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Tuesday November 06, 2007

Humorous Bugs

I remember that when I first moved from Australia to the Bay Area, a ~~half~~ wit filed a bug against the calculator program that I'd written, with the summary line of "calctool blows chunks".

I wasn't so thick skinned in those days, and I initially took it personally. But then a few weeks later, I met the bug submitter for the first time and saw what a complete tosspot he was, and started to view it differently. I could see the humor in it.

Earlier this evening, while I was googling, looking for web pages describing how to use two dimensional Javascript arrays, I accidentally stumbled over a pointer to a couple of funny Mozilla bugs. After reading a few of the comments on these bugs, I found others. Here are some of them.

95849: Lack of Sex is interfering with my ability to triage bugs.
122411: Mozilla does not have a kitchen sink.
226482: Where did the kitchensink go ?
330884: When different users on one system choose to save or not save passwords for sites, any other user can see sites they not only saved passwords for but can also see what other users have been saving/never saving passwords for.
360323: Firefox development conflicting with my environment.

This is great. Where else can dozens of nerds find a legitimate place such as this for attempting humor. It's also clear that some of these people have way too much time on their hands.

I'm sure there are a few lurking in the GNOME bug database as well. If it would stay up long enough, I'd try to find them.

And now we got a brand new bug database for OpenSolaris. Bug numbers are still in the low triple digits. Maybe it's time to file some worthy funny entries there.

[Technorati Tag: Bugs]

[Technorati Tag: Humor]

[Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris]

( Nov 06 2007, 10:54:46 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [9]

First Cut At A GreaseMonkey Script For Expanding All Hackszine Categories

One of my favorite sites is Hackszine. I've been keeping up with the new entries by monitoring their RSS feed, but I also wanted to see what other interesting posts they'd created in the past.

The search functionality on their web site is fine if you know what you are looking for, but I wanted a way to quickly summarize everything they've ever done.

Again, GreaseMonkey to the rescue. I've created a first cut at a script that does this. Currently the script will extract a list of all the categories from their main web page, and then follow each of those URL's and extract a list of all the posts on that first page of each of those categories. It will then generate a page of lists, one for each category.

There is still the problem that some of the Hackszine categories have multiple pages worth of entries. In such a case, there is a paragraph just before the entries that will say "Page 1 of <N>" From that we could work out how many URL's of the form "http://hackszine.com/blog/archive/<category>/<N>.html" we would need to look at and process, but I can't currently work out how to easily read those pages and embed the results into the new page that is being created, because the number of such category sub-pages is initially unknown and the results are also being returned in an asynchronous manner.

Several of their posts are also filed under multiple categories so there will be duplication, but I don't see an easy way out of that, unless we do extensive process of each entry.

Still, it's useful now and this kind of approach should also work for extracting a summary of other web sites (like LifeHacker or 43 Folders), so once I've got it fully working for Hackszine, it should be trivial to generate similar GreaseMonkey scripts for those other interesting sites.

[Technorati Tag: Hackszine]