Web work

On psychological trauma via a content filtering job

There is a rather serious article on Slashdot about unprepared minds being traumatized when working as a content moderator. There are a lot of sick people around, when they fancy their fancies, any sane person should be as far as possible. But that understanding is always easy coming. As it is often said: “Some things cannot be unseen”, and you should think carefully before agreeing to see such things.

On a lighter note, with a subject like this, Slashdot is pretty much guaranteed to have some funny comments. Here is one that made me smile:

The problem is that most 20 year old kids don’t really know how sensitive they are to things like this until they’re repeatedly exposed to them, by which point much of the damage has already been done. Luckily for me, I was exposed to the Internet and all of the nastiness on it when I was only 13, and I’ve managed to get by with no ill effects at all except for the occasional extended blackout followed by a dead hooker in my bed. Some more sensitive people might really lose their minds, though.

Finally! Per account signatures in Gmail

I’ve been waiting for this feature for years and finally it arrived! For those of us who have multiple accounts configured in Gmail, custom per-account signatures are supported. No more copy-pasting from templates, Greasemonkey scripts, and Canned responses trickery. Go to your Settings and configure a separate signature for each account. And it gets better than that – you can even do rich-text signatures if you use HTML emails a lot.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you to the whole Gmail team and those guys who made this handy feature happen. I wanted this for a while!

Google services via command line

I don’t know how I missed the announcement and why there is no noise around this release, but here it goes. GoogleCL is a tool that you use from the command line to access Google web services. I just installed it on my Fedora 13 laptop and its awesome!

Here is what you need to do to intall

$ sudo yum install python-gdata
$ wget http://googlecl.googlecode.com/files/googlecl-0.9.7.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf googlecl-0.9.7.tar.gz
$ cd googlecl-0.9.7
$ sudo python setup.py install

Here are some of the things that you can do. And I guess more is coming shortly.

The first time you’ll connect to any of the Google web services using this tool, you’ll need to authenticate and grant access to the application. After that – it’s all pure honey.

Custom background for Google search

The Next Web points out:

Starting this afternoon, and rolling out over the next few days Google is releasing the ability around the US and the world to upload a custom image as the background of your Google.com.

Obviously, there will be a lot of noise about it around the web. I though have no idea why that is such a big thing. I rarely ever see the front page of Google at all. I always enter my search terms into the search or address bar of my browser and it takes me directly to the results page.

CySec logo copy-paste design

A friend of mine pointed at the almost lack of difference between the logos of United States Department of Health & Human Services and Cyprus Securities & Exchange Commission. Here are the screenshots from both web sites in case they will change them.

And here is the United States Department of Health & Human Services logo as a stand-alone image. Just to make it easier to spot the similarities.