome and chromium were a little too gumball machine like. so i grabed the chromium icon and recolored it. As reminder of the all knowing power behind it: HAL style 🙂

here you can grab the Mac Os X icon. have fun.

EDIT btw: the icon is under the same license as the original chromium icon.

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english OnlineLife Net Webapps video

[video] data visualization…

i’ve been following David McCandless’ rss feed on informationisbeautiful.net for some time now. he regularly has amazing visualizations about a lot of different topics that become much clearer when seen in his graphs. he was giving a talk at TED which i recommend watching. i especially like the one minute and ten seconds part at 6:20.

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OnlineLife Net Webapps Software video

[video] Willkommen bei Facebook…

viel besser kann man es nicht auf den punkt bringen. ich kann kaum offene alternativen, die man selbst hosten kann, erwarten.

alexander lehmann hat schon ein paar so geniale filmchen gemacht. ich fand auch karls posting zu dem thema sehr lesenswert.

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english OnlineLife Net Webapps Software

quick fix for version problems with firefox addons…

i love firefox addons for certain quick tasks. they get things done so much faster and there are some really nice ones that i use regularly.

one of them was Exif Viewer, until it stopped working with version 3.6.* of firefox. 😐

since there was no update since July 2009 i didn’t expect a quick fix. so i did it myself.
here is what you do to make the addon work again (i already had it installed when i upgraded firefox to 3.6).

go to (the SOME_HEX_ID part is usually different for everone)

1
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[SOME_HEX_ID].default/extensions/exif_viewer@mozilla.doslash.org/

and edit the file

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install.rdf

in that directory.
change:

1
2
3
4
 [...]
em:minVersion="1.5"
em:maxVersion="<strong>3.5.*</strong>" /&gt; &lt;!-- Firefox -->
[...]

to

1
2
3
4
 [...]
em:minVersion="1.5"
em:maxVersion="<strong>3.9.*</strong>" /&gt; &lt;!-- Firefox -->
[...]

or a version number that suits you. after a firefox restart the exif viewer addon should work again.

i give no guarantee this will work on any version of firefox. after all there is a reason they put a version number in there 😉

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english OnlineLife Net Webapps Software

Twitter vs. RSS…

I’m following about 50 people on twitter. some of them post regularly some of them from time to time.
what annoyed me was when people twittered automatically via some service about something they do VERY often (e.g. geocaching: “i found the cache XYZ”).
and now i did it myself 🙁
i posted automated messages on twitter.
 no actually in my case i let twitterfeed check for my flickr photo stream RSS feed for new images, that the service could then publish as twitter messages. although i explicitly set twitterfeed to only check for photos that had ‘tweet’ as tag to avoid spamming the daily image annoyed some.
thanks to mika for reminding me 🙂 i apologize for spamming you (my followers) with automated messages. i will try to avoid this in the future 😉

here why i think this is bogus:

  1. twitter is a platform where spontaneous messages, thoughts, findings, fun facts and any type of content can be published, without the overhead of formulating a big chunk of text e.g. a blog. twitter is great to publish tiny little bits of content that are greatly incoherent. people love twitter because others remind them of stuff they did not think of and pull them a little aside from the usual dirt tracks they use in their every day online life. do not post the same stuff over and over again.
  2. there are already platforms out there that offer a way to publish content in different ways such as video or photo sites: youtube, flickr, picasa, vimeo, etc. these platforms offer a great variety of services that users can access mostly for free. this includes distributing their content and making it accessible to others via different ways and formats: standard HTML (normal web surfing), RSS and atom feeds and maybe an API. use it!
  3. one should not abuse a service for something it’s not! this is definitely the case when you use twitter to divert a RSS feed as i did. let the original service serve its RSS feed. this way people have the choice to follow your contributions on another platform if they wish. post a message on twitter that you offer a RSS feed about a specific topic and people can get it from there.

to sum it up: follow my daily image here if you like. subscribe to my blog via RSS or Atom feed. i even have a youtube feed.

let me know what you think, post in the comments or send a trackback.

if you don’t know what RSS is read on on wikipedia about RSS and Atom feeds.

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english OnlineLife Net Webapps

loops and stretching with urlshorteners…

there has been some discussion (via @mstrohm) on the security of urlshorteners and i have been thinking about this the past days.

putting the problem of the bottle neck aside it leaves us with the possibility of spamming and/or loops and missing transparency when looking at urlshortening services. let’s say the advantage of shortening urls has to compensate one of the disadvantages; let’s take the bottle neck. it’s clear that one cannot shorten a url and expect the link to be independent or maybe distributed like DNS at the same time.

still there are 3 problems which have to be solved:

spamming: there are concepts which we know from mail services that can narrow this issue down. is.gd uses the surbl blacklisting service to check for spams. with a little fine tuning this is manageable.

loops: similar to the spamming problem, there must be a blocklist of sites that are not accepted for shortening. qr.cx already implements a list of about 200 services that are blocked from shortening. is.gd is saying so too, although they accepted qr.cx links and others at the time of writing. this is really easy to implement and should be done by every shortening service.

transparency: the problem here is that users cannot see where they are going when clicking a shortlink. the solution is again very easy to implement. tinyurl implements it by putting ‘preview’ as subdomain http://preview.tinyurl.com/m5l96j and qr.cx by putting ‘/get’ behind the shortlink: http://qr.cx/1r8/get.

curious as i am i decided

Continue reading “loops and stretching with urlshorteners…”
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OnlineLife Net Webapps

qr.cx url shortener…

mein kleiner url shortener aus diesem beitrag hat sich jetzt zu einem richtig grossen kleinen url shortener ausgewachsen.
qr_cx
qr.cx. zur zeit bietet er urls mit einer länge von 16 zeichen.
weiters habe ich eine kleine api aufgesetzt die euch helfen soll dieses service in andere applikationen zu integrieren. gerne nehme ich anregungnen und wünsche unter shorty [AT] qr [dot] cx entgegen.
als spezielles gimmick liefert das service QR-codes zu jedem gekürzten link.

have fun 😉