Excellatronic Communications

I just found a cool greasemonkey script on userscripts.org by a person called Vorn. The script is called Linkoder (QRCode) - it can basically add Barcodes for each link on any web page. Its really useful for mobile phone users, with barcode reader applications on their phones, such as the N95 which comes with a barcode reader app as standard, as it saves them typing in long URLs, instead they can just scan the barcode on their PC screen, and then browse directly to the link with their phones web browser.
you can get the script here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24580

I wrote a new Greasemonkey script that lets you import your photos from your account on the picasaweb website to your Flickr account.

In order to run the script, you need to be usin gthe Firefox web browser, which you can get from here: http://mozilla.org/firefox

You also need to have the Greasemonkey extension installed, which you can get here: http://greasespot.net

Once you have those 2, you can install the script simply by clicking here

The script functions on 2 types of pages on the picasweb site, on album pages and also on the organize album pages. On normal picasaweb album pages, a link will appear above the list of thumbnails called “Export 2  Flickr” and it will have the blue and pink flickr dots beside it. Clicking the link will export the whole album to flickr one image at a time.

On the organize page of the album, the Export 2 Flickr link also appears above the list of thumbnails, but on this page you can select exactly which images you wish to upload by clicking and selecting the thumbnails of the images you wish to import into Flickr.

The script just imports the photos, it doesnt copy the image titles or descriptions, and also doesnt create new sets for each album. For the image title it just uses the filename of the image on picasaweb, eg if the image on picasaweb is called 100124.jpg on flickr it will be titled “1000124″. The description gets set as the full URL to the image on picasaweb. These 2 things are not done by the script itself, they are actually done by flickrs upload system.

All my other flickr greasemonkey scripts are available here: http://steeev.freehostia.com/flickr/

If you appreciate my scripts please make a donation.

I just read about the Nokia Internet Radio application for the N95 and thought it sounded interesting, so decided to try and download it. First of all i tried visiting the nokia download page on my N95, but the download link was nowhere to be seen, the instructions on the page say you need to use Nokia PC suite to download the app, not very useful when you are browsing on your phone. In fact its pretty crazy that Nokia of all companies doesnt seem to have a Mobile version of its site.

Anyway i then tried visiting the page in my PC’s web browser - Firefox 3, and crazily enough, i couldnt see the download link there either! Insania! I did notice that there was a hidden flash file on the page, this is because i use the excellent FlashBlock add on which blocks all flash content on pages, and lets you choose which flash files to load. Anyway I guessed they must be hiding the download link in the flash file, so enabled the flash file to load, but still no sign of any link. I then decided to try disabling FlashBlock for the nokia site, then reloaded the page. This actually worked, I was then presented with a small applet that allows you to choose which phone you are using, so you can select the appropriate file to install. Hmmm a lot of rigmarole, just to find a simple download. Anyway to save others the hassle, heres a direct link: http://tinyurl.com/3at5rl to the N95 version of Nokia Internet Radio and also a Barcode version of the link, in case you want to try out the N95 barcode reader and save yourself some typing

The application itself is really good, best used over a wifi link though 

It basically lets you listen to streaming internet radio on your phone. They have a large direc tory of stations, but you can add specific stations if you know the stream URL

I finally got round to updating my Flickr Groups Organiser greasemonkey script.

It now works fine with the latest version of Greasemonkey and also the latest Firefox.

Ive also modified the script, so the “quit group” links only show up if you click the “show quit links” link at the top of the groups list page. I did this as it was sometimes possible to accidentally click on the quit groups links by mistake, now they only show up if you actually enable them.

Heres a couple of screenshots of the script in action:

On the groups list page

On the Organize page

The updated script and all my other flickr greasemonkey scripts are available here: http://steeev.freehostia.com/flickr/ as usual.

Ive updated my Flickr - Multi Group Sender script to include a search box, that lets you quickly search through your group list to find suitable groups to send your image to.

Heres a screenshot of it in action:

Ive also updated the Flickr PM script to display the users real name and location, if they have listed them, when you pop open the mail sending window, also fixed it to work on the all sizes page and all the search pages.

Another script i made an update to was Flickr Inline Forum post editor, it now lets you edit or delete comments below photos without leaving the page you are on.

You can get all these scripts and more at my Flickr Projects and Greasemonkey scripts page

Ive updated my flickr shades greasemonkey script to version 2. The new version of the script lets you customise the colour scheme on the flickr website. Ive added a colour editing screen, where you can select the colours you want to use. You can access the new colour configuration screen via the “Tools/Greasemonkey/UserScript Commands” menu in firefox.

Heres a screen shot of the colour config screen in action:

You can get the updated version of the script here

Dead Pigeon - Roadkill

Originally uploaded by steeev

I saw this dead pigeon in the road, whilst i was on my way to Salzburg’s House of Nature museum. It reminded me a bit of the Austrian flag.

Ive been wondering for a while now, why this site ( http://steeev.freehostia.com ) is no longer appearing in Google search results. In fact it apparently hasnt been in there since December 2007! I know this because I signed up to the Google WebMaster tools site. And they can tell you when your site was last indexed by their robots. Though the annoying thing is theres no way of finding out the reason why they are no longer spidering you.

I tried the google webmaster faqs on the subject, and I also tried asking in the google webmaster group on google groups, but didnt really get any nearer to finding out the cause of or solution to the problem. I searched for quite a while, for a way to actually contact someone at google and ask them what the problem was. I had more or less given up on ever finding out.

Then today, i had a brainwave, I tried a google search, for the text “how can i contact someone at google and find out why my site is not in their index” and found a great resource all about it called “Banned By Google?” There they explain what the reason might be, and how to find out if you are banned. One of the things they said to check for was a faulty robots.txt file, and they have a nifty tool for checking this for you. And this led me to find what could possibly be the cause, it wasnt the robots.txt file that was faulty, the tool told me that it was getting a 302 temporary redirect for that file. So I investigated further, and found out that if i type any random filename on my site, I get a 302 temporary redirect which redirects to a html 404  page that is instead of returning the correct 404 (file not found) status code, its returning 200 (ok)! pretty mad! It seems the site is setup this way by default, pretty crazy isnt it?!

Now I could understand why this might possibly be the cause of why my site is not showing up in the Google index. Well I looked up my hosts faqs on the subject , and they explain how to make the 404 page actually return the correct 404 error code. Now fingers crossed, I might actually get some sweet, sweet google juice once more

UPDATE As per the advice at the above mentioned article i sent an email to help@google.com to ask why my site wasnt being indexed, but apparently they dont accept help queries at that address, they sent an automated response saying i need to contact them via http://www.google.com/support/ Blimey Ive tried to find a way of contacting them before via their support system, and it wasnt easy. Anyway luckily, they seem to have updated their webmaster tools site, to include a system for contacting them and asking them to reconsider reindexing your site. So i’ve tried that, and they said it may take up to a week or 2 for them to reply. Fingers crossed my site will be back in google soon.

Ive recently signed up for an account with TrialPay which is a new way to pay for things on the internet. A lot of online companies have started using their payment system for their products. I blogged about them recently here

As an experiment I have uploaded one of my scripts, Flickr Group Pool Admin : Warn and Delete to their secure server, and now you can purchase a copy of the script via their system by clicking here

The great thing about it is, you dont necessarily have to pay anything, in order for me to be compensated, you can just sign up to a free trial of something like video rentals, or a free trial of a website or you can even purchase something entirely unrelated that you need anyway, and get my product thrown in free. The way it works is TrialPay get a fee from their Partner for getting a new customer or making a sale, and they then pass on a cut of that money to me. I think its a great new development on the internet, and it looks like its growing in popularity. If you would like to “show me some love” but dont have any spare cash, why not try buying this script from me via the TrialPay system, that we we both benefit, and you benefit twice, its a win win squared situation

Who will be the first to buy my script and show me some love? Its exciting, and I hope the system takes off. Im thinking of putting all my scripts on this system, as not enough people seem to donate for free software, if I put them all on TrialPay, people could still get them for free, but I would get compensated too, for all my hard work.

A couple of months or so ago, I had a revelatory web browsing experience. I had been using firefox 1.5 for what seems like forever, i briefly tried FF2 and found it to be a terrible resource hog, and quite unstable, so went back to the 1.5 which itself was quite a memory hog.

Anyway, I heard good news surrounding the release of Firefox 3 Betas, people were saying the runaway memory hogging issues had been finally fixed after all these years. I couldnt resist a download to try it out, as my pc is pretty limited in the memory department. I was really impressed, the version I downloaded was Firefox 3 beta 4, and it seemed to run like the wind, the memory usage seemed very stable, no matter how many tabs i opened, it was also much quicker at processing pages with lots of javascript in them. All was running swimmingly, then i heard that 3b5 had been released, so i gave it a whirl, but damn, it kept crashing on me all the time, so i went back to good old faithful 3b4.

Then just the other day, I started having strange problems, with 3b4 firefox was taking up loads of memory and thrashing the disk, at first i thought i might have caught a trojan horse or a virus, but various antivirus/spyware checks,  turned up nothing. I decided to find out what was causing the disk thrashing, so i ran Filemon which is a nifty little utility for realtime monitoring of what files the pc is accessing. I found the culprit, Firefox was repeatedly accessing 2 files, urlclassifier.sqlite-journal and urlclassifier.sqlite and the files were ridiculously huge, one was 30 megs and the other 60 megs, no wonder my computer had crawled to a halt! Apparently these 2 files are used by the new security feature of Firefox, that can tell you whether the site you are visiting is genuine or has been blacklisted for hosting malware or phishing attacks. Theres 2 checkboxes in the security tab of the options panel that you can uncheck if you are having the same problem as me: “Tell me if the site im visiting is a suspected attack site” and “Tell me if the site im visiting is a forgery” Unchecking these options and restarting my browser, seemed to bring everything back to normal.

Its strange though, as i did a search on the web to see if anyone else was having this problem, and found that this was apparently happening as far back as the first beta of Firefox 3, so either the bug has popped back up again, or it hasnt been fully addressed. I hope the brilliant developers of Firefox, manage to get to the bottom of this one, as otherwise I am mightily impressed with how FF3 is coming along! Have not tried out FF 3RC1  yet, as my previous experience of being on the bleeding edge wasnt a particularly pleasant one, I will wait a while, until things become more stable