Archive for the 'Play' Category

Taking GMail Labs for a spin

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 7 June 2008
in Play
. 0 Comments

Google recently unveiled GMail Labs, experimental features that Google engineers are working on out of their 20%.

The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break. (There’s an escape hatch.)

I’ve been testing a few features, and already I’m loving some of them.

Quick Links lets me add bookmarks to access searches, conversations, and even shortcuts to specific GMail settings.

GMail Labs - Quick Links

Email Addict puts you offline for 15 minutes and renders your GTalk status invisible. Great for those who need to walk away from the computer once in a while. Problem is, reloading the page will undo the lock-out.

GMail Labs - Email Addict

Those are my two picks. I’m not particularly hot about the other features so far: Superstars, Muzzle, “Old Snakey”.

One other feature caught my eye, though: Random Signature. Remember when you used fortune for your random sigs? Well, here’s the Web 2.0 version: the feature allows you to use a feed for the random signature. I plugged in my tumblog feed, and watched as “Compose Mail” generated a random feed entry — surreal and almost Zen-like. ;)

GMail Labs - Random Signature

GMail Labs is supposed to be also available for Google Apps, but like @JeromeGotangco, mine doesn’t seem to have the feature yet.

Minor blog changes

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 25 May 2008
in Play
. 2 Comments

You’ll probably notice the cool Flash tag cloud on the sidebar. That’s courtesy of Roy Tanck’s WP-Cumulus plugin. Thanks, @sofimi for the heads up.

I’m still on K2 (RC3), but I’ve ditched its Sidebar Manager for WP’s widgets. SBM has been causing lots of issues for me lately, but I haven’t had the time to muck around it. (When did I ever have time for anything, anyway? ;)) It’s working fine in my sandbox, though — well, RC5 at least, but I’m not that keen on porting my tweaks yet to that release.

I haven’t been posting here lately. Like a few other bloggers I know, Twitter (and FriendFeed) has been the choice for posting “lifestream” tidbits. But, heck, I don’t even use Twitter that much now (prolly, the IT sec audit at work has something to do with it, heh).

Experiments with the eee

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 5 May 2008
in Play
. 3 Comments

It’s been a while since I last handled the eee.

I haven’t gotten around to changing the default Xandros OS to either Ubunty or Fedora. Frankly, the OS works just fine for me. And as long as I can get a command-line and an internet connection, I’m a happy camper.

But it’s been an unusually quiet weekend so I decided to focus a bit more on this cute little monster.

First off, an upgrade. It was a simple matter of doing a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. The bad side is, since the OS uses unionfs, the 4GB storage is now down to only ~260MB free (or around 83% in use). I’ll have to look at the repackaged updates from the XEPC project, if the storage factor becomes critical, but for now, I can live with this.

Next, the OS change. I did attempt to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the eee, but hit a snag while creating a USB bootable flash disk. I had a spare 1GB flash disk at hand, and was able to dump the netboot image from the Ubuntu archives. For some reason, the eee cannot recognize it. Again, I’ll have to dig into this later, but as I’ve said, Xandros works fine for me for now so I’ll stick with it at the moment.

Since I cannot change the OS, I opted to optimize whatever I have for now. One major “annoyance” is the screen real estate (i.e., the lack thereof). Firefox, for example, have large chrome properties that need to be slimmed down. I’m using the basic display mode for Xandros, so there’s desktop screen space is not a primary concern. Since I mostly use the eee for browsing, I need to trim the fat off Firefox.

I had to download the TinyMenu extension. This reduced the menu to a vertical one, which is nifty since I was able to move the navigation bar buttons alongside it. I reduced the space even further by using a minimalist theme called Mini Firefox. I then hid navigation bar buttons that are currently disabled through some tweaks in userChrome.css:

#back-button[disabled="true"], #forward-button[disabled="true"], 
#stop-button[disabled="true"], .search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

The result:

Reduced Firefox chrome

Revisiting my tumblog

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 14 April 2008
in Play
. 2 Comments

I’ve made several improvements to my tumblog.

Previously, I merely plugged in the RSS output from Yahoo! Pipes to Feedburner, and served up the content using Buzzboost. Using techniques from Cristiano Betta’s lifestream and elsewhere, I simplified and modularized the Yahoo! Pipes mashup.

I then used the pipe’s JSON output and styled it with some simple CSS. I didn’t want too much dependence on other JavaScript libraries so I used native code as much as possible, except for dynamically loading the JSON object from Pipes (for which I used the JSONscriptRequest class). I’m still having trouble getting the logic of reloading the content asynchronously: for now, I simply destroy the child element containing the tumblog items and rewrite everything — expensive, I know.

I’ve also been thinking of creating a Google Gadget out of this, but the iGoogle API’s FetchFeedAsJSON method is somewhat limited. I may have to use my current approach of dynamically creating a JSON script request into the gadget.

Well, without too much fanfare, the code is over here, and the tumblog is right here.

Three new old books, two notebooks, a FreeAgent

Published
by
Ian Dexter
on 9 March 2008
in Play and Work
. 0 Comments

(… And a partridge in a pear tree. Heh.)

Not much updates from me, except:

  • Got three more great finds from Booksale: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, The Confusion (Vol. 2 of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson, and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury — all for under a hundred pesos.
  • I had the pleasure of trying out two sleek notebooks: an Acer Aspire Gemstone and a Gateway T-6311. Both were from balikbayan kamag-anaks who asked me to, er, stress-test their new toys. More on this when I’m done playing with them. Suddenly, I’m craving for a replacement to Mathilda (my Dell Inspiron) — not!
  • My bro gave me a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external hard drive. Yay! It’s 500 GB in a cool black finish, with a footprint of an office stapler. It now rests next to the 19″ LCD monitor. All I need now are a cheap NAS solution and a UPS, and my home computing setup is complete.
  • Due to several NDAs I signed, I couldn’t blog much about what I do at work. Let’s just say it’s been a very interesting engagement. I’ll be in between team deployments (but with the same client) next quarter, so that gives me some breathing space to take on vendor and in-house training. My blogging will more or less be the same — I’m actually thinking of changing my tagline to “Posts of a weekend blogger”. :)