Greasemonkey fix for /. user page

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Neil McAllister

I’m singularly unimpressed with the Slashdot gang’s attempts to reinvent the site’s UI. Every new change seems to make the interface uglier, more bloated, and harder to use. I liked the mechanics of the old, pre-AJAX site just fine, thank you.

But the most recent insult was the sudden, unexpected change of the User page. Previously, if you clicked on your username in the upper lefthand corner, it would take you to a page that listed your recent comments. Now you get dumped to a Firehose page, forcing you to do an extra page load to get to where you’re going — and don’t get me started on Firehose.

So I decided to write a Greasemonkey script to fix it. You can download the script here. » More... » →

Happy 2009, everybody!

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Neil McAllister

Wow. It only just dawned on me how long it’s been since I posted an update to this blog. Don’t worry, I haven’t been idle — on the contrary, my plate’s been pretty full throughout December. In addition to blogging for InfoWorld and PC World, I’ve been working on some private jobs for clients, some stuff you’ll be seeing soon, and finishing up some classes at City College of San Francisco — not to mention the Holidays!

I hope everybody has a happy and safe holiday season, and a prosperous New Year. I’ll give updates on what’s going on with me after the jump. » More... » →

Linux IQ quiz

Posted on November 3, 2008 by Neil McAllister

Another one from the “just for fun” file — this week, InfoWorld is running a quick quiz to see just how much you really know about Linux.

I always get a certain amount of hate mail when we put together one of these things, so let’s clear up a few points right off. No, getting some of the questions wrong doesn’t mean you’re dumb, or that you’re bad at your job as a Linux admin. It’s for fun. See?

Anyhow, check it out, and if you feel like bragging about your score — or calling me an idiot — post ’em here or on the InfoWorld site.

More changes to LibraryLookup

Posted on October 12, 2008 by Neil McAllister

My LibraryLookup script for the San Francisco Public Library has been returning a lot of false positives lately. I finally managed to sit down and address that issue, in addition to some other general maintenance. You can grab version 1.5 of the script at its new, permanent page under “Odd Bits.” » More... » →

Adventures in amateur BlackBerry repair

Posted on October 5, 2008 by Neil McAllister

Last night as I was walking home I pulled my BlackBerry Pearl 8120 out of my back pocket and noticed that the LCD was cracked (image here). I have no idea how this happened — I didn’t drop it or anything. The phone is only two weeks old! Unfortunately, no matter how it happened I knew T-Mobile wasn’t going to have much sympathy for my plight. T-Mobile, like most carriers, considers any screen breakage to be the customer’s fault, and it’s not covered by warranty.

This particular Pearl, however, was a replacement for my old Pearl — an earlier model 8100 — which I accidentally dropped in the toilet about two weeks ago. And that gave me an idea: Why not swap out the broken screen in the new Pearl with the working screen from the old one? » More... » →

Fatal Exception rated “Great” at Blogged.com

Posted on September 21, 2008 by Neil McAllister

This just in: Fatal Exception, my InfoWorld blog, has received a rating of 8.0 at the blog rating site Blogged.com, qualifying it for a score of “Great.” Just six other InfoWorld blogs have been reviewed by the site. Tom Yager rates a little higher than I do, as does Zack Urlocker and Savio Rodrigues’ Open Sources blog, but I daresay I can deal with “Great.” Drop on by the site and leave a review of Fatal Exception, if you’re so moved.

20 (more) IT mistakes to avoid

Posted on September 15, 2008 by Neil McAllister

Think you know something about how to manage IT? Care to learn a thing or two about how not to do it?

My latest article for InfoWorld revisits an old theme, originally covered in 2004 by Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld’s then-CTO: the top IT mistakes to avoid. We all fall prey to bad ideas once in a while. Presented here are twenty doozies for you to observe and evade.

And lest you think you’ve heard it all before, rest assured that this year’s list doesn’t overlap much with the original 20. Some of the topics are related, but I’ve tried to present a new twist or an opposite angle. Taken together, the two articles form a pretty formidable list of “worst practices.” So click on over and let me know what you think.

Inside Google’s Chrome browser

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Neil McAllister

For the truly geeky among you: In the latest post to my Fatal Exception blog over at InfoWorld, I’m taking a look under the hood of Chrome, Google’s new Web browser. A lot of articles make mention of how Chrome is open source. I actually put it to the test, by building a custom copy of it myself.

Along the way I found out a lot of interesting information about Chrome’s internals and how Google built it. On the plus side, it’s very clean, well-organized code. On the minus side, it looks like it’s going to be Windows-only for a good while, yet.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this piece (it’s been a long time since I had a legitimate excuse to pull out a compiler on Windows), so if you have the hobbyist spirit, drop on over and join the discussion.

Welcome, Slashdot readers

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Neil McAllister

Posts from my Fatal Exception blog at InfoWorld have been linked on Slashdot a lot lately. This morning it was my editorial “Was JavaScript a mistake?”, which asks whether we’re spending entirely too much effort trying to standardize a single language for client-side Web programming. Other recent posts to receive the royal Slashdot treatment include “The Web development skills crisis” and “Java is free at last. Now what?”, among others.

Naturally I’m pleased as punch with the attention. The so-called Slashdot effect is well known, and while visitors from Slashdot have yet to bring InfoWorld’s servers to their knees, the mention is always a surefire way to bring in a lot more traffic. It’s especially great in this case, because the Slashdot audience is pretty much exactly who I had in mind when I launched the blog. I’m a longtime Slashdot junkie myself — and in fact, long before you saw any of my editorials linked on the site, you’ve probably seen my posts in the comments. » More... » →

Taking netbooks through their paces

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Neil McAllister

A new category of low-cost, ultra-lightweight laptops has appeared recently. It began with the Asus Eee PC and spawned a slew of imitators, including the Acer Aspire ONE, the HP Mini-Note, and the MSI Wind — not to mention a somewhat-confusing array of Eee PC models to follow the original.

These devices have mostly been marketed to students and home users, with Web browsing and light computing tasks in mind. I wanted to see whether they might also be attractive to business users. So I packed up an HP Mini-Note and Asus’s latest Eee PC 901 and headed off to the airport, with the plan to test each of them in real-world field conditions. My review for InfoWorld, published today, details the results of my trials. » More... » →

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