Google module: Personalized Home

Here is the latest version of my google module: Personalized Home.
This module is aimed at modifying the look of google personalized homepage.
You can change columns spacing, text padding, link color, link style, title font color and title bar color..

screenshot

module :
http://membres.lycos.fr/kyrlian/personalizedhome.xml
You'll need to set it as "Inlined" using the developer module (see below).

I tested the module on Firefox 1.5 and opera, with windowsXP.

Inlining:
As my module modifies the page style, you'll need to set it as Inlined.
To enable inling you must have the developper module installed.
To add it, just type "developer.xml" in the "Create Section" box.
This module will list all the modules you have, with a 'Inlined' and a 'Cached' chekbox.
You can check both for "Personalized Home".
More info about inling

Update
Due to numerous user inputs, the module is regularly updated. To force updating of your module, just untick the 'cached' checkbox. Then tick it back to save my bandwith, thanks.

Due to the limit of 10000 characters applied on google base, the google base mirror is discontinued.

But we have a new mirror on GoogleModules.com:
http://www.googlemodules.com/module/184/

My Google Menu

Also wrote a greasemonkey script named My Google Menu.

This script will add a link to google “Personalized Home” and a link to google “groups” just after the “you@gmail.com” in the top right menu of any google page (if you are logged in).

Google Module

Hey.
Recently wrote a google module.
A module is a snippet embeded in google personalized page.

This module is aimed at modifying the look of google personalized homepage.
You can change Columns spacing, Text padding, Link Color, Link style, and Title bar color.

screenshot :
http://membres.lycos.fr/kyrlian/personalizedhome.jpg

module :
http://membres.lycos.fr/kyrlian/personalizedhome.xml
You'll need to set it as "Inlined" using the developer module (see below).

I tested the module on Firefox 1.5 and opera, with windowsXP.

Inlining:
As my module modifies the page style, you'll need to set it as Inlined.
To enable inling you must have the developper module installed.
To add it, just type "developer.xml" in the "Create Section" box.
This module will list all the modules you have, with a 'Inlined' and a 'Cached' chekbox.
You can check both for "Personalized Home" (or for 13694720870286158375 if you are using the google base mirror)
More info about inling

Screenshot there.

You can find info about google modules here.

Update:
A mirror of the module is available there:
http://base.google.com/base/a/13694720870286158375

You might want to have a look at the google groups thread if you have a google groups account.

Update:
Due to the limit of 10000 characters applied on google base, the google base mirror is discontinued.

But we have a new mirror on GoogleModules.com:
http://www.googlemodules.com/module/184/

Flock

Trying Flock

del.icio.us

I tried del.icio.us some time ago, but it wasn't very convenient. Having to go to a webpage to get my bookmarks, in a lenghty format, having to go to another webpage to add a bookmark, too much for too little.
Then a friend reminded me of it, at a time when I was working on different computers, with need of online bookmarks.
So I searched for a convenient way to use del.icio.us.
I surely am not the first one to find it, but here it is - firefox only:
First go to your del.icio.us bookmark page, This icon should appear in your status bar, it's for live bookmarks. Click and choose 'Subscribe to feed for xx bookmarks'.
If it doesn't appear, open bookmark manager, click File, New live bookmark, and enter the url of your bookmark page.
Now your del.icio.us bookmarks will appear in a folder together with your regular bookmarks.

Then the 'add bookmark' button.
Del.icio.us proposes a 'remember this' bookmark, which brings you to a web page to enter details about the new bookmark. with a little modification (see below), you can skip the details and just save the bookmark with no tags.
To do this, edit the bookmark, and change this
javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/YOURID?v=3&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)
with this
javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/YOURID?v=3&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&description='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)

Google web accelerator

It seems google web accelerator is availlable for download again.
As I recall, it came up early May 2005, and went down shortly after that.

You should read some comments before using it.
at 37signal,
at metafilter,
at o'reilly radar,
at bnc.
You can also read google web accelerator faqs here and there.

Considering drawbacks previously raised, I will wait for some more reviewing before installing this.
Anyone uses it ?

Clusty

Recently tried clusty, a clustering search engine.
I usually use google, but when I didn't find what I was searching for I tried clusty, and found.
Don't know if this clustering thing is of any use, it enables to categorize your search in a different way... Sort of post-processing.
Just like google, clusty has web, news, images, shopping searches, also has wikipedia, blogs and jobs searches.
Note: Google's blog search is currently beta.

BTW, when looking for alternatives to google, I had a look to mozdex. This is an open source search engine, currently beta. With not much activity during last year. It seems a lot of buzz followed it's opening (in 2004), but nothing followed. I guess it's dead.

So

No news.
I'll post a javascript led clock sometimes later.
Too bad Palm is turning toward M$ OS.
Gotta go.

URLize This ! update

Thanks to D. for his input, I've slighlty changed the Googlize This ! script. The added urls are now dash underlined to distinguish from original ones.

To install, first install greasemonkey, then right click here and choose "Install User Script...".
Warning : Greasemonkey doesn't seem to work with firefox beta 1.5.

GG

More good free games :
Open Quartz: From Quake1
tuxracer: Penguin bobsleigh
Every Extend(Japanese, here is the babelfish translation): Action, sort of suicidal shoot them up. Difficult to describe, try it.

Briefly: Minifox

Just found the minimal firefox theme I was searching for: minifox.

Gmail 100

Gmail has increased the invitations to 100 per user, on the way to public release ?

Opera 8 - Later -

Goods:
Skin change show instantly. And there is some choice already.
Fast Rewind and Fast Forward buttons, which go to the more likely previous or next page. We'll see.
Mouse gestures. Well, if you use it.
Voice control. Forward... Forward... Sorry mate, 'was talking to my browser.
Subwindows. Tabs are real internal windows, as in word you can tile your documents, you can tile your webpages. Firefox can't do that. And it seems usefull.
Typing directly in the adress bar triggers a google lucky search - sometimes. Firefox do that - sometimes.
Buttons and text fields have slightly round corners, good looking.

Bads:
The menu bar (File/Edit/View/.../Help) is not considered as a toolbar. Thus you can't place the adress bar up there.
Unfortunatly, this is my favorite layout with Firefox, having a toolbar with menu, few button, adress field, and below that the page tabs.
Then you can't have less than two toolbars (url and tabs), no minimalist AND usable layout then. Except using minimalist skins, such as Breeze Simplified MICRO V4.15.
Popup blocking is quite agressive, even in 'block unwanted' mode, blocking wanted popups.
No extensions, meaning I don't have my stumble upon button. Can't remember if extensions are considered a security breach and won't be allowed, or if it's work in progress. As there is no info on extensions on opera's features page, I suppose this is a no go.
Ads. Opera is now ad-free, good. But you don't have ad blocking functions such as adblock, ads are everywhere again.

Neither good nor bad:
Is it faster ? Well, that's not obvious. Not slower as far as I can notice.
You can call back closed windows. In fact closed windows are moved to a trash, you can then call them back from the trash until you empty the trash. Any use ?

All in All:
Clean and simple. No extensions means no fancy tweaks, it's all about browsing.
I like it. I might stick to firefox for adblock, but I really like it's style.

.

Opera

The alternative browser Opera becomes totally free: no ads.

I tried it years ago when it was a good alternative to IE, and Netscape was old and slow. But when firefox appeared, I switched immediatly.
Let's have a look at the new rival.

Get it: english for windows or other langages, platforms.
Let's play with it.

Translate

Wandering on the internet I end more and more often on japanese websites. As I'm very bad at reading question marks, I can either close the page or jump to babelfish translation.
Japanese to English translation, if not perfect, enables to understand the general meaning of a text, better than nothing.
But copying the page url, going to babelfish, pasting, reading, is anoying.

Here comes Translate, a firefox extension which add a Translate function in Tools, and a button in your toolbar.
When on a Japanese page, hit translate and babelhish kicks in with immediate translation.
Linked page are also translated, which is usefull most of the time but can screw up navigation.

URLize This !

I have added three buttons to implement the GooglizeThis! function.
When you click on one of the three buttons, all words longer than 5 letters will be replaced with links to google lucky, wikipedia or google define depending on the button you choosed.
Try it:
- Google lucky: luck
- Google define: def
- Wikipedia: wkpd

The three buttons are placed in the footer of each post, [luck | def | wkpd | ?], they will affect only the current post.

Note: Once applied a replacement can't be undone, reload the page with F5.

Have fun !

Googlize This !

I recently discovered greasemonkey, a firefox extension which enables to launch user scripts after a web page is loaded. Having a look at the existing scripts, I remember an old script idea I had some time ago: Googlize this!

When I am writing posts, I often add links to illustrate my ideas, the firefox and greasemonkey links in this post for example. To do that I just do q quick google search, and often copy the first answer as a link.

Thus I wanted a script which would run onload and replace significant words (ie long words) with a google lucky link.
At that time I didn't know about XML DOM javascript functions, which enable to edit the HTML structure of the document, rewriting it all. I discovered that exploring greasemonkey, and wrote two scripts :

The first script is a grease monkey user script, when installed on your firefox (along with greasemonkey) it will Googlize any loaded page - you can include/exclude pages.

To install the greasemonkey script, first install greasemonkey, then right click here and choose "Install User Script..."

The second script is a simple javascript you can include in a page, and activate with a button : try it (working, but quite slow). Get it.

Of course you could change the URL from google's to anything like wikipedia or google define.

All this was tested with firefox only.

Later.

Update : The greasemonkey script is now listed on greasemonkey, rate and comment !

Zip, zip

Removed google search from sidebar, because it is in blogger's top bar.
Added recent posts in sidebar.

Astronoid

Interestingly enough, a non gamer friend is my first source for new interesting games.
After warsow, reviewed here, I tried astronoid.
First, the web site. I haden't seen a webpage resizing itself since... the new century.
After this first surprise of the pre-friendly era of the world wide web, the site opens a new non resizable windows. Argl.
This is an interface, not really a web page not really a game browser, you can create an account and download the game. A bit overdesigned, compared to this.

Download is 80Mo, close borwser, install, start game.
Loading time average, start race.
Throttle up... throttle up... is this my max speed ? Give me my pod racer back !
This is sooo slow.
The principle of the game is: RPG. It means that when starting you have a crapy spaceship, you must run races and earn "fame points" to win new ships and new races. If you don't fall asleep during the first lap, drop your mouse, break your foot and uninstall this slowness of a game.
I was it this state of wind when murki113 started to talk to me using the internal chat stuff.
- murki113: Press backspace to chat
me (thinking): I do not chat with strangers, where the hell is the throotle up ?!
- murki113: Backspace is the key just up the return key
me (thinking): And which is the throotle key ?
- kyrlian: Ok, ok... why is it I'm so slow ?
murki113 explains me this RPG racing concept.

Well, you can like the RPG concept or not, but it was quite a good surprise to have a co-racer explain me the concept of the game, here to earn points and how, the use of antigravity and special keys. If he was just friendly, good wolf to him, if he was a sort of moderator, good idea from the team.

Did I mention Astronoid was in beta test, and therefore free, and will be based on a pay per month business plan ?
The monthly (or 6 monthly if I remember well the discussion I read) fee is not defined yet.

Oh, the website content is in french, but the interface and the game are in english.

Have a look at it, I don't think I'll make it to the end of the beta.

Le Décodeur.

I've recently read a book by Guy Tournay titled Le Décodeur.
This book pretends to describe a website on a serie called Street Hassle closed by the FBI for being used as a communication channel for terrorist organisations.
Wondering about the reality of the facts on which the book is based, I did a bit of searching, here are the raw results.

Links referenced:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-02-05-binladen.htm
The article is available. Describes the use of steganography as a communication channel for terrorist organisations. Dated 02/05/2001.
No mention of "Street Hassle" nor of websites closed by the FBI.

http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3244--222839-, 00.html
or
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3244--222839-,00.html
This article is no longer available.

http://www.citi.umich.edu/techreports/reports/citi-tr-01-11.pdf
This publication is available, it is a paper about steganography, as a response to the USA today article and a wired article. It is not a report about analysing ebay content as stated in Le Décodeur.

http://linuxfr.org/2001/09/28/5184,0,1,0,1.php3
This web page is no longer available.

http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/WCC2003/
This web site is still online, and is effectively the web site of the WCC 2003: International Workshop on Coding and Cryptography, March 24-28, 2003, Versailles (France). The focus of this workshop is related to the activities of the CSIS.

http://www.ina.fr/produits/publications/da/92/index.fr.html
This is a link to the INA: Institut National d'Archive, referencing a book titled Les dossiers de l'audiovisuel with an article by Guy Tournaye titled TV/Internet : convergence ou cannibalisation ? No more information about the article is available.

Other references:

The George Mason University exists : http://www.gmu.edu.
The CSIS exists : http://www.isse.gmu.edu/~csis/.
No publication on FBI or Street Hassle.
No related publication in 2002 nor 2003.

No "street hassle" serie on Imdb.
No results on google for +"street hassle" +abc.
No results on abc.com for Street Hassle.
No results except online librairies and critics for "guy tournay".
"Street hassle" is a Lou Reed album.
.

You can find more information on steganography in the wikipedia.

Truveo

Wandering on google news, I read an article (reuters) about a new video search engine called truveo. Pretends to be a step ahead google and yahoo video searches.

Let's try it.

I've entered the search I tried on google a few month ago when their video search was out: Jacques Chirac. The google video search returned a bunch of American talk shows about the war in Iraq and Chirac refusing to go, being a French coward. But absolutely no video featuring Chirac himself.
The problem is google is searching the subtitles, titles, and so on, but when speaking Chirac seldom pronounces his own name. This is the reason why, I suppose, Chirac interviews where nowhere to be seen.

So, here are today results on truveo, google and yahoo.
As you may see, truveo returns videos featuring Chirac, along with a title, date and details, informative and easy to read. The play button opens the source page, reuters video for my first try.
Google returns a documentary about the rainbow warrior. Not really up to date, which is not playable, even if the little play button is active. Clicking it leads to a page with photos every 30 seconds, with the caption "Video is currently not available. More information »". The More information link giving no more information. Well, this is still a google lab.
Yahoo returns a lot of videos, represented by a shot, a file name, size and length. File names are usually unreadable, no date, no title, nothing to assess if the video is of any use - only the shot on which you can see if it's Chirac talking or some news flash where is name is pronounced. Not really white noise, but not really better.

Then I guess this Truveo thing is interesting... If you need to search for videos.

See ya.

Modding

I've been looking around for W40K-DOW mods, and I found a Dawn of Squirels project.

I say project rather than mod because it seems it was a lot of talk without real modding.
Impressive how several hundreds posts lead to... nothing.

Well, If you are interested they are still looking for a leader, modelers, animators, for... her... people to do the work. Last posts are from mid august this year.

I've done some modding years ago, when I was still a student with time to kill. A mod for quake 3 named... brownie. (I'll put it in binaries as soon as I find it in my archives)
I started fiddling around with the autoaim mod, which was quite difficult to find and didn't work. Have no fear, it's blocked by pure servers. Then I went to modding weapons : bouncing plasma gun (couldn't get rid of the grenade bouncing noise though), lock mode for rockets, heat seeking rockets, and point-of-view rockets, which changed direction according to the owner's viewing direction. You could fire above a wall, then look down and the rocket would go down behind the wall.

This experience was great, it was my first real occasion to play with c++, and to do some code digging, reading pages of code searching for THE place where to put the line of code to do what I wanted.

Reminds me of that photo you found when searching for autoaim : a video camera aimed at a screen, a bunch of electronics and a mouse traped in servomotors.

Later.

Google Search

Also added a google search for this site. Well, may not be usefull at all, feel free to give your opinion.

Creative Commons

By the way, I put a Creative Commons license on this site.
Mainly because I like the logos, but also because it is our duty to keep the net free. Partly.
This can be done by spreading the very concept of offering free content. As I, in my very humble way, try to do here.

Skype and ebay

Rumors about skype being bougth by google or yahoo or microsoft or anyone, have turned toward ebay. I can't see how ebay's business could use voip, but it seems they do. I don't think I'll continue using skype if it's owned by ebay.
I'll stick to GAIM, after trying trillian and miranda, I prefered GAIM, for it is free (trillian is not) and extensions work better than with miranda.

MSN, as crappy as it is, does video chat, just as yahoo's, but I really can't have one of these on my desktop.

Also tried google's IM : google talk, but it's just another IM. Good voip though. Keep this one in mind.

.theprodukkt

Some time ago I told you about .kkrieger, the 96kb game.
As I've updated my hardware, I gave it another try, and it runs ok now.
Well, it's just a demo, and no further version has been published in a year, but it's impressive. In a programming way.
This team also propose .werkkzeug1, a demo (as in scene) editor.

The concept is a bit like povray, meaning it's as much about programming as about design, but with a graphical interface, where you move operators as little blocks. Spent a few hours making a hello world.
Then I ran out of ideas.

If I manage to produce something, I'll put it in binaries.

Open Source FPS

In my constant quest for THE FPS - or at least A fps - to put in the same category as quakes and UTs, I recently tried warsow, an open source fps.
I was not aware of such open source projects, so I searched for others, and I found cube and nexuiz. Both (all three in fact) seem to be in a quite advanced stage of development.
I tried those three.
Cube was recently updated, and new servers weren't listed a few days ago, so I put this one aside. Warsow had very few players a week ago, aside two.
I went to Nexuiz then, which is a based on the quake II engine, very advanced graphics, but quite slow on my computer. On which far cry runs full tilt. I got around 10 to 30 fps with low settings, with some lag in multiplayer, too much for comfy play. I kept it for further tests, but at the end of the line this one is out.

Next: warsow
By then, warsow had had some advertising in germany, a dozen servers where up, full of gamers. This one is also based on the quake II engine, with very simple graphics (reminds me of GL Tron), faster, with dodge style movements, half a dozen weapons (gun, shotgun, rocket, grenades, snipe), very fun and very fast.

But not as fast as Cube.
This one seems to be finished, as the writer has moved to building a next generation engine. This one has it’s own 3d engine, which is currently 2d (as in duke nukem 3d, doesn’t mean it’s all flat, but you can’t have overlapping floors). And it’s incredibly fast. The gameplay is also very, very fast, too fast for me. I tried this one online just tonight for a few minutes, and it wasn’t as fun as warsow – at least for me, but you should give it a try two.

I’ll keep both warsow and cube, looking forward to the next generation of cube, named sauerbraten, available as a beta right now. This one is a full 3D engine in all the three dimensions, with a very interesting approach of map editing.

I didn't mention OS : warsow is win32 or linux, cube is win32 or linux or mac, nexuiz is win32.

See ya.

download warsow
download cube
download nexuiz 1.2.1

I'll Never Plan Next Post Again

As you may have noticed, I haven't post for a while - and this post may, or may not, be a significant improvement.

Quick news:
The French Guy has stopped writing here, and has moved to new pages.
I've change job, house, I'm still a gamer and I still can't find time to write.
It's been more than a year since my last post.
Time rushes.

I was discussing with Aska about blogging, telling him I've got nothing (interesting) to say, this weblog being a written example.
The old memories brought me back to wwimm blog, and to the free writing.
Which is, I must say, an interesting – at least for me – game.

It seems having something to say is not mandatory then.

But
I had a new palm for my birthday,
GTA4 didn’t fulfil my expectations,
WH4K did,
Bernard Werber didn’t, so I won't link him,
Neil gaiman did, with American Gods, Neverwhere and Stardust, which is wich I prefered. Being tres fleur bleue.

A lot of stuff have gone by, insignificant events I could have commented, games I played and gadgets I didn't buy... I might come back and tell some happy few what I think of the world.

Did I mention I went to see H2G2, which is good, from a fan of the books.

Well, this is it for today.

I...

Well, I'll Never Plan Next Post Again.

thx