Running Bookmarklets from the Firefox URL Bar

I have certain bookmarklets bookmarked with "keywords" in firefox so that when I am on a page, I can, for example, just navigate to the url "offline" which executes the pocket bookmark.  Mozilla has recently disabled this functionality and there is now an add-on that adds that functionality back.  This add-on allows users to run bookmarklets from the command line in Firefox again.

Why You Should Never Pay For Antivirus Software

Most of us are familiar with the software that comes bundled on a typical new PC.  Typical jewels include application markets, and demos of "brand X" clip art applications.  Of course, there's always the obligatory trial of a for-pay anti-virus software package.  Here's why even keeping that free trial is a bad idea.

Follow the Money
All of those demos and trials that are bundled with a new PC are advertisements.  Each of those application vendors pays the PC manufacturer to install the application so that the final customer will be exposed to (and hopefully purchase) that application.  Antivirus software vendors such as those who create McAfee and Norton pay the likes of HP and Dell to place their software on our machines.  When we pay for that software, a substantial portion of that payment goes toward kicking back Dell and HP for future installations.  This helps bring the price of new computers down, but it also causes the price of the software to be higher so that the antivirus vendor can still make a profit.

The Free Stuff Finds Viruses Just As Well - Sometimes Better
In the most recent av-comparatives study of Antivirus software, the most popular free and for-pay antivirus applications all scored in the hight 90% region.  Many free tools such as Avira and Panda out-scored popular for-pay tools such as Norton and McAfee.  Even Microsoft Security Essentials, which appears 14 out of 19 tools tested was able to catch 96.3% of viruses in the wild.  It should be noted that the viruses that each tool misses are typically extremely rare and extremely unlikely to infect a normal home computer.  Most security experts I follow agree that Microsoft Security Essentials is good enough for home users.

The Free Stuff Doesn't Just Stop Working If You Forget To Pay Up
I'm occasionally asked to help a friend or family member diagnose a problem with his/her computer.  They always tell me, "I have _____ antivirus, so I don't know what's wrong".  But, I often find that the antivirus installed is a for-pay tool that came installed on the computer and has since expired and stopped updating.  An out of date antivirus is as useless as no antivirus at all - sometimes worse due to the false sense of security it provides.  While it's true that free tools can go out of date also, it's far less likely.

The Free Stuff Gets Out Of Your Way
Each antivirus tool has to do something to differentiate from the others in order to make a case to users to use that tool.  The big for-pay tools typically use big advertising and marketing budgets to get new users, and lots of on-screen alerts to remind you to pay up.  The big free tools typically use simple interfaces and high-performance to win you over.  The big guys pitch useless features like email scanning where all free and for-pay scanners include a real-time scanner that is always running that slow down your computer and actually make scanning less effective even while showing that feature in a bulleted list of features that you don't need.

There it is.  Now, please, stop paying for antivirus software.

Lenovo S10-3t Reset Trick

After a normal reboot, my lenovo S10-3t suddenly was reporting that the battery was completely dead and that the wifi was "disabled" even though the switch for wifi was set to the "on" position.  After doing some searching, I discovered that removing the battery and power cable and holding down the power button for 40 seconds resets some bios configuration which brought battery status and wifi back to life.

Source

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I am a sucker for modern history about the world in which my chosen profession lives.  In this period in our time, we give a lot of credit to Apple, and more specifically Steve Jobs, for driving the last three decades of technological evolution.  There is a theory in Anthropology that modern history is very inaccurate due to the fact that we all have a predisposition to bias our own feelings too much.  Fifty years from now, we will be able to look back on this biography and decide how important it really is. 

What is likely to stand the test of time is the example Jobs set by placing Products before Sales when attempting to ensure corporate longevity.  By simplifying a product line, Apple was able to focus on its core competencies and shed itself of lateral growth and compartmentalization that has plagues other large companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Yahoo.

What is likely to NOT stand the test of time is the assertion that Apple really had such a large impact on the industry.  Being nimble enough to be a first-mover on capacitive touch screens doesn't mean you can claim credit for inventing a product that was already being developed by Microsoft and Palm.  Being a UI innovator doesn't mean you can claim credit for inventing a product to play music that already existed.  The same is true from the original Macintosh (the Mac wasn't the first PC) to the iPad (Microsoft had tablets for over a decade before Apple).  Sure, Apple has a habit of coming out with products that are among the best in their class, but I was very put off by the conclusions of the book that claim that Apple invented the classes it so frequently dominated over the second half of Job's reign.

Walter Isaacson tells a really good story and has an uncanny ability to research and communicate.  His frankness and honesty, even though he spent to much personal time with his subject, is amazing.  But, even while he discusses the "Reality Distortion Field" over and over again, he seems to get trapped in it from time to time, especially when describing details fewer than five years old where his own predisposition to bias that reality distortion field short of hard facts.

Book Review: God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

History books, especially those about the period of time before The Enlightenment, are always biased based on popular views and prejudices.  Among those controversial events was those of the Crusades - which traces its roots all the way forward to the current Israel/Palatine/Middle East fighting the persists today.  This book is an attempt to remove the religious bias that accompanies the study of post-Islamic middle east to provide a geopolitical study of why Europe kept sending people east.

The author attempted to make "a case for the crusades", which I think was a failure.  He didn't convince me that the crusades were a good idea, but the author did convince me that other people were convinced.  Moreover, he convinced me that his arguments were a much more likely set of arguments than those that are traditionally taught - religious extremism coupled with total anarchy.  These traditional arguments I always found hard to believe given the multi-national cooperation of Europe, Byzantine, and both the Latin and Greek churches.

Before reading this book, I had an American high school knowledge of the Crusades, which is to say, very little understanding of what happened and why.  So, I can recommend this book as an introductory text on the subject, but I can't attest to its completeness or validity.  Still, it was an easy read and quite enjoyable.

Introducing QUnitTestDriver

For the past month or so, I've been working on a library to make JavaScript testing integrate better with my company's Java build (junit/maven/jenkins).  All of the options we've tried have been failures because they either don't work well with jQuery or they require an external browser instance which makes them slow and buggy (Selenium, HTMLUnit end-to-end, js-test-driver).

What we really wanted to do was run very fast (sub-100ms) unit tests written in the language of our production code.  This lead us to qUnit.  The problem with qUnit is that there wasn't a convenient way to exercise those tests inside of our normal build easily.  Sure, there is the qunit-test-runner project, but that doesn't come along with any IDE integration.  It requires the tests be run from within an Ant script.

Enter QUnitTestDriver.  It's a simple library allows you to create a plain old jUnit test in any JVM language you choose that points to a plain old qUnit test suite HTML file.  Under the hood, the library lights up a jetty server to avoid "file://" URLs, and uses HTMLUnit to parse the output of the qUnit test results.  Here's an example Java class that would run an entire qUnit test suite that could contain many tests inside of many different files:

public class QUnitTest { @Test public void testPage(){ QUnitTestDriver.run("path/to/qUnitTest.html"); } }

That's it. I hope you find this useful!

You can find out more about the project on it's new Google Code Site Here.

Book Review: jQuery Mobile

Done.  A quick read.  I think that the jQuery Mobile API, unlike the regular jQuery API, is more "invasive".  jQuery Mobile really alters the way we are supposed to work with HTML - adding enhancements to HTML5 to better support mobile browsers.  I think this is a good thing.  The jQuery Mobile team really did a good job adapting HTML/CSS and Javascript to smaller devices.  One warning: this book is very Apple-heavy.  This really isn't a big deal, but I think that as this new book gains mass acceptance, Android will be the predominant platform developers will want to target first.  These platforms are, for the most part, interchangeable, but the screenshots are a little deceiving to those who aren't really familiar with the IOS browser which appears to bleed navigation into the page a little more, something I don't really like.

I thin that anybody who is writing mobile applications really should START here and move slowly to the world of apps.  This is a great books for developers familiar with jQuery and Javascript, but those uninitiated to web development might need a little introduction to Javascript and HTML first.