Tim Dupree

Today I decided to convert some of my Greasemonkey Scripts to Chrome Extensions.  I converted my Digg AdBlocker, Hacker News OnePage, and Hacker News Comments scripts.  It turned out to be quite easy, I barely had to change anything to get them running as Chrome Extensions.  I packaged them using the python script Google supplied, so they are easy for anyone to install.

To use the extensions, you first need to be running the dev build of Google Chrome, you can get it here. Then ad --enable-extensions to your Chrome command line. Do this by right clicking your Chrome shortcut and choosing “properties”. Then in the “Target:” field add a space after the file path and then add the command.  It should like similar to “C:\...your..path..\chrome.exe --enable-extensions“.

Click the following install links and Chrome will ask you if you wish to install the extension.  There are also links to view the source and JSON manifest of the extensions.

Hacker News OnePage (install): Provides users with the ability to browse Hacker News articles and comments without leaving the page. source - manifest

Hacker News Comments Footer (install): Adds a footer to the end of the comments pages to give a visual cue of the end of page. source - manifest

Digg AdBlocker (install): Removes ads from digg. source - manifest

To view your installed extensions, or to uninstall an extension visit this address in Chrome: chrome://extensions/

Over at DSS Creative we usually have a couple projects running in the background that are just for fun or satisfy a particular need.  We call these our Labs projects.  A while ago we created a url shortening service and just recently we made a domain name lookup service.  Go ahead and check out our DSS Labs page!

I have been using a relatively new HTTP server called nginx (pronounced “engine-x”) on a project and have been pretty impressed with it.  Despite the original documentation being in Russian, the English documentation is getting better and we are beginning to see a lot more resources popping up to help people with nginx.

Here are some resources you might find helpful in getting your nginx server up and running…

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Official Stuff:

Official nginx website: http://nginx.net/

Official nginx English wiki: http://wiki.nginx.org/Main

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Installing nginx on Ubuntu Intrepid:

Install it really quick  - Install nginx using aptitude package manager

or

Install it from source (giving you much greater control) - Install nginx from source

When installing from source, make sure you look over the install options.  You may want to configure nginx to support https, mail proxy, or sha1 (–with-http_ssl_module, –with-mail, –with-sha1=DIR). Check it out here: Nginx Compile-time Options

If you installed from source, make the init scripts to start nginx on reboot: Nginx init scripts

now that you have installed nginx, you will need to…

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Configure nginx (modifying the nginx.config file)

This link is more usefull if you installed nginx using the aptitude package manager.  If you installed from source, you will just have to keep your eye out or differences in paths etc.: Slicehost nginx.config tutorial

Learn about all the modules in your nginx.config file: Nginx Modules

More advanced configuration examples: Nginx Configuration Examples

Once you have nginx running you will probably want to get MySQL and PHP running as well so you can actually do something.

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MySQL, PHP5, FastCGI, and other goodies

Between the following articles and Googling here and there, you should be able to get MySQL, PHP5, FastCGI, Ruby on Rails, etc up and running alongside nginx.

Tutorial 1 - nginx, MySQL, PHP5, and FastCGI

Tutorial 2 - nginx, MySQL, PHP5, FastCGI, Ruby on Rails, and Rewrite

Tutorial 3 - nginx, MySQL, PHP5, PHP-fpm, and Ruby

Tutorial 4 - nginx and PHP5

Turorial 5 - nginx, PHP5, and xcache

Tutorial 6 - nginx, MySQL, PHP5, and FastCGI

Tutorial 7 - nginx, PHP5, FastCGI, and xcache

Tutorial 8 - nginx, PHP, FastCGI, APC

I also found the slicehost forum to be of help as well: Slicehost forum

Update (04/13/2009): nginx “how to” by calomel.org.  This has a lot of great information and explains things very clearly. It also goes over setting up https with a GoDaddy SSL cert.

Good luck!

Here’s a handy tip, if you want to remove the www. from your domain and have visitors always see http://mydomain.com, then all you have to do is add 4 lines of code to your .htaccess file (or create a .htaccess file if you dont have one already).  Just add:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Just replace “mydomain” with the name of your domain and you’re done. Thats it! Now any time someone goes to www.mydomain.com the www. will be automatically dropped.  The one caveat, your server has to be running the apache webserver for this to work.  If you’re on a linux host, you proabably run apache webserver and are good to go.

About one and half years ago I wrote a Greasemonkey script for removing the ads from digg.com.  Today that script reached 2,000 installs!  Grab my Digg AdBlocker script and check out the other scipts I have made.

There was a submission about “What makes a good programming font?” on HN today and, as usual, the comments on the submission proved more enlighting than the actual linked post (Hacker news has a great community).  From the comments I came across some nice programming fonts; Envy Code R and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.  The user who posted about the Vera Sans Mono font also added a picture of it in action here.  I liked the syntax highlighting/code coloring of that code screenshot, so naturally I set out to try out something similar with dreamweaver and TextPad.

I have to say, I’m disappointed in the both of them.  While you can go to a preferences pane and change the code coloring in both editors, neither supports creating, saving, and loading new color schemes files.  Additionally, both editors made the whole process cumbersome to change just one color as there was no instant application of the change to the document, so I was forced to apply the changes and close the settings box every time I changed something to see how it looked.  Weak.

I think I am going to try the Envy Code R for a while and see how it goes.  I never got a color scheme going that looks like the nice screen shot (I did in TextPad but it was only applied to the working document), oh well.

In searching for answers I did come across a nice addition to the Dreamweaver Syntax highlighter which adds support for MooTools.

The other day I decided to play around with the Msgme SMS platform.  My goal was to create a application that lets my wife record the number of hours she works.  She just needs something very simple. So my idea was to make a little app that lets her use her cell phone or web browser to indicate start and stop times of when she is working.  I was going to tie in the Msgme SMS service to allow her to text “timeStart” or “timeStop”.  Msgme allows you to set up keywords that are tied to their SMS number.  Then when someone sends that keyword to the number you can return a simple message from Msgme or interact with an external web app (that you create), among other things.

So when she sends “timeStart” to Msgme, Msgme then sends that message along to a php page I create which then records the action “start” and the time and date of the request to a database.  Sending “timeStop” will record the action “stop” along with the time and date.  Then another pag ecan parse that info, figuring out time elapsed between start/stop actions and display that data textually and visually using the google charts API.

I was on my way to setting up the system when I encountered the dreaded “Exception Error” response from Msgme when clicking on the “Test” button for testing the response from the external application.  It for some unknown reason is failling on the call from Msgme to the external app.  I can change the msgme request to have it ask for an rss feed, and then format my output for the rss specs and it works fine, but the msgme service polls the rss feed twice, which results in two db entries, so it’s not a viable work around.  If anyone has ever encountered this and was able to come up with a fix, let me know.

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Update (12/19/08): After several emails and a couple days the problem got fixed.  I was very unimpressed with the support I received initially (I think whoever was answering the support emails wasn’t very technical and was just writing back canned responses).  But I just received an email from a developer for Msgme who informed me that it was an error on their side, he fixed it, and that everything should work fine now.  Yay! He was really genuine and apologized for the problems. I really appreciated it.

I came across a story from a fellow in Singapore who dropped his iPhone.  His account of breaking the phone read nearly identical to mine.  I wonder how many other people are breaking their iPhones as a result of dropping them in restaurants and having the glass hit the table leg. It seems an unlikely event.

A while back Google added SMS capabilities to the Google Talk client built into Gmail, but it was a bit buggy so they took it away. Yesterday they announced they again added the feature.  The Google talk client in Gmail is getting more and more robust, especially with the addition of video chat a month ago.  While all of the new features are really nice, it does leave me wishing that they would add them to the dedicated desktop app or at least to the pop out Gtalk client (which I could then wrap in an Adobe Air app or something).

About 2 weeks ago, Brittany and I were getting some takeout at a local Chinese restaurant and I dropped my iPhone when I was taking it out of my pocket.  It happened to land face down on a metal leg of a table and shattered near the home button.  Having owned it for only about 3 weeks, I was pretty upset.  So after trying to figure out what to do about it, I ended up buying a replacement glass display and digitizer to fix it myself.

I didn’t really find a definitive source online to learn about what was covered under warranty, how much the fix will cost, and how to fix it etc. Sooo, I figured I would throw a page up online to help out the other poor schmoes who bust their iPhone 3G.  It’s not quite finished but has some good info on it nonetheless.  I taped my repair and have the video pretty much edited, I just need to add narration.  I am also going to create a written repair guide on replacing the glass + digitizer as well. You can check out my page about fixing a an iPhone 3G with a cracked glass display here: 3gcrackedglass.com

Below is my sad phone before the fix: