Software Salariman

If you read Usenet newsgroups, no doubt you'd be familiar with spam messages spruiking credit, fake jewellery, external organ enlargements and free graduate degrees. On a PC, you can use killfiles in newsreading software to ignore spam messages. If you're reading newsgroups using the Google Groups web-based reader with Firefox, you can ignore annoying spam messages using a Greasemonkey script called Google Groups Killfile (GGK).

You can add entries to your killfile list using GGK's context menu but the list becomes hard to view and manage once you have a lot of entries. It is easier to edit GGK's kill list variable:

• Enter "about:config" in Firefox's location bar.
• Enter "kill" in the Filter field.
• Click on greasemonkey.scriptvals.www.penney.org/Google Groups Killfile.GoogleKillFile and edit the configuration string.

2008-04-14: If you use regular expressions (RE), you can reduce the number of entries in the killfile list by using wildcards and the "alternate" operator (vertical bar symbol ("|")). You can further reduce the number of patterns to define by specifying case-insensitive comparison in GGK. Just search for the REs' "compile()" function in the GGK script and add a second "i" argument.

Labels: Firefox, Google, Spam

A note on how to work around the problem when Google's Gmail continuously loads in Firefox but never completes, and reloading the page or restarting Firefox does not fix the problem. There's three URLs for your Gmail account, so use the second or third alternative listed below:

• HTTP: http://mail.google.com/mail/
• HTTPS: https://mail.google.com/mail/
• Plain HTML interface: https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=a

Failing that, try:

• Clearing your Firefox cache in Tools / Options / Advanced / Network / Cache.
• Older Gmail interface: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1.

Some days later, either Firefox or Gmail seems to recover. It's only happened to me twice and I haven't had time to investigate too deeply.

2008-05-01: Added couple more work-arounds for older version of Gmail and clearing Firefox cache.

Labels: Firefox, Google

Google mail can now retrieve mail from up to five different accounts and merge them into one mail box. Very handy feature, since I dislike using the Webmail interface provided by my ISP.

Labels: Google

After playing with Google Earth, I found that I could export my placemarks as KML files which can then be viewed using Google Maps. Here's a list of places we've visited. I'll see if I can annotate them with pictures later.

Labels: Google

Installed Google Earth for the kids and showed them how to make placemarks and paths. They're pretty excited marking their friends' houses and are having a walk to make sure they got the placemarks and paths right. Prior to this, the kids have been rather reluctant to do any physical activity outside or explore their neighbourhood. 'Ray! Another activity for the kids!

Labels: Google

I migrated my blog to the new Blogger interface. Since I had a Google account, now I have one less username-password combination to remember. One nice new feature: labels. Now I don't have to put keywords in the title of each blog entry just for categorising blog entries. It's a Google-ish feature and works like labels in Google Mail.

Labels: Blogger, Google

I don't how long Google Desktop 2 has been available, but I found it today and installed it. From my quick test, it worked as well as the previous version and now supports the "filetype:" keyword. That keyword is useful for restricting the search results to files with specific extensions. For example, adding "filetype:pdf" would restrict the results to just .pdf files.

Labels: Google