Year: 2007

Missed another blogging birthday

I’ve been blogging for quite some time now.  I’ve been doing it even before it was called “blogging”.  I had my own website, a diary, and an online journal.  I started, as many others, with static HTML files and a text editor.  That’s how it used to be back than.  Then I wrote a shell script to simplify a few things.  Then I improved it.  Then I re-wrote it in Perl, adding a few features on the way.  Then I improved it more.  Then I re-wrote it again.  Then I found somebody else’s and modified it with my bits of code.  Then I plugged in something else.  Then I found another script for the picture gallery.  Then I found another one… And it went on and on and on.

Then more and more people started having online diaries and software started to appear to make common tasks like editing text, inserting pictures, and linking to other pages easier.  I’ve tried a few of those systems too.

Each time I was moving the archives of the previous diary forward.  Or, at least, I tried to.  There were times when I was too lazy, or when I didn’t care enough, or when I wanted to have a fresh start.  Because of that, some entries are lost forever.  But there are still plenty of others.

Looking at the archives of this blog, as they are now, the earliest entry dates back to October 26th, 2001.  That’s 6 years ago.

Lots of things happened to this blog during this time.  It did a few software changes and updates.  It was redesigned a few times.  The blogging style changed a few times as well. It was experimented on, broken, lost, and restored. But one thing never happened to it.  It was never abolished, lost and forgotten, left to die and rot.

For the last 6 years there was not a single month when I haven’t written an entry for this blog.  Not one.  There were a few slow months with 1 or 2 or 3 entries.  There were periods of high activity with more than 150 posts a month (look at the year 2005, for example).  I’ve written a total of 3,842 posts which averages to 53 posts a month (3,842 posts divided by 72 months).

As far as I can see, this blog isn’t going to disappear any time soon.  It runs on the best blogging engine out there (WordPress, but not the latest version yet).  It got re-designed again recently.  And there are more things to blog about than ever.

So, here is the toast, for a happy blogging birthday! :)

Firefox feature wishlist : tab groups

I wish Firefox (or any web browser for that matter) had a nice and easy way to group tabs together. If I could just move or copy tabs between groups, color them differently together or one by one, collapse and expand groups, search for tab, link tabs together (close one and linked one close together, move one and others will follow), etc.  Considering the amount of time it took for tabs to go mainstream, I am not sure I’ll live long enough to see a solution for grouping…

P.S.: Yes, I am aware of

  • grouping related tabs in several browser windows,
  • ColorfulTabs plugin for Firefox,
  • using bookmark groups to save tabs and open them later with one click,

but these aren’t solving my problems.  Not as they are now at least.

The 20% rule

Sidenote: it seems this is the third post for today, and the third one that is somehow related to Google. This is not intentional.

It’s a wide known fact that Google allows (or, depending on how you look at it, forces) its employees to  work 20% of the time on the side projects.  What kind of projects?  What do they actually do?  Where this time goes?  Here is an idea from the hilarious article at Cracked.com:

Google engineers are given “20 percent time” in which they are free to pursue their own personal projects. This incentive has produced such efforts as Gmail, Google News, and 20% more employee masturbation.

The future of SQL

Slashdot lets us know that Google contributes code to MySQL.  Among the comments to that post, there is this one, which is while being rather funny holds some truth to it:

They need to add a GOOGLE function to allow queries to be searched nicer.

SELECT * FROM articles WHERE GOOGLE(‘boobies’);

something similar might be available but it is a PITA to list the fields to search and specify the operators etc

I think here lies the future of SQL…

Looking forward for new Gmail

Mashable mentions that a new Gmail is coming. And I’m eagerly waiting for the new version, because I really, really want these changes:

One of the features is pre-fetching of messages. This means that when you load a page that has a list of messages, Gmail will fetch them in advance, so that they will be available immediately, when you decide to click on one. This goes along with the new JavaScript architecture that’s expected to bring improved performance. There will also be a new contact manager, which will be shared with other Google Apps, including Docs and Calendar.