Spam Clock runs the counter of the SPAM websites that were created since January 1st, 2011. The data is provided by blekko search engine. And the numbers are staggering. Every hour a million of new SPAM pages is created. And there I was, thinking that we mostly have a problem with email, where, any ISP in the world will tell you, SPAM messages account for roughly 99.99% of all emails.
Via Download Squad.
Here is something that I thought of today, played with, and found quite useful – integration of Google Translate with Google Chrome via the search engine configuration. Of course, I know that there are addons for Google Chrome to integrate Google Translate. Of course, I know that Google Chrome comes with certain integration out of the box. But what I need is something else. Once in a while, when I write an email or a blog post or something like that I’d forget a word in English that I know in Russian, or the other way around. I usually open a new tab, go to Google Translate, and type the word in faster than I think of a better way to solve the problem. It’s a completely automated process for me. My fingers know how to do it. Plus it’s all so fast because I do it from the keyboard with shortcuts, so even if I’d have some addon installed with a button in the toolbar, I’d need to reach for the mouse, which would slow me down.
So, here is what I did. I went to Options->Basics->Default Search->Manage. Of course, I didn’t want to change my default search engine from Google to anything. Instead I wanted to add a new search engine. See the above screenshot. I named the search engine “Google Translate (English->Russian)” to avoid ambiguity when I add more search engines for translations between other languages. I assigned the keyword “en,ru”, which is what I’ll have to type in the address bar for this search engine to kick in. And I configured the search URL. Nothing fancy.
Now, whenever I type “en,ru” in the browser address bar, Google Chrome switches from generic completion to a search engine, where I just have to type the word that I want translated and hit Enter. Again, see the screenshot above for how the address bar looks.
In exactly the same way I can add more search engines to translate between different languages. It’s even possible to use “auto” as the source language for Google Translate to figure out in which language the original word or phrase is. And, of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to Google Translate search engines only. I have search engines defined for PHP functions lookup, Wikipedia and IMDb searches, and more. The trick is to find the search URL by performing the actual search on the site that you want to add, and then replace the search query with “%s”. That’s all. Enjoy!
Andrey forwarded me a link to last.fm robots.txt file, which, as many other robots.txt files, forbids search engine bots to access certain areas of the site. This one however does a little bit of more. For machines, it serves as the reminder of Three Rules of Robotics by Isaac Asimov. For humans, it provides a tiny bit of geek humor. Here is a screenshot, in case it disappears over time.
I came across Topsy – a search engine powered by tweets. Even though you can search Twitter and see tweets in your Google search results, it looks like Topsy has a place of its own. Clean interface, tweets and image search, only a few sources, trending topics – all make it a tiny little cool toy. Check it out!
It’s been bugging me for a while now that advanced search is extremely slow in our RT3. I thought it was something related to the famous Perl bug, but apparently it wasn’t. Then I was I waiting for Fedora 10 to come out, so that we’d upgrade our RT3 installation to version 3.8. And that didn’t solve the problem either. Finally, we got bored and annoyed enough by this problem to actually do soemthing about it. The solution was, as often, just a Google search away. Here is the quote from this discussion:
Faulty rights on a specific queue caused the owner list to be quite long, which RT didn’t like. (By mistake someone had given the own ticket right on the queue to all unprivileged users)
I went through all the queues to check the rights, and there it was – a test queue had “Own Ticket” assigned to “Everyone”. Immediately, after remove this access levels things got back to normal.