Month: December 2010

Duct tape programmers – A slightly older, but good read.

salilp Uncategorized

Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

More @ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html.

Customizing iGoogle…

salilp customizations, firefox

I’ve started using iGoogle as a sort of “dashboard” for stuff that I need to check on every once in a while. Love iGoogle for that.

The problem? 
I don’t like the standard Google search box that appears at the top of every iGoogle tab. With the logo, the text box and the buttons, it takes up too much screen real estate for a dashboard. If I need to search, I have the Google classic search page set as my homepage. No need to mix the search with the iGoogle gadgets…

The solution?
Two nifty little FireFox extensions, AdBlock+ and Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock+.

Rolling your own search plugin for FireFox

salilp firefox, www

Just created my first search plugin for FireFox, for the Motley Fool CAPS site..

Here’s how:

Make sure you know the search URL. For e.g. searching for “test” on google.com gives you the following URL: “http://www.google.com/search?q=test”.

    • Start with the MyCroft Search Plugin Submission Utility
    • Enter the information in the form. Substitute the search query in the search URL with “{searchTerms}”. This would mean the google search query would be “http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}”.
    • Hit the “Generate Plugin” button. This generates some XML in the text area below the button.
    • Save the generated XML to the FireFox searchplugins directory (typically “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins” on Windows) as a .xml file.
    • Restart FireFox. 

    You should see the search box next to the (awesome?) address bar have a new dropdown option for the search you just added. Note also that you’re missing a neat little icon that other search engines in the dropdown have.

    To add this icon, go back to your XML file.

    • Notice the tag in the file? This needs to be updated.
    • Save the icon you wish to add to the search engine to your desktop. This is typically the favicon file for the website you are building the search engine for ( for google).
    • Now you need to base64 encode this icon file and copy the generated text to the element. I used the one @ http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/data/data.
    • The encoded string will be a long string of the form “data:image/x-icon,%01%01%10%10%…”.
    • Replace the text in the tag with this encoded string. For e.g. data:image/x-icon,%01%01%10%10%…
    • Restart FireFox.

    There should see the icon added to your search plugin.

    See, it’s not that hard, if you know the steps :-).