mh-z web-log

If you get an email or Facebook message prompting you to log into “fbstarter.com”, that’s a phishing site — be all right — don’t bite.

[http://www.etherpad.com EtherPad] is way cooler than [http://docs.google.com Google Docs] for collaboration. Doesn’t support or require an annoying (for many purposes) WYSIWYG editing mode. Synchronizes with the server instantaneously, as in on every letter you type, not just every minute or even every ten seconds. Loads much faster and feels lighter. Color-codes your text. Built on a server-side Javascript framework called [http://www.appjet.com AppJet], which is the product of a startup formed by a few ex-Googlers.

The only downside is lowered security. EtherPad has no notion of an account, so you’ll have to save the URL to your document yourself (by copying and pasting it somewhere), and it’d theoretically (I would imagine) be possible to brute-force document URLs so as to hunt for interesting things people have typed, and so on.

This blog post about [http://blogs.msdn.com/andypennell/archive/2009/04/01/hd-dvd-is-back.aspx the return of HD DVD] had me fooled, until I pasted the link into an email [to my old boss, against whom I'd once made a bet that HD would beat Blu-Ray] and saw the entry date. Sigh.

I had my wisdom teeth out this morning. All four of ‘em. The bottom two were really the ones which had to go, since they pointed forwards. It was a stable configuration, creating a perfect storage pocket for a cyanide capsule on one side and a micro-nuke on the other, but I’d since moved on from espionage and it was time to move on dentally, too. The top two were just going to be lonely without their mates on the bottom, not that they’d been doing much mating before given the orientation of the bottoms, so to speak, but if at some point I ever want them back, I’m sure science will have discovered techniques for growing teeth in a petri dish by then. And hair. Teeth and hair.

Apparently if you possess more than one Mercedes, you have Mercedeces.

I had a dream in which I knew a code for all vending machines, which when entered, caused coins to come out. The code was “365″.

A couple searches I’d like to be able to perform easily, but can’t:
# I want to be able to search and find conversations, not just individual messages. E.g., let’s say I remember that I received a message from friend A and forwarded it to friend B and later friend C. Apparently if I search for “A and B and C” then Gmail won’t find anything, since each individual message within the conversation is just between me and A, me and B, me and C.
# …Search for messages sent more than X number of hours ago. There are browser plugins that can fake this, but in terms of what Gmail supports, when searching by date I need to put in a specific date, not something like “today” or “yesterday” or “24 hours ago”. For example, I’m using the “Multiple Inboxes” Labs plugin, and it’d be cool if I could create a filter which highlights messages older than 24 hours so I’ll know to deal with those first.

Yay, I’m [http://youtube-channels-beta.blogspot.com/ famous]. Sort of. Not really. :)

I was mainly responsible for the video/playlist browser gadget at the top of the page. There’s some cool AJAX pagination going on behind the scenes which allows for very long scrollboxes full of stuff without having to load //all// the stuff from the server ahead of time, when most visitors won’t scroll through all of it.

This is [http://www.youtube.com/user/grythx my own YouTube channel] (one of ‘em, at least) where I’ve uploaded a bunch of songs I composed way back in the day (mostly high school) on my computer. There’s some good, some bad… I mostly just wanted to put this out there because it’s not like I’m ever going to finish most/many/any of these. I recommend “006″ and “Negative Energy”, or check out the “Cool Stuff” playlist (I’m sure I can think of a better name). Enabling “HQ” mode in the player improves the sound a lot, too.

New crossword puzzle UI version. [http://mh-z.com/xword/v2/ Check it out here]. I have rudimentary input support — just put the mouse over a clue or spot on the board and start typing. The entry point always goes to the first available empty square in a word. I’m trying to make the program smart about which direction you’d want to be typing in when hovering over a square, but right now it just uses a checkerboard pattern (which would take too many words to explain, so just try it out). The easier alternative is to explicitly let you control the current direction (by right-clicking). I’m not sure which one will feel more intuitive in the end.

I started working on my JS/DOM version of a crossword puzzle UI. [http://mh-z.com/xword/v0/ Here]! The puzzle is stolen from Yahoo! Games. Untested in IE, sorrIE, and you can’t do much with it, yet, but this was actually the trickiest part.

Is it mere coincidence that stamps are now 42 cents? I think not.