Old Ex Cathedra

How? Start with the article at the unofficial how-to blog for Thunderbird.

Only one problem: that puts every blog in the same stewpot. What happened to organizing your blog feeds? Well, it can be done, but it’s a little harder.

Here’s how to do it. Start off by setting up the options to get News and Blogs on Thunderbird, just like in the how-to blog article.

Now let’s get organized. Create some subfolders under News & Blogs. I’ve got one folder for friends’ blogs and another for miscellaneous fun stuff. I have another for music, one for science, and one for news. Do what you like for yours. I’m just assuming in the example that follows that you have a subfolder under News & Blogs called “Fun.”

Let’s imagine you want to get RSS feeds from MSNBC’s Peculiar Postings. Make a “Peculiar Postings” sub-subfolder under “Fun” like this:

Now go to one of the articles under “Peculiar Postings” on MSNBC:

Click the RSS icon at the right of the address bar. It’s the one that looks like a wedge made up of 3 curved lines:

I think it’s supposed to represent a broadcast. What that has to do with RSS, I don’t know, but there you are. It turns out in this case, you’ll be offered two choices: subscribe to Peculiar Postings or subscribe to top news stories. Pick the former, and you’ll see a page that asks you what program you want to use to subscribe:

Oh, cool. It offers you the choice of using Thunderbird. Nope. They’re deceiving you. That would be way too convenient. What you should do instead is highlight the URL of the page you’re on now (the one that’s asking you what program to use) and copy it to the clipboard (ctrl-c).

Now go to Thunderbird and open up the main page under News & Blogs:

Click on “Manage subscriptions.”

Paste the URL you just copied to the clipboard in the “Feed URL” space (ctrl-v).

Wait! You’re not done! Click on “Store Articles In” and open up the tree:

Navigate to the folder for “Peculiar Postings” under “Fun”. And now you can click “OK”.

Hardly the epitome of convenience, but it does work, and it lets you use Thunderbird’s built-in blog reader, which does work reasonably well, and it lets you organize your feeds. Remember, always create the subfolder your feed will be going to before you click “Manage Subscriptions”.

And note too that putting several feeds into one subfolder (e.g., putting Dilbert, Kevin and Kell, User Friendly, and Xkcd into “Toons”) is a lot easier than making a separate subfolder for each one.

—————-
Now playing: Kenny Dorham – Mamacita

Pretty cool gadget. If you’re running Firefox with the Foxytunes extension, you can put sigs on your webmails and blog postings (including WordPress blogs like Ex Cathedra if you’re one of our authors) — any of the apps on this list. You’ll see a little text icon with a treble clef on it just above the compose window.

It’s early days yet. It doesn’t work on Thunderbird (FoxyTunes does, though), and it doesn’t work on WP comments. Nor does it have a valid sigdash. Perhaps it’ll have some of them soon.

Oh. Clicking on the little icon pastes the signatune where your cursor is. So you can edit the signatune. E.g., below.

So how long will it be before you post your first pretentious signatune? You know, a song you actually aren’t listening to, but what you’re actually listening to is way too lame.

—————-
Now playing: GG Allin – Rings Around Rabaul
via FoxyTunes

I wrote the other day about how ZoneAlarm no longer loves CA Antivirus, and I said then that I’d do a little research.

So I did. I asked Patrick. He uses Kerio Personal Firewall. Kerio decided to concentrate on enterprise applications and let somebody else handle the consumer stuff, so you get it at Sunbelt Software’s website instead of Kerio’s. What you do, according to Patrick, is get the trial version and after the trial expires, it doesn’t stop working, it defaults back to the stuff you probably want, and turns off the stuff you probably don’t want.

Patrick also runs NOD32 antivirus, and while I’ve still got some time left on the license for CA Antivirus, the reports at AV-Comparatives are kind of disturbing if you’ve been running CA. Still, I’ve noticed that CA hasn’t just been updating definitions recently; they updated their whole engine a couple of times since that report came out, so it may be they’re getting back into the game.

So I made a tentative plan:

1. If ZoneAlarm doesn’t fix their CA incompatibility problem in a couple of days, I’ll dump it and install Kerio
2. I’ll keep an eye on AV-Comparatives, and if they report CA hasn’t cleaned up their act, I’ll go get NOD32

Day before yesterday I installed Kerio, just to see if that part of the plan was viable. It pretty much worked straight out of the box. I’d recommend installing it in “learning mode”. Its default behavior in the other mode is to allow applications to connect to the internet without popping up a warning, which I think defeats a good part of the purpose of having the firewall. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t just allow every application to access the net. Surely it’s got some heuristics that protect you from trojans and spyware phoning home. But I prefer to have it ask me for each application that tries to access the net anyway. Trusting software is the first step on the path to perdition.

So far I’ve only found two applications that had any problems with Kerio. FileZilla, my favorite FTP client, once it’s made a connection, goes into server mode for some of its functions, e.g., to display the directory contents. That’s pretty much SOP for FTP programs. But Kerio’s default for “all other applications” is to silently deny requests to run as a server. As soon as I changed the permission from “deny” to “ask”, it asked, I said yes, and it worked fine. So I don’t have to scratch my head over that kind of behavior again, I set the default for new applications to ask, ask, ask, and ask.

There was one other program that didn’t play nicely with Kerio, and that program deserves a prize for the strangest misbehavior I’ve ever seen. I’m talking about Firefox. First weirdness: when you have Firefox configured to open a new tab whenever a script calls window.open(), when Kerio’s running, instead of opening the tab, Firefox opens a new window. Weirder still: if you close Firefox and bring it back up, now the page you just opened with the script appears in a tab, like it should have in the first place.

That doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but in fact it’s the way I’ve got my bookmarklets set up: they run out of the bookmarks toolbar, and I’ve got Tab Mix Plus set up to open a new tab for bookmarks. And it all fits together very nicely: I highlight some text, click a bookmarklet, and up comes a new tab with e.g., the Wikipedia entry for the phrase I highlighted. So the misbehavior on tabs turns out to be a big strike against Kerio. In fact, unless I could get Firefox working the way I like it (or get Opera to duplicate most of the goodies I’d installed in Firefox), that pretty much ruled Kerio out.

I uninstalled Kerio, just to confirm that when I was running ZoneAlarm, Firefox went back to behaving itself again. Confirmed. So I started googling and finally saw the magic words “popup blocker” in an article on Kerio, whereupon the lightbulb lit up. Kerio has a popup blocker? Hmmm. What if Kerio’s popup blocker was interacting with Firefox so that when the popup blocker was on, instead of preventing Firefox from opening the popup window, it was making Firefox open the popup window?

I reinstalled Kerio, turned off the popup blocker, and Firefox started behaving again. Yup. That was it.

Even more curious, though much less annoying: see the little calendar in the right-hand column on this page? When you turn on Kerio’s ad blocker, it becomes really big. Turn off the ad blocker and it goes back to normal. Since I don’t rely on my firewall’s popup blocker or ad blocker, having to turn them off was no big deal. And since the functionality was going to go away anyhow (when the trial period is over and I let Kerio fall back to the functionality of the free version), it’s a total non-problem.

I think I’ll keep Kerio on for a while to see if I find any other funny business. I’ll let you know.

Bob Rankin, who writes Tourbus along with my son Patrick, published an article on tricking out Firefox which reminded me that it’s been quite a while since I let y’all in on the Firefox extensions I’m using. But it wasn’t until I ran into Computerworld’s 20 must-have Firefox extensions and Mozilla’s own list of recommended extensions, that I decided I’d better get to it.

Because the extensions I use are way better. Here, see for yourself:

Adblock

Adblock Filterset G

No-brainer. Who wants to surf with ads all over the place? There’s an Adblock Plus which seems to be a little more intrusive. I used it a while and went back to plain old Adblock.

All-in-One Sidebar

A pretty good imitation of Opera’s brilliant sidebar. Look at bookmarks, history, downloads, plugins, LiveHttpHeaders, error console, page source, DOM inspector, and a bunch of other info, all in the sidebar.

Bookmarks Synchronizer

Turns your bookmarks into an XBL file and uploads it to an FTP (etc.) server. Downloads the XBL file from the server and turns it into bookmarks. Also does a very good job of merging the XBL file from the server with your current bookmarks. The original developer lost interest, so I needed to search pretty hard to find this version, which is compatible with Firefox 2. It’s still the one I like best, in no small part because an XBL file (a variety of XML) is a useful product.

ColorZilla

An eyedropper, color picker, zoomer, and more color doodads.

Colour Contrast Analyser

Is the contrast on your web page sufficient to permit people with visual impairments to see everything easily? It isn’t for this blog. Oops. Expect an update one of these days.

del.icio.us

One button lets you tag the page you’re viewing and send it to del.icio.us. Another lets you go to your page on del.icio.us. There are other del.icio.us extensions that merge your bookmarks with your del.icio.us tags, but I think that’s a terrible idea.

DOM Inspector

Shows the tree structure of a website. Even if you don’t do scripting, it’s utterly essential when you’re stumped about why a style directive isn’t doing what you think it should.

DownThemAll

I went on a quest for download managers, eventually trying more than a half dozen. This is the one I kept. It lists all the links on a page, lets you check the ones you want to download, and lets you start now or enqueue them. Perfect for pages like this list of streams and MP3 files. Also useful to see if there are any goodies the page links to that you missed.

ForecastFox

Weather in your status bar.

FoxyTunes

A hook into your media player. By default, FoxyTunes installs in the status bar, but I like it better up in the menu bar. There’s also a version for Thunderbird.

IEView

Fire up Internet Explorer to view the current page. Useful for when some moron builds a website that only works on MSIE.

JSView

View any of the auxiliary CSS or JavaScript files associated with a web page. Good for seeing how developers did a neat AJAX or style trick.

LiveHTTPHeaders

Shows the HTTP messages back and forth between your browser and the website.

OperaView

Fire up Opera to see the current page.

Right-Click-Link

Some web pages have links written out but don’t make them hot (e.g., http://www.google.com/). Instead of having to copy the link and paste it into the toolbar, right-click and you’ll get a menu item that lets you open the link you’ve highlighted. Isn’t it strange that Firefox doesn’t already have this?

StumbleUpon

Go see random websites based on sites you tell it you like. Good for filling up those boring corners of the day when going to del.icio.us is just too much trouble.

Tab Mix Plus

Firefox has greatly improved their tab capabilities, but they still lack two things: clone this tab and open links from the bookmarks toolbar in a new tab. Tab Mix Plus takes care of that.

Talkback

Installed automatically. I’ve never used it.

Web Developer

A no-brainer if you develop web pages and pretty useful even if you don’t. E.g., viewing source.

OK, so last time I wrote such an elaborate introduction I never got around to doing the actual review. We did come up with a pretty good set of requirements, though, and they’ll be just what we need to evaluate Forumzilla. So enough procrastination: how is Forumzilla at “subscribing to, aggregating, formatting, arranging, and reading feeds?”

At first glance (a glimpse of the entries in Thunderbird’s mail folders) it’s very encouraging.

After installing it, I got a new folder in my Local Folders called “Feeds”, and after entering a few feed URLs you can see some of my friends’ blogs on the list.

Now let’s look at the whole Thunderbird screen:

[You may need to select "View Image" to see all the details.]

Each blog is a folder in the folder pane on the left. The folder contains the most recent posts for the blog in question, displayed like email messages (in the header pane and the preview pane). What gets into the preview pane (or the message window) depends on what the site owner decides he’s going to put in the feed, the whole article or just an excerpt.

And up among the headers on top of the preview pane is an extra header: “Website”. Click and it opens the URL of the article in your favorite web browser. That’s usually the permalink, but that depends on what the site’s RSS engine puts into the feeds. Want to read the rest of the article or see it nicely formatted with all its pictures? Click that link. So for arranging feeds, I give it 100% and another 100% for reading feeds. It’s exactly what I want a feed reader to do. And it does it inside my favorite email program, a tool I bring up all the time.

Deleting article feed messages, moving them to other folders, printing, saving — they act just like other email messages. No surprises.

How about aggregating? You set up the polling interval (for an individual feed or a default for new feeds) in the Options bar. You can access that through Tools / Extensions / Forumzilla / Options or through the Feeds button on the toolbar (mine’s on the right in that previous picture next to the Address Book).

The default polling interval is 30 minutes, but that’s absurd. I’ve set the default to 120 minutes. It seems to get at least some of the feeds when you start up, but so far the startup wait hasn’t been too bad. Considering that what you want is to poll the sites without your thinking about it, I’ll give that a 95%, just to account for the times you might want to see the newest posting on a favorite blog right now. And I’ve noticed some blogs will give you duplicate feeds. Evidently the messages show up as new all the time, perhaps because I’ve been playing around with the feeds. I’ll let you know if it continues.

Later: I stopped fooling around with the folders and I stopped getting duplicate messages.

Formatting? If you’ve set up Thunderbird to display messages as text, Forumzilla displays the RSS text as text. I like text. I have to admit not everyone is as forgiving as I am about things like .flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }. But if you have no fear of nasty things lurking inside the emails you get and display your emails in HTML with pictures permitted, Forumzilla does a very decent job of displaying the pictures and the rest. I have not tested this very much, but the feeds I displayed as HTML looked fine. Let’s make it 95% to allow for some unexpected gotchas.

Later: After a little experimenting, it seems the messages Forumzilla generates are HTML, which means when you do a “save as”, you’ll probably want to save them as “whatever.html”. It also means that if you forward a feed message to an archiver program like hypermail that expects plain text, you may find the message isn’t properly converted.

What about the remaining requirement: subscribing to feeds. Uhhhhhhhhh, gee, it sure does aggregate, arrange, and format and let you read well, doesn’t it?

OK, there’s two ways to do it. One is to use this interface:

Find the feed URL (not the site URL, that won’t work), copy it from your web browser, paste into the dialog, give it a name, and in it goes.

That’s absurd. RSS feeds are annoying to locate (I’m certain some site designers hide them deliberately) and Forumzilla’s error messages are terse. Here’s a marginally better way I’ve found. Fire up Sage, the Firefox plugin, and grab the link URL using the little magnifying glass finder:

I decided to make subfolders “Friends” and “People” for my feeds. So I’ve stuffed the feed I found (PZ Myers’ brilliant Pharyngula) under the “People” category. I collect several feed URLs or just one, and then use Sage’s “export OPML” facility.

Not quite done. Forumzilla does a splendid job of HTML importing, turining the outer <outline> containers into into subfolders, but if you bring up the export file in your favorite text editor:

you can see it’s got one container too many, the one marked “Sage Feeds”. So I delete that and its corresponding </outlne> element, and then Forumzilla will import it (and, incidentally, when I tried it just now, it put Pharyngula right amongst the other sites under “People”).

But don’t throw away the exported OPML files! Forumzilla doesn’t currently export OPML files.

I also imported some OPML files generated by FeedDemon, but somewhere along the line they picked up BOMs (byte order marks) at the beginning of the files. Forumzilla wouldn’t import them until I stripped off the BOM. After that, it picked them up fine.

There’s another Thunderbird extension. I won’t name it, but if you browse through theThunderbird extensions, you can hardly miss it. It’s huge, it fairly reeks of complexity, and it seems to rest uneasily on top of or beside or around Thunderbird. By contrast, Forumzilla is smallish (72K), simple, straightforward and (unless you put half the Internet in your feeds) unobtrusive. Were it not so bloody difficult to add feeds, it would be perfect. Even so, it’s what I’m going to be reading RSS feeds with from now on.

RSS is a technology in search of a product.

Not in search of a problem, notice. The problem is very well known: I (and lots of people like me) only want to visit a favorite website (a) when there’s something new there that we haven’t seen before and (b) when the new content is something we’re interested in.

A little more abstractly, we need to marry web-based content with push technology. The web is the apotheosis of pull technology. You can publish on the web, you can gather comments and sometimes spark genuine discussions like we’ve had here on Ex Cathedra. But you have to go to the website yourself. Now that’s good: the idea of web pages coming to you without your asking for them is the stuff of nightmares. But what if you don’t know there’s an article on Ex Cathedra that you might want to read or a discussion going that you might want to participate in?

You can do as a number of our faithful readers do and drop by every few days to see if there’s anything new or anything you missed last time. I do that too. That’s one of the reasons I put a blogroll over there in the right-hand column.

But I don’t really need to do all that clicking. Well, I do, but I shouldn’t. I don’t want to visit a website if there’s nothing new there, or if the only new article there is something I’m not very interested in. What I really want is a reminder when there’s a new article on the site, along with a brief excerpt so I can see what might be hiding behind the sometimes too clever titles. I want the owner of the website to send me a nice little message whenever there’s something new and enough information that I can decide whether I want to see it.

And by no coincidence at all, that’s exactly what RSS provides.

Oh all right, it’s not exactly like that, but it’s close. We have to go get a site’s RSS feeds ourselves, and check them against our list from the last time we visited. But we don’t have to read and interpret the whole website and that’s a good thing. Asking every website to manage a mailing list and send out emails? It’s (a) not gonna happen and (b) practically the definition of spam. Besides, (c) do you really want Andrew Sullivan and Markos Moulitsas to have your email address? Not to mention the kindly old Rev. and the Enormous Hooters Forum?

OK, I think we know enough now to tell the software pixies what they need to put into their bag of tricks to make it easy for us to play with those feeds and accomplish something useful with them.

First we need a gizmo we’ll call an aggregator to go out and fetch the RSS feeds from the sites we’re interested in once a day or once every couple of hours and make a note of anything it finds that wasn’t there last time. And we need another gizmo we’ll call a feed reader that makes it easy to read the feeds the aggregator has collected.

Somewhere in between we need a gizmo that formats the RSS feeds (RSS is a variety of XML — isn’t everything these days?) into something readable. And we need a gizmo that organizes and arranges the data from the feeds so our feed reader can display them in a way the user will appreciate.

Almost done. Did you notice that I said “sites we’re interested in”? We’ll also need some kind of gizmo that lets us tell the other gizmos what sites we’re interested in. Following Usenet usage, we call it “subscribing” to feeds, even though we don’t tell the site anything. We just add it to our aggregator’s list of sites to query, our feed reader’s list of sites to display, and so on.

Sometimes these functional requirements are all bundled together in one program, other times the functions are divided. And sometimes the designers are extra-smart and let you read the feeds in a program you already know your way around: your favorite web browser, Usenet news reader, or email program.

Everybody pretty much caught up again on the pieces of the puzzle? OK, because now we get to the fun part, the puzzle itself: what’s the best program (or set of programs) for subscribing to, aggregating, formatting, arranging, and reading feeds?

I’ve tried lots of them, and I’ve even reviewed some of them here on the blog:

• I started out with a shootout between feed readers back in the summer of 2003. None of them was very good, but RSS hadn’t been around that long. It turned out that, apart from a brief flirtation with w.bloggar, I ended up not using any of them.
• Then I became a loyal fan of FeedDemon and really gave it a workout. I blogged about FeedDemon quite a bit, but I never actually reviewed it. In a nutshell, its principal fault is that it requires that you learn a whole new program (FeedDemon) to read feeds, and after a while I ended up forgetting to fire it up.
• I tried out Sage, a Firefox-based feed reader, but it was too clunky and I ended up never using it. It was awkward because a web browser is the wrong tool to read feeds in. If I have my web browser up, why bother going into Sage? Why not just go to the website?
• Then I tried aggregating feeds on my Google Homepage, and discovered that reading feeds in the main page is just as uncomfortable to use as reading them in the sidebar, and it turned loading my homepage into a test of patience, thereby violating the Prime Directive for homepages: they have to load fast! So I went on to
• nntp//rss, a very clever little program that runs an NNTP server on your local PC as a service. The interface is any Usenet news reader, which is a huge step in the right direction. But you have to run the NNTP server. I ended up turning it off to save some CPU cycles and forgot to turn it back on again.

Even as far back as 2003, I was pretty much convinced that the ideal paradigm for RSS aggregators and readers is an email program. It’s exactly like the author of the website sending you an email when the site changes.

And finally somebody did exactly that: Myk Melez, with his lovely Firefox extension Forumzilla. Well, the “finally” isn’t quite right. I blogged about it over two years ago but never got around to trying it. I should really read Ex Cathedra more often, especially the articles from that Crispen guy.

Anyway, let’s wrap it up for tonight, and later on, maybe tomorrow, I’ll write about how Forumzilla works. Or you could just download it and try it yourself.

Record the top 100 films of all time on your TiVo

Worship the Glitch (where I got this) asks “why doesn’t every movie site have a ’schedule this movie to record on your TiVo’?” Good question.

Btw, did you catch the TiVo Blog reference in that first URL? I didn’t know a TiVo blog existed. Hey, everybody! There’s a TiVo Community and a TiVo blog and a Tivo Portal (UK) and PVR Wire.

And when you’re not tivoing, here’s what’s on the On Demand channels: Cinemax, HBO, Showtime, and Starz.

Convergence: earlier today we sat down to watch a movie we’d seen before, Quiz Show, on one of the On Demand channels. Kelly’s more into re-watching old favorites (comfort movies?), while I like to see something new. But, as usual, Kelly was right, because this time the movie really grabbed me. What a remarkable performance by Fiennes! The “golden boy” fog that he lives inside, and the frightened animal you can glimpse through that fog — I can’t imagine another actor who could have done it.

That got Kelly curious about Charles Van Doren, so she searched for him on the web, and near the top of the results was this page, Van Doren’s 1999 talk to the class of 1959 at Columbia. Characteristically and poignantly he quotes Virgil:

facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

It’s followed by a good translation, but since Latin quotes aren’t always accompanied by good translations and since I’d just published a gaggle of bookmarklets, some of which called on translators to do their work, I thought, why not add a Latin translator to my list?

Only one problem: Google doesn’t translate Latin at all, and most of the Latin translation pages out there are pretty dreadful. Here’s how one of them translated the last two lines:

to call back to conduct one’s self superasque to go out to heaven , this deed , this to sink is

Almost Engrish, nonne? And that brought back memories of having looked before for Latin translators on the Web and coming back disappointed. But this time Google pushed a true gem up through the muck, nearly to the top: Kevin Cawley’s Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid at Notre Dame. And a single click later, I arrived at an even greater gem, William Whitaker’s Words.

Words doesn’t give you a neat, clean translation. For instance, here’s what you get for the last line:

h.oc PRON 3 1 NOM S N
h.oc PRON 3 1 ABL S M
h.oc PRON 3 1 ABL S N
h.oc PRON 3 1 ACC S N
hic, haec, hoc PRON [XXXAX]
this; these (pl.); (also DEMONST);

opus N 3 2 NOM S N
opus N 3 2 VOC S N
opus N 3 2 ACC S N
opus, operis N N [XXXAX]
need; work; fortifications (pl.), works; [opus est => is useful, beneficial];

h.ic PRON 3 1 NOM S M
hic, haec, hoc PRON [XXXAX]
this; these (pl.); (also DEMONST);
hic ADV POS
hic ADV [XXXCX]
here, in this place; in the present circumstances;

lab.or V 1 1 PRES PASSIVE IND 1 S
labo, labare, labavi, labatus V [XXXAX]
totter, be ready to fall; begin to sink; give way; waver, decline, sink; err;
lab.or V 3 1 PRES IND 1 S
labor, labi, lapsus sum V DEP [XXXBX]
slip, slip and fall; slide, glide, drop; perish, go wrong;
labor N 3 1 NOM S M
labor N 3 1 VOC S M
labor, laboris N M [XXXCX]
effort, labor, toil, exertion, work; suffering, distress, hardship;

es.t V 7 3 PRES ACTIVE IND 3 S Early
edo, esse, -, - V [XXXAO]
eat; consume, devour; spend money on food; destroy;
.est V 5 1 PRES ACTIVE IND 3 S
sum, esse, fui, futurus V [XXXAX]
to be, exist; also used to form verb perfect passive tenses with NOM PERF PPL

Strong stuff, and yet there’s enough there to puzzle out the meaning. You’d still need to be a Robert Fitzgerald to come up with “There is the trouble, there is the toil,” but there’s enough to let you make a pretty decent translation. And there’s very little computer-generated idiocy like the aforementioned “conduct one’s self superasque to go out to heaven.”

Two minor quibbles so far: It doesn’t show the Latin original, so you have to click back and forth between the original page and the output of Words. And Words flat out missed the proper names Avernus and Dis, largely, I suspect, because it tries really hard to find words. But in one of my favorite quotes about someone I’m claiming as an ancestor: “Claudius Marcellus T. Quintius Crispinus coss. speculandi causa progressi e castris insidiis ab Hannibale circumventi sunt. Marcellus occisus, Crispinus fugit“, it not only gets the abbreviation “coss.” (Consuls) but guesses (correctly) that “T.” is short for Titus. Mind you, Livy might have been in its database, but I suspect it’s likelier to be the result of Whitaker’s having thrown a lot of real-world Latin at it.

If you want a quick translation, it may not be your cup of tea, but if you studied a little Latin, Words will give you the equivalent of having Cassell’s and a good Latin grammar in front of you, all opened to the right pages.

So without (much) further ado, here’s the bookmarklet. But a caution: there’s quite a bit to read on the page at Notre Dame, and there’s versions of Whitaker’s Words that run on your favorite platform, so don’t lose the links.

la->en

Translate Latin to English using William Whitaker’s online Words

You’ll find a “how to” in my earlier article on bookmarklets.

I’ve added a new bookmark: “YP”. It looks up a word or phrase in the Yellow Pages. You’ll need to customize the script once you install it. Right-click on the link for the bookmarklet and look at the very beginning of the “Location” field. You’ll see something like

javascript:void(city="Decatur");void(state="AL");

Want to guess what you do to customize it for where you live?

I’ve also (maybe) fixed the page reload problem on the other bookmarklets. I think. I know, I promised that before, but this time I really mean it.

Here’s all my bookmarklets. Drag any or all of them into your Firefox or Opera toolbar or bookmarks list:

OneLook

Look up words or phrases in multiple dictionaries

Wikipedia

Look up words or phrases in Wikipedia

Holmes

Look up words or phrases in the Sherlock Holmes stories (aka the Sacred Writings)

Allmusic

Look up artist name on allmusic.com

CDDB

Look up artist name or artist name and album in CD Database

fr->en

Translate French to English

es->en

Translate Spanish to English

de->en

Translate German to English. You get the idea. Once you put this bookmarklet in your toolbar or bookmarks list, you’ll see the “Location” field starts off like this: javascript:void(langpair="de|en"); Want to guess what you do to make it translate from English to Italian? Here’s a hint.

YP

Search Yellow Pages

TinyURL †

Make tiny URL from current page’s URL

RIAA ‡

See if a CD is made by an RIAA member company

->nntp//rss §

Add feed from current page to the feeds in your local nntp//rss server

->Google §

Add feed from current page to your Google homepage

The way they work is the same as always: highlight a word or group of words on any web page, click the bookmarklet, and off you go in a new tab. If you don’t highlight anything, it’ll prompt you to type something in, then it puts the results in a new tab.

† The TinyUrl bookmarklet is different: it makes a TinyUrl out of the URL of the current page. It’s different from the one you can grab from the tinyurl.com website only in that it opens a new tab.

‡ The RIAA Radar bookmarklet is also different. Highlight the ASIN of a CD (it’s under that CD’s “Product Details” at amazon.com), and it will show you whether the recording is on a label that’s a member of the RIAA. I copied this from the RIAA Radar website and haven’t got around to making it open a new tab yet.

§ The ->nntp//rss bookmarklet and the ->Google bookmarklet check the current page to see if it’s got any embedded RSS or Atom feeds (most blog main pages do, most regular web pages don’t). If it does, it adds the first one it finds to your Google homepage or your nntp//rss server. A while back I described the ->nntp//rss bookmarklet [link to blog article] and the ->Google bookmarklet [link to blog article], so you can get some more info there.

Later: I’m not the only person in the world making bookmarklets. In particular, Christof Schellen’s All In One Video Downloader looks like a dandy. So far it works exactly as advertised.

Yet another Firefox extension? In heaven’s name why?

This is why:

The picture above shows FoxyTunes installed on Firefox. Notice the tape-recorder controls in the toolbar just above the first tab? They control your favorite media player.

Which media player? You choose in the configuration menu (the two eighth notes icon). See the list of supported players in the picture to the right.

Back to the FoxyTunes player. To the left, beside the magnifying glass icon, is an artist-title display which changes as the song changes. Hovering over the single eighth note icon pulls up the nice display you see above of the artist, song title, and sometimes the album name and cover art.

You can get to the web search function from this popup display or by clicking on the magnifying glass icon to the left of the artist-title display. You can go to the Wikipedia, Allmusic, Amazon (etc.) listing for the artist, the song, or the album.

The up-arrow has a tooltip label “Open File,” but actually it brings your media player to the top (errr, really actually, I’m not sure what it does, but it seems to be harmless). There’s a volume control slider. Clicking the little speaker icon toggles muting. The little arrow on the volume control collapses the volume control, and the little arrow on the far right lets you collapse all the player controls, in case you’re stuck for toolbar real estate. There’s also a hovering mini player you can choose. I chose to hide two other control icons: show player and hide player.

You can move FoxyTunes around to whatever toolbar you like (including the Web Developer toolbar: nice touch). And you don’t see the popup I showed in the top illustration unless you hover over the single eighth note, so apart from the artist-title notifier which will scroll if it’s too wide to accommodate the whole string, it’s nice and quiet.

One more why: I’m constantly having to open up Media Monkey to pause it when I go to a site that has a video. This keeps me from having to leave Firefox to do that. Ditto for going to the next song when it’s playing a song I don’t especially want to hear now. I thought about FoxyTunes a couple of times, and finally broke down and got it when somebody I know recommended it. I got it for that purpose alone, to save some clicks while I’m surfing. I didn’t expect it to be as nice as it was, but, ungrateful wretch that I am, that just gives me more stuff to criticize.

Minuses? FoxyTunes gets the album data from amazon.com, not from the media player, so it’ll miss the album data when it isn’t available at Amazon. And it might get the album wrong. For instance, it’s playing Neil Young’s “Helpless” right now from the Decade album, but the album displayed is Greatest Hits. A few more songs lead to the suspicion that Amazon may have its own agenda. It identifies “Prayer” from Pianism as being on Michel Petrucciani’s Complete Recordings, even though Pianism is in stock. So I think we can figure out the algorithm here, don’t you? “Show the most expensive (or perhaps the most profitable) album on which this song and artist appear.”

Kinda neutral: if you use my radio station links [zip archive] to have MediaMonkey play a radio station, presently MediaMonkey has to open up an auxiliary player like WinAmp to play it, so FoxyTunes still shows the last track you were playing. That only makes sense.

On the plus side, it doesn’t interfere with EvilLyrics, which is good, since the lyrics search isn’t that great (it does an ask.com search for artist, song title, and “lyrics”). And it doesn’t go out searching Amazon for the album and cover art until you hover or click the single eighth note, which in an environment where every application is hitting the net for some damn thing or other, is definitely praiseworthy.

I’ve pimped my jazz (and classical and a few indie) radio station links [zip archive] a couple of times, but one of my far-flung correspondents — from Yurrup, no less — shows me I’m a piker.

He reports:

My main links for weekly recording live jazz:

• BBC bigband 30 min weekly
• Whats going in the UK
• Switzerland – check the programs about live jazz
• Netherlands: one bigband broadcast + one vintage live weekly
• France
• Switzerland Rete Due = italian language
• Switzerland – french language and
• look at this german radio and TV list for all the jazz programs available
• Bonus link

He also informed me of a list in Switzerland that I’d seen ages ago and then misplaced.

Happy tuning!

This one’s pretty good: EvilLyrics works in concert with your favorite music player and goes hunting on the net for the lyrics of the song that’s playing. Not that great if you’ve got a collection that’s heavy on jazz and indie artists, but if the band is reasonably well known it’ll find something close.

If you want EvilLyrics to start whenever MediaMonkey starts, go get gen_ellaunch.dll and put it in MediaMonkey’s plugins folder. Later: It works, but I backed it out. Too much crap launching at the same time. I also disabled the plugin that fires it up automatically when you launch WinAmp. Now I just launch it from my Start menu whenever I want to know the lyrics for the song that’s playing.

A discovery: this little green button is the “try another source” button. There’s also a little square green button beside the song name, but I have no idea what it does. The first results for some artists’ lyrics (e.g., Death Cab for Cutie) are pretty bad, so you’ll have to hit that button (the round green arrow, the one circled in the picture) once or twice to get good lyrics.

You might want to check the EvilLyrics addons page. There’s a program that lets you add lyrics to your MP3 files and even time the lyrics for karaoke. This is allegedly supported in MilkDrop.

Later: I found a workaround for jazz tunes — well, standards, anyway — if EvilLyrics tells you “no lyrics found,” just remove the artist name and hyphen and try the song name by itself.

A secret command (oooh!) from onemen in the Tab Mix Plus user forums.

Put this into prefs.js:

user_pref("dom.disable_window_move_resize", true);

Now you can set Tab Mix Plus and possibly Tabbrowser Preferences to open all your popups in new tabs without having rogue tabs reduce the whole browser window to the size of the popup.

From ScanSafe’s Website:

ScanSafe announces early beta version of Scandoo

23 May 06

ScanSafe announces early beta version of first free spyware scanning and classification service for web searching Scandoo.com provides web ‘traffic lights’ to take the risk out of clicking online

Scandoo.com (www.scandoo.com) is the first secure search service available free to anyone on the web. Currently in initial beta testing, Scandoo.com provides an early warning system to help users search the web safely and securely and avoid the risk of clicking on unknown web sites. The simple, intuitive service guides web users through searches, allowing them to detect and avoid malware, including spyware, adware and viruses, as well as harmful, offensive or illegal content, such as pornography, gambling, hatred and phishing sites.

Scandoo.com is the brainchild of security specialist, ScanSafe, a company that scans over three billion web requests a month for corporate users and is the largest provider of managed web security in the world. Scandoo.com is free, requires no downloads, software installation or updating…

It looks pretty cool, and is one way to help us all practice safe hex. Check it out.

This is cuter than a bug: nntp//rss. It’s a server you run on your PC that polls your favorite RSS feeds and lets you read them in your USENET newsreader. As you can see in the image below, the feed text doesn’t look that bad, even in a plain text newsreader like Xnews.

And it’ll also display HTML if you’ve got a newsreader that’s set up for that. It would be an abomination unto the Lord if you did have a newsreader set up for that, but the kindly old Rev. knows his flock can’t all be perfect.

So is it a useful tool, a parlor trick, or something in between? As somebody who’s run Hamster and had it store my email messages from Yahoo Groups into a set of local newsgroups, I’m leaning toward “useful tool”.

People who love their newsreader and think that’s the natural way to serve up RSS feeds, nntp//rss is for you. If you want a “webbier” kind of RSS reader, you may like FeedDemon. If you want to go all the way toward webbiness, there’s Google homepage. Or if you think the best way to display RSS feeds is in your browser bookmarks, there’s the Sage extension for Firefox.

Me, I don’t think they’ve come up with the killer interface to RSS yet. My choice is somewhere between Google Homepage and nntp//rss. A little thought should reveal that there’s almost no overlap between the two, nor should there be in any of the obvious ways. But that’s what I’d use.

Here’s the best things about nntp//rss:

• Postings don’t automatically expire and disappear. That lets me look at a feed whenever I want to, or not look at a feed for weeks.
• You don’t have to fire up a special program to read feeds. Just use your USENET newsreader.
• Very convenient way to add feeds (see the bookmarklet below).

Here’s the worst things about nntp//rss:

• You have to start nntp//rss. You can do it from the Start menu, or you can run it by default from the Startup menu, or you can install it as a service. There’s pluses and minuses for each approach.
• This is a complaint about Xnews: it never handled non-ASCII characters very well, and nowadays they’re showing up all over the place, even in RSS feeds.
• Most text in feeds doesn’t have line breaks within paragraphs, so you have to set word wrap on by default (in Xnews, add “ViewerWordWrap=1″ to the [Display] section in xnews.ini).
• What do you name your feed newsgroups? There’s a default, but it’s not that great. I didn’t use it.

And would the kindly old Rev. leave you without a bookmarklet to add a page to your nntp/rss server? Of course not. Here it is:

->nntp//rss

Just drag it into your Firefox toolbar and click on it when you’re on a page that has an RSS feed. If nothing happens, the bookmarklet doesn’t think there’s an RSS feed on the page.

You may remember it was just yesterday when I said

Google took something useful, versatile, and a little geeky and turned it into something disorganized, confusing, and corporate. Mind you, it’s their website, and they can do whatever they want to with it. But I’m not playing any more. For now the Ex Cathedra home page is my portal.

That resolution lasted less than a day. I went exploring, and I discovered I could put this on my Google homepage:

Curse you, Google!

I’m such a slut.

However, I did a little (shudder) work — very little, but never mind that — and came up with a “To Google Home Page” bookmarklet. Drag this to your toolbar, then whenever you want to, click on a site’s feed button, then, while you’re looking at the XML gibberish, click the bookmarklet.

RSS->GoogleHome

Later: The one below is much better. Forget about having to click on the feed link and see the XML. This bookmarklet tries to find an Atom or RSS feed in the page you’re viewing. Whichever it finds first, it adds that feed to your Google home page.

->GoogleHome

Later: I had to take a couple of tests out to accommodate Blogger blogs (which use the title attribute in an oddball way, imho). I’ve verified it works on blogs on Blogger and LJ and blogs powered by WordPress and MovableType (unless their owners have gone deep into their innards and royally screwed them up). Let me know if you find any blogs it doesn’t work on. I’ll stop fooling with it for a while so everybody can comment on the same version.

Now that everybody’s putting cool movies on the net and we’ve finally got hard drives big enough to save some of them before they disappear, isn’t it just our luck that the places that host them are making it annoying to grab the movies off the page? Fear not. What tech can do, tech can undo. KeepVid lets you download files from Google, Youtube, iFilm, Putfile, Metacafe, DailyMotion, and a host of others.

I’ve tried it with a good assortment of sites, and it seems to work as advertised. Hint: don’t forget to click the tab for the host you’re getting the files from; this isn’t a universal one-size-fits-all thing yet.

And if you run across a site they don’t have an embedded media downloader for yet, never fear. Get the Save Embedded Firefox extension and download away. Hint: the documentation is wrong. It doesn’t give you a new context menu item. Look down at the bottom on the status bar and you’ll see a big red arrow pointing down. Click it and you’ll get the file. Try it out on Monster Kid Home Movies, a really cute site: click one of the icons for the sample clips, and not long after the movie starts you should see that red arrow:

There’s one negative about downloading these movie files. Last night while I was sleeping a huge population of .flv files has infested the net. .flv files? Not a problem. They’re Flash videos (as opposed to regular flash movies which end in .swf). Martin DeVisser has a lovely free .flv player. Or if you think Flash video won’t last (yeah, because we all know how big an egg Flash laid, right?), you can convert .flv files to .mpg or .avi. Just read this howto by hitrec.

And for good measure (you probably have this already), for old-timey Flash movies (.swf) that you’ve downloaded, there’s no need to fire up Firefox just to play them., Use EOLSoft’s free flash player.

Do you suppose this is the last time we’ll revise our bookmarklets? We’ll see. Anyhow, sometimes a bookmarklet would make a mess in the calling window because the script mistakenly sent back a return value to that window. With luck, this is all solved now.

• OneLook – look up words or phrases in multiple dictionaries
• Wikipedia – look up words or phrases in Wikipedia
• Holmes – look up words or phrases in the Sherlock Holmes stories
• Allmusic – look up artist name on allmusic.com
• CDDB – look up artist name or artist name and album in CD Database
• TinyURL † – make tiny URL of current page
• RIAA Radar ‡ – See if a CD is made by an RIAA member company

The way they work is the same as always: highlight a word or group of words on any web page, click the bookmarklet, and off you go in a new tab. If you don’t highlight anything, it’ll prompt you to type something in, then off it goes in a new tab.

† The TinyUrl bookmarklet is different: it makes a TinyUrl out of the URL of the current page. It’s different from the one you can grab from the tinyurl.com website only in that it opens a new tab.

‡ The RIAA Radar bookmarklet is also different. Highlight the ASIN of a CD (it’s under “Product Details” at amazon.com), and it will show you whether the recording is on a label that’s a member of the RIAA. I copied this from the RIAA Radar website and haven’t got around to making it open a new tab yet.

I believe that between their own developers and their extension developers, Firefox is finally becoming civilized — i.e., like Opera. Latest goodness: Tab Mix Plus which, in its current incarnation, takes the “close tab” button off the tab bar and puts it on the tab itself, where God intended it to be. Like this:

Just in case you hadn’t used it before, Tab Mix Plus has got every option under the sun in there, from “duplicate this tab” to “enable undo close tab” through arcane matters like managing the focus on popups stored in a tab. I discovered it when I realized I hadn’t kept the copy of Tab Mix Plus I’d been using earlier. Serendipity, I’m your pal.

I can’t begin to tell you how wrong this is: an Abe Vigoda Status Firefox extension. Every time you fire up Firefox, it shows a little picture of Abe in the status bar and, beside it, whether he’s alive or dead.

I’ve installed it.

I’ve also installed a whole passel of 3D modeling tools.

• Spazz3D, a CAD-style modeling package that’s geared toward VRML. It supports all the VRML objects and properties, and has a nice animation editor and even a Cybertown avatar builder. It has some lovely extras like CSG, lathed and extruded objects, and text extrusion. I’ve probably spent more time with Spazz3D than with any other modeler, and even though I’m an incurable VRML source hacker, I can actually get around in it pretty well. Spazz3D has been superseded by Vizx3D, the authoring tool for Flux3D, so one of these days I’ll probably move on up to the new product.
• Design Workshop Lite, another CAD-style modeler, but pretty limited. I don’t really use it as a modeler. It’s part of a process for turning 3dmf files into VRML files. I get a compressed 3dmf file (mostly from repositories like Great Buildings), open it in Design Workshop Lite, save it uncompressed, and then run it through my own 3dmf2wrl utility. Still, if you want a simple, basic modeler, it might be just what you need.
• Wings 3D, a subdivision modeler. Somehow in the process of getting both Nendo and LiveArt, my registration for Nendo stopped working, and they don’t make it any more. But Wings 3D looks enough like son-of-Nendo to be worth a try. It doesn’t seem to have Nendo’s gorgeous texturer (that let you blend solid colors, per-vertex color, and image textures), but it seems to have all the modeling features. Its user interface and modeling paradigm are from Neptune, but for from-scratch modeling, especially of odd shapes, it’s hard to beat it.
• sPatch, a spline/patch modeler: I never have been able to figure out how to make sPatch do anything I could understand. I believe it takes a more delicate touch than I presently have. Either that, or a peculiar kink in the brain. I’m told there are folks who won’t use anything else.
• Blender: it’s not so much a modeler as a lifelong commitment. Hard core modeling, animation, rendering, with heavy script support. I haven’t touched it before, and as you might be able to tell, it scares me.
• POV-Ray, a raytracer that you control with its own specification language (with some procedural features and mathematical abstractions). Great just as a rendering engine when you want to take a big step up from VRML browser rendering or renderers built into modelers. Most of the other tools either export POV or produce files that can be converted to POV via AccuTrans 3D or something similar. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in POV-Ray.

Why the big pile of 3D modeling tools? Because Kelly wants to build a 3D model of 221B Baker Street. So I’m giving her a wide variety of choices, hoping she’ll find a modeler she loves. I’ll start her off on Spazz3D, because buildings are very amenable to a CAD-style modeler. The others are there just in case. I suspect Kelly and I will build the models in one of the modeling tools and then we’ll turn them into POV-Ray for rendering, because I can get pretty good looking results out of POV.