Category: Uncategorized

Google Reader auto sort


[[http://reader.google.com|Google Reader]] offers several options for [[http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?answer=69980&topic=12012|sorting feed items]]. After having played around with the “auto-sort” for several months now, I am reverting back to “Sort by newest”.

{{ http://www.google.com/googlereader/images/logo_reader.gif|Google Reader}}

The problem is that the auto-sort mode is a little too simplistic. Here’s what it does in their own words:


//This works by prioritizing subscriptions with fewer items. So, with this setting, your friend’s blog with one item a month will not be drowned out by higher volume sites such as the New York Times because we’ll raise the blog to the top.//

The general idea behind auto-sort is good, but unfortunately the execution hasn’t evolved at all to become smarter. For instance, some blogs I read haven’t been updated in a while. And I’m really not interested in the stuff they wrote some months back. So I never read those few old posts and yet they continue to hang around at the top of my feeds, which gets annoying quickly.

Ideally, the auto-sort should also take into account my reading trends (they obviously collect all this data, so might as well use it). In my case, what I really want the auto-sort to do is this: if there are some old posts and I’m consistently choosing not to read them, then perhaps they don’t need to be raised to the top any more. If I need to find them, I can always do so. In fact, I wouldn’t even mind if the old posts were raised to the top of the list once in a while.

An even smarter auto-sort will also take into account my reading habits. If there’s an infrequently updated blog that I read religiously, then I definitely don’t want to miss even an old post, no matter what. Similarly, old posts from an inactive blog that I have stopped following should be given less weight.

How do you sort your feeds?

Firefox regression?


While going through my feeds today, I happened to land up on the [[http://acidtests.org|ACID tests]] web page, and so I thought “hmm, let me see how Firefox does”. My expectation was that since Firefox is touted to be such a standards compliant browser, it’d pass tests 1 and 2 with flying colors. I already know that it doesn’t pass Acid3 yet, so I wasn’t expecting much anyways.

And so I was quite shocked to see it miserably fail both [[http://acid1.acidtests.org|Acid1]] and [[http://acid2.acidtests.org|Acid2]]. I’m not sure if this is because some extension that I have (unlikely). I’m running Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10). Take a look at the results of the test:

A more extensible KDE


First off, I love KDE and I am a long time KDE user. I use GNOME/GTK applications where they good KDE/QT based alternatives don’t exist, but I prefer K-land in general. Don’t get me wrong, KDE is one of most extensible free desktops out there. However, I do think it is missing extensibility in a few key areas, namely the web browser (Konqueror) and groupware (the KDE PIM suite).

The explosive adoption and popularity of Firefox is a testament to the power of having an extensible platform. The ingenuity was in opening up the API and then getting out the way of developers. Even a cursory look at the [[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/|extensions directory]] shows that big and small developers basically just ran with the extension mechanism, using it to enhance the user experience of Firefox in often unexpected ways. And thats the real beauty of the system — it is now self-sustained, with a vibrant, thriving and supporting community. Another huge facilitator was a centralized extension directory and a built-in auto update mechanism.

{{ http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/buttons/header.png|Mozilla Firefox}}

A similar phenomenon has propelled the growth of Thunderbird. While the [[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/|Thunderbird extension directory]] is not nearly as comprehensive as the Firefox one, there is nevertheless a lot of interest and enthusiasm in extending Thunderbird. It also allows users to take advantage of newly enabled functionality without waiting for a proper release to come out. For instance, there is a [[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631|provider for Googel Calendar]] which allows read/write access to your Google Calendar from within the Thunderbird UI (using Sunbird or Lightning). Or check out [[http://simile.mit.edu/seek/|Seek]], which builds a completely new search interface (Faceted Browsing) in Thunderbird.

On the other hand, despite having an [[http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=418950|excellent]] [[http://vntutor.blogspot.com/2008/02/10-hidden-features-of-konqueror.html|feature]] [[http://www.konqueror.org/features/|set]] and a proven rendering engine (KHTML, from which WebKit was derived, which in turn powers Safari, among others) [[http://konqueror.kde.org|Konqueror]] never quite hit mainstream. Even today its user base is limited to power browsers or loyal KDE fans. I have myself [[http://floatingsun.net/2005/10/10/konqueror|tried to switch to Konqueror full time]] but always gave up, usually because of lack of functionality compared to Firefox (often enabled due to various plugins I had installed) and bad support for advanced Javascript and most noticeably, Flash.

Konqueror implemented support for Netscape/Firefox plugins as a stop gap measure, but AFAIK that mechanism was primarily meant for Flash, and even then it is quite flaky (it //still// doesn’t work for me). There never was the ability to use any of the regular XPI/XUL based Firefox addons.

{{ http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart/klogo-official-oxygen-128×128.png|KDE}}

Similarly crippled is the entire groupware suite in KDE, [[http://kontact.kde.org|Kontact]] and all its component applications, most notably [[http://kontact.kde.org/kmail/|KMail]] and [[http://kontact.kde.org/korganizer/|KOrganizer]]. Here are just few of the ways in which I would **love** to extend KMail and KOrganizer, but have no way of doing so, short of downloading the code, making the changes and compiling from source, which makes it all but impossible for the vast majority of users out there:

* allow KAddressBook to synchronize with my Google Contacts
* allow KOrganizer to synchronize with and edit my Google Calendar
* support for arbitrary tags/labels in KMail
* build an attachment browser for KMail
* build email analysis and visualization into KMail

It might be that some of these are better implemented as core features and not as plugins, but thats not the point. What frustrates me is that there is //no// way for me to easily and quickly extend the functionality of my applications, despite the fact that KDE has always had a really clean and modular architecture, so building a plugin mechanism really shouldn’t have been that hard. Case in point: Amarok.

Anywho, with KDE4 and the consequent KDEPIM port/rewrite, we have a chance to fix things. Please, //please// make sure that an extensible plugin based architecture is a first class feature this time. And with the [[http://kross.dipe.org/|Kross]] framework, I should be able to write extensions in several popular languages (btw, I’m not a big fan of XUL/XPI, and the documentation on them is not that great either). It would be so much easier and nicer to be able to write addons in Python or Ruby.

So here’s to a more extensible KDE.

Filelight alternatives for Windows


I was recently running Windows on my dual-boot laptop and realized that I was all but out of disk space. Now, granted that this is not a particularly monstrous partition, but I was still surprised that the 30 gigs was so close to exhaustion despite that the fact that I don’t have a lot of media (music, videos) or that many heavy applications (perhaps the biggest is Office).

[[http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/images/filelight-1.0.png|{{ http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/images/filelight-1.0.png?200x200}}]]

Faced with similar situation in Linux, I would immediately fire up [[http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/|Filelight]], an excellent utility that “creates an interactive map of concentric, segmented rings that help visualise disk usage on your computer.” So I went looking around for similar alternatives for Windows.

In the Windows world, it seems that [[wp>Treemap]]s are more popular than radial representation. I did find [[http://treepieblog.blogspot.com/|treepie]] but it wasn’t all that exciting. I then chanced upon [[http://windirstat.info/|WinDirStat]] and [[http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview//|SequoiaView]].

[[http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/sequoiaview_-_c-03272008-063441pm.jpg|{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/sequoiaview_-_c-03272008-063441pm.thumbnail.jpg}}]]

[[http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/c_-_windirstat-03272008-063434pm.jpg|{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/c_-_windirstat-03272008-063434pm.thumbnail.jpg}}]]

Both the tools are extremely similar in functionality (and even visuals). SequoiaView seems to be an effort out of the University of Technology at Eindhoven (Netherlands). WinDirStat is almost a direct port (in features and user interface) of [[http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/|KDirStat]]. In my limited testing, I found SequoiaView to be faster than WinDirStat, but WinDirStat had a better experience overall.

Thanks to these tools, I was quickly able to locate and eliminate the bloat.