Navarr's Tech Side

Maybe they’ve been doing this for awhile, but it’s the first time I noticed it.

facebook.com/notes/navarr-barnier/she-knows-my-best-and-my-worst/222268802110

Notice how it has my name, the note title, and then the ID at the end?  By the way, that ID is the only thing Facebook cares about in the entire URL.  This exact same link works and points to the exact same note:

facebook.com/notes/good-day-sir/i-am-a-homosexual/222268802110

Just thought it was interesting, and I hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere before.  So I thought I’d take a moment to point it out.  It’s probably good information for brands who are trying to get their Facebook Pages indexed by Google, they can customize the URL to their notes however they want to when they link to them from their websites (If any brand in the entire world does this, anyway).

• The ability to block someone from showing up in your timeline, but not block them from following you.
• The ability to allow users to send you DMs, even if they’re not following you (and block them from doing so on an individual basis).
• The ability to see all @replies from your friends – I WANT THIS BACK

That is all.

This is the first post of a new series, looking at some of the odder bugs encountered while developing for the expanding Web, no matter how basic a bug it may be.

Thanks to twitter user @paperfairy, a bug was discovered on my Command Line Twitter Client, TwCLI.

For some reason, when submitting a command in Chrome for Linux, the page would simply refresh, and the command would never be sent.  At first, I had no possible way to track down this bug.  I didn’t have a linux box (with a GUI, anyway) so I simply told him that it was unfortunate, but it’d have to stay a bug.  Until a recent post on lifehacker brought my attention to Portable Ubuntu. I immediately installed it, opened up the Chrome website in Firiefox, installed Chrome Beta, and headed over to TwCLI to see what was amiss.

Of course, it was a single line in a detection script to send Geo-Data to Twitter (as long as the user approved it, of course):

else if(google.gears) {

This single line was throwing an exception I hadn’t encountered in other browsers – Google wasn’t defined.  Oddly, I thought it would handle that properly, since google wasn’t defined, it would just skip over it, but instead it threw an error and halted all further javascript code.

The fix was simpler than tracking down the bug, I simply had to add this to the start of the javascript code:

try{ if(!google) { google = 0; } } catch(err) { google = 0; }

And voila, I had both a check for google, and a catch if it decided to throw errors while checking for it.

Whether this is a Chrome bug or not, I don’t know – I simply don’t know enough about JavaScript in order to say so either way.  But, are undefined variables supposed to throw errors, or are they simply supposed to return false?

Usage:

• Call createLightbox(); to create the actual lightbox element (does not display anything).
• Call fillLightbox(string content) to fill the lightbox with RAW HTMLor

  Call appendLightbox(element childElement) to append a DOM Node directly into the lightbox.

• Call setLightboxSize(int width, int height, null, string unit) to set the width and height of the lightbox.  Unit will default to pixels “px” if not specified.
• Call showLightbox() to actually display the lightbox to the user.
• Call boolean lightboxVisible() to determine if the lightbox is still visible or not.
• Call hideLightbox() to remove the lightbox from view.
• Call cleanLightbox() to delete all content inside the lightbox container.

For those starting to learn Japanese, you may be stuck trying to figure out how to pronounce some new Kanji you just found (at least, in their current sentence).  Normally, you’d have to look in a Jisho (Dictionary) and try to figure out how they might be modified in their current form.  Luckily, Google Translate is much, much more helpful.

Just plug in the Japanese, tell it to translate from Japanese to Japanese, and then click the “Show Romanization” button and voila!  You have instant Romanization of your unknown kanji.  Of course, in order for you to make use of Google’s output, you might need to know some language constructs.

For example, in the image above we see Google says “Ganba~tsu te” where we had “頑張って.”  Knowing how っ works, we’re able to deduce that Google meant Ganbatte.

Five of the nation’s largest publishers of newspapers and magazines are teaming up to challenge Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle electronic-book reader with their own technology that would display in color and work on a variety of devices.
- Ryan Nakashima, The Washington Post.

As I’m sure you all know by now; I am a coder above all else.  With this one piece of data, you should know there are two things I despise in this entire world:

• Flash and
• PDF

Why?  Because they’re closed off, proprietary, and quite frankly a bitch to deal with on computers.  However, that doesn’t stop me from advocating their use for WHAT THEIR ACTUAL PURPOSE is (or, in the case of flash – should be).

So, it should come as only a slight surprise that I’m incredibly agitated over these new formats.  You’re creating “book” file formats that will “display in color” and “work on a variety of devices.”  Huh, isn’t there already a format specifically for publications, made to work on any multitude of devices?  Let’s see, oh, right Portable Document Format – A file format made SPECIFICALLY to render the same way on any device.

Kudos, Publishers – You’ve just re-invented the wheel.

by Dave Winer on Protoblogger

read more »

Look, I’m not going to play the political game here – I LOVE Obama and even though I don’t agree with his recent decision on the Afghan War will continue to support him – but seriously, giving your speech at a Military Academy?  I couldn’t have possibly kept myself from commenting on how funny it is that almost your entire audience is dressed nearly IDENTICALLY.

How can you not compare this event to the 1984 stereotype?

For reference, the Apple 1984 Commercial (remake):

Toying around with the interface for publishing blog posts in Microsoft Word 2010 Beta.

It truly is fascinating, but I don’t think it’ll manage to replace Windows Live Writer, which definitely has a much better, and more blog-specific user interface.