Why is the Sun Java updater so bloody annoying?

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I can't really find a reason for this.
The Java updater, this is on Windows, is trying hard to update my JRE installation, without my consent, and by overriding my choice of never auto-updating my system.

What I mean is: I explicitly disabled all automated checks and/or updates performed by this monster, and still it bugs me trying to run the update every day.

Why this has to be so annoying? I hate it. I think last time this happened I removed some registry key or probably used the MS admin console to disable some obscurely named service.

And the worst thing is that I have to waste 10 precious minutes of my life to find how to disable this annoying crap.

Java updater, I seriously hate you.

Just disabled Technorati ping from My Opera

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I just found out that pinging Technorati atm is really slow, so I disabled this service by overriding the default production configuration.

It seems every Technorati ping took around 180 seconds, which is a bit round as number, so I guess their service is either timing out, or we started sending wrong data, or to the wrong URL, which is again weird, because we didn't change anything… :-)

Let's see tomorrow…

The “Gran Torino” of keyboards…

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My keyboard

It's not the best keyboard for everyone of course, but it's the best for me. Totally awesome personalized keyboard. It's fully supported by my window manager. I don't understand why everyone coming at my desk refuses to write on it…

It's more than 10 years old. It has served me very well, and has been cleaned extensively 3 or 4 times with full disassembly. Here's my personal ritual. Every day when I'm finished working, I cover it from dust with a special cloth. This cloth has been covering my keyboards since I had my first C64, then C128, Amiga and now this one. :-)

Full picture here.

Ubiquity for Opera, “currency converter” and more…

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Today I went back to a project that I really like, Ubiquity for Opera. Usually I do that when I'm annoyed by something (in this case I needed to quickly convert currency amounts), or when I find something funny.

This time, Ubiquity gets some more commands and some updates to existing ones.

  • the isdown command, that checks if a host is up, has been changed to be interactive. This is the first one that I managed to make interactive, as it requires a bit more magic than just opening a browser window.
  • the currency-converter command,
  • the instant-rimshot command

Download Ubiquity for Opera,
or go to the Ubiquity for Opera github repository.

Enjoy :-)

Improved slideshow in Dragonfruit

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In the new Dragonfruit release, we also worked on an improved, or completely new, photo album slideshow functionality. This replaced our LightBox based slideshow that worked, but had some quirks here and there.

I think the new slideshow is really awesome, and if you didn't try it yet, you should try it now!.

Take a look at these albums:

by derspecht, http://my.opera.com/365/albums/slideshow/?album=704336

by AgnetaM, http://my.opera.com/365/albums/slideshow/?album=722249

And these are my own :-)

From the 365 group, http://my.opera.com/365/albums/slideshow/?album=769801

And one of my first photo albums on My Opera:

http://my.opera.com/cstrep/albums/slideshow/?album=504322

Opera 10 and the Microsoft Silverlight plugin

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Just in case anyone is wondering…

If you don't know, SilverLight is the Microsoft answer to Flash.
If there's some website that has videos or other content that you want to see but they chose to use SilverLight, not all hope is lost.

Just go to the download page for the SilverLight plugin. If you are using Opera, it will tell you that "This browser is not supported blah blah blah…".

Ignore that bullshit and just download it. Then close Opera and install it.
Be sure to remove any pre-existing version first, or it won't work.

After the installation takes place, reopen Opera and go to the plugins page. You should see the SilverLight plugin already enabled. Congratulations, and welcome to the fantastic world of SilverLight content. :-|

YouTube is implementing OEmbed

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That's good news. For once, we were faster than YouTube to implement something :-)
Anyway, if you look at any video page source code, you will find something like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" href="http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Da1Y73sPHKxw&format=json" title="Dramatic Chipmunk" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml+oembed" href="http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Da1Y73sPHKxw&format=xml" title="Dramatic Chipmunk" />

And, by looking at one of these URLs, for example the JSON one, you can see:

{
  "provider_url": "http://www.youtube.com/",
  "title": "Dramatic Chipmunk",
  "html": "<object width="384" height="313"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/a1Y73sPHKxw&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/a1Y73sPHKxw&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="384" height="313" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>",
  "author_name": "cregets",
  "height": 313,
  "width": 384,
  "version": "1.0",
  "author_url": "http://www.youtube.com/user/cregets",
  "provider_name": "YouTube",
  "type": "video"
}

So, from now on, you don't have to guess what's the HTML code to correctly embed a YouTube video (like we on My Opera did for the Embed Video button on the new blog post form, but you have the full, and always updated, HTML code in the OEmbed JSON content.

Nice, I think.

European Perl Conference, Day 1

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Every YAPC::EU (Yet Another Perl Conference Europe) is a really big event in the Perl world, with lots of people from every part of the planet. I got to know some of them already, so we just meet like good friends :-) This year's theme was Corporate Perl, how Perl is used in the corporate world.

This time though I was presenting a talk during the first day of the conference: How Opera uses Perl, that's up on Slideshare right now. If you take a look at it, you will find out that we actually use Perl for a lot of systems, from the very tiny to very complex, mission-critical ones. It's been quite some fun preparing the talk, and I think it also went decently.

There were lots of other interesting talks, even lightning talks, like Giuseppe Maxia's MySQL Sandbox, or Sue Spencer's talk about "Perl at Cisco Systems". There was also a talk on roles and inheritance in OO systems by Curtis Poe of the BBC, and a really funny lightning talk by Alex Kapranoff, a russian guy, but I don't remember the title. Merijn Brand presented lots of ways to improve your Perl modules. This guy's amazing. Also avid Opera user.

During lunch we met up with Martin Berends and Carl Mäsak and talked about Perl 6 syntax, CPAN 6, etc… really cool people.

CSS Frameworks

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The other day I was trying to make sense of all my feeds, that is, keeping up with the enormous amount of unread news, and I saw an article on IBM DeveloperWorks, "Weaving a better web page".

It's really interesting and I suggest you to read it. I've certainly heard about web frameworks, and javascript frameworks are not uncommon nowadays, but it was the first time that I saw mentioned "CSS frameworks".

Turns out this is a very useful concept. Abstracting away browser differences (Internet Explorer, anyone?), layout and typography are the main areas where these kind of frameworks shine. The one mentioned in the article is Blueprint, but there's tons of others, like yaml.

When I'll have time to redesign my personal page, I'm sure I will try out one of these tools…