Friday, November 30th, 2007 03:51 pm GMT +8

Ajaxian talks about an interesting way to use Google Gears for sites that don’t necessarily integrate with Google’s toolkit for offline applications: inject code using Greasemonkey. An article shows how you can save a number of Wikipedia articles for offline use, without depending on your browser’s cache.

Sites with a lot of static information — Wikipedia, any API documentation, web-based email — would be great to be able to use when no internet connection is available. But what if you’re a user that always has an internet connection? Then adding Gears to a site doesn’t do much, right? Wrong. Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there’s altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don’t wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters’ precious bandwidth/server power!

Here’s the Greasemonkey script for Wikipedia (requires Firefox + Gresemonkey + Gears). For each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on “cache page” and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

The eePc will be going on sale in Australia this weekend (december 1 and 2). The 7in Linux-powered ultra-portable goes on sale at Myer Sydney this Saturday, with other Myer stores introducing the $499 subnote on Sunday.

Links:
eeeuser.com
Implementing OSX on the Eee PC

I use snagit for documenting screens, toolbars, menus etc on Windows. It’s basically a screen grab utility, that also provides some basic post capture editing (such as boxes, text, arrows etc to highlight partcular areas). There’s several output options as well. One of the things I’ve just discovered (it has only been made available in the most recent releasde) is Snagit accessories, which also include a Snagit Firefox extension.

About the only bad thing I can think of is that the latest version of snagit costs $US40. However, Snagit does offer a 30 day free trial version.

A cheaper alternative is that Techsmith are giving away free licenses for SnagIt. The only catch is that (just as with their Camtasia Studio offer) the version they’re offering is SnagIt 7.2.5, which is quite old. If you want all the latest features, you’ll have to upgrade to SnagIt 8.2, which will set you back $20. But SnagIt 7.2.5 (the free version) is still quite a few steps up from the Windows print screen button.

Amazon’s S3 is a file storage and serving service. In this article, Eric Heuveneers demonstrates how to use Amazon S3 via its simple REST API and Java to store and serve your own documents, potentially offloading bandwidth from your own application.

There’s a few Article and Tutorials on the Amazon S3 site for people who use other languages..

Few use raw JavaScript anymore if they can possibly avoid it, in the same way that few people code in assembly language. Dojo is one of a group of powerful JavaScript toolkits that can do a lot of the work for you, and Matthew Russell has put together this introduction.

Dojo is an incredibly powerful toolkit that provides a wealth of web development utilities that you don’t want to miss out on. In addition to coming packed with rich, turn-key Web 2.0 widgets for you to snap into your applications, it also includes the standard JavaScript library you’ve always wanted, facilities for compressing your code when it comes time for production, AJAX utilities, a suite of object oriented programming (OOP) constructs that reduces the boilerplate you’d otherwise have to write and maintain your own custom widgets, and more.

What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

…we�ll also throw in a security measurement that will prevent you from clicking on links in emails, unless you discovered the switch to mark a mail as safe. Another security measurement we�ll add is that you won�t be able to log-in with just username anymore but are required to enter the full username@gmail.com. Furthermore, we will change the browser URL from http://gmail.microsoft.com to the more professional looking http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home.

A new freighter set to launch in December will be receiving a hefty dose of power from a kite the size of a football field. The 460-foot ship, owned by the Beluga shipping company, hopes to see as much as a 50% drop in fuel consumption during optimal conditions.

The SkySails system consists of a towing kite with rope, a launch and recovery system and a control system for the whole operation. The control system acts like the autopitot systems on an aircraft, the company says. Autopilot software sends and receives data about the sail etc to make sure the sail is set at its optimal position. The company also says it provides an optional weather routing system so that ships can sail into optimal wind conditions.The kites typically fly at about 1,000 feet above sea level, thereby tapping winds that can be almost 50% stronger than at the surface.

Note that a master password has to be entered for all the following methods (but only if one has been set).

1. Greasemonkey Scripts:
If you are using the excellent Greasemonkey extension you can choose from a wide variety of scripts that reveal the passwords:
Show Password on Click – displays the password if you click the password form.
Show Password onMouseOver – reveals the password if you hover the mouse over the password field.
Unpassword – changes the type of the password form to text which always displays the passwords as text.

Javascript Code
Paste the following line of code into the address bar and hit enter to reveal the password on this website. If you’re feeling brave, you could turn this into a bookmark….

javascript:(function(){var s,F,j,f,i; s = ""; F = document.forms; for(j=0; j<F.length; ++j) { f = F[j]; for (i=0; i<f.length; ++i) { if (f[i].type.toLowerCase() == "password") s += f[i].value + "\n"; } } if (s) alert("Passwords in forms on this page:\n\n" + s); else alert("There are no passwords in forms on this page.");})();

3. Firefox extension
Unhide Passwords – this extension does basically the same as the Unpassword Greasemonkey script.

master password
Are you are one of the users who is letting Firefox save passwords for you so that you do not need to enter the password and username again when visiting the site at a later time ?

You need to realise that if you have not set the master password, then anyone with access to your computer is able to go into Tools > Options and click on Show Passwords under the Security tab to list all sites and usernames that Firefox has stored in its database.

Open Firefox and paste the following line into the address bar:

chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul< A message will appear saying that if you reset your master password all login details including usernames, passwords and websites will be lost. If you click on Reset the master password is reset which means that you can enter a new one. If you Cancel, then nothing is done.