Good news! After 20 years of us crying out for someone to listen… Firefox 3 will finally support animated alpha PNGs!
I hear you ask.
“I really don’t know.”
I answer.
Greasemonkey is enabled! Or so it says when I mouse-over the little monkey face that sits at the bottom of my browser. Greasemonkey is an extension to Mozilla Firefox that lets you apply your skillz to munging up web pages in ways that will make graphic designers cry and cause web-enabled, P2P, e-commerce, tech oriented, um, solution providing, pro-active businesses to issue cease-and-desist orders.
It will mostly be used for good however, and here, by way of demonstration, I’ll do something nice and add some functionality to the WordPress blogging software.
ull time employment. The destroyer of spirits, and crusher of dreams. What is it for? Surely it serves a purpose greater than paying your taxes. For we all know that wherever dark, oppressive forces rule - the flower of nobility and art sprout through.
And for the employee, that flower takes the form of the Friday Afternoon Beer. The closest most of us will ever come to pure enlightenment.
So to ease the quotidian burdens that lay ahead, here’s a handy tool for tracking your time ’till enlightenment: Beer o’clock - The Firefox extension. A little app that sits patiently, alerting you periodically, reminding you of your purpose in life. Keeping you focused. A great productivity tool.
Finally got around to “finishing” this FireFox extension. I called it “FileFisher” and only just realised what a crappy name it is. Hopefully that’ll get an upgrade in the next version… Anyhoo, FileFisher is a tool to download photos that your friends have been too lazy to meaningfully rename before they stuck them on the web. You use it anytime you realise that the file names you want have an obvious sequence - like image01.jpg, image02.jpg, image03.jpg… image50.jpg etc etc..
Click on the first image and load it into a browser tab. Now start FileFisher from the tools menu. You will see the current URL in the top bar of FileFisher, and many wierd options below it… What we are going to do is swap the “sequence number” part of the URL for our token…. so if the URL in FileFisher is “http://www.allThesesImages.com/media/image01.jpg” manually change the “image01.jpg” to read “imageAA.jpg”.
Then set the numbers you want to try and grab… so, say you want to grab image1.jpg through to image99.jpg, put “1″ in the start field, and “99″ in the end field. Choose your download directory and “go fish”. The AA bit will be substituted with each number in turn, and the files downloaded.
It works with any file type - but for zip, wav and other filetypes that download rather than displaying in the browser, you’ll need to paste the URL directly into FileFisher. Filefisher has a couple of other tricks up it’s sleeve too, but you can read all about them in the Help.
Theres heaps planned for the next version, but I have a very short attention span and it’s amazing it got as polished as it is now. As it stands, the program is filled with bugs and strange behaviour so let me know what interesting and wonderful problems you find.
So get crackin’ and install FileFisher v0.4 (for Firefox 2.0.* and below)
It’s hard work being a Slashdot moderator . The importance of such a task can not be overstated. The fate of the the quality of critical information rests solely in your hands.
But how can you know, as you go to mod that post “-1 overrated” that the poster really is half-wit and not a sublime genius whos intricate balance of insightfulness and poetry has sailed clean over your head? You need my Slashdotter v0.01 extension for Mozilla Firefox!
Simply right click on the posters name and click “Slashdotter”. A helpful popup screen will magically appear and display a summary of the user’s recent comments - as well as a handy “average post score” which will greatly assist your moderation decisions: “Average score 1.222222? -1 troll for you… Average score 3.9? Must be +1 insightful…” Its that simple.
Works on the thread starter’s and all replier’s user name - anywhere it says “<post title> by <user name>” basically. Employing all the latest hi-tech html parsing techniques, Slashdotter is almost sure never to fail. In fact in my 25 minutes of testing, I have only been able to break it a few times. Havent tried it on my linux box yet either. But anyway….
