The enemy of my enemy.

Since being involved in Web development for the greater part of the last decade I have to admit that Flash (once helmed by Macromedia now a part of the Adobe creative empire) has been a thorn in my side. Flash drives the majority of what I hate about the internet:

• Obnoxious Advertisements
• Flash websites
• stupid holiday memes
  

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against online advertisements. I understand the value of free information and entertainment. But why you have to choke my bandwidth and interrupt my focus with some animated, noisy (before they got realistic and muted them by default) cartoons trying to get me interested in some completely irrelevant to me product? Lightweight adds can be just as elegant and communicate a product in a way that doesn't piss me off. If you piss me off I'm not going to be interested in your product.

Flash websites are the bane of the world wide web. Sure you can do some pretty cool effects and animations and page switching and all but if I wanted to play a game I probably wouldn't be coming to your website to find your information. I'd play a game. Hollywood has found that design companies who use flash are really good at marketing for their movies, and I can't say that's a completely bad thing, but if the bandwidth you use to communicate what you are presenting is almost the size of the bandwidth it takes to watch the trailer for your movie then please forgive me for finding your content on YouTube.

Holiday memes...

Recently though there is a huge brouhaha in geekdom about the choice of a particular fruit-logo'd company not giving Flash any love especially in regard to it's latest innovation of porn-on-the-go devices that has all the hipsters raving about how we've arrived.

Most people that know my technical, geeky side know my feelings toward the maker of the Mac. As such I have had to consider where I really stand on this issue. Not that where I stand really matters in the greater scope of things, but I needed to know.

I'll let you know. To be continued...

Until next time

Les

Google Chrome starting to get Serious about Extensions

After opening the dev channel Google Chrome this morning I noticed a change in the info on the home screen:

If you look closely at the bottom you'll see a message notifying you of Google Chrome support for both extensions and bookmark sync. These aren't technically new features, but it is interesting to note that the link provided for extensions goes to a Google hosted link which at the time of this writing is not a valid link:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions

Also the jigsaw graphic in the corner connects to the same link.

With the rumors of the RSS feed extension for automatically detecting feeds in a web page being provided in the future as a default extension for Google Chrome this may be another sign that Google is ready to roll out full-fledged extension support, a feature which has been one of the main barriers to entry for hard-core Mozilla Firefox users.

Until next time

Les

Glipper: the clipboard manager for Gnome

I like a clipboard manager. As a programmer I find myself needing to be able to keep track of a history of copied texts and codes for pasting at any given time (yeah yeah, call me a copy/paste programmer if you must, it is the number one form of code reuse :-P ). Anyway, I have been using Ubuntu almost exclusively on my personal laptop and mostly I miss ClipX. On my work machines I use Windows XP, just haven't taken the leap to Ubuntu yet with my Windows driven work life, but I have a common toolset which includes the aforementioned clipboard manager.

ClipX is a bare-bones, no nonsense clipboard manager. It is small and simple and does exactly what I need: keeps a history of my clipboard and allows easy access to those entries. I miss that when using Ubuntu. For a while I was using KDE and it comes with the standard KDE version: Klipper. Gnome though comes with no such default and this is a bit disappointing to me.

I finally found Glipper. It was constructed for Gnome in the tradition of klipper and is simple to use.

It's in the repos so you can find it in Synaptic or simply execute a console command:

sudo apt-get install glipper

It will install and then you'll go looking for it, but you won't find it... anywhere. This is because it's an Applet that can be added to your panel. To get it to show up in my Add to Panel... dialog I actually had to log out and log back in... but then upon launching the add to panel dialog I found Clipboard Manager (or something similar, just start typing clip and you'll see it).

I have to uncheck the option in it's preferences (found by right-clicking the icon on your panel and selecting Preferences) for the mouse selection/middle click option, I have a bad habit of selecting things I don't need when using a mouse and for some reason it was adding all that stuff to the history as if I had copied it.

Until next time

Les