Enrico Foschi’s official blog

Few minutes ago I just deployed a new JQuery plugin: TwitterSuggestion: twitter style suggestion and validation boxes (> link)

Basically it reproduces the suggestion and validation effects anybody can see on www.twitter.com/signup

Here is a screenshot:

And here is a demo.

Let me know what you think

Agglom was used to display an invitation to download the Firefox Add-on Agglomerator in the main pages to all the users.

Unfortunately, the invitation was displayed by users that already installed the Add-on too. The challenge was to check with JS if the user already had the add-on installed and, if he had it, to hide the invitation.

Surfing the web I stumbled upon this page:
http://ha.ckers.org/weird/firefox-extentions.html

Thanks to ha.ckers.org, the feature has been pretty easy to develop. What we did was to include the invitation inside a DIV with a specified id (firefoxExtension). Right after the closing tag of the DIV we appended this image:

<img src=”chrome://agglomerator/skin/icon24.png”
class=”displayNone”
onload=”if(document.getElementById(‘firefoxExtension’))
document.getElementById(‘firefoxExtension’).style.display=’none’;” />

The IMG tag loads an image that is included in Agglomerator (the icon displayed in the toolbar to save and share the current browser session). If the extension has been installed correctly, the icon will be loaded and the onload event will be fired. This is then hiding the DIV with id=firefoxExtension. If the extension is not installed, the onload event won’t be fired.

This is a quick and dirty method and should work with all almost any add-on.

Hope it helps.

…and you can even access them wherever you are and share them with anybody.

Is just a few clicks operation with Agglomerator, the Firefox add-on from Agglom.com.

This is a web search that I just organized in less than 1 minute:

http://www.agglom.com/agglom/323/Best_cars_drawn_in_MS_Paint

This extension will add one button on the toolbar that, when clicked, will open a new window in Agglom.com with a list of all the URLs of the current opened tabs. You will be able to choose which ones you would like save and how to share them (you may share them with everybody, with your friends, keep them private or protect them with a password).

Once you save them, you’ll be able to view all the saved web contents (links, videos, images, wikipedia pages, etc…) in just one page and to share it with a Permalink.

Here is a useful video tutorial to get started with it:

Here is the link of the Firefox Extension:

• From Agglom: http://www.agglom.com/extension.aspx
• From Firefox Add-on (requires registration):
  https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/7935

I’m used to buy about 3 / 4 IT books a month, each one usually has more than 600 pages. As well as I like travelling and I would occupy all the space of a room just for my books, I need them in electronic format (an SD card could help me save some space here in Ireland, with so high house prices).

As well as I care about my eyes, I couldn’t read all the ebook on my laptop LCD monitor. I need some e-Ink enabled devices (electronic paper, not translucent). And I would like to read them while I’m in bed, in the bathroom or everywhere else.

After studying a lot the available devices, I decided to buy the Sony PRS-505 and I’ve to say that I’m so proud of it!

The screen refresh in about 1 secs, but it’s not a problem (and it’s like that on all e-Ink devices). I have no hurry usually when reading and I could waste 1 second while switching pages .

Well, it is easy go get used to these devices. 7 inches display is enough if you want to read books without images and other kind of non-textual content, but probably it is not enough if you have to read magazine or IT books.

But no worries! Some really nice guys have developed very useful tools for converting content from almost everything (even web pages or rss feed) to the sony .lrf format. Some of these useful softwares services are:

• libprs500
• pdf2lrf
• web2book
• www.feedbooks.com (oh, absolutely love this!!!)

I’m reading at the moment a Microsoft certification exams book on my PRS, standard A4 pdf format converted to lrf (I got double of the pages, but at a larger and viewable size). And it look awesome!

The bookmark feature is very useful and I like so much the way I can store almost everything using an SD card and a MMC card too.

It’s very thin (0.8 mm) and very lightweight. I absolutely love it. It worth all the 299 euros I paid on eBay.

Probably I would buy another one for my girlfriend too.

This is what the future is expected to be:

I’m just getting deeply in the understanding of C# 2008 features, such as LINQ, var, extensions, etc…

I definitively have to say that I LOVE THEM, as well as I love the MS teams that is continuing to improve a language facilitating the way of writing robust and strength well designed code!

Unluckely, I’ve to come back installing the SQL Server 2005 + Service Pack. In 2 days playing with the installation, I found that the easiest way to get the FTS on my laptop (Windows Server 2008, 32-bit), is to copy the msfte* file from the Binn directory of another sql server 2005 or 2008 installation (currently I don’t have any available).

Sad…. but waiting for the next CTP…I’ll never give up!

While playing with the installation process of SQL Server 2008, I discovered that it won’t install on my laptop on previous instances, even if those ones where uninstalled correctly.

Anyway, I wouldn’t play. I just am trying to figure out how to correctly install the FTS (Full Text Search) on the CTP-6 version, that isn’t installing by default and is needed by TFS 2008.

Well, this is a funny thing that happened today.

While writing Actionscript 3 code, I wrote this line:

return (SpokeRotation + FinalRotation) / 2 * Math.PI / 180;

Well, after pressing the inliner (I really don’t know exactly the name of the feature, but is that button very useful that just inline the code), the line was changed in this:

return SpokeRotation + FinalRotation / 2 * Math.PI / 180;

Whoa!! Isn’t it funny? No parentheses, no party!

Yesterday I decided to install Windows Server 2008 (RC1, downloadable here) on my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop. I was really surprised, it took about 20 minutes to install. And after having installed all the drivers (other 20 mins), the system was perfectly working.

Then, I installed at once:
- Visual Studio 2008
- Team Foundation Server 2008
- PGP Desktop
- Daemon Tools

…and I was surprised with a BSOD, that took all my previous night. Unluckely, even reading the dump files or rechecking the memory, I wasn’t able to figure out which was the problem (or the problemS), but I suppose some kind of old driver not compatible.

As well as I would like to experience this OS, this morning I installed it again. After 40 mins my system was up and running (with wireless network, geForce card and sound card perfectly working).

I won’t install anymore PGP or Daemon Tools, as well as I think they may be the cause of the previous crashes .

Anyway, I encountered a curious problem while trying to update the system. Even if the network was working, the update manager couldn’t connect to the net to get the list of updates.

…after 5 mins, I discovered that the cause was Windows Firewall service that, after being disabled from the service manager console, made my updates working.

(TBH, I think that Windows Firewall should automatically bypass the system updates).