Our website at work is now officially huge. We’ve got OVER 9000 pages!!!11eleven!

(Yeah, I got the feeling that I had to post this crap. And yeah, I know, I’m such a poor internet meme victim and need to get a life…)

I figured, that I’ve got more ideas and wishes that I’ve got time and skills to make them real. So, I’ll be posting something like a wishlist every now and then. Let’s start with a simple request.

These are the icons that represent the function of a program to save the current state of a document - or whatever you are working on - to a file, the save icons.

The icon itself was derivated from a floppy disk. The floppy was a major storage medium back in the 70s and 80s and there were several variants of it. The one the save icon was modeled on - the 3.5″ floppy disk - was introduced in 1981 and looked like this:

Old 3.5" floppy disk.

However, technology advances fast, especially when it comes to computers, and so new kinds of storage media were developed. The hard disks got bigger and affordable, the CD became a major medium for computers, followed by the DVD, Blue-ray and USB sticks. So the floppy became obsolete and in the late 90s more and more manufacturers began to ship their computers without a floppy disk drive. So it’s not unlikely, that you’ve never seen a floppy disk like the one in the image above.

When Pluto was still a planet, the floppy disk was state of the art (and the term disk-jockey did not only refer to someone who arranges music). To use a floppy disk as a save icon was a very logical step, since it was really representing the function. But let’s compare storage media a bit. A standard floppy carried 1,440 KB (around 1.42 MiB), which was a lot back in the days when Twix was still called Raider and usually more than enough to save a bunch of documents. But as I said, technology advances fast and so a standard 700 MB CD (actually 737.28 MB or 703.1 MiB) already carries as much as 512 floppy disks. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A standard 4.7 GB DVD (or 4.38 GiB) is equal to about 3,264 floppies, a single layer Blue-ray disk (25 GB) can store about 17,378 floppies, a dual layer Blue-ray disk twice as much and a common 1 TB hard disk can even save almost 695,000 times as much as a standard 3.5″ floppy disk. So let me reassure you, the floppy disk is more than outdated. You could even have a hard time purchasing a floppy disk drive or the floppies themselves.

But we still click on an icon that represents an archaic medium to save our work. We do not save it onto a floppy disk anymore, we didn’t do that anymore for over a decade. We save to hard disks, USB storage, Flash cards, optical drives, network storage and even the great interwebs. And people who are new with computers have no idea what a floppy disk is. They cannot intuitively connect the symbol to the function it represents. But we still stick to that old icon.

So here’s my wish and a task for every UI designer out there:

Create a new standard save icon!

One that does not represent any kind of storage media, since we all know that those will outdate someday. Don’t use the arrow to folder icon, since that is already out there and not good enough (otherwise the floppy would’ve been replaced years ago and it also represents an even older way to store and save files). And also refrain from using  a cross, even though Jesus saves (and does incremental backups). The icon should be coherent in any language and culture. Create something new, something great, something that any software developer will immediately want to use. Your win? Fame and glory!

And if you’re really good, you’ll create matching icons for “Save”, “Save as/Save new”, “Save all”, “Save draft” and “Open”. (And to be really, really, really good, also add matching “New” and “Close”.)

Thanks in advance!

Yesterday I’ve been watching No Retreat, No Surrender (aka. Karate Tiger in Germany/Europe) while working on some maps. Basking there in nostalgia, I noticed a song that I haven’t heard in years. I haven’t heard it since the last time I watched this movie, to be precise.

Ten minutes and a bit of searching later I knew more. The song I wanted is “Hold On to the Vision (in your eyes)” composed by Frank Harris and sung by Kevin Chalfant and never made it to the stores. Even the master records seem(ed) to be lost. But years of asking, begging and sacrificing virgins have finally been yielding some fruits last year. Harris released a CD with all songs of the movie and some remixes: No Retreat No Surrender Original Soundtrack Album

I also found out that by now a German band recorded a very good cover song of Hold on to your vision, which can be ordered on their website.

So, anyone who is searching a little present for me because… uhm… I’m such a swell guy, has my permission to endow me with those CDs. Please, go ahead.

And if you want to listen to a full length, low quality sample of the song, check your friendly YouTube neighbor.

Notepad entry (will be updated every once in a while).

Some Add-Ons for Firefox that I use:

• Abduction - Helpful tool to create screen- or webshots.
• BetterPrivacy - Since the methods of datamining get better, one needs better defense.
• ColorZilla - A colorpicker, ’nuff said.
• DNS Prefetch - While Firefox 3.5 will do DNS prefetching to speed up the browsing, you need this little extension with earlier/current versions.
• DownThemAll! - Firefox has no decent download manager? With this, it has.
• Firebug - Very, veeeery helpful when debugging websites.
• Flashblock - Flash is a great way to create interesting content for websites and also a great way to kill memory. Not to speak of annoying banners with SFX. Simply block them by default and activate them when you want them with a simple click.
• Greasemonkey - While I personally only use it on deviantArt, it can be helpful on almost any site. For the popular ones (like most Google services) there are already a lot of tools available that make the browsing more enjoyable/simple.
• Lazarus: Form Recovery - How often did you fill out a long form, only to see the contents vanish to the nine hells, because you took to long, your browser crashed or another error occured. Lazarus remembers them for you, even textareas, which alone outraces the built-in function.
• Read It Later - Before this Add-On I usually had dozens of tabs open with pages I want to read some time, but not right away when I stumble upon them. Usually they stay open forever, since I never find the time and making a bookmark is to much work to do (especially to remove them later). With this Add-On you get  a nice tool that provides a simple way to store and remove them in a seperate bookmark folder and you also get a tool to keep track of them. You could even store them online to use with several computers.
• Redirect Remover - Some sites create links that lead to an internal app first and then to the site you want to go. Some do this for stats, others for datamining,  some to direct you to ads every once in a while or they just do it to please their evil overlord. This tool directs you to the real URL directly.
• Session Manager - Firefox remembers your last session. Session Manager can remember several sessions and lets you load them even partly.
• Torbutton - Well, this is on my to-do list. Doesn’t work out of the box, so I need to dig in more.
• Tree Style Tab - Another way to organize your tabs, especially useful for wide screens.
• Ubiquity - As already said, a great tool. The only two things that it lacks are the integration of external apps (like Thunderbird and Lightning/Sunbird) and that most standard functions lead to non-German services (which I don’t care about in language, but location… I usually order at some-store.de instead of some-store.com for example). But it’s quite easy to extend, if you know a bit programming.
• Web Developer - You can’t really do webdevelopment without this toolbar.

• The Nethnet - I place this a bit seperately. This is a MMOG, using the www as playground. While the idea sounds like loads of fun, I’m not really sure if it is a good idea. Since all is tracked on a central server, it kinda sounds like a big datamining operation. Just my two cents…

Just a few for the moment. I hope some will be replaced by equal or better built-in functions in the future.

Oh and before I get mails that state that Opera can do most of that with build-in features: I do not care!

So, to comply with a request, here’s a bit more about Bookmarklets (or Favelets, as they are called with an inferior browser). Bookmarklets allow you to execute small commands that interact with the current website (or a part of it). To be precise, they are just short (since bookmarks have a certain max size, depending on your browser) JavaScript commands, so they are quite easy to write. I could go into detail, but why should I when others already did that way better than I could. Go and have a look at these pages:

• bmlet.com - Great page for ready-to-use Bookmarklets
• Jessi’s Bookmarklets Site - More ready-to-use Bookmarklets
• Bookmarklets.com - Guess what…
• Any JavaScript website you know will help you develop your own.

Not all Bookmarklets will work for you, cause it depends on your JavaScript engine, browser and if the coin of fate fell so, that Tymora smiles upon you. But if you find some helpful little Bookmarklets, they will enhance your web-experience. Here are some that I use frequently:

• Search Wikipedia (EN) - Does what it sounds like. Either a marked part of the website or if nothing is marked, a popup will appear. Can easily be changed to query whatever language on Wikipedia you prefer.
• Search Leo Dictionary - Same as above. Hey, my English ain’t really that good, I really need it.
• Sort table - unfortunally not all webdesigners think it is a good idea to add a sort function to cluttered tables. Well, this helps.
• Highlight RegEx - Since there is no highlight search feature in Firefox and the fact about every search function in every application sucks (more about that in an upcoming post) and me being a RegEx freak, this is a wonderful function.
• Edit webpage - As mentioned in an earlier post. Not a regular Bookmarklet of mine, but helpful when creating documentations or just to have fun.

There are a lot more helpful functions (taking the first two from this list will give you a hint how to use it with any other web(site) search function), those are just a few examples. Go browse and find some that work well for your. Or maybe even create your own and post them to the pages mentioned above.

And while we are at it, there’s another way to enhance your webbrowser (as long as it is called Firefox or can use whose Add-Ons). Check out the following two Add-Ons. No further describtion from me, just check the links.

• Ubiquity - Great tool in development by Mozilla Labs. Even has a natural language parser.
• Greasemonkey - Mostly for layout stuff, but some very useful scripts (especially for communities like deviantArt).

That’s it for now. Go and enhance your browser!

About 20 years ago, the ship on which the father of James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) served, was attacked by some unknown but powerful Romulan mining ship from the future on a mission of revenge for their destroyed homeworld. Sacrificing his life, he led the ship into the battle and helped his fellow crew members escape, including his pregnant wife, who delivered their son a few moments before the father died. Now Kirk is a young man looking for trouble. His latest brawl with some Starfleet cadets draws the attention of Captain Pike onto him. He persuades Kirk to join Starfleet. In his third year at the academy, shortly after cheating in the Kobayashi Maru test, planet Vulcan is under attack. And since all of the fleet is far away, the cadets are sent out with new ships to help out. Being delayed on the way, the Enterprise with Kirk (and about all known TOS characters) on board arrives late at Vulcan, only to find all other ships destroyed by the same Romulan mining ship, that destroyed the ship of Kirk’s father. And not only that. Using a huge energy drill and red matter, and despite all efforts of the Enterprise, they manage to destroy Vulcan. Meanwhile, Half-Vulcan Half-Human Spock (Zachary Quinto / Leonard Nimoy) has to find his path between Starfleet, heritage, emotions and his lover Uhura. Now the Romulans are setting course for earth.

If this sound’s a bit strange to you, that’s okay. You’re in good company. “A chronicle of the early days of James T. Kirk and his fellow USS Enterprise crew members.” So they say. In fact, with this movie they throw over several facts that already exist due other movies and the series. Sometimes it makes you wonder if J.J. Abrams was just fast-forwarding through some Star Trek DVDs, picking up a few ideas, but since he didn’t understand them, turned them into something different. (And I’m not talking about the fact that new shows of the elder stuff look more enhanced. That’s strange, but okay, since today’s stuff looks even better than in TOS.) Of course, some things can be explained by the time travel stuff, but some other stuff just makes you think “someone” pulled the ideas out of a monkey’s rectum. Overall they try to explain that all this fits well into the established timeline, but let’s just stick to “no”. And with a chronicle of the early days of some characters, you would expect some character development. But actually they just throw the bunch together, give them one or two signature lines and that’s it. Quite shallow. Even Kirk is far from having an interesting development. The acting itself could be generally better. Another thing are the settings. While the bridge, the transporter room and the hallways are well made, most of the lower decks, where the infrastructure like the engine room resides, are just shots made in huge factories and storages. I.e. they all look like a big waste of space and far from being a realistic starship interior, especially in the clean Star Trek universe. This makes the settings inconsistent and unrealistic. The special effects are good, as expected, and the space combats look more interesting and dynamic than most others of the Star Trek franchise. There are some fun scenes as well, so overall I did somewhat enjoy the flick. I don’t mind changes to a certain degree, change is good and telling the same story again and again doesn’t make it better. But with this movie they try to tell a new story and fit it into an old story, which leads to some big logic bugs. So, from a semi-neutral point of view, the movie kinda sucks, even if you think of it  as a reboot, like some people call it. J.J. Abrams is know for being mysterious about his projects, hyping them and f*cking them up in the end. For me, he’s just proceeding as usual.

Links: Movie at IMDB, Movie Homepage

… sometimes you’d prefer to be the victim instead of the culprit …

Notepad entry (will be updated every once in a while).

Some Add-Ons for Thunderbird that I use.

• Enigmail - E-mail encryption. Not using it as much as I should, but then again I can’t really decide if I should use S/MIME or PGP or both to sign my stuff. Once I get over that I will use it frequently.
• Lightning - Very important, since it manages my calendars and tasks in eGroupware (work), Horde (private) and locally (whatever) at the same time.
• Shift-Delete Controller - I don’t know how often I accidentally used Shift-Del instead of Win+L when leaving my desk and deleted a mail. Better prevent that from happening than having to restore it (using Ctrl+Z makes me feel kinda stupid in that case).
• TB Reset Quote Header Extension - The standard reply headers of Thunderbird… well, could contain more information. One way to fix this is to mess with the configuration. The other one is this Add-On. And there’s another AddOn as well: Change quote and reply format - but for some reason I prefer the upper one. Downside: It’s hard to find, since there’s no developer page, not to speak of an up-to-date entry at Mozilla. At the moment this one works. Hope they implement a decent feature in TB3.

Werte Mitbenutzer der Deutschen Sprache. Das Ministerium für sprachlich korrekte Beleidigungen in der Anwendung (kurz MfskBidA) weißt auf folgende Abkürzungen hin:

Assi (hartes/scharfes S) = Assistent
Asi (weiches S) = Asozialer

(Mir ist bewusst, dass laut Duden beides “Assi” geschrieben wird, doch eine Unterscheidung wäre nett, zumal die Aussprache unterschiedlich ist.)

I’ll start using the blog as some kind of notepad for stuff I always end up searching elsewhere.

Starting with a simple method to edit webpages (but only for display in the browser). Copy and paste to the url bar: Link

(Works as a bookmark as well.)