lukebaker.org

Saw this praying mantis by our apartment. I proceeded to spend awhile trying to a get a few good shots of it. I definitely like the last one best.

Cool beans. I don’t even need to write a greasemonkey script to change between accounts (this has long been on my todo list). Sweetness plus.

Wow, go me! I managed to dork up my site for awhile. :-/ Well I updated my Gmail greasemonky script to work properly even when changing between multiple Gmail accounts. Gmail changed something awhile ago, and I was slow to update the version on the site. It’s there now.

Google decided to change the domain and URL syntax of Gmail:

1. gmail.google.com redirects to mail.google.com
2. instead of URLs like /gmail?param they look like /mail/?param

My persistent searches script has been updated to work with these changes. I would recommend uninstalling the original script and then installing the updated version.

It appears that the issue is that behind the scenes (or at least relating to search and filters), labels apply to individual messages. Apparently when a filter is set to add a label, it will add that label to the message, and not to the conversation that the message is a part of. This is the only way that different messages in the same conversation may be labeled differently. Every other interface that Gmail provides to the label functionality relates to conversations, not messages. This turns out to be annoying. :-/

I’m using Gmail a lot more recently (more later), however I’ve found an annoying bug. I’m now forwarding all my messages to a non-Gmail account to Gmail. All of these are given a label to indicate that they came to that non-Gmail account. They are also optionally given additional labels depending on if they have certain subjects, recipients, or content. I want to be able to do a search for any messages that only have the initial label that indicates that this email came through my non-Gmail account. For instance, if I label all my bills as “bills” and all emails from my gas company as “gascompany”, then some emails may be labeled both “bills” and “gascompany”. However, when I do a search like [label:bills -label:gascompany], I sometimes will get messages that are labeled both “bills” and “gascompany”. For those that are showing up in my results (but shouldn’t be), I can manually give them the “gascompany” label (again) and they won’t show up in the results if I do the same search again. Here’s proof:

Cool. The new bittorrent search engine uses Nutch.

As everybody and their mom has been talking about Greasemonkey and AJAX, I decided I had better get a piece of the action. I also had a growing annoyance with the state of MUAs. I was contemplating writing my own, however I’ve since realized that perhaps I can get what I want by using Greasemonkey to add features to Gmail. Persistent Persistent Searches is that first step. The bit of code that I wrote allows people to write Greasemonkey scripts that store data in a Gmail contact. I wanted it to be relatively secure, “nice” to Gmail’s servers, and easy to use. What I ended up with is something that stores data in the note field of a particular contact. The data resembles cookie data and can be used in a very similar fashion. In fact the note data is cached in a cookie. This is my attempt to be nice to Gmail’s servers. On initial login, the note data is downloaded from the contact and stored in a cookie. Any read attempts for note data actually just read the local cookie. Any write attempts change the data in the local cookie and on Gmail’s servers. Since this data is cached in a cookie, I was a little concerned with the expiration time of this cookie (so that other users on the same computer couldn’t see the cookie data). The pseudo-solution was that this cache cookie expires after 3 minutes. However, Gmail checks for new mail every 2 minutes. Each time this happens (and the same user is logged in), the cache cookie will be given another 3 minutes to live. In other words, this cache cookie will be around after the user logs out of Gmail for at most 3 minutes.

Introducing persistent searches in Gmail that are…persistent. First off, props to Mihai Parparita who did all the hard work for adding persistent searches to Gmail. I’ve added to Mihai’s script, so that the saved searches are stored in a special Gmail contact. Previously they were stored in a cookie. The advantages are two fold:

1. You can access your saved searches (and only yours) from any computer as long as your browser has this script installed.
2. Multiple people can use the same computer and browser while their saved searches remain separate and distinct from the other person’s.

Installation Instructions:

• Install Greasemonkey (only works with Firefox).
• Open up this user script (in Firefox).
• From the “Tools” menu, select “Install User Script..” and confirm all of the various prompts.
• Logout of Gmail and log back in.

FWIW, I hope to eventually add a few more unrelated features to Gmail via this script. For an overview of how my modifications work see my post on Cookies and Contacts.

Update: Gmail apparently changed a few things in their code this evening. I’ve updated one of the regex’s to work with this change. If you see that your saved searches aren’t being saved or restored properly, you’ll want to reinstall the script.

Update (December 1, 2005): The script has been updated to work with Firefox 1.5 and Greasemonkey 0.6.4.

Instead of having to buy Hackers and Painters, I can just read it online. At work everyone on the internet team got a subscription to Safari Tech Books Online. It is quite nice to have so many technical books at my disposal. I would have eaten this sort of thing up while in college. It’d be sweet if Calvin provided a subscription to every CS student. It’d be more worthwhile than that those silly Microsoft / MSDN subscriptions they provide. Right now I’m going through Learning Python and Hackers and Painters, though I just noticed that Linux Kernel Development was recently added to the library. That was the one other book that I wanted to browse through. Not so much because I’m interested in kernel development but more so I can better understand how Linux interacts with the hardware.

The library is great in that they have a ton of books. I think they have all or most of the O’Reilly books, which is key. However, the drawback is that the site itself is pretty horrible. It is horrible from a user interface perspective and performance wise. Every single action triggers a request to their super slow servers. Several actions require a few too many clicks which translate into waiting for their servers to respond. They should allow users to control page navigation simply by using the keyboard. They also fail to do the basics like remember what font setting I used last. Needless to say the site could use a major overhaul to bring it into the 21st century.