Wizard's Blog

Google Web History Updater extension icon

I’ve created my first extension for Google Chrome – Google Web History Updater!

One of my favorite features of the Google Toolbar is that it records your browsing history in Google Web History.  If you don’t like that feature or are paranoid about Google keeping information about you then you might as well stop reading now.

The benefits of Google Web History are that Google uses your history to personalize your search results, and that you can track down a site you visited while on another computer.

Unfortunately Google Toolbar isn’t available in Chrome.  The reasons for this are fairly clear (Chrome doesn’t do toolbars at all because of its minimalist aesthetic) but I still missed my Google Web History.

Several people entered bug reports for adding Toolbar’s features to the browser, but I got tired of waiting and decided to try and make an extension that would update Web History.  I quickly hit a dead end and contacted the Chrome developers to ask them for help.  They said there was no published API for updating Web History and suggested I reverse engineer the way Toolbar does it.  I couldn’t work out how to do it, and the developers said that the Toolbar team were thinking about making an official extension to do it, so I waited some more.

Then I read an article that reminded me that some browsers (Opera) have had this problem for a long time, and there was a solution available for them – the UseGoogleWebHistory userscript.  This is a small javascript file that runs whenever a page loads, and sends the URL to Web History.  I could have converted the userscript to an extension pretty easily or even had the conversion done for me automatically using a new feature of Chrome but although the userscript worked, it didn’t work for every URL.  I couldn’t work out what was wrong with it, so I went looking for another solution.

It turns out that sending a URL to Web History is actually done as a side effect of asking Google for the PageRank of the URL.  This means that PageRank extensions like this one actually do exactly what I want, except that they also take up space on the screen.

I ended up just modifying that extension (mostly just removing the UI) so I can’t take much credit, but the majority of the code is lifted from the Toolbar anyway.

In the end I got what I wanted – Chrome updating Web History.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Google Uses the Toolbar Data (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• Google Toolbar Fail; Doesn’t Work On Chrome (techcrunch.com)

Amazon 10th Anniversary Wishlist Sweepstakes

To celebrate their 10th Anniversary, Amazon is holding Wishlist Sweepstakes.

Every week from the start of October until the middle of December they’re giving away prizes.  To enter the sweepstakes all you have to do is add something to your wishlist and then click on the link to enter the sweepstakes for that week.

Here are the prizes for each week:

• Week 3 (Oct. 19-25): Meet the Jonas Brothers in London Wish List — A trip for two to London to hear the lads in concert and then meet them in person
• Week 4 (Oct. 26-Nov. 1): Kindle Love Wish List — 10, count ‘em, 10 Kindles
• Week 5 (Nov. 2-8): Ultimate Backyard Theater Wish List — $15,000 for a backyard makeover, plus all the equipment needed to start the show
• Week 6 (Nov. 9-15): Yellowstone Photo Expedition with Canon Wish List — A trip for two to Yellowstone National Park, and a private lesson with a professional photographer
• Week 7 (Nov. 16-22): The Magic of Disney Wish List — A trip for four to explore the wonders of Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla., plus a $2,000 Disney gift card
• Week 8 (Nov. 23-29): High-Def Heaven Wish List — A 55-inch HDTV, a Blu-ray home theater, and a Wii
• Week 9 (Nov. 30-Dec. 6): Glamorous Life Wish List — A stunning set of 1½-carat diamond stud earrings
• Week 10 (Dec. 7-12): This one is under wraps until it launches!

Certainly some of the prizes aren’t interesting to me – Disney?  No.  Jonas Brothers?  Hell no.

But HDTV?  Yes.  Kindle, oh yes.

I’ve written before about how much I like the Amazon Wishlist, and as it happens I tend to add something to my wishlist at least once a week, so entering the sweepstakes is easy for me.  Even if it wasn’t for the sweepstakes I’d recommend to anyone to use the Amazon Universal Wishlist – it’s very useful.

Vicon Revue

In the past I’ve posted¹ about my search for a wearable camera and how Microsoft’s Sensecam project looked promising but wasn’t commercially available.

Finally it appears there is good news – a British company named Vicon has licensed the technology to release a version of the SenseCam, and it will be available in the next few months.  The bad news is that it’ll cost £500 (about $820).

I’m starting to get the impression that I’m not the target audience for the SenseCam – it needs to be about 10x cheaper before I could consider buying one.  I think the price could come down if they made it a bit less smart – it currently has accelerometers, light sensors and heat detection that it uses in an attempt to only record interesting images so that it doesn’t fill up its storage too fast.  Storage is cheap – if they got rid of all the cleverness I think it would be a lot more affordable.

Then again I guess life-blogging isn’t exactly a huge market – the subset of all people who are geeks, the subset of geeks that are less paranoid, the subset of them that are interested in auto-instrumenting etc.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft’s life-blogging SenseCam becomes the ViconRevue, coming to a lanyard near you in 2010 (engadget.com)
• Tools for lifestreaming become available (myventurepad.com)
• Zee.: New Camera Promises to Capture Every Minute of Your Life (thenextweb.com)

1. I would wear one of these every day, Finally some movement on the SenseCam front and Wearable cameras [↩]

Heat Wave book cover

I just finished reading Heat Wave by Richard Castle – a tie-in novel for the TV show Castle (I wrote about the show previously).

There are some TV tie-in novels that I’ve enjoyed – for Burn Notice¹, Psych² and Monk³, however they all had a certain pulpiness in common.  Not just because they immediately came out in paperback (which I’ve always taken as a sign of the publisher putting in less effort because they don’t expect to make a lot of money from the book), but because they were a bit hobbled by their connection to the TV series.  The writers can’t kill off or otherwise make any major changes to the characters, their back story or setting – something writers of original novels can do at will.

Heat Wave is different – it’s meta-fiction.  In the TV series Richard Castle is a writer, and has written a book called Heat Wave - this book is written as if it is that book, by him.  For a brief while we get to live inside the world of the TV series because we can read the book that they’re reading.  The illusion is maintained flawlessly – from the dedication and afterword to the picture on the back cover.

An advantage Heat Wave has over most (if not all) other tie-in novels is that because it’s supposed to have been written by the TV character instead of about the TV character, the actual author can change things without causing any problems.  Any differences to the TV series are put down to the meta-author changing the names to protect the innocent or improving on (what is to him) real life by making it juicier.

A difference between the TV series and the book is that Castle is the main character of the series, but Nikki Heat is the main character of the book.  The main difference this makes is that although a good portion of the series is dedicated to Castle’s personal life, that aspect is almost completely missing from the book.  Once again the meta nature of the book smooths this over – Castle’s mother gets a cameo in the book, and if you’ve seen the TV series you can easily imagine her haranguing her son to be written in.  His daughter is completely missing, but as a protective father you can imagine Richard Castle wanting to spare her any embarrassment by leaving her out.

The book is further tied back into the TV series by the actual cover being used in an episode and the actual page number of a sex scene in the book (p105) mentioned in the episode.

Additional meta is provided by Nathan Fillion showing up to book stores and signing the books as Richard Castle.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ABC to Publish Novel Tie-in For Hit Show Castle (readersread.com)
• Heat Wave (annetteholland.com)

1. The Fix and The End Game [↩]
2. A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read and Mind Over Magic [↩]
3. Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii and Mr. Monk and The Blue Flu [↩]

Our DirecTV satellite reception has been getting worse for a while, and now it’s at the point where our DVR can’t record any programs without wild glitches.

We were finally able to convince DirecTV that the poor reception wasn’t caused by the summer storms we’ve been having, and they sent out a technician.  Unfortunately, the problem seems to be that there’s a tree between the satellite and our dish, and over the years the tree has grown to a point where the line of sight is too obscured.  Apparently there’s nothing they can do – wherever they would reposition the dish there’s a tree.  We also can’t do anything drastic like cut the tree down, because we live in an apartment complex and it’s not our tree.

So we cancelled our DirecTV account and signed up with DirecPath.  Apparently DirecPath just resells DirecTV to apartment complexes like ours – there’s a big dish somewhere in the complex and all of the apartments are serviced from it via the built-in cabling.  Needless to say, there are no trees in front of this dish.

We also took the opportunity to upgrade to HD – we bought an HD TV immediately after signing up for SD DirecTV and it’s been annoying me for three years.

This is all fine except that DirecPath aren’t installing the receiver until next week, the mid-season finale of Burn Notice is tonight and the season premiers of Psych and Monk are tomorrow – my three favorite programs.

I have created my first Wikipedia article – Zemanta.

I’ve been using Zemanta since March 2008, and I was surprised that it didn’t have a Wikipedia article.

I’ve been planning on creating an article for Zemanta for a long time, but Wikipedia is pretty intimidating.  There are a lot of rules about what you can write about and how you write it – if you do it wrong up they might unilaterally delete your article.  Added to that is the fact that wikis use a unique kind of meta-data that I needed to learn, and I just ended up putting it off week after week.

In the end what worked was telling my wife to nag me to get it done.  I guess that goes to show a negative can be turned into a positive  Considering how easy it turned out to be, I feel foolish having put it off at all.

As you can see, the article is pretty bare at the moment because I was concentrating on just providing referenced facts without bias – it can always be fleshed out (by me or anyone with relevant knowledge) later.

Wikipedia have obviously put a lot of work into providing FAQ’s, tutorials and help sections for beginners like me, but I’d say they still have a long way to go.  I spent the vast majority of the time just trying to find answers to simple questions.

While writing the article I found several things that should have Wikipedia articles but don’t, for example Common Tag, LinkWithin and Outbrain.  If my first article is well received (or at least not immediately deleted) I might write some more.

EDIT: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that Wikipedia is less welcoming to new contributors – After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wikipedia engulfed in row over Rorschach tests (telegraph.co.uk)
• Wikipedia in a Physical Form (prathambooks.org)

Battlefield 1943 was released on Xbox Live Arcade yesterday (it comes out on the PlayStation Network today) and it puts a lot of other XBLA games to shame.

I’m getting a lot of hits from searches like “failed to connect to ea online”, so here’s something to help those people:

EA underestimated the demand for Battlefield 1943, so there aren’t enough servers.  They’re adding more, so just be patient and either keep trying to connect or wait a day or two.  In the meantime you can follow their twitter feed or go to their forums for news.

Continue reading ‘Battlefield 1943’ »

GeekChart logo

I recently read a Lifehacker article about Geek Chart and decided to check it out.  Basically Geek Chart gives you a widget that shows the social media sites where you share things.

Here’s my Geek Chart:

Ghosttie’s Geek Chart

Currently they support Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Last.fm, with support for Facebook coming soon.

You can also see Geek Charts for famous people like Al Gore and Barack Obama.

Geek Chart seem to be having some problems at the moment – none of my tweets are showing up and there’s a message on the site saying:

GeekChart.com is currently experiencing a high load. Things may be slower than normal. Please be patient.
We’re also hitting the Twitter API limit so Twitter feeds may not update until next hour.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Show Off Your Social Media Prowess with a GeekChart (mashable.com)

Last weekend was my wife’s birthday – I won’t say which one

Our camera is a Kodak EasyShare DX3900.  I have no complaints with it, but the camera does show its age in the fact that it only takes 3.1 megapixel pictures, only has a 2x optical zoom and only has a 1.5inch LCD screen.  For some reason my wife has always disliked this camera and wanted a new one.

Canon Powershot A1000IS

So for her birthday this year I bought her a Canon Powershot A1000IS.  It’s 10 megapixel, has a 4x optical zoom and a 2.5inch LCD screen.

It has all the exposure, white balance etc. settings if you know how to use them, but more conveniently for us it has a very nice automatic mode.

The Powershot has a cool face detect feature to make sure that any faces in the picture are in focus.  It also has an optical image stabilizer which is extremely handy because I tend to move the camera just as I press the shutter.

The camera comes with a 32MB memory card, but as that’s only big enough to store about 12 pictures you’ll really need to buy a bigger one.  We got the Transcend 4GB SDHC Class 6 Flash Memory Card and it’s fine.

I also bought the Canon PSC-85 Deluxe Soft Case to go with the camera because Amazon suggested it, but it turned out to be too big.

The camera comes with two AA batteries, so unless you like spending money on batteries you’ll need something like the Canon CBK4-300 Rechargeable Battery and Charger Kit for PowerShot Cameras.

I hadn’t realized that it could do this when I bought it, but the Powershot can record videos.  At 640×480 the 4GB card can hold about half an hour of video.  It’s very good quality – at least as good as any webcam or digital camcorder.

So far we like the Canon Powershot A1000IS very much.

When I moved from the UK to the US, one of the differences I noticed was in weather reporting.  First of all it’s a lot more accurate, but I think that’s a matter of geography not competence – the UK is on the meeting point of three weather systems, so if the meeting point moves slightly you can go from tropical to arctic, which makes it impossible to predict.  Atlanta is far enough inland that the meteorologists can see the weather systems coming several days out, and so their predictions are very accurate.  In the UK the weather report always says “chance of rain”, “chance of sun” etc. so either you always carry an umbrella or never carry one because the prediction is no help.  In Atlanta, if the weather report says it’s going to rain you’d better bring an umbrella because it is going to rain.

The other thing I noticed about the difference in weather reporting was the hyperbole.  In the UK they just say it might rain, whereas in the US they say DANGER – Severe rain warning! It’s always “DANGER – Severe something warning”, whether that’s rain or clouds or wind or sun.  Every day you’re in danger of the sky trying to kill you.

Now to be fair, sometimes the sky does try to kill you here.  They have tornadoes and floods every year.  Setting aside the question of why you would choose to live in such a precarious environment (I’m also looking at you, California and New Orleans), it’s still not that dangerous every day, the way they’re reporting it.

I do understand why they exaggerate, even if I find it reprehensible.  Information is so freely available now that they can’t really sell it anymore.  Why would you watch a weather report on TV when you could look it up online in a fraction of the time and at your convenience instead of theirs.  The answer is that if they can convince you that your life depends on watching their report then you’re more likely to do it.

The long term consequences of all of this hype is either (like me) you see all news reporting as tainted and ignore the tornado warnings (probably unwise), or you live in a constant state of fear.  I think that’s where most people are, nowadays – they’ve had so much of this kind of exaggeration that they see the world as a terrifying place – terrorists under every rock, pedophiles behind every bush!  Then they overreact, wrap their children in bubble wrap and who knows what problems that will cause a generation down the road.

If this is what news companies do for something as inconsequential as a weather report, imagine how much worse it is with real news.

Which brings us to a very recent news story that I’m sure we will be beaten over the head with for the foreseeable future – swine flu.  Some people in Mexico died of a new strain of the flu, and people who were recently in Mexico brought it to the US, New Zealand and Spain.  The World Health Organization has warned of a possible pandemic.

The overreaction is immediate and extreme – doctors are telling concerned patients to wear masks, countries are planning quarantines, and the news reporting goes into hyperbole overdrive.

Now I don’t deny that a pandemic is possible – I don’t doubt that this is an unusually nasty variant of flu – but look at the facts of the story and it’s not as frightening as it seems.  There are no deaths outside of Mexico and Mexico wouldn’t be on the top of the list when it comes to good nutrition, hygiene or health-care.  If you’re concerned about getting any kind of flu, a doctor will tell you to wear a mask.  Planning quarantines is not the same as implementing them – governments are constantly planning for worst case scenarios and responses to disasters.  The World Health Organisation has warned there could be a pandemic, but it’s their job to warn about things like that – they’re still meeting with medical experts to advise on whether to raise the alert level.

It’s by no means the end of the world, but guess how it’s being reported.  If this all sounds very familiar, look through the news archives for avian flu and West Nile virus.  Remember when they wiped us all out?  No?

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Great Flu Pandemic of 2009? (horsesass.org)
• Mexico flu sparks worldwide fear (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Family quarantined after son contracts swine flu (cnn.com)
• Swine Flu – An Epidemic Waiting To Be Unleashed? (manolith.com)
• Swine flu caused 800 Mexican cases, health minister says (cbc.ca)
• Mexico City on alert over swine flu outbreak (cnn.com)
• Inside the Home of a Swine Flu Victim (abcnews.go.com)
• 2 Swine Flus in Kan., US Total 11; 8 Likely in NY (abcnews.go.com)
• Swine Flu Outbreak Beyond Containment; Deaths Mount in Mexico, California, Texas (ethelthefrog.com)
• Mexico flu ‘a potential pandemic’ (news.bbc.co.uk)
• CDC confirms 7 cases of swine flu (cnn.com)
• Experts await samples in swine flu outbreak (cnn.com)
• Mexican Swine Flu: An Advanced BioWar Event? (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)