Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Engineering beautiful software jon aquino labs | personal blog

Saturday, April 24, 2004

I'm quite proud of this homepage:

  • I use my homepage bookmarks on the left instead of my browser bookmarks. Thus, I get my bookmarks regardless of which browser or which computer I'm on.
  • The bookmarks on the left are in fact a separate webpage, which means I can load them into the sidebar of my Firefox browser (nice). I wish MyIE2 allowed custom sidebars like Firefox -- MyIE2 is a lot more responsive on my secondary computer (Pentium 166).
  • I can edit the bookmarks from any web browser because they are on a (dummy) Blogger blog page -- the Blogger tools make editing easy. And there is a neat Firefox trick to block the ads.
  • Some of the bookmarks are handy submit forms. My favourite is the one that posts to my blog. So much power in such little text boxes! I like how the submit forms are buttonless -- got that idea from BoardGameGeek.
  • Some of the more interesting links are: a link to TightVNC running on my secondary computer (I find that the Java client has faster screen refreshes than the native client?!), links to my favourite Yahoo services (calendar, address book, notepad -- all of which can sync with my Palm thanks to Yahoo), Gmail (I'm quite proud to be among the first users -- being a Blogger member helped here).
  • A recent addition to my bookmarks has been the BBC Week At A Glance -- the most important news from around the world for the past week, compressed into a single page, neatly arranged, with pictures. I'm impressed. As Edward Tufte says, "Maximize the data-ink."
  • I've set up a Groovy script to run every week, posting to my blog a summary of my web-surfing activity for the past 7 days. Wasn't too hard, with the help of jwz's mork.pl script for parsing the Firefox history.dat file. I hope to soon add a graph of links visited per hour, generated by gnuplot (haven't used this before -- scriptable charting, I'm hoping).
  • On a theoretical note, I noticed an interesting thing about my categorizations. Some of them work just as well inverted. For example, I started with "Mail: Google" and "Mail: Shaw", but then I found I would tend to look in the G's for Google mail, so I added "Google: Mail" (and "Shaw: Mail" too). There's something interesting going on here but I can't put my finger on it -- or maybe this is elementary set theory, which I haven't studied.

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