Control Option Command

Indeed. Why does this ordinarily quite burlesque and colorful blog suddenly look like the works of Jacob Nielsen?

If you are new to this blog; move along, but if you’ve come to expect bright colors and swirly shit all over the place, take a while and harken.

I need a project to get back to my former glory, and I need to deliver myself a prompt, swift kick in the rear to get going. The best way to do this is to just publish this new design for the blog while it’s still butt-ugly so that I’ll have an incentive to fix it the fuck up as soon as humanly possible.

If you really miss the old design go visit Kajas blog.

That is all.

Is it hypocritical of me to write about a Flash blocker when I’ve spent a good portion of my time the last four years doing Flash? Maybe, but some of the sites out there have ridiculous amounts of intrusive and annoying banner ads, and I just can’t stand having my the fans on my Mac blowing a fuse every time I want to check out the news.

My favorite implementation of Flash-blocking has always been ClickToFlash which is a Safari-only plugin that works exactly as advertised. You click the element to load Flash. Sadly, as mentioned, it’s Safari-only and my browser of choice these days is Google Chrome.

Fortunately I found a port, or perhaps a backwards engineered version for Chrome named, somewhat more aggressively, Kill-Flash. It works on exactly the same principle. All Flash elements are replaced with an inconspicuous grey-scale gradient with the label “Flash”, and you “Click To Flash”… Duh.

Stupidly however, I have found no simple way to add sites to the plugins whitelist. A few sites (YouTube and GMail) are whitelisted by default, but no option that I’ve found to add new sites. There are several sites I visit on a regular basis and where I want to see the Flash. Hell, my own blog uses several (subtle, I hope) Flash elements and I don’t need to see those grey boxes every time I come here. In fact, personally I think perhaps a “blacklist mode” would be my preferred way to operate.

So, anyway. I started digging around in the Library to figure out how to add sites to the whitelist. The first issue of course is to find out where the whitelist is located. A couple of headscratches later I found that this is the file you need to deal with:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions/kfncbcioneejfnnelcdmocdjncbmceea /1.1/kill_flash.js

I’m not sure whether or not that crazy string is the same for everyone or generated randomly for each installation. If you see the kill_flash.js you’re there.

Opening this file reveals, at the very top the following variable.

What you need to do is simply append the domains you want to whitelist to this array, in quotes and separated by commas. Like so:

When you’ve done this you might want to create an alias for easy access to the file. Personally I just dragged it to my Dock for the sake of convenience.

I might at some point write an AppleScript or something to make this easier. If that ever happens I’ll be sure to post it here.

A short while ago I wrote about my disappointment with the O’Reilly iPhone apps. The other day I noticed that three of the four titles I originally bought had an update. I’ve finally had time to have a look at them and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised.

The 1.1 versions are infinitely more readable but also feels a lot more responsive. The code isn’t breaking lines as often and not in such awful ways when it is.

Making code properly formatted on the iPhone is hard, and there’s still room for improvement but these new versions certainly wouldn’t have prompted me to write angry blog posts.
Thanks O’Reilly.

It seems like people have a hair trigger when it comes to labeling their links “NSFW“. I’ve even seen warnings about NSFW language which seems like overdoing it a bit to me. Anyway, since using the label “NSFW” to refer to anything from cuss words in plain text to “Harry Potter / Tentacle Rape Slash Porn” seems pretty unhelpful, I’ve devised this easy to understand rating system.

Please rate your links accordingly from now on, so I can filter out the seriously freaky shit from some of the kindergarden stuff that seems to be NSF your W.

To whom it may concern.

I have for years been a satisfied customer of O’Reilly. I’ve bought and enjoyed several books from you both as dead tree paperbacks and downloadable PDFs.
To my chagrin I also bought a number of titles on the iTunes app store once I found out that you publish a selection of your books as standalone apps there. I’m sad to report that I found these apps to be rather disappointing. In fact they are complete and utter crap.


It’s apparent that what you have done is to adopt the Stanza engine and stripped it down to contain one book per instance. Unless you’ve reinvented an already triangular wheel it also seems that you simply process your Safari PDFs through the downloadable helper app and then push the results to the app store.

Look; Stanza is a great e-book reader when it comes to downloading and reading “Frankenstein” as a Public Domain EPub book. And if you have some totally-not-copyrighted PDF you want to get onto your iPhone the desktop Stanza app does a tolerable job of ripping the file to HTML and reflowing it to read nicely on the small display, but converting PDFs with Stanza in this manner is, undeniably, a hack. It’s a workaround to get a PDF meant for a big screen unto a small screen, no questions asked.

Stanza is admittedly a pretty good solution to get a book onto the iPhone, a few formatting issues aside. There is however a considerable difference between reading a novel and feeling slightly irked because the chapter titles don’t show up in bold and reading a book on programming where half of the code is illegible, broken, or overflows beyond the page and into oblivion.

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