Coredump

• Starting today, we’re on DST, so a one-hour shift in the work sked. Yaiks.
• Last weekend, we were off to Taal Vista Lodge in Tagaytay for the Tech University, a two-day company event. The first day started off with an “Amazing Race”-style tech challenge — a battle of wits to solve real-world cases in 30 minutes or less. At stake: a 4GB iPod nano for each group member (five per group, two categories, SMB and enterprise). Unfortunately, we didn’t win, so there goes the nano.
• Sunday was capped with a teambuilding activity, complete with a motivational talk by APO Jim Paredes (something about creativity — I didn’t get to go through that one straight on, had to chow on the sumptuous buffet breakfast at the Cafe-on-the-ridge, heh).
• Got sick on purpose yesterday, so I could be with Peng and Gab at home. I really needed that. Tiyo Paeng was raging, so we snuggled in bed, and went through three “American Tail” DVDs (Gab’s current fave). Didn’t catch the endings, though, as I dozed off a few times in between.
• Question: you’re a system admin in a big-time government installation, handling a fairly large environment, when you come across a problem of the mail queue backing up because of multiple incoming connections (in the thousands), half of which are spam. The spam don’t get through, of course, but still you face the problem of the growing queue, so what do you do?
• I’m getting the hang of Firefox 2.0. The del.icio.us bookmarks extension by Yahoo! is constantly nagging me about uninstalling the Google Browser Sync extension, though. I also saved some precious screen real estate, with the chrome settling on less than 100 pixels or so of the top part. Coolness.
• Gone blog reading again, when the case load was low. I’m totally hooked on Google Reader. Stand-alone RSS readers are so overrated, but I still find them useful for offline reading so I still keep one at hand: why, Feedreader, of course.
• On to more Lifehacking, I’m using Password Safe to, er, keep my passwords safe. I used to keep a GPG-encrypted and signed text file for that, but then after 50 or so accounts (including 10 something just for work — talk about single-sign-on!), it got a bit tedious. Thanks, Bruce Schneir!

Buy-off anxiety? Del.icio.us (recently bought by Yahoo!) has been buggered lately. It still shows bookmarks, but I can seem to do anything else. Can’t fetch JSON objects, too. Oh, well…

Lately, I’ve been reduced to link blogging, instead of writing full-blown treatments of things I want to blog about.

Call it laziness or whatever, but I’ve been hooked to tagging! I pass through an interesting site, I invoke my bookmarklet shortcut for posting to del.icio.us, jot down a note about it, then I’m off to another link. The result: lots of del.icio.us bookmarks and not enough substantial reading. And it’s disturbing. I’m addicted to meta. Ack!

There is, of course, a ready-made Javascript code to include the latest del.icio.us postings to your blog or web page, but if you want to ‘beautify’ it, take a look at what I’ve done.

I used del.icio.us’ JSON object, named Delicious.posts that contains the latest bookmarks. I snatched the code from the del.icio.us JSON help page and added a few enhancements, like the extended note and the associated tags.

This is the code:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">latest del.icio.us postings</h2>
<div id="delicious-posts"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/iandexter \\
   ?count=5"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
/**
 * Delicious linkroll - Modified code from del.icio.us link roller.
 * Ian Dexter R. Marquez, 2006
 */
 document.write('<style type="text/css">#delicious-posts ul{ \\
   list-style-type:none}#delicious-posts span{ \
   font-size:smaller;margin:0;}</style>');
 function showImage(img) { return (function(){ img.style.display='inline'; }) }
 var ul = document.createElement('ul');
 for(var i=0; i<Delicious.posts.length; i++) {
  var post = Delicious.posts[i];
  var li = document.createElement('li');
  var url = document.createElement('a');
  var note = document.createElement('span');
  var img = document.createElement('img');
  img.style.display = 'none';
  img.style.padding = '0 2px 0 0';
  img.height = img.width = 16;
  img.src = post.u.split('/').splice(0,3).join('/')+'/favicon.ico';
  img.onload = showImage(img);
  url.setAttribute('href', post.u);
  url.appendChild(document.createTextNode(post.d));
  if(post.t) {
   note.appendChild(document.createTextNode(' / '));
   for(var j=0; j<post.t.length; j++) {
    var tag = document.createElement('a');
    var tagu = 'http://del.icio.us/iandexter/' + post.t[j];
    tag.setAttribute('href', tagu);
    tag.appendChild(document.createTextNode(post.t[j]));
    note.appendChild(tag);
    note.appendChild(document.createTextNode(' '));
   }
  }
  if(post.n) {
   var post_note = post.n ? post.n : '';
   url.setAttribute('title', post_note);
   note.appendChild(document.createElement('br'));
   note.appendChild(document.createTextNode(post_note));
  }
  li.appendChild(img);
  li.appendChild(url);
  li.appendChild(note);
  ul.appendChild(li);
 }
 document.getElementById('delicious-posts').appendChild(ul);
</script>
<noscript><h2 class=”sidebar-title”><a href=”http://del.icio.us/iandexter”> \\
   latest del.icio.us postings</a></h2></noscript>

First, set up the HTML container for the heading and the postings. The Delicious.posts object is fetched using:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/iandexter \\
   ?count=5"></script>

The script iterates through the object, parsing the URL (Delicious.posts[i].u), description (d), and extended note, if any (n). The inner j loop iterates through the tags (t).

The script also fetches the page icon of each link.

To roll your own, just replace the username in:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/username \\
   ?count=5"></script>

and

    var tagu = 'http://del.icio.us/iandexter/' + post.t[j];

Paste in the code somewhere in body of your web page, and you got yourself a yummy link roller.