GMail gets IMAP
GMail has finally added IMAP support. It’s apparently not available on all accounts, but both of my accounts (gmail and for domains) have it.
I don’t know for sure if I’ll use it since I’m so accustomed to the GMail interface, but it might be nice for offline reading. Now if they’d just come up with a way to write to the calendar from apps like Evolution I’ll be happy.
Import Thunderbird Contacts Into GMail
It’s easy to use the “cut” command to convert your Thunderbird contacts into a format that GMail is happy to import.
Start out in Thunderbird, click Tools, Address Book. Once the Address Book pops up click Tools, Export. A save dialog should popup asking you to for a filename and folder. Look down by the save button, change the format dropdown from LDIF to CSV, name the file myExport.csv and click Save. The default of the home dir should be fine.
All of your T-Bird contacts are now in the CSV file, but GMail won’t appreciate the extra columns and lack of headers. We can fix that easily from the command line. Open a shell and change to the directory where you saved your CSV. Run the following command:
echo First Name,Last Name,Email Address > toImport.csv ; cat myExport.csv |cut -d”,” -f1,2,5 >>toImport.csv
Now head over to your gmail account and import the csv. The Import link is on the “Contacts” page near the top right.
GMail should report success once it’s done processing the file and tell you how many contacts it imported.
Tuesday 10am - Browser Wars
It was very interesting to hear all four browsers battle it out in this type of forum.
Here’s the basic rundown. AOL didn’t say much, Microsoft wouldn’t say much, Mozilla said a lot but wouldn’t say a few things and Opera talked them all under the table.
They all pretty much agreed that the web is better now than during the last major battle in the war on standards. Microsoft admitted it had a way to go on catching up with the standards and FF talked about some recent progress in that department. The entire panel either agreed or didn’t quibble that Opera was the most compliant. They also unanimously agreed that it didn’t rightly matter since the majority of the web has been written with broken browsers in mind. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but twice as many of the top 100 sites are using strict mode now versus a year ago.
Moderator: Arun Ranganathan , AOL
Arun Ranganathan AOL
Brendan Eich CTO, Mozilla
Charles McCathieNevile CSO, Opera Software
Chris Wilson IE Platform Architect, Microsoft
Google Reader Subscribe Book Marklet (Favelet)
To use, drag the URL to your bookmark toolbar. When you find a blog you’d like to subscribe to, hit the bookmark and it’ll take you to Google Reader and offer to subscribe to the feed (if Google can find one).
Google Reader’s new search can find the rss feed when you search for a blog’s URL. This book marklet takes you to the search results for the current page. Makes subscribing to blogs in google reader way too easy. It seems to work equally well from pages withing a blog as from the front page.
IEs 4 Linux - Internet Explorers for Linux » English Page
IEs 4 Linux - Internet Explorers for Linux » English Page
This script ran perfectly on my Ubuntu Breezy laptop.
I’m not advocating using IE on linux for general purpose browsing, but it’s useful for testing a page design in IE without hunting down a windows box.
IEs for Linux is a simple Bash Script program that installs Internet Explorer 6, 5.5 and 5 on Linux using Wine. The whole process is automatic and very easy.
Manual Firefox 1.5b1 install on Fedora Core 4
This should work on other similar systems.
su or login as root first.
# wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5b1/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-1.5b1.tar.gz # cd /usr/lib # tar xzvf ~/firefox-1.5b1.tar.gz # mv firefox firefox-1.5b1 # which firefox /usr/bin/firefox # cd /usr/bin/ # mv firefox old.firefox # ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5b1/firefox .
That should do it, and shouldn’t affect any of your launchers or file associations.
[update] It appears that you may need the compat libs for this to work. If you use a package manager, search for ‘compat’ and you should find something like compat-libstdc++ or libstdc++-compat. If you install them FF should be happy.
lr2Clique - Combination click and hit stats
lr2Clique - Combination click and hit stats
Just a quick post to let you know that progress is being made on my community plugin for the Weblog Tools Collection plugin contest.
I’ve had the data collection plugin running here for about a week now. Please comment, or email me if you have seen any strange javascript errors.
I’m working on, and have a fair start for a combination link and hit tracker with a community twist.
using a bash ‘for loop’ to wget
One of the ways that I frequently fetch files from the internet is with wget. It is a very useful command line utility that is capable of fetching anything from one file to mirroring whole sites.
When looking for new and interesting music I often find myself on a page with a few or more mp3 urls. Using firefox to download them all, even with a good download manager is tedious. The following bash script will read from stdin and download each url it sees.
# while read url ; do wget "${url}" ; done
Bookmarklets
I’ve started working on a series of bookmarklets.
I’ll write more here later, but for now, here’s the link:
http://anton.lr2.com/marklets/.
