tail -f findings.out » Web Applications

Charlie Sheen is a long way from philosophy– but the journey is winning

Samuel Huckins — Wed, 25 May 2011 19:52:13 +0000

After reading about an interesting phenomenon witnessed in a cartoon by Randall xkcd I decided to see how true it was that you could get to Philosophy from most any Wikipedia term via a reasonable number of clicks (here the devil waits, no doubt). The principle:

If you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

—Book of XKCD, Chapter 903 (See alt tag)

Being a good citizen of the Internet I started my search with the article on Charlie Sheen, hopeful that I was a mere two or three hops from my beloved Ivory Tower description. The truth, it turns out, is far more amusing. Follow the clicktrain:

Step 1: Charlie sheen -> Martin sheen -> Stage name -> Pseudonym -> Name ->
Step 6: Noun -> Linguistics -> Human -> Taxonomically -> Science ->
Step 11: Knowledge -> Facts -> Information -> Finite -> Mathematics ->
Step 16: Quantity -> Property -> Modern philosophy ->
Step 19. Philosophy

Now of course I have to write a script to facilitate exploring distances between terms in Wikipedia. After more important projects…

Show all available documents to new Google Apps – Docs users

Samuel Huckins — Sun, 15 May 2011 01:55:52 +0000

At my job we use Google Docs (via Google Apps) for internal collaborative documents and archives. One big issue with this platform is that when new folks are hired/given accounts and they go to view “All documents”– lo, and behold! it is empty. That’s right, if you go to “All items” and select Visibility -> YOURCOMPANY under More options as the filter, you will still only get “No items matched your selections”. This despite there potentially being thousands of documents that should fit your criterion.

As it happens these views only get populated based on creation or modification dates. In other words, new users only get to see documents that are modified or created after their account was created. By “see” I only mean visibility of the existence of documents in the Docs index interfaces and searches. The user can still view a document directly if they are sent a direct link (assuming they have permission). But the fact that you can’t even see documents you have permission to see in searches until they are modified is just insane. Google support verified this was a “feature”, and their reasoning is that in larger organizations new employees might be overwhelmed by a huge list of documents, things would be too hard to find. So the solution is to make it difficult to find anything!

Until the time when Google realizes this is annoying and silly, here’s a quick and easy (albeit not permanent) hack for this situation. Create a new collection (helpful: name = creation date) and add all current documents to it. This step counts as a modification to all the documents, and thus they will then appear in the list of all docs! The annoying bit is that next time you make a user you have to do the same thing.

This hack might not be feasible if you have high hundreds or especially thousands of documents, I am sorry to say. As far as I can tell you can’t drag more than 40-60 of them at once or it throws an error. If you do it in chunks it works fine though.

Lastly, perhaps you dislike messy lists of things you no longer need and want to remove the previous collection when a new user comes on and you create a new one. If you do that by simply deleting the collection you will also delete all documents in the collection! Really Google? You couldn’t add a damned checkbox to confirm the removal of child documents or just the collection container? Anyway, if you really care that much then there is a way. Click on one document, hold Shift and click on another document slightly past the bottom of your screen (after scrolling). This should be a reasonable number for your chunk size. Then hover over one of the selected documents, click Actions on the right, and click Organize. Here you can select the new collection to add them to it and deselect the old one so they aren’t in it. Once you are done going through all your docs the old collection should be empty and you can remove it safely. My approach is to create them with a name based on the date and just never remove them. If your users heavily leverage collections you might need to reconsider this.

WordPress 3.0: Well-polished, fun to customize

Samuel Huckins — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:44:37 +0000

After reading about all the exciting new features and improvements packed into WordPress 3.0, I’ve finally gotten this blog updated to it. Thelonious is one awesome release of WordPress, making this great platform even better!

Upgrading

I ran into a memory limit issue for PHP when I first tried the upgrade automatically, due to the larger size of this new version. This was easily fixed by following this post’s advice. After that I just clicked Upgrade Automatically and what do you know WordPress updated itself properly in no time at all. I then went to the Dashboard and was greeted with the new hotness.

Themes and such

As you can see if you’ve been to this blog before, things look a bit different. This is mostly because it’s so easy and fast to customize many visual aspects in the new version that, well, it’s hard to resist tweaking!

I decided to go with the new theme included in WordPress 3.0: TwentyTen. With a variety of attractive headers, six widget areas, and great looking typography fresh out of the box, this is a much improved default theme. One of my favorite features: when editing in Visual Mode, your post content will appear just like it would in your actual blog! This means no more processes like: make some edits, click save, wait for the save, click preview, check out the preview in a new tab. Just keep working in the same editor and get the real view right away.

You can now also add and edit your blog’s menus without editing any files through the Appearance Menus. The positioning of this through the UI is limited by what your theme supports, but its much easier to customize and get what you actually want into a menu than before.

Plugins

Working with plugins is also made a bit easier in WordPress 3.0. You can update all plugins with updates available in a single step. And you get lots of handy info about the upgrade from a single screen. I mean just look at this:

Awesomesauce. And when you are done, it shows you the status all at once as well, so you know if that big batch of upgrade cookies came out alright or not:

In this and many other areas, the admin interface has been streamlined, making just about everything easier to get to. And the icing on the cake: everything is faster anyway! I didn’t make any other changes to my server, but since the upgrade interacting with everything in the admin interface has been much snappier. Add to that a whopping 1200 bug fixes and this is a great milestone release.

New Flexibility

Another big feature of 3.0 is Custom Post Types. This allows you to register new types aside from just the default Posts, Attachments, Pages, Revisions and Nav Menus. You can define the custom type’s attributes, how to display it, and more. This would be great for more business-oriented blogs, or even simply highly-customized personal sites.

WordPress 3.0 is an incredible update! I highly recommend upgrading to it.

Skip the distractions: Focus on web page content with Readability

Samuel Huckins — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:38:36 +0000

Often when trying to catch up on the news or just researching something online, I come across article pages filled with distractions. Ads before the article, ads around the article, ads below the article, ads in the article, obscene sidebars with three or four columns, animated neon dancing bears trying to sell me railroad testing equipment at a Ruby on Rails site, you get the idea. Sure, you could use something like FlashBlock and get the worst of these out of the way. But often you’re still left with a misshapen mass of text whose designer might have had a number of priorities before getting to clarity of presentation.

Enter Readability:

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

Huzzah! Simply go to the Readability site and try out the different options for how you want rendered pages to look. You can change things like font size and style, as well as margin. You can even make the colors inverted if you prefer a dark background. Then drag the indicated button to your bookmark toolbar and click it whenever you are on a page you want to be more readable. After discovering Readability, I’ve been using it every day.

I was interested to see that the new version of Safari released today (version 5) added a feature called Safari Reader. This serves the same purpose as Readability, just built into the browser’s address bar. It doesn’t appear that Safari Reader allows you to set more advanced options like the appearance of the font, but it does have the added benefit of remembering your zoom level.

Editing Trac comments at the DB layer

Samuel Huckins — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:58:34 +0000

Today I needed to alter the content of a comment made on a Trac ticket. I didn’t anticipate this would be a difficult task, but I wasn’t too familiar with Trac’s DB schema. So to save you a few consternated queries, here’s the spoiler. Comments on tickets aren’t kept within their own table (as you might expect) but are instead stored in the ticket_change table.

In my particular case the Trac DB was MySQL, so the examples I’ll provide will be MySQL queries. If you have an SQLite-backed Trac the operations should be the same, you’ll just need to use SQLite’s syntax.

Say the ticket with the naughty comment is #1234. To see all comments on this ticket:

1
2
3

SELECT * FROM trac.ticket_change
WHERE FIELD = "comment"
AND ticket = 1234;

And to update a comment:

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2
3
4
5

UPDATE trac.ticket_change
SET newvalue = "New hotness"
WHERE FIELD = "comment"
AND ticket = 1234
AND oldvalue = "Old and busted";

Happy revisionizing.

WordPress contact forms and mailing made less complicated

Samuel Huckins — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:15:00 +0000

After setting up some WordPress blogs on my own server, I ran into the problem of wanting a basic contact form that would email myself and users. I in no way wanted to bother setting up my own mail server. I also would prefer not buying SMTP mail service. After a wretched chain of annoying plugins, I came across a salutary trio that met my needs: Cimy Swift SMTP, Contact Form 7, and a Gmail surprise.

Cimy Swift SMTP allows you to setup SMTP settings, which is perfect if you want to use an external service and not use PHP mail() function. Apparently, Google will let you send mail to any address from any domain using SMTP. Handy! So you just install Cimy, go to its Settings page, put in “smtp.gmail.com” as SMTP server, port 465 (it tells you this is for Gmail), your Gmail user and pass, and that you want TLS (it also notes this is for Gmail. Save, put in a test address, and it should just work. At least it did for me, where others failed.

Now you are all dressed up with SMTP, but where to go? I tried a number of contact form plugins that looked great, had lots of features, etc. And none of them bothered using the SMTP settings I put in. Contact Form 7 did, however. It’s simple, and takes a little customization to make it look decent. But still, it is a basic contact form that works, and that is all I needed.