Wednesday, February 25, 2009

AutoPager is great

A lot of content on the web is split into numbered pages. AutoPager is a Firefox extension which concatenates pages, so instead of clicking "next page" links I can simply scroll down. This is great, and it makes me realize how obsolete pages are on the web.

In the past, I've used CustomizeGoogle to "stream search result pages". That was pretty good, but it sometimes got stuck in a loop when I was logged in and it only supports this feature for Google. AutoPager supports it on many web sites, and I have not had any problems with it.

A few suggestions: The simple modal prompt is annoying, so turn that off. A green rectangle in the bottom right corner of the screen is much nicer than a "yes/no" popup. I generally set AutoPager to only autoload one page. Page loading is so fast, that by the time I'm done with that page, the next page will be loaded and so on.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Yaari is like a virus

I got an invite for Yaari, a social networking site which is being marketed to Indian youth. A google.ca search for Yaari has a very interesting blog post as its second result. Apparently, the registration procedure requires a Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail address, and you have to give them your password so they can send invites to everybody in your address book! Then those invites are sent as if they are coming from the address you gave. If you continue reading that post, you'll see there's Yaari has more downsides. So, I'll be telling Gmail that Yaari invites are spam.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

The Vista shutdown screen (ie. Why is Microsoft insane?)

A friend who installed the Windows 7 beta was complaining about the shutdown screen. It tells you that an application is preventing shutdown, but it prevents you from interacting with the application to do something about it. Instead, you can either kill the application or cancel the shutdown, interact with the application, and then shutdown again. What idiot added this feature?

Vista does the same thing. Fortunately, I'm not too familiar with it because due to standby to RAM and hibernate I rarely shutdown or restart.