Stupid Geek Tricks

One of the biggest headaches in deciding when to upgrade to Firefox 3 has been the whole issue of extension (in)compatibility.

Many (most?) plug-ins can be made to work through Nightly Tester Tools, which permits users to “force” Firefox 3 to allow extensions to run, regardless of advertised lack of compatibility.   Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for several extensions — in particular those that deal with passwords and bookmarks, due to fundamental changes to Firefox’s handling of passwords and bookmarks.

In the past couple of days, I’ve come across information on two of my favorite extensions that fall into that difficult category.

The first of those is Google Browser Sync, a 20% project from Google which enables folks who use Firefox 2 on multiple computers to keep bookmarks, passwords, cookies, and history data in sync.

Unfortunately, it looks like GBS isn’t going to be updated for Firefox 3.  It’s a shame, since it was the only extension I had come across that synced so much of a user’s profile.  Fortunately for me, I’m currently down to using only one copy of Firefox, since the next best alternative, Mozilla Weave, seems to be alpha-quality.  (Users who only need to sync bookmarks seem to have Foxmarks as the preferred alternative.)

The other extension I’m missing for Firefox 3 is Password Hasher.  It’s a cute little utility which hashes out unique passwords for different sites using a code word you choose and the site’s URL, thereby allowing you to (theoretically) easily use a different password at different sites.  Throw in the ability to unmask password fields, and it proves to be a particularly handy extension.

And…the developer has promised to update it for Firefox 3.   That’s a good thing, since the next best extension I’ve found, PasswordMaker, has a couple of annoying bugs under FF3.

And FWIW, all the other extensions I regularly use seem to be doing OK in FF3.

In an Excel-based tool I maintain for some of my underwriters, I use conditional formatting to help highlight missing information.  I also have some default values based on formulas, and for various reasons I’ve been wanting to highlight them too.

Excel has a nice collection of “is” functions to help identify the contents of particular cells — ISLOGICAL, ISTEXT, ISNUMBER, ISBLANK…   However, there is no ISFORMULA.

The answer is to add a VBA function:

Function IsFormula(Cell As Range) As Boolean

    If Len(Cell.Formula) = 0 Then

        IsFormula = False

    Else

        IsFormula = (Left(Cell.Formula, 1) = "=")

    End If

End Function

Once coded, usage is =ISFORMULA(cell) ; it returns TRUE if cell contains a formula, FALSE otherwise.

It’s nothing fancy, and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t track down the requisite code sooner.  However, I thought I’d share in case others have need of something similar.

I’ve seen some noise over the past few days regarding the release of Amazon’s Kindle, a $399 ebook appliance that is supposed to be readable in sunlight, have a day-long battery life, and to be able to buy books (and newspapers, and magazines, and…) wirelessly (EVDO or WiFi) from Amazon.

Much of the reaction is skeptical, in part due to the expense ($399 + $10 per book…), in part due to the perception that a hardcopy book is something special, and in part due to expectations that Amazon could be squashed by either Google or Apple.

For example, Jeremy Toeman at LIVEdigitally comments:

In my eyes this is one of those technologies that is still searching for a problem. At $399 + $9.99 per book, it’s certainly not a cost-competitive solution to purchasing books, unless you are comparing solely against new, hardcover prints. Further, it’s not exactly a challenge to find and buy books, whether online or offline, new or used. In fact, it’s pretty hard to argue that an electronic reader will vastly improve the book discovery, purchase, and consumption experience (unlike how much an MP3 player was able to do that exact thing). The only really viable argument against physical books is they are bigger and bulkier, but that really only applies to hardcover books.

Rex Hammock observes:

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’ll buy and review a Amazon Kindle, but what I really want my eBook reader to be is a Kindle-size iPod Touchbook (or what we call around here, Rumor #3). I guess since Apple doesn’t blog — they advertise and publicize and present and pronounce — I guess I am wasting my time blogging about this. Perhaps I should be sending this message to Apple in a way they might understand (Books are my girl frend…):

Scoble takes a more pragmatic view:

[E]ven if Jeff Bezos turns out to be a failure here this device will push the market simply by getting you all to consider a world where you read your books off of a screen rather than off of paper. To me that’s interesting.

Now, I am one of the small minority of folks who prefers to read books in electronic, rather than dead-tree format. For the past half-decade-or-so, much of my recreational offline reading has been various utilities on my PDAs (first Palm, now Windows Mobile), and I’m usually walking around with a small library in my shirt pocket.

The downsides with this mode of reading include a relative lack of titles in my preferred .pdb format, and the fact that reading on a relatively small PDA screen can get tiring.

On the other hand, having several books always available is danged nice. When I take a business trip, I can easily go through 3 or 4 paperbacks on the plane, and I like to travel light. Also my wife and I have completely different shopping styles…so when she wants me to stay with her in store X, while she goes through the store in her excruciatingly slow, detailed manner…well, I can always break out a book to amuse myself while waiting for her to request my opinion on whatever she’s looking at.

Plus, I’m going to carry a PDA around anyway—it’s the only way I can keep my and my wife’s very dynamic schedule straight, and keep up with my to-do list—so there’s no additional space occupied or mass borne.

Looking at the Kindle, I have to admit that it’s an intriguing gadget. The expected increased availability of etexts, the ability to buy new books wirelessly and instantly, and access to newspapers and magazines offline but still electronically are all extremely appealing features to me.

The idea of a lightweight gadget with a larger screen but is still presumably a hand-held gadget is also interesting to me. However, it’s another gadget at a time where I already carry plenty thankyouverymuch.

If the Kindle has a failing, at first glance, it is that it appears to be a single-function device. If it had a calendar and task app, a note-taking utility, and maybe audio/video functionality, I’d seriously consider adding it to the list I’m sending Santa.

However, I’ll have to agree with Scoble… if the Kindle succeeds in getting the idea of ebooks into the mainstream…or at least out of its current tiny niche… it’ll be a Good Thing. (And maybe I won’t get as many strange looks when folks see me reading books on my PDA on the plane.)

Yes, I know…I keep intending to write a series of “stupid geek tricks” articles, and I still haven’t gotten around to it.

This post, unfortunately, isn’t going to represent the start of clearing that particular writing backlog. However, since I just resolved one of the things that has annoyed me about Vista, I thought I’d share.

I am a fan of Vista’s Glass interface. I know, I’m weak-minded when it comes to pretty things, and Glass is really a rip off of various pretty UI’s for OSX and/or Linux…but that doesn’t lessen my appreciation for Glass.

One of gripes I’ve had with Glass, however, is Microsoft’s decision to not have the sidebar be transparent/translucent when an application window is maximized. Maximize a window, and the sidebar background goes to black.

I’m aware that there are a couple of hack-y remedies for this situation, but I had a past install of XP ruined by a misbehaving skinning program, and so I’ve been leery of going down that path.

Enter NirCmd.

NirCmd is a handy little command-line sonic screwdriver-type utility I stumbled across recently, which has all sorts of odd little functionality. For example, it can be called in a batch script to automagically mute/unmute/set the Windows system volume when booting, waking up, etc. (NirCmd is, by the way, the first utility I’ve been able to find that allows for a batch file to affect the Vista system-wide volume.)

It also has the ability to render windows transparent.

Just for yucks a little while ago, I typed into a DOS box:

nircmd win trans ititle “windows sidebar” 1

…and here’s what I saw on my screen:

That’s a maximized Firefox window open, sitting next to a Windows Sidebar through which you can see my desktop wallpaper peeking through.

It may not seem like much…but it finally resolves something that’s been annoying me for months, and I am pleased.

In almost all of the jobs I’ve held since college, even though I’ve been employed in an actuarial or quasi-actuarial role, I’ve also had the dubious honor of being the unofficial support person for all things IT or geeky.

(The one exception to that was a 4 month stint where the desk I telecommuted from was in the IT area, and naturally I let those folks have the honors.)

Part of that is the result of my nature.  I’m inherently lazy, yet somewhat creative, so I have the tendency to find the easiest way to things.  This in turn leads to building a small arsenal of what, for lack of a better description, I’ll call “stupid geek tricks”.

I’ve been toying around with starting a category/column/feed on this site to share these tricks, and an experience today has prompted me to explore the idea a bit further.

The Problem: I mentioned that a couple of weeks ago, I lost my old Palm Tungsten C in a freak lava-lamp accident.  (And no, I’m still not kidding.)  After being briefly deluded into thinking that I could make do with a pen-and-paper PDA to help keep the chaos that is my life organized, I acquired an HP Ipaq RX5915.

The new PDA runs Windows Mobile 5, which means getting used to new software and new quirks…and after some recovering from adaptation shock, I’m reasonably well pleased.

One of those quirks arises from my syncing my PDA with two PC’s — a personal Vista machine running Outlook 2007, and a corporate XP machine running an earlier version of Outlook, reliant on an Exchange server.  On my PDA I’m running Pocket Informant 2007 as a PIM.

However, I’ve observed that recurring tasks don’t sync correctly in this setup.  If I complete/respawn a recurring task on either PC, the change syncs properly with the PDA…but it doesn’t get passed along correctly to the other PC.

I’m guessing that it has something to do with ActiveSync and/or the Windows Mobility Center not monitoring all the relevant date fields associated with the recurring task.

The Solution: To be honest, I don’t seem to have a real solution.  A few searches on Google haven’t turned up any viable answers, although it appears that a couple of other folks seem to be having the problem.

The Workaround: The easiest way to avoid this issue appears to be making sure to only check off recurring tasks on the PDA.  Marking them done on either PC fails to cause the status on the other PC to update, but marking them done first on the PDA seems to avoid the sync issue.

It’s annoying, but one encounters many annoyances when trying to maintain a calendar and task list electronically, and when one’s employer uses Exchange and is fairly draconian in its implementation.

OK, so that isn’t much of a stupid geek trick.  However, hopefully this will help out someone who was having the same issues that I have been, given Google’s inability to help me out.