Another minor upgrade to my LibraryLookup Greasemonkey script; a couple of tweaks seem to be necessary to get the script to work in Firefox 3. This fix should have it working in either version of the browser.

As usual, you can download the script here. You should delete the old version by hand before installing this one, because I’ve updated the namespace to reflect my own site instead of Jon Udell’s (finally!).

If you don’t understand what this is all about, check my earlier post on the subject. (And if you don’t live in San Francisco it probably won’t be much use to you anyway. Try a Google search for a similar script that works with libraries in your area.)

If you have any questions or problems with the script, post here and I’ll try to address them.

I don’t know why I do these things.

It occurred to me this afternoon that it might be nice to have a native Ubuntu Linux partition running on my main Windows Vista machine. “Should be easy,” I thought. So I whipped out my trusty Feisty Fawn CD, resized my Vista partition with GParted, and proceeded to install Linux.

Big mistake.

The installation itself went fine and Linux started right up. The problem came when I tried to boot back over into Windows Vista. In a nutshell, it wouldn’t. I’d get the green “Knight Rider” screen, but then the system would switch to a black screen and everything seemed to grind to a halt. » More... » →

My former colleague at InfoWorld, Jon Udell, came up with a really clever JavaScript hack for avid readers who use Firefox,* called LibraryLookup. It cross-references product pages at Amazon.com with the catalog systems of public libraries. Whenever a book you’re browsing at Amazon is available at your local library, the script automatically lets you know, by inserting a notification into the Amazon page that links to the library’s online card catalog. It really comes in handy, especially if you’re an impulse book-buyer.

Jon originally wrote the script for the libraries in his hometown of Keene, New Hampshire, but there are only so many different library catalog systems in use. The script is adaptable to any of them, and lots of folks have modified it to work with the systems in their own communities. I never found a good version for San Francisco, though, so I spent some time working with Jon’s latest code to get it working. It needed just a couple of tweaks. » More... » →