Do Know Evil - Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

A majority of my readers use Firefox to browse the web. I myself happen to be a big fan of Firefox, as some of my previous posts have indicated. Always striving for efficiency, I have made a few tweaks to lower my frustration and increase the enjoyment of my web browsing experience. Amongst these changes, one of the first things I do on a new install is to change the way the download dialog (ctrl+j) behaves.

To clarify, I don’t like the downloads box to pop-up when I start a download and I want to choose where to save my file. To achieve this, I go to Firefox options:

and select your options as noted below:

To access the infamous download box in the future, use the ctrl+j hotkey combination:

When I do group projects at school, I like to keep the team in check with a project management system to keep a centralized collection of work, including conversation and various files about said work. In the past I had been a big fan of the (once open-source) Base Camp clone, activeCollab. However, as many of you reading this may know, activeCollab is no longer free.

Fear not my friends! There exists a fork called Project Pier, which picks up where the the free version left off.

In my opinion, the default theme shies away from the clean cut web 2.0 freshness that was activeCollab but the folks at Project Pier were friendly enough to bundle some slick themes for those who are as nitpicky as I.

Checking your class schedule is easy at Wentworth Institute of Technology. So easy in fact, I’ve decided to share this web experience with you.

Step One: go to http://lconnect.wit.edu

Step Two: Be told that Firefox is out of date because this web application is using some new crazy technologies that your browser may not be able to support like “javascript, cookies and java”.

Step Three: Click continue to go to the ‘real login page’, which if you note is ipsca.com secured. Solamente el mejor para Wentworth.

Step Four: Click Leopardweb-Banner (whatever the hell that means! More confusion to the end user than anything IMHO).

Step Five: LOL

Step Six: Click Student and Finical Aid

Step Seven: Click Registration

Step Eight: Your choice. ‘Week at a Glance’ or ‘Student Detail Schedule’. H3LL Y34H B0Y, TH4T’5 L337! I hope my browser can support the technologies that are able to give me two options on how to view my schedule O.o.

So, do think your school can top this?

Sungard Higher Education may be the solution for you!

I’ve talked about mind overflow before. You know the stuff that your brain wants to remember but it can’t because you’re trying to focus on too much information at once and it stresses you out because you forget some things and blah blah blah? If this sounds at all familiar to you, check out my makeshift solution that’s sort of a precursor to TSO which I haven’t gotten developed yet.

I take a 5×8in piece of paper and fold it in half then in half again to make myself a little ‘book’.

Then I label the sections (imagine pages 1,2,3,4) as ‘todo’, blank, ‘ideas’, ‘remember’ respectively.

I do this because to me, TODO is the most important (front), then Remember (back), then ideas (inside right), then blank space for who knows what (inside left). If I ever run out of space, I have the whol inside to use, wheee! So all day, I just have this with a pen in my pocket and write down / cross out whatever I need.

To manage my mind overflow further, I use a three ring binder to manage the overflow of the 5×8 overflow so I can move todos, ideas, remembers and whatever else to new days without losing track.

I post a lot of zip files on forums to trade information with my fellow gamers, programmers, internetards and what have you. As such, I like to tell them what the zip contains. Now the title of this post is a bit of a misnomer as I haven’t really created the zip yet… but I figured it would be just as helpful. The only extra step you would have in doing an actual zip file would be to extract the files to a folder but enough of the intro, lets dive in.

Step one: Have a folder with the files you want to list

(Whats with your image icons d00d? My images are associated with irfanview)

Step two: Open the Command prompt.

Do this by going to start -> Run… and typing in “cmd”

Step three: Navigate to your folder with “cd” (change directory) and list the files without any attributes using “dir /b”

Step four: Right click anywhere in the black and choose, “Mark“, this allows you to highlight the outputted text.

Highlight your filelist

When you right click again, the text is copied to your clipboard and you can paste it anywhere you’d like

I’ve always had some trouble staying organized in real life (IRL). I think part of the reason is that other people’s methods don’t really work for me.

This tool is designed to help me deal with ‘mind overflow’. That is, more information than my brain is willing to process at one time. An organizer of sorts. That is what I consider my project to be. It is neither a notepad or a day planner, a scribble pad or a journal; it is what you need it to be, fast.

Used in conjunction with its bigger brother, who we’ll call ‘Homebase’, the device ‘Soldier’ is a fully customizable, expandable, archivable, seperatable ‘mind overflow system’.

Soldier is able to hold ~10-30 pages of 3 ringed paper 3.5″x5.5″. He can find relief from older documents by redistributing them to Homebase.

Notice the pen on the outside edge. This is intentionally done for quick access to the pen when TSO is closed.

To me, doctypes have always been somewhat of a hassle. I know when I write good code and I know how to fix errors the validator spits out at me. Other than that, my knowledge is limited. I usually just copy the header from my older documents and hope for the best. However, yesterday I had a change of heart and thanks to a simple google search, that led me to a great article, that brought me to a not so easily found page on w3. I was able to sigh in relief. I really don’t understand why the chart below isn’t easily accessible.

This chart is located about half way down the page.

According to my purple to blue link ratio, there are no links off the front page of w3 to this article. I find this rather inconvenient. Thankfully, the good folks at ALA know what’s up.

Email can be a hassle but it doesn’t have to be if you lay out the ground work properly. Folders are a great solution but they only bring you so far. I know I don’t want to manually sort all my email. If you’re like me, you’ll love thunderbird’s filters and tags. Filters allow you to sort, delete, tag and so much more automagically.

To get started, click tools > message filters…

And you are brought to a dialog similar to this (mine obviously has a few filters):

Click ‘new…’ to get started.

In this dialog, conditions are defined at the top and actions are defined below. In the example above, you’ll notice that my condition is based on the Subject of the email. When this condition is true, it will perform the actions below. Move to the BOA folder and tag the message as important.

A little note about this window that confuses people, those + and - buttons are to add and remove conditions/actions. You do not need to click + if you are just filling in the one field, thunderbird knows it’s there.

Also note, Thunderbird allows you to add your own tags with a nice array of colors to choose from (though I would prefer hex).

To access this dialog, click the tag button on the tool bar and select ‘new…’

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a message. Happy sorting!

Bookmarks are something most of us don’t really keep up to par. Sometimes you just ctrl+d on a whim, losing that page in your lack of a hierarchy forever. Well, at least that’s how it’s been for me. However, once in a while I give myself a kick in the ass and try to shape up. Based upon the patterns I’ve learned in the past and the general direction I wish to go, I reevaluate my mess and decide the proper way forward. In this case it was the standard, “Make general categories and add sub-folders if they need more organization” route… with a little extra spice.

This time around, I decided to utilize folders in the bookmarks toolbar. Maybe I’m blind to this but I feel like most people don’t utilize this helpful feature, I know I didn’t until now. After spending a few days using folders on my toolbar, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is both effective and efficient.

I spend a lot of time developing locally and often do rounds on my live sites and rather than waste 4 seconds typing in a 32 character URL, I’d rather waste 0.4 making two clicks. Yes, that’s right, I’m shaving off seconds to increase my efficiency. It might not seem like a lot but it adds up to minutes a day and hours a year.

Now, because I’m going to be spending a lot of time on my laptop, I needed a global solution to my bookmarks. The path I chose to get is syncing them with the Firefox extension, Bookmark Sync and Sort. If you don’t have your own server, there are some hosted alternatives such as Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. Those trendy bookmark sites aren’t really the solution for me for a few reasons.

1) I like to control my data.
2) Those sites are usually distracting to me
3) While the Firefox bookmarks manager isn’t the ideal solution, the GUI is far more advanced than something you’ll find on a social bookmarking site.

Admittedly, there is an advantage to these sites, and that’s the fact that I can get to my bookmarks quickly no matter what computer I’m on. But again, I can argue that I can find a link just as fast (if not faster) with SSH by greping the xml file Bookmark Sync and Sort generates.

Back on track, once you have the extension installed, click ‘Bookmarks’ > ‘Synchronize Bookmarks’ and fill in the dialog with your information as such:

What kind of man would I be if I didn’t take advantage of this moment to sort my bookmarks?

Mmm, alphabetical order.

Now I just need to upkeep as best I can… I’ll let you know when I come up with a better solution for that. Right now, I just force myself to take the time to find the correct folder in the hierarchy. It’s a good habit but a hard one to keep. If you have any advice, please share. Good luck and happy bookmarking.

P.S. I edited the file wp-admin/admin-functions.php, line 2126 to increase the generated thumbnail size in wordpress. Just replace ‘128′ with the max you wish. Thought maybe some of you could use that information.