:: rushabh ::

Power-using Firefox

Note for the uninitiated: Internet Explorer sucks. We all know that. Popups kill you, and it has a bunch of missing features - tabbed browsing, programmable bookmarks and ad-blocking to name a few. So what are the alternatives? There's opera which you have to pay for (not cool). Then there's Mozilla which is more than just a browser - the package is somewhat similar to Netscape Communicator and comes with a browser, email and news reader, HTML editor and an IRC chat client. However - it did rock the boat. I started using it around the 0.7 release or so. I love it. So much so, that I didn't bother upgrading it after 1.0 (currently at release 1.6).

The only problem with mozilla (not so much of a problem either) is that it comes with a lot of junk that I don't use (IRC client? Email and newsgroup? naahhh). Enter Mozilla Firebird (phoenix). The browser evolved because some people realised that mozilla was becoming overburdened with these other components. They ripped out everything but the browser and out came Firebird. I played around with Firebird some but its rendering seemed to be somewhat broken and its "lightning fast" claim didn't really hold up in my non-scientific tests.

Enter the latest version of Phoenix codenamed Firefox. Amazing. Like really, really amazing. Download it today. Look at it and weep, IE. Continue reading the extended for my opinions (nearly all positive) about Firefox, and some power using tips, tricks and extensions.

First of all - why use Firefox. (Please note that I'm not discriminating against Mozilla - its browser has all the same features; its just that I want a browser, not a whole suite). Also note that, at this point, I expect you to have downloaded and installed firefox, if only to just try it out. Its barely a few MB and its nice, clean, doesn't break anything. Trust me on this, download it. Now back to motivation - why Firefix (or Mozilla):
1. Tabbed browsing: This is a brilliant, brilliant feature that doesn't seem ground breaking at first, but becomes indispensible once you start using it. Hit CTRL-T to open a new tab. This way you can have two (or more) pages loaded up at once and switch quickly and efficiently between them. Ever read a document and wanted to follow a hyperlink, but wanted to keep reading the page? Typical IE response to this behaviour was to right-click -> open in new window. Blah; that's old school. Now you CTRL-Click the link and it opens in a new tab, all while you keep reading your current page. Wonderful.
2. Popup blocking: Firefox automatically blocks popups. Enough said. For the really nerdy people who're going - wait, what about site XYZ which legitimately uses popups (such sites should be banned)? - you can disable the popup blocker on a site by site basis.
3. Ad blocking: This feature is actuallly not built into Firefox per se, but is available through an extension. I highly recommend it. (more on extensions below)
4. Programmable shortcuts: This is easier to explain via an example. Forget for a moment that Firefox offers a google toolbar. You can program any bookmark to be triggered off a keyword / letter. Thus, I usually program google to be g. Even more nifty is that you can program what happens to the string after this keyword - thus for me, "g foo bar" in the location bar results in a google search for "foo bar". This functionality can easily be extended to do Google Lucky searches (so jump straight to first result), dictionary lookups, perldoc lookups, man lookups etc. (I currently have it limited to google, lucky and dictionary).Very very powerful feature. If you want to know more details about how to do this, comment on it and I can post furthur instructions
5. In place searching: This was introduced in Firefox (I think). You can also tell this was made by some freak using that retarded editor. Go to a page. Any page. No, not that page. Say, slashdot. See a link you want to jump to? Start typing it! Et voila! It searches the link text in place. And its not limited to links only. Hit / and type for in-place text searching, type ' and type for in-place link searching (or just type). Hit Ctrl-G for jumping to the next hit.

I hope that provides more than enough motivation to get started using this browser. Next post will cover extensions and other cool things. Word of warning - don't use the Newsmonster extension, cool as it sounds. It hosed my browser and I had to do a reinstall to fix it. Bloody 'ell. But its not the browsers fault, so I don't blame firefox just yet.

Are banks safe?

I have my crazy, scary experience for the week:
I go to a large, well known bank to get my address changed. I've been so lazy that I haven't changed it since my days in Illinois, so I wasn't expecting this to be easy.
Continue reading the extended entry...

I have my crazy, scary experience for the week:
I go to a large, well known bank to get my address changed. I've been so lazy that I haven't changed it since my days in Illinois, so I wasn't expecting this to be easy.
First of all, they said that they couldn't change it since I opened the account in missouri and I'd have to call their phone service instead. Fine. No worries. So I call them (thankfully using the bank's phone and not my cell)
Start talking to a machine (its so hard to talk to humans these days, but that's another rant). I key in my social, machine eventually gets confused and plops me over to a human. So far, so good.
I explain my problem to her - the change of address is slightly more complicated because its a joint account. Oh well. So she starts asking me the usual questions: date of birth (sure, I knew that one). Then the fun starts: location of the bank where I opened the account (don't know), date of last withdrawal (don't know), current holdings (don't know), current address of co-owner (don't know). I kept telling her that I could call and ask the co-owner if she wanted. She didn't. At the end she gave me this exasperated "Sir, you can't answer any security questions!". At this time, I fully expected to be told to get that information and call back.
"Okay, I'll go ahead and make the address change anyway". Blink. Whaa? After a whole bunch of other non-interesting complications, she makes the address change and sends me some checks and wants to put me on hold so she can order my check card for me. Wow.
So, in case you missed it, here's why this is so, so bad: the ONLY piece of information I entered into this whole system was my social security number. On the basis of that I got the bank to change the address, send me checks and almost send me a debit card. That is scary. Don't banks have some strict security procedures they follow?

Updates on foot, caffeine and roomates

My foots coming along in its healing. The pain is almost down to zero. Its still quite annoying getting around and I really wouldn't be able to do much without immense help from friends who help do everything from getting me to work to taking out my garbage - you all rock!
If you want to see more pictures of my cast than you could possibly care for - check out this page.

My friend Vincent decided to go vegetarian for a month. Now that's hard for this guy - he's French for crying out loud - the french word for main course is synonymous with meat! So, to show my support, I'm going caffeine-free for a month. Decaf stuff doesn't count (even though it contains some caffeine), but no real coffee, caffeinated teas or sodas. If you know me at all, you know this hurts.

My old roomie/housie Ted is the best - he sent me "Snatch" on a DVD. I've been wanting this movie really bad for a very, very long time and he finally sent it to me. He rocks! The ironic thing was that he sent it as a "something to do while your foot is in a cast" kind of present, but while my foot is in the cast, I cannot easily go check my mailbox for new mail. So for over a week, the DVD had been sitting in my mailbox; finally Kristin made a trip and retrieved my mail. Phew.

East, West

I love Salman Rushdie. Fantastic style, gripping stories, dry, sarcastic, punny humour - what's not to like? No surprise that I immensely enjoyed his (this) book of short stories. Some people in my Salman Rushdie orkut community have put this book down as his best work - he can work wonders even in the short story space. The way he weaves in real historical people, places and events is just great. Very, very good book. That makes this the second great book that I've finished this week. Hurrah!

Emailing my blog and other losses to procrastination

People have been yelling at me for not getting this email thing going. Apparently, its a whole bunch of sheer pain to check redefine every so often just to check if I've put up a few ramblings.
I blame Trillian. This great piece of software has an RSS plugin, which means that I'm subscribed to most of the blogs I care about (except Kristin's since xanga is stupid that way) and I get my bloggage along with my IM.
Naturally, this is not the case for Trillian non-users. I think I gave up on getting MovableType to send out email and being the geek that I am, settled on the idea of writing a small cronperl script that will take care of mailing a recent blog entry or excerpt to a mailing list (which will then get forwarded to whoever is subscribed). What are your thoughts on this careful piece of overengineering, my fellow geeks?

In other news, friendster is dead. Long live friendster. Due to higher geek ratings, I have far more friends on orkut than on friendster, plus I like orkut better anyways. Better interface, faster, in short, all the goodness of google. If you're not on orkut yet, email me and I'll send you an invite.

Interpreter Of Maladies

Finished this incredible book by Jhumpa Lahiri. If you have not read it yet, I'd highly recommend it. It is a book of short stories - "stories of boston, bengal and beyond" in her own words. Absolutely fabulous and its not a hard read at all. I particularly liked The Third And Final Continent - a rather simple story about a man emigrating from Calcutta to Boston via London. Not stuff that I can exactly relate to, but it comes close and is very charming in its own way.

Now I'm going to go back and struggle with Guns, Germs and Steel

Firefly

Based on Andy's suggestion and some other rave reviews I'd heard, I decided to use my time in bed, resting my leg, to watch firefly, among other things.
It was good. I wouldn't put it as some of the best TV I've seen (and I don't see much TV), but it was pretty good. I think it had a lot of potential and I really am curious to find out what they could have done with the whole River angle. That girl was very intriguing and interesting. Or maybe I'm into paranoid schizophrenics. Same difference.
I would recommend watching it - some of the episodes are definitely skippable but most are pretty good. I still remain a big fan of Babylon 5 though.

Categories - woohoo!

Check out the new category thing :) Finally got it working in movable type templates. Hurrah!

The end of snowboarding

Given the frequency of my snowboarding trips, it had to happen sometime. It finally did. I fell and broke my heel bone. The stupid part of the this whole incident is that I did the blues just fine and broke my foot on a dumbass shallow green. I am forever embarassed in the annals of snowboarding.
For the gory details, read the extended entry.

Vinh and I went boarding to Steven's Pass after everyone else declined. I politely asked Vinh if he wanted to warm up on a green slope and his usual polite answer was "Dude, are you crazy?". Oh well, so off we went to the blue and we did the (same) blue slope a few times and it was good. Then we decided to go down another blue slope and I told Vincent I could keep up with him (of course I couldn't). So he went down the slope in his usual mad-frenchman-gone-bonkers style and I lost him in no time. I decided to take the easy (green) way down - turned out to be a silly straight portion; snowboarder's hell, in other words. There was a small dip in the trail, which I went down, clipped the snow and fell. Oops. I figured it was no big deal - my ankle felt a little funny; I put it back in the snowboard and down the slope I went - no problem. At the base it felt a little painful, so I figured I should go show it to the ski partrol (I'm kinda wimpy that way) and the lady out there said that it was probably a sprain, gave me a bag of ice and let me lie down on the bed. It felt rather stupid, nursing my slightly sprained ankle in a room full of popped-out shoulders, broken knees and other worse injuries.
So I decided to "be a man" and wait there for 6 hours while Vinh continued to board. Err, bad, bad, bad idea. At 6.30, by the time we left, ankle was swollen, hurting like mad and I don't know how I hopped from the bus to the car. (We took the shuttle up, so we'd parked the car at the shuttle stop)
Called up my aunt in LA (who is a doctor) asked her if I need to go to the ER or "just a litlte ice and rest". She reckoned I had a hairline and insisted that I go straight to the ER. My aunt rocks that way. Took the X-rays and the doc (or PA, rather) told me that it was a clear fracture of the tailus (sp?) or heel bone. She showed it to me, and egad - it was rather obvious. Bummer. That was the end of snowoarding for this season (first thought that crossed my mind, I guess I'm a little adicted). Got a CT scan, orthopedic surgeon came in, took a look a tthe scan, decided no surgery required. Lovely.
They sent me back with a cast, went to the doctor again today and now I have a cool-looking red colored cast. Awesome. 6 more weeks and I'll be done.
But, (and this is the part that hurts) no more boarding this year.