Traveling Tech Guy Blog

StackOverflow Chrome Extension - Update

2010-01-31T10:19:00.000-08:00

Just a short update: I updated my extension and uploaded it to the Google Extensions sites. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/SOExtension (Chrome version 4 and above and a StackOverflow profile required).

Version 1.2.0 now supports Meta.StackOverflow, utilizes the latest jQuery library (1.4.1) and fixes an annoying bug - all those by requests from users (see comments on that page).
I'm considering a future version that will alert you to a reputation change automatically. In the meantime, keep the comments and requests coming - I'm having fun

Update: just got a 'stamp of approval' from Jon Skeet, the leading StackOverflow-er . It was due to Jon's and Dan's requests that I've added Meta support. See the announcement here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37731/stackoverflow-chrome-extension

Update 2: Just updated to version 1.2.1: The options page now includes instruction on where to find your Profile ID - thanks for the suggestion Sasha!

Haiti

2010-01-19T15:45:00.001-08:00

I was about to write a scalding review of a gadget I have, but current issues make it less relevant.

On January 12th, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti. As if that place didn't have enough trouble with poverty, corruption and military regimes, nature devastated what's left of the island nation.

My heart goes out to the victims - especially since I know what an earthquake feels like. California suffered a 6.5 magnitude quake 2 weeks ago - but other than some minor damage and short blackouts, no one was hurt. A week before that my house shook to a 4.1 quake. The complete loss of control, the realization that there's nothing you can do and that a force much stronger than you is in action here is humbling.

There's nothing I can do to help those people, but contribute some of my money in hope it helps even a single individual. I urge all my readers to contribute as well - even a few dollars can make a difference down the line.You can find all organizations who help Haiti in this crisis, and how to donate, on this page, edited by Google.

I gave to MercyCorps using Amazon Payments so it just used my Amazon profile to submit the donation (and by the way SHAME ON YOU Amazon, for using this donation page to try and sell some books [look at the bottom of the page] - making money off this disaster is despicable, even if you did give MercyCorps a banner on your home page).

And one last thing: at the risk of never being welcome in Venezuela: SCREW YOU Hugo Chavez. May you be stuck in the same cubicle in hell with Pat Robertson.

Chrome Extensions - continued

2010-01-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

As you may recall, I developed 3 Chrome extensions, so I could learn about he environment and flex my AJAX muscles. 2 commenters alerted me to the fact that in following Chrome versions, the 'toolstrip' behavior I relied on would be deprecated, so I sat down to re-write 2 of the extensions to fit the new model (too many RSS extensions out there, so I left the third behind).

I made use of the new HTML5 features like localStorage, allowing me to save data locally; and the ability to include a properties page for the extension's data.

So, after some testing, I uploaded my extensions to an open source repository called ChromeExtensions.org (here and here) and then something strange has happened. Several well-known sites started publishing my extension for download (like CNet, ZDNet, VersionTracker and many others) - all, without notifying me or asking my permission. Fine, I thought, this is open-sourced software, and who cares how it gets distributed, as long as it does?

And then I got this: 2 sites, apparently related, called soft-files and soft-go (no links here- those bastards do not deserve them) started listing my extension AND SELLING IT FOR $3!!! This was no longer just irritating, but illegal. I wrote them an email asking to remove my extension from their site at once - no reply, but suddenly the "price" field changed to "Free!". I wrote the fraud department of their hosting service and got no reply from them either. May they all roast in internet hell.

In the meantime, Google rolled out its extensions repository (you'll need version 4.0.288 and higher - see my earlier posts). The easiest way to download new extensions is to select "Extensions" from the Wrench menu, and click the "Get more extensions" link at the bottom. so now you can download my extensions directly into your Chrome browser - just click this link to get the MyIP extension, or this one to get the StackOverflow one. Enjoy and comment. I'm already working an idea for a new one. Here's what my 2 extensions look like now:

MyIP Extension - shows your IP and location

StackOverflow Reputation extension - show's your reputation on the 3 SO sites

Properties Page for the StackOverflow extension

Firefox Tips Part III

2010-01-09T21:46:00.001-08:00

In the final installment of my Firefox tips series (links to part 1 and part 2), I'll cover add-ons (or add-ins or extensions as they are sometimes called).

Add-ons are small pieces of software that provide added functionality to a browser. While Firefox and Chrome support an easy add-on model, Microsoft's IE and Apple's Safari require compiling and registering add-ons. Most browsers offer repositories of add-ons, allowing developers to upload their latest creations and the general public to download them. Those repositories provide some peace of mind, usually checking all add-ons for any malware or security issues.

I've already explained how to disable Firefox's compatibility checking mechanism, to allow you to run any add-on, in any FF version. You'll need to use that tip for some of the add-ons on my lists. There's one for my default profile, and one for my web development profile:

Regular add-ons

AdBlock Plus - The first add-on I install every time I install a new version of FF. This add-on uses a list of known advertisers addresses to prevent any ad from being displayed on any page you browse to. This not only makes your browsing experience faster, but safer as well. No doubt the most hated add-on by Google an other advertisers .
Coral IE-Tab - though the number of sites that don't render well in FF has dropped significantly over the last few years, you may still need to use IE to view certain sites. But why use IE when you can click one button and the site opens an IE frame in an FF tab? As a bonus, Coral IE Tab also communicates with AdBlock to keep ads out of your IE tab.
Delicious bookmarks - allows me to add bookmarks to my Delicious account for sharing across browsers and machines. Similar versions exist for IE and Chrome as well. You can see what sites I bookmark (usually tips, howtos and programming related sites) at http://delicious.com/gvider.
Download Statusbar - allows you to follow the progress of your download from the status bar of FF, as well as open, locate, or delete the downloaded file.
FoxyProxy - have you ever been frustrated by a message like "this site is blocked in your country"? Happened to me while I visited Israel and tried purchasing an MP3 file on Amazon, and when I tried watching a TV episode on the British Sky site from the US. After downloading this littl add-on, you add addresses of proxy servers, allowing you to pass yourself as a native of other countries. Oh, and it screws up with advertisers as well .
Google Redesigned - if you use Google Reader, Calendar and Gmail sites, but get bored by the (lack of) design, this add-on will add some color to your screen:
Greasemonkey - much like the previous add-on, allows on-the-fly redesign of every site on the internet. It also adds functionality to sites and mashes-up information from several sites on a single page. I use it to add the Emoticons (,) to my posts (it grabs the icons off another site), to render Google Reader posts on the same page and to save Youtube files to my local disk. Scripts are written in JavaScript and are viewable and editable. Go to Userscripts.org to grab some scripts.
Personas - a new feature in FF 3.6 (currently at RC1) allows you to change the look-and-feel on the fly, replacing the need to download themes and restart the browser every time. Currently I use the Golden Gate Bridge persona.
SafeHistory - I already reviewed this add-on at length.

Development add-ons (useful for web development - skip if you're not ineterested)

Colorzilla - a color picker, allowing you to get the RGB values of every color on the screen.
DOM Inspector - allows isolation of every element in the DOM (document Object Model) as well as changing it on the fly.
ElasticFox - allows management of Amazon EC2 instances - great for my current project.
FireBug - THE definitive JavaScript debugger, including a DOM inspector, an AJAX inspector and a full debugger.
JSONView - allows analyzing JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) objects.
Modify Headers - allows manipulating HTTP headers on the fly - both outgoing and incoming.
SQLite Manager - allows managing SQLite files. SQLite is an open source, single file database in use by many applications (run a search on your hard disk to see how many *.sqlite files you already have on your machine).
User agent Switcher - allows you to switch your browser type on the fly to test how a web site behaves under different browsers.
Web Developer toolbar - adds a toolbar full of useful web development tools.

You can get most of these add-ons at the Mozilla repository. Drop me a comment if you're using any interesting add-on I should be aware off.

Firefox Tips Part II

2010-01-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

It took some time, but here is part II of my Firefox tips trilogy. Today, we'll talk about "profiles".

Everything you do, install, browse, save etc. is saved in your FF profile. I'll show you how to backup your profile, migrate it to a new machine, create new profile and use them for different browsing purposes.

Where is your profile?
On Windows (Vista, 7) Your profile can be found at %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles, where you most probably will find a folder with a name like "jnkpk4bj.default". If you have more than one profile already, you'll see other folders named xxxxxxxx..

Create and manage profiles
To create a new profile or manage existing profile, run "firefox.exe -ProfileManager" or create a shortcut that contains the full path (in my case "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\firefox.exe" -ProfileManager) and call it Firefox Profile Manager. This will get you to this simple profile manager app:

As you can see, I've created a "Dev" profile, that I use for web development. This allows me to install different add-ins and have different config settings that are conducive to web development.

You could also use the ProfileManager to launch FF into the profile you just created, or, like me, just create a shortcut for each profile, using the -P parameter (i.e. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\firefox.exe" -P "Dev" -no-remote).
The -no-remote will force this version to work online only.

Backup and restore profiles
Now you know which directories to backup, but for a complete solution that would allow you to selectively backup your config settings, add-ins, bookmarks, passwords etc. - you need MozBackup. It will allow you to backup and restore your FF profile and password-protect that backup file (think about it - it contains so much private info about you, not to mention passwords). It will also do the same for other Mozilla apps (if, for example, you're using the Thunderbird mail client).

Migrating profiles
Basically, with every new machine I get I install the newewest FF version right after the OS installation. I then copy over my backed up profile (on Windows, I just use the MozBackup "restore" function) and can start browsing immediately, using my bookmarks and add-ins. FF's cross-platformness makes it pretty painless.

The next and last post will deal with add-ins - which to get, and why is it good for you.

Firefox Tips Part I

2009-11-30T18:33:00.000-08:00

I recently found myself having to reinstall my OS and browser. I decided to start from scratch and configure it to get the best browsing experience I could get in Windows. I started by leaving IE8 in - for those tough cases of web sites who haven't embraced proper web standards yet. I then added Chrome 4 - for my continued experiments at extensions development. And then I got to Firefox.

I've been using Firefox since the beta. The jump from v1 to 2.0 was a significant improvement. The slew of add-ons and themes made my browsing experience easier and more effective, saving some manual operations and providing a securer surf environment.

The jump from v2 to v3 brought with it the first signs of extension incompatibility, and for the firat time I started missing an older version. But over the years, most add-ons were adapted or replaced and FF turned to be my default browser, both in Windows and Mac OS. My least favorite question to face from a customer became "why doesn't your software support FF?" - mainly because I thought they were right.

But then came FF 3.5. Wow. Talk about a major regression. Sluggish. Buggy. Leaky. Those are just some of the adjectives that come to mind. And not just me - just search the web for reviews. Add to that Google Chrome that appeared all of a sudden, shiny and screamingly fast, and you can see why people were jumping of the FF ship.

But I still kept it around - mainly because of the add-ons, but also out of my attachment to the open-source ideal. I recently installed the 3.6 beta and I'm happy to report, it seems like FF is back! I'm currently running Firefox 3.6b4 and it's THE browser to use in Windows 7. It supports the 7 taskbar preview, meaning you can get small previews of all open tabs and jump directly to the one you like.
It also provides it's own internal tab navigation, when you click Ctrl+Tab:
These 2 features can be turned on or off through the FF configuration settings. There are several useful things you can set up to make your browsing experience smoother. Start by typing about:config in the address bar, and promise to be careful .

1. Extensions compatibility
I've already explained how to turn off extension compatibility check, but in the 3.6 beta, they've added another key, so now you have to set these 2 booleans to false (create them if they don't exist) if you want to install extensions that don't support the beta yet (and most don't):

2. Move your cache
Since I'm using an SSD, which excels in data reading - but not that much at writing, I'm trying to keep the amount of HD write operations to a minimum. This hack will allow you to move your cache to a secondary disk:

3. New window open behavior
FF allows you to open new windows in new tabs, this sounds like a cool idea, until you hit a site that tries to open a small window (let's say, to allow you to select a date from a calendar) only to find it spread across a full page in the next tab. After mixing and matching, I found the following combination works:
In the Tools>Options dialog, set FF to open new windows in tabs:

In about:config, set the following value to 2:

This will ensure that windows opened using target="_blank" will open in a new tab, while those opened using window.open() will open in a small window.

4. Robots
I have several more config hacks, but I think that's enough for one column. But just for fun, try typing about:robots into the address bar, and counting how many movie references you recognize :

In my next post, I'll review the extensions I use and how each benefits my browsing experience.

American Airlines Sucks Part III

2009-11-23T14:49:00.000-08:00

Link to part I or http://bit.ly/AASucks
Link to part II or http://bit.ly/AASucks2

As you may recall, I sent an email to American Airlines' Customer Relations manager, Sean Bentel, complaining about the level of (dis)service I received when being denied boarding to a flight, and the poor compensation offered.

I just received an answer from American, in the form of a direct email and a comment on that post. Both contain the same text. I really, really, really wanted this to be over. I wanted this post to have the title "American Airlines unsucks" or "AA redeems itself" - but this is what I received:

November 23, 2009

Dear Mr. Vider:

We've received your additional email to Mr. Bentel, and have looked into the facts and record of your flight where you were denied boarding. While situations like this are very rare, they do happen on occasion and we are truly sorry it happened to you in this case. We historically have one of the lowest denied boarding rates in the
industry, but we also know that statistics don't mean much to folks like you whose
travels do not fit the usual pattern and end up being affected in this manner.

Our policies were correctly followed in this case and we believe most other airlines
would have handled it quite similarly since their policies are much like ours.
Unfortunately, as you have stated, your flight was oversold by five passengers, which
simply means more passengers showed up that day than we had seats available.
Historically when this happens, we are usually successful in finding volunteers who
are willing to fly on a later flight and receive dollar-for-dollar vouchers spendable
on any American Airlines/American Eagle fare within one year. In this case, that did
not happen, and involuntary denied boarding rules set by the U.S. government were the next step those rules were followed exactly as they are set forth by the government.

Overbooking of flights has been a common practice of all airlines for many years. The
reasons are simple nearly every full flight has passengers who simply do not show up
for that flight for any number of reasons. The example of a 100 seat airplane in
which only 100 seats were sold would nearly always leave the gate with some empty
seats (four or five empty seats would not be uncommon on that mythical 100 seat
plane). Those empty seats could have ultimately been provided and sold to other
customers who also need and want to travel that same time and day, but would otherwise be turned away. This practice also helps us provide the low fares we offer to be competitive with other airlines. To estimate the number of empty seats for each full flight, we use historical data for that flight, that day, to estimate how many
"no-shows" it will have, using both computer and human input, and also considering any
special factors that might skew the historical data. Most of the time we are quite
accurate in our estimates. Occasionally, passenger behavior on a given flight does
not match our best estimates. As we said, this is what unfortunately happened to you.
It's rare, but not unprecedented. And again, we're sorry for your inconvenience.

Sincerely,

Russell Shady
Customer Relations
American Airlines

Couple of points about this response:

As far as apologies go - this is quite a weak one. Again, more an explanation than an apology, educating me on what is overbooking and why is it so great for me and fellow travelers. You see, it's better for airlines, nay - every provider out there! - to oversell his/her product - in case people pay but decide not to use it.
How come Amazon never thought of that? To hell with stocks! - just sell to everyone who wants and expect some of your customers to cancel.
Saying "Overbooking of flights has been a common practice of all airlines for many years" does not make it any more acceptable. Just ask every Wall Street weasel who traded in CDS (Credit Default Swaps) and brought us the current economy crisis - he was just doing what his colleagues/competitors were.
I guess I'm more affected because my "travels do not fit the usual pattern". Can someone please explain this sentence to me?
This email/comment completely ignores the compensation issue. No reference, apology, or offer is made.

A diligent reader named John commented on the post and pointed me to the following Department of Transportation document that deals with compensation in the case of boarding denial. I quote 250.05 (emphases are mine):
Sec. 250.5 Amount of denied boarding compensation for passengers denied boarding involuntarily.

(a) Subject to the exceptions provided in § 250.6, a carrier to whom this part applies as described in § 250.2 shall pay compensation to passengers denied boarding involuntarily from an oversold flight at the rate of 200 percent of the fare (including any surcharges and air transportation taxes) to the passenger’s next stopover, or if none, to the passenger’s final destination, with a maximum of $800. However, the compensation shall be one-half the amount described above, with a $400 maximum, if the carrier arranges for comparable air transportation [see section 250.1], or other transportation used by the passenger that, at the time either such arrangement is made, is planned to arrive at the airport of the passenger’s next stopover, or if none, the airport of the passenger’s final destination, not later than 2 hours after the time the direct or connecting flight from which the passenger was denied boarding is planned to arrive in the case of interstate air transportation, or 4 hours after such time in the case of foreign air transportation
John thinks I may actually have a case against AA, first for not notifying me of my rights and second - a $100 is definitely not 200% of my fare. If there's a lawyer in the crowd, please feel free to comment on this, or contact me personally. I'll definitely keep this option open.

I feel like I gave American a fair chance to respond and I'm sure they feel they have. I still think their customer relations responses should be taught in business schools as how to NOT manage an incident. I shall consider my next moves, but until then American Airlines still sucks.

So this coming Thanksgiving and holiday season, say NO to American Airlines - unless you want to take the chance of spending your Christmas eve at an airport somewhere, just because all passengers decided to show up.

Windows 7 and my new SSD

2009-11-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

A friend commented on some of the negativity in my blog lately (he meant all those American Airlines posts), so I've decided to write a positive one to end this week :).

I've been using Windows 7 since early beta, and the RTM version since September. I recently read somewhere that the single best, cost-effective upgrade you can add to your laptop would be a Solid State Drive.

I always had great belief in Flash technologies. I owned one of the first flash drives, called Disk-On-Key from M-Systems. I paid quite a hefty sum in 2002 for a 128MB piece of Flash memory, at a time people were slowly switching from mountains of floppies to slightly smaller mounts of CDs (DVD-RAM was just on the horizon). At the time, people didn't really understand the significance of the technology. I just enjoyed being able to lug around the equivalent of 80 floppies in my pocket. Today, everyone has at least one such "flash drive" at arm's reach, and the capacity is measured in gigs.

So here I am, 8 years later, buying a 128GB flash drive (Gordon Moore, consider your law officially broken :) ). I delayed my decision for quite some time, debating between the Intel X-25M series, Crucial and Corsair. Finally, mostly due to the high Intel prices, I went with the Corsair P128. It has 128GB, a 128MB buffer, 220Mb/s read speed, 200Mb/s write speed, and a Samsung controller. Buying it from amazon set me back $369 - but so far, I'm happy as can be.

This is not a hardware blog, so I'm not going to extol all the benefits of using an SSD, the speed, the silence and the lowered wattage. I'll refer you to AnandTech, or Tom's Hardware, or even Linus Torvald's blog to draw your own conclusions. I won't spill too many adjectives, just share some statistics with you:

1. Boot time: BIOS to Windows 7 logon screen After SSD installation:
Notice that although the overall score is the same, this is due to my graphics card - look at the HD score).
9. Read/write speeds (screen shots from HDTune):
Before:
After:
The overall experience is that of having a new, faster laptop. I can't comment on the battery life improvement yet, as I had no chance to test it, and as for the noise levels, my Thinkpad was already one of the most silent laptops I ever owned, and it's even quieter now.

Bottom line: I recommend adding an SSD to your computer if you want a noticeable bump in speed. Prices are still quite high now (over $2.50/gig, compared to $0.15/gig for regular SATA drives). You can wait for the imminent price drop. Or you can buy one now and consider the time you save and the overall speed improvement well worth the price paid.

PS: to improve the life span of your SSD and the overall performance of your Windows 7, I recommend going through some of the tips and tweaks outlined in this post. The main drive is to transfer all those temp files off your SSD and keep it focused on applications and files.

American Airlines Sucks Part II

2009-11-21T18:24:00.000-08:00

Link to part I or http://bit.ly/AASucks
Link to part III or http://bit.ly/AASucks3

I got quite a few remarks and comments about my American Airlines Sucks post. Some people shared similar stories about being maligned by AA in the past. Some told similar overbooking stories from other airlines - but with a better treatment, understanding and compensation.

A good friend just ran an "American Airlines Sucks" search on Google, and concluded I'm joining the party a bit too late: 219,000 (!) results show that many people out there share my conclusion. Hey, there's even a guy who's taken the time to register a domain! (www.americanairlinessucks.us). I will let you sift through the results and highlight the funniest stories.

I started a twitter hash tag #AASucks and it keeps collecting twits from "satisfied" customers. The funniest comment I got was a request to change it from AASucks to something else, lest someone mistakes it for the Alcoholics Anonymous organization :).

My fellow blogger Damian referred me to a story about a web designer at American Airlines who was fired upon answering a customer's comment about the suckiness of AA's web site.
You can read the full story, reported firsthand, in Dustin Curtis's blog. The short of it is, just like me, Dustin commented on the bad design and usability of the site. A web usability designer at AA read his blog and sent him an email explaining some of the design decisions and promising they are aware of the situation. He asked to be kept anonymous, since he was not officially representing AA. Alas, The AA IT team scoured their exchange server, found the original response and the guy was summarily sacked. They won't even let their own employees alleviate the public's perception of them.

As for me, one of the comments on the original blog suggested I ping Christopher Elliott, a leading traveling journalist working for National Geographic. Christopher replied immediately (thanks Christopher!), and pointed me to a page on his blog listing the addresses of all AA executives involved with customer relations.

I just sent the following email to Sean Bentel, (Manager of customers relations) and cc'd Mark Mitchell (Managing director, customer experience):

Dear Mr. Bentel,

Please excuse my addressing this email to you directly, but I have been receiving, in my opinion, less than adequate treatment from the CR representative I've been corresponding with so far. Furthermore, all my emails to the people
taking care of my case at your department have been ignored and filling and re-filling your online form is quite time consuming. I've also taken the liberty of cc'ing Mr. Mark Mitchell to this email.

I will not bother you with the full description of my case. I'm sure you can pull my earlier correspondence from your CRM system. You can also read about my case, along with the detailed back-and-forth, on my blog post (http://www.guyvider.com/2009/11/consumer-rant-american-airlines-sucks.html).

I'd like to get a final response to my issue, consisting of a proper apology to the situation I was put in, and a proper compensation. To make it clear that I'm following this matter out of principal and not for monetary gain, I hereby offer that any compensation you offer shall be fully contributed to the charity of your choice. This way, everyone will be happy: I'll get some closure and regain my confidence in your customer service, you'll gain the renewed confidence and goodwill of my readers, and someone will benefit from the compensation.

I will publish a copy of this email on my blog (http://www.guyvider.com/2009/11/american-airlines-sucks-part-ii.html) and will await your reply. I ask your permission to post your reply to my blog (either verbatim, or the spirit of it). I will follow up on this subject in 2 business weeks from today (December 5th, 2009).

Awaiting your reply and thanks for your time,

Guy

So, let's see how this would end. Hopefully, we will all get some closure.

I LOVE Chrome Extensions!

2009-11-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

It's true - the first one is always the hardest. But once I got my first Google Chrome extension done, the next 2 just flowed out of me. And believe me, it was a fun process. JavaScript, jQuery, Ajax, JSONP, event-handling - fun to learn, easy to implement.

This time, I decided to solve some real-life problems. How many times have I been on the phone explaining to a non-computer-savvy person how to get their current IP? Let's count the steps:

Click Windows Key + R (explain "holding a key" to the uninitiated)
Type CMD and click enter
type i-p-c-o-n-f-i-g and click enter (the word "config" nly means something if you're in IT)
look for that line that has four numbers separated by dots and read it to me
What was it again 192.235 or 192.265...?
Etc.

MyIP is a simple Chrome extension that shows your current IP in the status bar.

To install the extension, click this link. The functionality is quite simple:

Upon startup, the extension pings a web service and gets your IP (ergo, you have to be connected for it to work). The extension also attempts to get your geo-location based on the IP. This is not the most accurate process, as the IP location tag at the top of my blog can attest.
Hovering over the IP will show you your location
Clicking it will open a Google Ma, centered on your location
Right-clicking it will force a refresh (one occurs automatically every 10 minutes)

Remember, you need to have Chrome 4.0.222 and above (I'm using 4.0.229 at this point), or wait for the official Extensions Support to trickle down to the release version.
One final fact: the above number is not MY IP :).

The StackOverflow Reputation Extension deals with my obsession of knowing my reputation on the StackOverflow sites at any given moment. If you revisit my original post, you'll see I've gained close to 1k reputation points since publishing it. But I hate browsing to all 3 sites to follow my point accumulate (or dwindle - I do get some down votes from time to time). To use the extension you provide your profile ID from StackOverflow, SuperUser, and/or ServerFault. To add your profile/s, do the following:

Install the extension
Select "Extensions" from the wrench menu, or type the address "chrome://extensions/"
Click the Options button next to the installed extension
Fill in your profile/s (found in your profile URL for the respective site/s), click "Save Options".
Click "Close Window" and right-click the extension to refresh it (or restart the browser).

And here you go - your reputation is in the task bar.
Click any of the numbers, and it'll open your profile page on that site.
And when I ran into an issue with refreshing the content, I put it as a question on, where else, StackOverflow :).

As for the (bright) future of Chrome Extensions: beginning with version 4.0.229, Google started teasing with the imminent arrival of extensions:
But when you click the link, you get:
So, in the meantime, enjoy my extensions - and develop your own. I'll be glad to share my experience (or lend my services hint, hint) to anyone interested.

Why, Lenovo?

2009-11-18T23:57:00.000-08:00

As you may recall, I'm a satisfied owner of a Lenovo Thinkpad T400. My one pet peeve was (and still is) the reverse positions of the Ctrl and Fn keys on the keyboard. I've since been approached by 2 other Thinkpad owners who share the same frustration.

So imagine my delight when I heard that Lenovo is going to offer a BIOS update that will allow switching the 2 keys. And then I read the post to the bottom (highlights are mine):

We plan to offer this in all future ThinkPad models, including the over 10 models that we are currently planning. While we really regret that we were unable to use some of the great ideas that we received, such as a BIOS update for our current products or switching the Fn and Ctrl key caps, we will continue to keep these ideas in mind as we move forward. Thank you for your understanding!

What?! Why??? Don't thank me, because I'm not sure I'm understanding. Please Lenovo, let my Ctrl go!

Spam

2009-11-18T23:41:00.000-08:00

We all get spam email (less so if you're using the GMail filters). But over the last 2 weeks I've been inundated with blog spam. It all started with an innocent comment on my Windows Live Writer post - quite an oldie from 2006:

Anonymous said...

I found this site using [url=http://google.com]google.com[/url] And i want to thank you for your work. You have done really very good site. Great work, great site! Thank you!

Sorry for offtopic

"Ah yes", I thought, "reader appreciation" - and clicked the "Publish" button. Little did I know that this was a hook. Once the comment got published, I started getting 2-5 comments a day to the same post, trying to sell certain "enhancing" drugs, pirated software and plenty of other things I can't comment about since I can't read Russian. All of those, I of course reject, but it's getting to be a hassle. So from now on, I'll be very careful with comment approval. And to the spammers out there, may you all @#@%^^$%!

IE9 on the Horizon

2009-11-18T23:04:00.000-08:00

Today at PDC Microsoft "introduced" IE9. The word is in quotes, because there's no real version out there. In fact, the development teams have started working on it only 3 weeks ago, and there's only an internal work build.

This comes a bit over a year after the release of IE8 - a much shorter release period compared to the one between 7 and 8 - and definitely shorter than the 6 years between 6 and 7. What prompted this speedy development cycle? It could be Microsoft's new dedication to internet technologies, or the rapid release cycles of Firefox and Chrome.

But my guess is that the reason is this:
For almost a year now, sites like BetaNews have been running browser performance comparison tests. You see that tiny purple line at the bottom? That's IE8, performing at an abysmal 1.75 x IE7 (or 75% faster), compared to Google Chrome, at over 15x IE7. (To read about the test itself, read this).

What's even worse for Microsoft are graphs like this:
This shows that all browsers perform better on XP than on Windows Vista (no surprise) and Windows 7 (bad surprise). The good news is that this time, Microsoft is not going to discuss the disturbing results in endless committees, but instead started developing the next gen IE. According to Paul Thurrott, a beta version of IE9 is expected at March '10, with a release following in October. As for me, I'm knee-deep in Google Chrome extension development. Fun.

Consumer Rant: American Airlines Sucks

2009-11-03T15:26:00.000-08:00

Link to part II or http://bit.ly/AASucks2
Link to part III or http://bit.ly/AASucks3

Should you fly with an airline that screws you up and thinks that you should do your best to see their point of view? I think not - and that's why American Airlines sucks.

3 weeks ago, on October 12th, I had to visit a customer at Montreal. Due to the short notice, I could not find a ticket for a reasonable price, so I had to resort to an American Airlines flight from San Francisco. I had a few problems with American Airlines in the past, so I tended to avoid them over the last 5 years, but I was ready to give them another chance. Boy, was I disappointed (to say the least).

My flight had a connection in Chicago. I checked-in online, verified all is OK, arrived at SFO well ahead of time and arrived in Chicago early. And that's where my problem started. American Airlines has overbooked the flight to Montreal - big-time. About an hour and a half before the flight was due to leave, they started asking for 4, then 5 volunteers to stay behind for the night, for the "amazing" compensation of a $250 American Airlines certificate. Needless to say, the underwhelmed crowd did not volunteer. (Just for comparison's sake, I've heard calls for volunteers before, but usually these included an immediate booking with another airlines, and usually a much more generous compensation - I remember one overbooked Lufthansa flight were they offered 400 Euros in cash). They kept on announcing for more than an hour, asking for people with flexible plans.

Apparently, American Airlines sold more tickets than were seats on the plane and were taken by surprise when all ticket holders appeared for the flight on time. This is what airlines call "overbooking" and I call "outright theft". If you have a 100 seats, you should sell a 100 tickets. If a customer cancels or changes his booking - you charge him an exorbitant change fee ON TOP of what he already paid for the ticket - and make even more money. But if you sell 105 tickets to a 100 seat flight - you better have a contingency plan for a case 105 customers arrive. Oh, and muttering "that's just the way we do business" is not a contingency plan - more on that later.

The way I see it, if I buy a ticket, for a large chunk of money, to a certain destination, on a certain date - the only thing that can prevent me from making that flight is weather, a technical difficulty, or an act of God. Anything else is a breach of contract. Hey, try telling your airline that you are not willing to pay for your ticket, because you "overpaid".

10 minutes before boarding time, I heard my name called. I went to the check-in counter, and the attendant informed me that I just "volunteered" to spend the night in wonderful Chicago. They would not book me on a flight to Montreal with another airline (and both United and Air Canada fly to Montreal from Chicago) - presumably to save American Airlines some money.

I had a meeting planned that evening in Montreal, and an early start planned for the following day, so I tried convincing him my plans were not "flexible". To no avail. He told me that they sorted by the dates tickets were booked - and mine was booked just 7 days before the flight. That made no sense to me at all, but he wouldn't hear me further - he was busy selecting 4 other "volunteers". All the other people boarded the plane, and it left the gate. The attendant then gave us vouchers for a night at an airport hotel, a ticket on a flight the following day, and a $10 certificate for dinner (when I asked him what kind of a dinner he expected us to buy for $10, he said, and I quote "this is the maximum the computer allows me to give" - yeah, blame the computer).

And then came the "compensation". Since I didn't "volunteer" in time, but was forcefully taken off the flight, my compensation was to be either a certificate for $159, or a check for $102.29 (I'm not making this up). The other 4 people were offered $500 and $800 checks. When I asked why, the attendant claimed that compensation is given based on the ticket's fare. Again, he was not open to discussion. And I ask - how does the fare of the original ticket matter, when the ticket itself was not respected? And if my ticket was purchased with miles - how can you put a price to that?

Well, needless to say, my evening was shot. I had to call my customer and apologize (imagine how lame an excuse "they overbooked" sounds), leave the airport, sleep in a hotel, come back the following morning, clear security again ("take off your shoes, laptop, belt, watch....") and arrive at Montreal in the afternoon.

I got an email address for the Customer Relations person in charge of complaints from the attendant, and sent them a complaint email. After a week without reply, I tried finding another way.

The only way to submit a complaint to American Airlines is going to American Airlines’ site, and drill 4 levels down to a horrible, outdated web form, that forces you to fill in all your details (I counted 30+ fields) and limits you to 1500 characters. I filled it all in, and tried typing my complaint, but no matter how much I edited it, I couldn’t get below 1500 characters. I finally printed my complaint (PDF) and mailed it the old way. After a week, I received a reply email (PDF), containing the following:

Our seat management system is highly sophisticated (my emphasis GV), and usually we are able to accommodate every confirmed customer who shows up for a given flight. Inevitably, though, there will be rare occasions when there are not enough seats on the aircraft
…
The offer made to you was applicable based on the fare rules of your ticket. I'm sorry that we are unable to offer additional compensation
…
I know that you were inconvenienced, but hope that you will give us the opportunity to win back your respect.

Oh, and let's not forget the instructions on how to respond to this email:

This is an "outgoing only" email address. If you 'reply' to this message by simply selecting the reply button, we will not receive your additional comments.Please assist us in providing you with a timely response to any feedback you have for us by always sending us your email messages via AA.com at http://www.aa.com/customerrelations.

Ah yes, back to the amazing form. I took the time, filled in the form and send my response (link to PDF):

I received your reply to my complaint. It contained neither an apology, nor a satisfying explanation to what happened to me - just some vague corporate excuses. Your overbooking policies, described as “highly sophisticated” are based on an assumption that not all people will show up for a flight – with no provision for what happens if they do.
…
I also find your policy of compensating people by the fare they paid misplaced, to say the least. My ticket was purchased by my cousin for 50,000 miles + whatever fees you charged him. How do you put a price to that? And how do you put a price to the damage I incurred from being late? And is that price a $100?

And this morning I received their final reply, which I bring here with my interpretation of what the person who wrote it thought while typing:

Dear Mr. Vider: I'm sorry to hear that our overbooking policies and procedures do not meet with your approval.

(In other words - it's your fault for not getting our policies - not ours for making them.)

While we understand your position and regret your disappointment, we do have very specific policies and procedures, and we are unwilling to make an exception in your case.

(We could care less about you and customers in your position. We have corporate policies designed to increase our revenue. Be thankful you got a $100.)

Mr. Vider, we hope in time you will understand our position and again choose American for your travel.

(If you are ever stuck on a volcano island and the last flight you can take to save yourself is operated by American Airlines, we hope you'll be kind enough to forget our transgressions and take that flight. Or not - frankly, we couldn't care either way.)

The last thing I did today before typing this post was to send an email to the person who sent me those emails (I omitted her name from the quotes, as I’m hoping she’s representing her company, and not her personal opinions), and asked her permission to use her email to train customer relationships and support people on how to NOT WRITE TO CUSTOMERS.

So, this is why I think American Airlines Sucks, and I’ll do my best to share my opinion with the world. Look for the #AASucks channel on Twitter for some future activities I’m planning (maybe print some T-shirts, write a song... Stay tuned). To include the badge that appears at the top of this post in your blog, paste the following HTML into your post:

<a href="http://bit.ly/AASucks"
target="_blank" title="American Airlines sucks">
<img style="width: 175px; height: 91px; cursor: pointer;"
src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XRxpot-MK0s/SvC9QkPpHFI/AAAAAAAAPtg/3PWL-Xexxek/s400/AASucks.jpg"
border="0" />
</a>

All I ask from you, my readers, is to spread this story and link to this post, from your blog, twitter, Facebook – whatever you can do to spread this tale. Oh, and DON’T FLY WITH AMERICAN AIRLINES – they do not deserve your business.

Chicago, Twice

2009-11-01T22:30:00.001-08:00

It’s been a busy 3 weeks for this poor traveler. This post will be a bit on the longish side, as I’ll try to cram travel, tech and personal experiences one on top of the other, so please bear with me. If I were less lazy, I would have posted more regularly, but pushing yourself to write, even if it’s your hobby, tends to get harder when you’re on the road.

Yes, I’m back on the road, after a month’s hiatus. To some degree I missed it. After 5 straight years on planes, trains and automobiles, I get bored to death working from home. But there’s nothing like some winter air-travel in the US to cure me from my airport addiction.

After looking at the first draft of this post, I decided to break it into several headings, to make some sense of the mess:

1. Montreal – backup your files!
I love Montreal. You can find it floating around my blog time and again. It’s one of the 4 cities I frequent the most on the planet (the others are NYC, London and Tel Aviv). It has some of the best restaurants I ever ate in, and has an overall look of a European city.

My customer in Montreal needed some software upgrades, network and devices tuning, and a backup solution. I cannot stress enough the importance of backups in this digital age. A simple thing like a hard disk failure can cause you to lose all your documents, presentations and large digital photo collection you’ve been taking all over the planet for the last 10 years. Setting up a backup device, with a daily/incremental backup task is quite easy, painless and extremely cheap (compared to the damage and grief of not backing up).

But what if your office burns down, or your house broken into and the thieves carry out every thing that has an AC cable?
To combat this, you need online backup. Not only would you still retain digital copies that have multiple backups of their own – but those will also be accessible everywhere, from every computer. I’ve been utilizing several such apps and services successfully for years now, so it was easy to set my customer up with an account with one of the leading backup services (I won’t mention its name yet – I might try to become an official reseller for that service).

2. Chicago – first time
On my way to Montreal, I connected at Chicago's O’hare airport. The airline I flew with overbooked the flight to Montreal – and guess what? Everyone who bought a ticket showed up. For an hour and a half they asked for volunteers to stay a night in Chicago, for the ridiculous compensation of a $250 certificate. Needless to say, there were no takers.

5 minutes before boarding, the attendant called out 5 names, mine included, and “volunteered” us to stay. No explanations or apologies. The compensation that was offered now was a $150 certificate, or a check for $100. A few other stupid things occurred after this, but suffice it to say I got stuck in Chicago for a night, had to leave the airport, return to it the next day (don’t you just love clearing security?) and missed my morning meeting with my customer.

By now you’re wondering why am I omitting all the relevant details and most importantly, the name of the airline. rest assured, I haven’t gotten soft: I sent the airline an email complaint 3 weeks ago, and a real snail-mail letter last Sunday. I’ll give them another week to respond/apologize. After that, they will be the deserving recipient of a Customer Rant post. Is there anyone in the audience skilled enough to help me mount a consumer campaign a-la United Breaks Guitars?

3. Hockey – the real prime-time sport
I lucked out and my visit to Montreal coincided with the first week of hockey season. I got to watch the Montreal Canadiens play (and sadly, lose) their 2 opening home games. I was seating at the best seats in the Bell Centre (thanks George!) and even met the Canadian Prime Minister Harper, who came to cheer his team (the Ottawa Senators).

I decided to embrace hockey as my favorite sport in this hemisphere, as it is the most dynamic and as closest to football (real football, not the American version) as you can get.

So I went to watch my local team with a friend (hola Diego!). We lucked out and the SJ Sharks (see that big shark head in the image? that's where the players emerge from at the beginning of the game), beat the Columbus Blue Jackets 6-3. I am now considering adopting them as “my” team. I wonder who I’ll cheer for when the Canadiens come to play here?

A funny thing that occurred during this game: after the Sharks' Dan Heatley scored a penalty goal, thousands of people (I'm not exaggerating here) started throwing their hats and caps into the rink. The maintenance people worked for several long minutes to clear all the hats of the ice, as more and more were thrown in. Our bench neighbor explained this is a tradition whenever a player scores a hat-trick (3 goals in one game). I tried capturing some of the action, but my Blackberry's camera is quite limited.

4. Zendcon – visit to the far side
Last year in October, I attended PDC, the Microsoft developers conference. This year, I decided to check how the “other side” lives. I followed up my visit to StackOverflow DevDay by visiting Zendcon – the PHP conference sponsored by Zend. I attended several announcements and sessions and enjoyed several lectures about how to run open-source, multi-contributor projects (hint: ego management). It was most informative and convinced me that I have still a lot to learn (and thanks to Eldad for the invite!).

5. Chicago – second time
My next customer visit took me to Chicago again. I got a chance to get stuck in O’hare again (although for a much shorter time). It was the first time I used Windows 7 and XP Mode to teach a class, and I’m very impressed – I decided to carry out all my future training sessions from XP Mode.

This also gave me a chance to catch up with old friends, and try Deep Dish Pizza – the local dish. Hint try one slice – that’s more than enough (and thanks to Ariel for introducing me to Ginno’s).

6. Yotta – it’s not a car
You’ve all must have heard about Gigabyte – a storage capacity size standing for a 1000 Megabytes (which is a million bytes). You have also heard of Terabyte – a 1000 Gigabyte, and maybe even of Exabyte (a 1000 Terabyte), and Petabyte (a 1000 Exabyte). But today was the first time I ever heard of Zetabyte (a 1000 Petabyte) and Yottabyte (a 1000 Zetabyte). Yes, there exists a storage unit that stands for 1,000,000,000,000,000GB (or 10^24 byte). Where, you may ask? According to this TechCrunch article, the amount of data the NSA intends to hold and analyze will be measured in Yottabytes by 2015. Scary.

7. Windows 7 – because they ran out of good OS names
I’ve been using Windows 7 for over a year now. I got the RTM version at the end of August, but the final drivers for my Thinkpad came out on the official release date, 10/22. Other than a couple of driver related issues (mostly the display driver), everything is peachy. I recommend it to everyone, although if you’re using Vista SP2, it’s very hard to find a compelling feature that will get you to update. I'll probably dedicate a future post to my Windows 7 experiences.

Other than that, I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 and I’m very impressed with the debugging and analysis features.

8. SSD – back in a flash
My next upgrade is a Solid State Drive (SSD) so I can get the maximum out of 7. Strangely, right now the SSD stock is in a flux, prompting many online sellers (notoriously Newegg) to hike prices for no good reason (i.e., an Intel X-25M 80GB drive, MSRP $225, will cost you about $400 on Newegg, and is out of stock on Amazon).

I think I’ll just wait for the stock to replenish before pursuing this further, and will of course report in a future post, once I get it.

Stack Overflow

2009-10-19T21:42:00.001-07:00

While other people may be addicted to Facebook, or MySpace, the site that got me hooked over the last year is StackOverflow.

StackOverflow (SO) is a Q&A site for developers and a heaven for geeks. Unlike the multitude of other sites that purport to fulfill this function, it’s easy to use, full of talented people, and most important: free.

SO is the brain-child of Jeff Atwood (if you haven’t read his blog, Coding Horror – you owe it to yourself to add it to your “must read” list) and Joel Spolsky, who I quoted many a time on this blog.

But the best thing about the site is its community. Not only does it help you get out of sticky code situations, but it also edits, filters and tags questions, throws out spam and inappropriate material, and basically governs itself. Borrowing from the Xbox Live Reputation System, SO rewards users for answering questions, asking interesting questions, commenting, editing and grading other users’ content.

It’s not enough to just answer questions – your answers have to be accepted by the community as good/interesting/contributing to a solution. Your answer can be voted up – or, as I’ve sadly discovered – voted down. On a question regarding password policies, I found out that so many people dislike such policies that they voted me down 3 times yielding a –6 points to my reputation. You can see all the questions I asked/answered by clicking my profile at the top of the post. The reputation badge is dynamic and will always show my current reputation.

You can also win badges, such as “nice answer”, “supporter” and “scholar” but also “tumbleweed” – the dubious honor of asking a question with no answers, no comments, and low views for a week. You can earn bronze, silver and gold medals – although the last type is extremely hard to get. But most of all, you gain the ability to edit content on the site – oh, and bragging rights

The site was such a success, that 2 sister sites (using the same web app, but a different color scheme) popped up: ServerFault for server-related issues, and SuperUser for miscellaneous computer issue. An SU user actually saved me money recently: my Xbox 360 controller stopped responding, the guy from Microsoft Support advised me to buy a new one (after over an hour on the phone without resolution) – but the answer I got on SU was actually simple and effective.

Today I attended the first SO conference. StackOverflow DevDays was held at Fort Mason in San Francisco, overlooking the Golden Gate bridge on one side and Alcatraz island on the other. During the day StackOverflowers met Joel, Jeff and each other. There were several interesting development lectures (I liked Rory Blyth’s iPhone dev – mainly because of the way he presented, and Scott Hanselman's from Microsoft showing the new beta of Visual Studio 2010 and Asp.NET MVC beta 2). During the break, a guy from Microsoft gave everyone 4Gb of memory for their laptops – all in all, a very cool day.

If you are a geek like me, StackOverflow is highly recommended. If you’re an IT guy, you’ll find your crowd on ServerFault. And if you are just a regular computer user, post your questions on SuperUser. Whatever it is you are struggling with, chances are other people solved it before.

My (First) Chrome Extension

2009-10-07T00:17:00.001-07:00

My attitude towards developing in new languages/environment has always been: you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
All I require is a brief documentation of the new environment, a sample code or two and 15 uninterrupted minutes. Oh yeah – and a mission.

A good idea motivates you to learn the practical aspects of the new language, and forces you to merge your experience and existing skill set with the new tools you learn. I learned the hard way that if I can’t find something interesting to develop, my interest tapers off and I leave the new toy untouched.

I’ve been testing the Google Chrome web browser ever since it came out. While it was quite faster than FF (not to mention IE), I never completely switched to it, mostly due to the lack of extensions support. I’ve gotten used to the AdBlock Plus extension in FF, which allowed me to not see a single ad on any web site for the last 3 years (so much so, that for the brief time I had Google Ads on this site, I had to add my site to the exceptions list). But since Google lives of those ads, I was sure hell would freeze over and pigs become kosher before Google will support those extensions.

Wrong. The latest Dev releases of Chrome (version 4.0.213 and higher) started supporting simple extensions. I couldn’t wait to develop my first one. But I needed a theme – something my extension will do.

Introducing the Traveling Tech Guy RSS Marquee extension.

This little extension lives in your Chrome’s status bar, and scrolls the last 10 posts from this blog. Clicking a link takes you to the post. Hovering over a link shows the first 2-3 sentences from the post (thanks to Yaniv for the suggestion), clicking the icon collapses or expands the marquee, allowing you to save precious space in the status bar.

How to install:

Get the latest version of Chrome (v 4.0.220 and higher) from FileHippo, and install it (takes less than a minute).
[For advanced users: by default, Chrome only updates to release versions – v 2.*. You can subscribe to the Dev channel, or use the Google Chrome Channel Changer so your Chrome updates automatically to the Dev trunk 4.*].
Browse to the Traveling Tech Guy RSS Marquee extension, click “save” and then “install”.
In the status bar, you can see the blog’s icon:
Clicking it will expand the marquee:
Clicking it again will collapse it.
To update, inspect, or uninstall (why would you?) the extension, select “Extensions” from the “Wrench” menu:
or type “chrome://exte nsions/” in the address bar.

You will then be able to see the extension details:

In the future, I hope to add more features to this extension, such as the ability to specify a different RSS feed, theme support, preferences support – who knows? I’m open to suggestions.
I also started working on an FF version for this – stay tuned.

Funny enough, the challenge wasn’t developing the extension, but hosting it. My server uses IIS7 and plain out refused to serve a file with the CRX extension. After a couple of days of back and forth with my hosting provider, I ended up adding the extension’s mime type to my site’s web.config file – and that did the trick.

Oh, and last piece of good news: hell may still be hot and pigs are definitely not kosher, but there’s an AdBlock+ extension for Chrome now (not working as well as FF’s, but getting there) - so Chrome is back on my menu.

And if you need an extension or a web applet developed for your site/product/company - you now know who to ask .

What the Internet Knows About You

2009-09-23T15:53:00.001-07:00

The other day I had a sobering, scary experience in realizing how not private my browsing history is. Go ahead, try it for yourself by browsing to http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/ and come back here. (Don’t worry, this is not a hacking site – I would never endanger you or your data).

Within 3 seconds, you’ll see all the (major) sites in your browser’s history cache: where do you bank, what credit card do you use, what were your last search queries on Google or Yahoo, which government sites you visited… the list goes on and on.

This site’s sole purpose is to call attention to a security hole that exists in all browsers today, that allows sites indirect view of your browser’s history.

At the base of this hole lies a common browser behavior called “visited link”. As you no doubt know, many sites color links you’ve already visited in a different color that the other links – to remind you where you’ve visited already. Even if the site’s developer neglected to provide such behavior for his web page, your browser will take care of it automatically, as can be seen in this Firefox color setting dialog:

Developers can specify this behavior by adding an attribute to a page’s style sheet, like this:


<style>
 a:visited { color: red; }
</style>

Now, when a browser renders the page, for each link it encounters, it checks the history to see if it exists (in other words, visited already), and if so, colors the link by the color specified.

The problem is: the browser allows any site to color any other site’s link as visited (in other words, Google.com may have a link to Yahoo on its page, and if it’s colored – know that I’ve been visiting Yahoo). Do you see where this is going?

All I have to do on my page is add a link, let’s say to Google.com, and ask the browser which color it intends to render it in. If red, I know for sure you’ve visited Google.com. If I keep that link invisible, you won’t even know I did it. Now all I have to do is repeat on a global scale: have a pre-prepared list of site addresses, add them dynamically to the page, and ask the browser which colors will they appear in – and thus build a list of sites you’ve visited. Here’s a simple piece of code that might do that:


var url_array = new Array('http://google.com', 'http://yahoo.com');
var visited_array = new Array();
var link_el = document.createElement('a');
var computed_style = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(link_el, "");
for (var i = 0; i < url_array.length; i++) {
 link_el.href = array[i];
 if (computed_style.getPropertyValue("color") == 'rgb(255, 0, 0)') {
     // The color was red, so the link was visited
     visited_array.push(url_array[i]);
 }
}

If you’re interested in understanding how ingenious and insidious is this code, visit this page.

So, how can you protect yourself from this gaping hole in your browser’s security? There are several ways that the site reviews, I’ll cover the 2 easiest methods:

Disable scripts on web pages, either through the browser’s settings, or using an extension like NoScript – the side effect, of course, is that all dynamic activity on the page ceases – that includes menus, Ajax updates, smart controls etc. In today’s Web 2.0 sites, this solution will cripple your browsing.

using the Stanford SafeHistory extension for Firefox – it basically allows every site to use the visited behavior only on links that came from the same site. The problem is that this is a Firefox-only solution, and that current versions of FF do not support it^*. This adds the following setting to Firefox's privacy tab:
Browsing to http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/ after installing the extension yielded the following message:
Congratulations, we did not find anything in this category in your browser history.
But of course, the real solution is to have our browsers’ developers (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple) fix this huge hole in their applications’ security. Go ahead – write to your favorite provider.

And until a permanent solution arrives – beware and be aware.

^*A solution to the extension's compatibility with newer Firefox versions (for professionals only! You have to know what you’re doing):

Open Firefox and type about:config in your address bar

Ignore message and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button

Right click in the list of keys, and select New>Boolean

Enter extensions.checkCompatibility as the preference name

Enter false as the preference value

Close the tab and Restart your browser

Your browser will stop checking extension compatibility from now on. You can run any extension on your FF, as long as it doesn’t do anything your version does not support. You can turn this key to ‘true’, or delete it altogether, to re-enable version checking (just don’t forget to restart the browser after changing any preference).

New Year Post

2009-09-17T23:47:00.001-07:00

As you may or may not know, this evening is the Jewish New Year’s. My tumultuous year started with me traveling all over the globe, working for a large corporation, and ended with me working for a corporation of one. But with a little bit of luck Traveling Tech Guy (my company) might break even by the end of the fiscal year.

As a final post for this year, I wanted to share my latest adventure in web development:

I’ve developed an integration with a social network called Hi5 (I won’t blame you if you've never heard of it – I haven’t either until a month ago. But apparently it’s quite big in some parts of the world).

The Hi5 API is atrociously documented, capriciously implemented and all in all not entirely working. Of course, all this is solved by slapping the word “beta” on the entire API, so they don’t even have to fix their bugs (the beta tag has been there since the beginning of 2008).

I can safely say that most of my efforts on this project were spent on butting my head against Hi5's crappy REST API. I especially spent quite some time trying to send notifications through this method. I direct your attention to the HTTP Parameters section:

One of the parameters is called “tolds” where you’re supposed to specify a list of user IDs to send the notification to. After hours of using this method, and receiving null pointer error exceptions from the Hi5 Tomcat server (great error handling, Hi5!), I finally found out that the name of the parameter is not tolds but toIds – to Ids. Great – I’ve been foiled by a font!

My second project required integrating a web application with SalesForce.com’s API (which, in comparison, has a well-maintained, highly documented API) and was a fun project to develop (especially when combined with a 10-hour-difference-jet-lag-from-hell ).

My next project is shaping up to be quite interesting, and if successful, may revolutionize remote searching. I'll tell you more about it next year.

Well, let me part by wishing you all a happy, healthy, prosperous new year. May you realize most of your wishes – so you’ll always have something more to aspire to next year .

Shana Tova!

Programming in the Holy Land

2009-09-08T11:32:00.001-07:00

My visit in Israel is drawing to a close. The only reason I haven’t been updating my blog lately, is that I was having too much fun doing other things :)

For the last month I’ve been meeting friends, ex-colleagues and potential customers at an average rate of 2 meetings a day. There are several cafés around my apartment where waiters now recognize me by name :)

Since this was mostly a work visit, I’m actually spent a large chunk of my time programming and communicating. Other than the challenge of communicating with customers who are 7 or 10 hours behind (boy, the shoe is really on the other foot for me), I also ran into several development challenges that reminded me of my early startup, 14-hours-a-day, days. Here are 3 basic development truisms that I learned the hard way before, and I’m relearning again:

Your chances of making errors after 2am are close to 100% – I had a call with a Californian customer at midnight Israel time, and just had to finish his class before going to sleep.

From 1am to 1:52am I wrote and tested a class. At 1:53am I accidentally deleted the class, by pasting the contents of another file into the class file. At 1:54am I uploaded the faulty class to the server, found out it was faulty and spent 5 minutes realizing I just erased all copies of my last 2 hours’ work in a second.

The time from 2:01am to 2:05am was spent cursing in every language I know (and believe me, I know a couple of bad words in quite a few languages).

At 2:10am I arrived at the conclusion that this was a sleep deprivation mistake. But did I go to sleep it off? Noooooo. I spent the next couple of hours re-writing and re-testing the class from scratch (even made it better the second time around). I just can’t go to sleep with an open problem – but those were 2 hours of my life I could have saved had I let the problem wait till morning.
An extra pair of eyes for 5 minutes saves 5 hours - when you code alone you might make tiny errors/omissions that are immediately obvious to someone else on first sight, but which you may fail to see even after checking your code a 100 times. I spent a few hours looking for an issue (see #3 for description), but as soon as I discussed my frustration with another developer, 5 minutes into the conversation he already put me on the right road to the solution. I guess everyone needs a sounding board once in a while.
There is such a thing as “too thorough” – this section is directed at the idiot developer who decided Ajax calls should be cached in IE8. [Feel free to skip the nxt paragraph if you're not interested in the nitty-gritty].
Explanation: Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And Xml) is a web programming technique that allows getting data from the web server to a web browser without refreshing the entire page. It’s meant to allow developers to update parts of the page dynamically, without requiring the user to refresh his browser (think of stock tickers, or news headlines that change constantly, while you watch). I emphasized the word “dynamically”, because it contradicts the word “cache”.

While caching pages, images, scripts and style sheets on the client side improve performance and make sense, caching dynamic requests makes no sense at all. And every browser maker in the world knows this – but Microsoft. IE8 caches Ajax calls - meaning that if you call the same URL over an over again, every call past the first will return the same data – regardless of the fact the data has changed at the server.
I just couldn’t understand why I’m getting the same data when another open IE tab displayed different data from my server.
The person who assisted me (thanks Dror!) pointed me to this trick. Basically, you add a random number at the end of the URL, thus “cheating” IE8 to think it’s different than last call, and going to the server to get the results rather than the cache. Upon further research, I discovered that since I’m using jQuery’s $.ajax() function to make my ajax calls, I can simply pass it a parameter {cache: false} and get rid of caching in IE8. What I later found out is that all this parameter does is add a random number at the end of the URL behind the scenes… :)

Oh well, guess we’ll have to cheat IE8 until IE9 comes out.

Finally, I wanted to report that less than a year after reporting on the early beta of Windows 7, I finally installed the RTM version and it’s up and running nicely on my T400 (in fact, I’m using it now to post this). Even the virtualization features work nicely – albeit slower than VMWare. So on the OS front, hooray to Microsoft!

My only beef is with the lazy engineers at Lenovo who apparently didn’t have enough time to develop all the necessary drivers, despite having access to a version of Windows 7 for more than a year…

Technological Digest XVI

2009-08-28T00:31:00.000-07:00

While writing a post describing my latest adventures in consulting, I ran into some interesting tech related news I wanted to share:

Solve world hunger by upgrading - Microsoft is running a bizarre (to me, at least) program to get people to upgrade to IE8:
We will continue to help fight hunger by donating 8 meals for every download of Internet Explorer 8 throughout the month of September. September is Hunger Action Month.
We want to encourage our customers to upgrade to a modern and secure browser – so we are doubling donations for people who switch from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8 through this campaign. If you move from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8, we will donate 16 meals to help fight hunger!
Stay tuned for the next upgrade scheme: "every time you use Firefox, we'll kill a kitten" campaign. Seriously, is Microsoft that desperate?

Of course, I can also announce a Traveling Tech Guy End Hunger campaign: every time you hire me for a project, I will donate 3 meals a day to a hungry consultant .

On the other hand, will someone in the crowd help solve world hunger by writing a script that downloads IE8 a billion times ?
How many vinyl records are you carrying in your pocket? This chart gives you the full breakdown of physical vs. digital storage, down to the last cassette. As storage becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, I think charts like that should become obsolete. Here's one excerpt:
Kick your torrent addiction - as authorities are clamping down on more Bittorent sites, this article reminds us of an oldie - but goodie, technology that may take BT' place: Usenet. It's full of tips, tricks and recommendations.

I remember using Usenet to download images as far back as 1992. Funny that it's still around...
We are all marketing people! - so says marketing guru, Seth Godin, in this hour-long talk at the Business of Software convention last year. Worth watching, for his great ideas, funny examples, and basic truths that run through the talk: you can be the best developer in the world - if you can't market what you develop, you might as well quit.
Where's your fingerprint, sir? flying back to the US, I often have problems with getting my fingerprints read at airports: my ridges are not well defined, and I have to frustratingly repeat the process again and again until finally the TSA agent gets a reading.

I blame this to some degree on the horrible fingerprint readers - no doubt purchased by the government from the lowest bidder. However, this story brings up a new theory.

A man who was treated with some sort of cancer medication had his fingerprints completely wiped out, raising authorities suspicions and causing him to be detained for hours. Now, I haven't been taking what he has taken, but this makes me think that there might be enough chemicals in medication I did take to erode some of my ridges.

Gadget Review: Mio Moov 500 GPS

2009-08-17T02:13:00.001-07:00

(I read somewhere last week that 5% of all blog posts in the world are apologies for the blogger not posting anything for a while. Rather than contributing to the statistics, I’ll skip that part ).

Currently, I’m in Israel again. Not exactly a vacation – I’m actually working close to 14 hours a day to make sure my customer meets his deadline. It’s been a while since I developed so intensely, overcoming language, environment and browser limitations – I kinda missed it. Don’t tell anyone, but I would probably have done it for free, just for the challenge .

One of the disadvantages of leaving my ex-employer is that now I have to pay my phone bill, along with all the tiny extras. I immediately realized that paying AT&T $10/month for their GPS software (which covers US and Canada only) is not fiscally sound.

My friend came to the rescue: he suggested I get a GPS device that can be hacked to include more maps from around the world. That will allow me to take it with me to Europe and even Israel. He recommended the Mio Moov series, as it is known far and wide as extremely hackable. He actually went a step further, and used CraigsList to get me a like-new Mio Moov 500 for $70 (retail price: $120 at Radio Shack, or 1400NIS in Israel – roughly $350!). For that price, the seller also included a 4GB SDHC card (thanks Brian!).

The Moov 500 is actually a small computer, running Microsoft’s WinCE 5 OS. It has a 4.7” touch-screen, an SD card reader and a loud speaker. As the system boots, it launches the bundled Mio Map 2008 software. The software itself is great and well-worth using (I like the lane-alerts, letting you know in which lane to drive on the road so you won't miss the next turn), and you can add other navigation software (some are free, some you have to buy).

At this point, all you have to do is apply a simple hack that removes that shortcut, and adds a Windows File Manager – and you can now boot to the Windows desktop (I’ll let you find those hacks in GPSUnderground and GPSPassion on your own).

Now you can add your own software and maps bundles (get them or buy them on your own – I got some through joining a beta test with a company). You can also add skins, icons, labels - anything you think will make your navigation life easier.

I added Israeli and UK maps – and they work great. It actually warned me of some traffic changes in my own hometown that were added while I was away.

I also added a (freeware) media player. The SDHC card allows me to listen to quite a lot of my own music. The app actually plays video files as well – but I think that may be one of the last things you need in front of your eyes while driving .

You can add more applications – any app that runs on Windows CE – but I fail to see the use, as it’s extremely difficult to manipulate a calculator or a Solitaire game while driving.

In short, the Mio is one of the best purchases I made in a while. While not the latest model out there, it’s extensibility and hackability make it perfect for a traveling tech Guy like me.

The Biggest Hole in Your Network

2009-07-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

According to a research published in The Register yesterday, the biggest security threat in your home/office is your network attached device (link to report).

The proliferation of devices that connect to the network/internet, such as network printers, wireless cameras, multimedia devices, NAS, etc. brought with it a new dimension of insecurity we haven't considered before. Moreover, the research shows most manufactures don't care much about security, and their web interfaces are highly hackable, by he simplest methods out there.

Script-kiddie level hacks applied to your device's web interface, such as JavaScript strings in place of user names, and cross-site scripting (XSS) can turn your camera into a spy, or have your printer send a copy of every scanned document to an external address.

The report does not name names (sadly), but hints that 4 out of the 5 big NAS manufacturers have been neglect in their duty to protect your data. The full results of the research will be presented later this month at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas (meaning that pretty soon, every hacker on Earth will hear about this).

We can only hope that device manufacturers take the research to heart and publish updates to their software and firmware that blocks such simple attacks. Knowing some of the players though, suggests it would take a long time for them to do so, if at all - there's no money in fixing things.

In the meantime, I recommend using your router to make sure network-attached devices are not accessible to the outside world. If you must access them, DO NOT use their built-in web interfaces, but some secure protocol like VPN or SSH.

Send Your Name to Mars!

2009-07-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

Last year NASA offered you to send your name to the moon on the LRO. The LRO rocket took off successfully on 6/18. But if you missed that ride, NASA now offers you to send your name to Mars on the Mars Science Laboratory Rover.

The rover is scheduled to take off sometime in 2011. My recommendation is to add your geo-location coordinates, so the aliens can locate you more easily (I doubt they use our zip system)

Services on the Go

2009-07-11T15:57:00.000-07:00

As some of you may already know, I officially launched my very own consulting company - The Traveling Tech Guy.

I offer consulting services on several levels: from project management and process optimization, to actual software development. I intend to leverage my knowledge and experience to assist my customers with almost any software environment, product or methodology out there. My full range of services, and resume is available on the site.

So far, I have 2 customers, and I'm negotiating right now with 2 more. Past referrals have been great and I'm learning that the most important word in the services biz is Networking.

One thing I've seen other bloggers who sell something do very often, is turn their personal blog into a marketing resource. It has gotten so it's almost impossible to see the trees for the forest. (e.g. the blog Joel on Software, that I used to enjoy and quote from in the past, have turned into a long ad for his company and products).

I promise to not turn this blog into a billboard. I will continue to share my technology and travel experiences here, but will attempt to keep marketing to a minimum - right after this mandatory notice from our sponsor:

Announcing the Traveling Tech Guy Referral Promotion:

Finder's fee: for any referral that will turn into an actual project, I will pay the referrer 10% of the final contract sum.

Blog discount: any customer who gets to me through this blog will receive a 10% off his final charge.

Small print: these 2 offers are mutually exclusive (i.e. you either get a 10% fee for referring someone, OR the referred customer gets a 10% discount, OR we can split it evenly between the referrer and the customer).

There. Got that out of my system . Just my way of sharing some revenue with dedicated readers. Expect some news from my venture now and again, but mostly - expect this blog to remain as it was: all about travel, tech and fun.