Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Yesterday was a somewhat slow day, so I spent some time on the housekeeping of my Firefox browser.  Somehow I managed to accumulate a lot of extensions, themes, plugins, bookmarks, bookmarklets, and what not.  It felt like a good time to clean the mess up a bit.

I spent about two hours going through the list of all installed pieces, upgrading outdated versions, changing old solutions to the modern alternatives, getting new tools, and so on.   I have to say that after that effort my Firefox works faster, and it suits me better now.  One of the biggest changes from my previous setup became the use of Tab Kit extension.  Among its many features, it has the one that I’ve been passively looking for for a long time now - tab bar on the right side, instead of top, but not as a part of the sidebar, and with a tree view.  Combined with Aging Tabs extension, the result is exactly the way I wanted it.

(it is better in real life than it is on the screenshot)

Now when I open links from the site in the new tabs, these new tabs are organized in a tree like structure.  Tabs that I haven’t yet visited are highlighted in green.  Current tab is highlighted in blue, as usual.  And the rest of the tabs are coloured in different shades of grey, depending on how long ago I last viewed them.  Also, because the tab bar is separate from the sidebar, I can get an additional panel on demand, with an application that I need the most at the moment, without sacrificing my precious tabs.

And just in case you are wondering which other extensions I am using, continue reading for the list of all extensions, which was generated by one of the extensions on that list.

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Slashdot is running the post about annoying software.  The fact that Slashdot crowd mostly consists of computer geeks is sort of a guarantee for some interesting comments.

With my Fedora 9 saga I had to review and try a lot of new software.  Needless to say, I found quite a few annoying bits.  Here is a brief list, just to give you an idea:

• Clock applet in Gnome. It shows calendar with Sunday being first day of the week.  If you don’t like it, you’ll have to recompile your locale to change it. This one is cancelled out though by an excellent support of Google Calendar (or, for that matter, any other web published calendar).
• Metacity window manager in Gnome. Window titles are displayed in the middle.  This is really annoying for those of us who are used to seeing them on the left.  There is no option to change this setting either in GUI or in GConf.
• Pidgin new message notification. I once had it popping up nice looking bubbles, but I don’t remember how I managed to do it.  I also don’t remember how I managed to break it.  And I have no idea to bring them back.  I really miss them though.
• WordPress 2.5 post editing screen. It has been much reworked in the latest version and looks and feels so much better. However, the list of categories was moved from a really convenient location on the right of the screen to a really inconvenient location at the bottom of the screen.
• FileZilla FTP manager. This one drives me nuts with server connections.  It either disconnects every 40 seconds when being idle.  Or it keeps multiple connections open forever and most FTP servers block me out temporary.
• Request Tracker (RT3). Works perfectly with queues and tickets, but annoys the heck out of me when I need to do something with users.  Users aren’t first level citizens, like tickets.
• SugarCRM. Excellent business tool, with lots of small annoyances, like not being able to set default user role, disable theme selector everywhere, change logos to company ones, lock down the functionality, etc.  Most of these are easily fixable.  But some aren’t as trivial as they may sound or seem.
• Google Reader. This one annoys me a bit (but often) when I want to leave a few items in the feed unread and go deeper into archives.  Somehow it keeps marking everything I passed as read.

Now, what piece of software were you annoyed with recently?

Google has recently added Gtalk bots that can do translations to various languages, mostly available with Google Translate.  While I’m all for helping people understand each other better (even though there are certain complains regarding the quality of translation), I think this functionality could have implemented simpler.

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it out myself, I’ve only read about it and saw the screenshots.

The problem that I see with the implementation is it being one way.  The bots are named fr2en and fr2en.  Which means that in order to keep up with conversation in the language foreign to you, you’ll need to have two bots nearby, not one.  Why?  Because if you will ask a person in his language a question, he will likely reply in the same language.  So you will need to translate both to and from the language.  I think this should have been done with one bot, not two.

Google Blogoscoped runs this post speculating about an “undo” option for Gmail.  I’ve touched this topic some time ago in my “You can’t recall an email” post.  The base for that post of mine was purely technical.  What is sent is sent, and there is no way to get it back.

With another look on this issue, I see that technical side can be controlled to a certain degree.  Webmail providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc), can indeed delay the outgoing message by a few seconds.  Countdowns and disappearing buttons aren’t an issue either - we have plenty of technology these days (AJAX, Flash) to implement them.  And there is a certain demand for the functionality too - this can be judged by all those browser plugins and extensions, like the one mentioned in the Blogoscoped article.

Still, I’m standing on the side of “don’t do it”.  I think it’ll add to the confusion of the interface and the complexity of the system, without too much benefits in return.  I don’t think that we should have an “undo” for everything either.   And I think that the old way of “sorry, forgot to attach this document” works pretty well and sometimes makes people to actually read through and think over again about what is that they are planning to send out.

What do you think?  Would you like to see an “undo sending” button in your email client?