Nilesh Kapadia

For those who haven't heard of Mozilla's Ubiquity it is an experimental plugin for Firefox that provides a command line interface for executing commands to control the browser.

Being a big fan of command-line commands, I've decided to jump on the Ubiquity bandwagon and create a command for bookmarking a page with Google Bookmarks (which I am a fan of). This is based on the bookmarklet provided by Google and I got some hints from Ryan Sonnek's delicious Ubiquity command.

Click here to go to subscription page for this command

I came across the following video ("The JavaScript Programming Language") that is a lecture by Douglas Crockford (who is a "JavaScript Architect" at Yahoo!) in which he discusses JavaScript. It is split into four 30-minute parts (totaling 2 hours):

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

It's useful to download the slides because the video doesn't always show them when he is referring to them.

It is a good introduction to JavaScript, explaining how parts of the language works as well as offering advice on how to use (or not use) various features of it. He also talks some about the history of the language.

For quite a while now I've been using Google Bookmarks along with the GMarks add-on for Firefox. This combination gives me basically everything I want as a bookmarking solution:

• Online storage of my bookmarks
• Ability to search the content of the pages that I have bookmarked
• Browser integration

After initially looking at OpenID I wanted to start using it, but I didn't want to be tied to one provider. So initially I was planning on running my own identity server. But after watching a very informative talk on it (by Simon Willison) I learned that the ability to use delegation allows you to easily use your own domain name for your identity URL, while delegating to another provider. This is a much easier option than running your own identity server.

Here are some good articles on how to get going with Postgresql on Ubuntu:

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostgreSQL

And Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard):

http://www.z1r0.com/2008/03/configuring_postgresql_82_in_o.html

Note that version numbers don't matter, as I was able to apply these instructions to Postgres 8.3.

I also find the pgadmin3 tool to be very helpful with Postgres. In Ubuntu you can find it in the repositories, in Mac OS X, you can get a binary to install from here.

There is some sort of problem with Vista's networking stack that is causing all kinds of software to fail to work. For example, there are issues with SSH tunneling and even Outlook 2007. The SSH problem I experienced myself when testing out tunneling RDP. The Remote Desktop session would start to connect but then freeze after displaying part of the screen and the SSH terminal would become unresponsive for several minutes.

If you are having any sort of problems that you think might be related to Vista's networking stack, you can try the following workaround:

You can define a keyboard shortcut for any bookmark in Safari (in Mac OS X). Here is how:

* Go to Keyboard & Mouse preferences and the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
* Click on "Application Keyboard Shortcuts"
* Click the + button
* Select Safari.app for Applicaton
* Put the exact title of the bookmark in the Menu Title (spaces are fine)
* Enter in your keyboard shortcut in Keyboard Shortcut

I have been watching the iPhone for a while, but just recently bought one. I'm going to keep updating this entry with my experiences with it so far and my opinions of it.

What it needs (to be competitive with other phones)

* Bluetooth A2DP support (stereo sound)
* Tethering of some sort (via Bluetooth or WiFi).
* Copy/Cut/Paste
* Bluetooth keyboard support
* A good solution for in-car use
* Voice dialing
* Support for more Bluetooth profiles in general
* Multi-media messages (MMS) support (ie picture messages)
* E-mail search options

I tend not to be very impressed with most of the software that comes out of Microsoft. Maybe its my bias for the alternatives, or maybe its because a lot of their software is not particularly good. But in any case, Remote Desktop is the exception to the rule. I am quite impressed with it and find it immensely useful for getting work done.

A VMWare employee (Eric Tung) has written up some unofficial guides for VMWare Fusion which are useful:

A Beginner's Guide to VMware Fusion

A Power User's Guide to VMware Fusion

The Power User's Guide is especially useful and has some interesting features.