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Posted on

Useful Tools Recap

I just got a new Powerbook and had to re-remember all the bits I need/like:

  • uControl — Capslock -> Ctrl key remapper
    I also use it to remap the ‘enter’ key next to the arrow keys to be a ‘fn’ key, so I can do ‘fn+arrows’ to give me easy pgup,pgdown,home,end.
  • Codetek VirtualDesktop Pro — pager / virtual screen
    Like any good Unix, this functionality should be part of OS X, but oh well. It also supports a hack to sorta give one Sloppy Focus.
  • WindowShade X — Windowshade functionality (window minimizer)
    This was part of MacOS, but left with OS X. Here it is as a third-party app. Sigh.
  • Carbon Copy Cloner — disk backup and cloner
    My backup solution is to clone my Powerbook’s disk to an external disk that I boot from in case of catastrophic disk failure.
  • MenuMeters — menubar stats
    Gives you little graphs of CPU, net, disk, etc.
  • PDF Browser Plugin — view PDFs and .ps files in the browser
  • Adium — multi-protocol IM client
    Adium is based off of libGaim, and supports tabs.
  • Mozilla Firefox — Kick-ass fast browser
    Sort of obvious, yeah, but Firefox still beats out Safari in terms of dealing with all the crazy pages out there
    (especially forms-based broken-ness)
  • Fink — Unix program package manager
    Fink can give you all the crap you can get on RedHat, if you want it.
    Things I use:

    • gnuplot
    • ncftp(get)
    • nmap
    • mtr
    • unrar
    • wget

    All my other Unix needs, even X11, are (surprisingly) supplied by OS X itself.

  • Media players
    Sometimes you just gotta view the occasional .rpm or .avi:
    – RealOne Player
    – Windows Media Player
  • Network Beacon — Rendevous service publisher

Almost recommended:

  • XBattery
    — battery monitoring utility
Posted on

Hilighting referring search engine text in web pages

On some random blog I arrived on via a search engine,
I noticed that the page had hilighted all the words
that were part of my query. This is awesome.

I wonder if this functionality could be added as a post-processing
step for all web pages before they are sent to the user.
(an Apache module?) The logic could be quite simple: 

  if( http_referer_exists &&
      http_referer_is_search_engine ) {
    query = get_query_from_referer()
    foreach word in query {
     response =~ s/word/<div name=hilite>word</div>/g;
    }
  }
Posted on

Hashes vs. PowerSets

Reminder to self:
Think more about fun comparisons of hashes
(allows decomposing of problems by N) and power sets (causes problems
to increase in complexity by 2^N)

The former is the standard technique I’ve used to make hard problems easy
or fast: divide-and-conquer. The latter is a a natural result that for any body of N nodes, full connectivity goes as 2^N: applicable in social networks, etc.

Sounds lke hashing fails to decompose power-set problems.
Can we use power-sets to decompose?