My Geekdom

I want to begin with an apology about the delay in publishing part II of Making the Most of Screen Real Estate in Firefox, Part 1. We’re having a family function this weekend and it is all consuming.

That being said, I just found out about NirSoft. It has about 2-dozen freeware utilities. Including useful tools such as MS Outlook Password Reclaimer. Very useful, for example, if you got a new computer, want to move MS Office but forgot your passwords.

The tools have a great range in complexity. On the complex end, it has tools to watch network traffic while, on the simpler end, it has a tool to control your computer’s volume with your mouse wheel.

I believe all of the tools are Windows only but they seem to fill some unique gaps.

I just want to give credit to Gizmo Richards’ Tech Support Alert which alerted me to the NirSoft site.

I really like my screen real estate. Especially in my browser where I spend so much of my time. I never seem to have enough screen real estate in my browser. Furthermore, to complicate my life, I like to have only one browser window open and I hate full-screen windows. These are just my personal tastes and not a reflection on Firefox’s design or quality, but they do seem to present a bit of a problem. The strategy I’ve used is to utilize the extensive customization features built into Firefox which allows modifications to the presentation and functionality of the browser. I have spent and continue to spend considerable time on developing and improving this strategy (no, I don’t have anything better to do).

Before I talk about my changes, let me show you what Firefox looks like when you boot it immediately after a download. (Note: It is recommended that if you have images disabled that you enable them for this entry.)

A Default Firefox Window of 838 by 742 Pixels

Click on image to view a larger version

Before diving in let me mention that the orange-brown coloring is from my Windows theme (I made it myself and, while never having asked for an opinion, my family have all said it is appalling). Using the default Windows theme produces coloring that is more typical of Windows.

Objections I Have With the Default Appearance of Firefox

• There is a lot of empty screen space. The menubar spans less than half of the space available to it. This is in a relatively small window that is only 838 pixels wide. My laptop is 1440 pixels wide so the browser window is only using ~60% of the screen’s width.

• The standard buttons are large and have lots of space between them. Great if you are 85 and have lost your glasses or have a hand with tremors. Otherwise I don’t much see the point.

• There is a search box on the line next to the URL location. The search box allows you to do quick searches. But, Firefox has a mechanism for searching from the location box. Why both are needed, I don’t know. I have read that a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b3/releasenotes/”>http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b3/releasenotes/, which has not yet been released, will be combining these two boxes so obviously I’m not the only one who questions this.

• To the right of the location box and search box are what’s called “Go” buttons. This is the green arrow and the magnifying glass. The usage of the location and search boxes is that you type or paste the text and then can hit the Go button to activate it. You can also type the enter key to activate it, unless you are a total mouse-devotee and never wish to use the keyboard, the “Go” buttons are just a waste of space.

• The bookmark toolbar initially begins with only two bookmarks but, it is intended to be customized so it can be filled to take the entire line. Still, you have both the web site’s icon and the page’s title. This means you can only have a few bookmarks before they get added to a dynamically created drop-down menu. You can squeeze more bookmarks in by renaming the page’s title in the bookmark to a shorter name or an abbreviation. But, once you’ve done this, if you forget what your abbreviation means, it gets complicated to see the original name. You can either open the page to see if you have the correct bookmark or right-click on the bookmark and view the URL in its properties window. Quite the hassle.

• The tabbar will resize the tabs smaller and eventually introduce horizontally scrolling if you get too many tabs. This is really not a bad setup but, unfortunately most new computers are “wide screen”. In my opinion they should be called “short screen”. For example, I used to have a Dell D610 which got replaced under warranty to a Dell D630 as the D610 is discontinued. There are several resolutions on the D610 and they all have a height of 75% of the width. The D630 also has screens with several resolutions but their height is only 62.5% of their width. There is no option to get the old 75% ratio. So, spending so many vertical pixels on the tabbar seems wasteful to me.

• The scrollbars, while standard size for Windows XP, are, IMO, fatter than they need to be.

• The statusbar wastes a lot of space. It is divided into two sections, a small visual display graphing the percentage of the page that has been loaded and a larger text display that tells you what the browser is currently doing and provides some feedback when you mouse over certain page elements. But, unless there are incredibly large status messages this small window has a lot of extra space.

In part 2 of this posting I’ll discuss the strategies I used to alter Firefox’s default appearance to better suit my needs. But, as a sneak peek, here is my (highly) customized browser displaying the same page as the default browser is displaying above.

My Customized Firefox Window of 838 by 742 Pixels

Click on image to view a larger version

My wife is a big fan of Staples the morning after Thanksgiving. They run some great sales which they make even better with wonderful rebates. So, as usual, she opened the doors at 6 AM (thanks for my 4GB Cruzer Thumbdrive for just $9.99 after rebates!). I handled the rebate forms which is pretty easy with Staples online rebate system. This, of course, got me onto a mailing list. I went to unsubscribe from the list and this was the form they gave me. Check out the 3^rditem. Sometimes one just has to wonder....

I happen to be spending a week at my parents' house. Very nice, but I hate their pillows. At home I have some pillows my wife bought me from IKEA that I like very much. I decided to buy some for my folks but couldn't remember the name "IKEA". All I could come up with was that it was some Swedish store (it was late and I don't really do names very well). So I typed "swedish store" into Google and got this response (you can enlarge the picture by clicking on it):

If you notice, halfway down the page Google says "See results for IKEA" and inserts three results for IKEA into the middle of the search. At first glance this might seem like a simple thing to implement but I don't quite think so. I bet if I was in Sweden it would not single out IKEA. Obviously the Google search engine has information about what Swedish stores are common in America or at least commonly searched for and knew that I wasn't in Sweden (there is more on this at the end of this entry). Maybe this was a sponsored link (i.e.: an advertisement) although, last I read, Google kept sponsored links to the top of the page and the right and clearly labeled them as sponsored. Even if it was a sponsored link, it was exactly what I needed, where I needed it, and when I needed it. It was simply wonderful.

Thinking it was so great, I went and did the same for Yahoo! and, while it's search page did include IKEA as a result, (the store's name), it did it with so much less finesse (you can enlarge the picture by clicking on it):

I wondered how this was done as I was pretty certain that searching for "swedish store" in Google in Sweden would produce different results. I was actually pretty certain that Google was backtracking my location via my IP address (unless you are using an anonymizer it is pretty easy to track a web request back to the ISP and the general vicinity (e.g.: town/city or perhaps county) which the user is in). I mentioned this to my friend Chris Shabsin¹ and he said that he suspected it had more to do with the fact that I was using Google.com (the US version) and not Google.se, the Swedish entry point for Google. When I verified that this was correct I tried accessing Google.com from remote countries. I used a couple of different anonymizers that were running in different countries and saw that Google.com always produced the same results, no matter what country I entered from. This made me happy as, while I know that Google tracks lots of information about me, I was uncomfortable with the thought that they were customizing searches based on IP addresses. I'm glad their not.

1. Chris has recently joined Google but the information in our discussion about how Google worked was not based on any information he has learned since joining it. It was strictly supposition. That was why I had to test it to confirm. I am greatly obliged to Chris for suggesting that I investigate further before posting.

I use a Firefox plug-in called “It’s All Text”. It is a very simple plug-in that simply adds a small “Edit” button on text boxes. Once configured, you can click this edit button from any web page and edit the text box in your favorite editor. Here is a sample of how it looks.

Besides choosing the editor, it has some minor settings such as where you want the “Edit” button to be placed, how long it should remain once you’ve left the text box (it is only visible when the cursor is in the text box or the mouse is over the tetx box), etc…

But, it also has the ultimate program option. Check out the last option on its option panel.

Alas, the program seems to behave the same whether or not I change that setting.

My previous posting on broken Google maps has been republished byGoogle Developer's Journal. You can read it "here". At least for awhile, it was listed as a "Google Developer's Top Story" and presented on the front page.

It seems that Google maps are a bit broken right now. In the "Screen Shot 1" you can see that I got two hits for the same store, differing only that one has the word "The" in the name. Excluding abbreviations, their addresses are the same although one has the unit # while the other just the address. One also lists a local number while the other an 800 number. These are a few minor problems. But the major problem is first that only one of the items is selectable. If you look at the "B" entry you can see that it is a red circle and not a push-pin shape it should be. But even worse, the "B" entry is shown about a dozen blocks away from correctly placed "A" entry.

Screen Shot 1
(Click for full Size Map)

The second picture shows a bigger problem. First, if you look at the listings, you'll notice that "A" and "E" are the same addresses and appear to differ only in the phone number and the exact name ("Walgreens" vs. "Walgreen Drug Store"). A similar problem exists for listings "B" and "F" except that they have the same phone number and address but a name and a different city. You might also notice on the map that "B" and "F" are shown over 10 miles apart. Furthermore "B" is a push-pin on the list and on the map but "F" is a circle on both the list and the map.

Screen Shot 2
(Click for full Size Map)

Perhaps the strangest problem is that in Screen Shot 2 I have selected the "A" entry. You see the familiar pop-up from the red push-pin for "A". But if you look at Screen Shot 3 where I have selected the "E" store with the same address, you'll notice that the "E" push-pin appears directly on top of the "A". So, at any zoom level, only the "A" or "E" can be viewed.

Screen Shot 3
(Click for full Size Map)

I'm sure Google will get this straightened out soon (you can reproduce

Keeping up with email can be a difficult task. Assuming that you have a good spam filtering mechanism in place, many people get hundreds of emails a day; either at the office, because of mailing lists they are on at home, or both. On my office email reader I filter many emails out never to be read (typically ones sent to large distribution lists that I know that I won't need) and still get just under 200 emails a day. So the question is what to do.

I've previously discussed GTD methodologies and their application for email management. That's half the philosophy behind the Clear Context Information Management System(CCIMS). Before I can describe the second half of the philosophy, let me make an aside into some of my mother's advice on organizing a house (one glimpse of my room when I was a teenager would show that I obviously paid more attention to her words than I did in following them). Her advice, like most good advice, was simple yet brilliant. She advised "As you organize, try to touch each item only once or, at least, minimize the number of times you must handle each item as best you can." In practice this means that once you've figured up what to do with something, do it. Don't make piles that you have to sort through a second time or third time. I view it like doing laundry. One strategy is to take the clean clothes out of the dryer and put it into a basket, carry that basket to your work area, take the clothes out of the basket and fold them, put the folded clothes back into the basket, carry the basket to each dresser, sort through the basket for clothes that belong in that dresser, and then proceed to the next dresser. Another strategy is to take the clean clothes out of the dryer, fold them as you remove them, put them into baskets arranged by the dresser they belong to, and then move each basket to the corresponding dresser and unpack it. Assuming you have the room, laundry baskets, and other tools to do the latter mechanism, it seems clearly more efficient. CCIMS is just those tools you need to implement the second laundry strategy within Outlook.

GTD tools such as GTDGmail provide some sorting, labeling, and archiving abilities for email. They perhaps even allow you to touch each email once. But, CCIMS is designed, not on sorting individual pieces of email, but rather on sorting entire threads. And while tools such as GTDGmail require you to follow ritualistic behaviors such as examining the list of deferred items and determining whether each one can be enacted upon or not, CCIMS automates all of this for you. Some of its more exciting features include:

• Once you've labeled a thread, all subsequent email in that thread, whether it arrives in a minute or a year, is automatically labeled. Furthermore, with a weak built-in rules engine and a strong engine weekly connected to Outlook rules (i.e.: neither is great but each is useful and has a different range of functionality), you can automate the labeling of threads. For example, you can say that any email that comes in from MyImportantCustomer.com should go into the Customer/MyImportantCustomer topic.
  
• When you defer a mail message, you specify how long you wish it deferred and, when the time arrives, it will magically appear in your inbox awaiting your attention.
• When responding to an email message you can specify that you wish, by means of an Outlook task with a due date and alarm, be notified that there has been no response and that you should take follow-up action. If a reply comes back, the task is marked as completed. This gets setup with the click of a button.
• Should you receive a mail message that will take more than the 2 minutes of response time recommended by the GTD methodology, a simple click of a button will turn it into an Outlook task for you to deal with at a later time.
• Even with Outlook 2007 and Windows Desktop Search, finding related items in email is greatly simplified with the use of CCIMS. At a button click, all related items will be shown. Besides showing related items, CCIMS can show related actions, alerts, and the history of the individual item.
  
• Should an email thread arrive and you just don't care (say it is an argument about what color to paint the walls of the janitor's closet, you can "unsubscribe" from the topic. After that, you just never see another email on that topic again.
• While far from the last wonderful feature that CCIMS provides, one of the coolest is that besides automatically labeling each thread, it also prioritizes each thread. It prioritizes each thread into one of five priority buckets based on a multitude of factors including your participation in the thread, if the email is sent directly to you or a list you're on, who sent you the email, etc... The relative values of these factors can be individually configured. Of course, you can rank your boss as "Junk" and automatically prioritize their email to the bottom of your inbox. On the other hand, if your boss requires instant attention, you can set up an alert such that you are notified if email comes in from your boss and isn't read in two hours, you'll get a pop-up notifying you of the unhandled email.

All-in-all, CCIMS is a wonderful tool. I've used it for a couple of years and recently switched from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 and, much to my surprise, CCIMS configured itself for 2007 and had several features that were better or better integrated. I'm certain that it reduces the time I spend dealing with email to under 50% of my what it was without it. Between the ignoring of features, automatic categorization, push-button task creation, deferring items, and automatically prioritizing incoming mail, I can quickly view the most important emails and (don't tell anyone at my office) just file many complete email threads without even glancing at their subjects. If ClearContext gives a thread a priority 5 then the odds are that I'll never even see the subject. There is, of course, some setup to get the priorities right but ClearContext does a lot of it automatically (it begins with an initial scan of all of your email to determine what senders you consider most and least important) and allows simple adjustments such as marking a contact with priority of Junk or stating that having your name in the To or CC header is of great importance.

Grab and Drag, a Firefox Extension, takes scrolling and turns it on its head. Before I explain what it is, let me explain what it is not. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the little hand cursor in Adobe Reader that allows you to click on a portion of the page and move the page around. Basically this feature is as electronic version of putting your hand on a piece of paper on a table and moving it around. While Grab and Drag has a hand cursor and allows you to move the contents of the screen around, it is definitely not the same feature as that offered in Adobe Reader.

For starters, Grab and Drag has a multiplier. This allows you to set, you guessed it, a multiplier for the page movement. For example, if the multiplier is set to 2, then for every pixel that you move the cursor vertically, the page moves 2 pixels. Similarly for horizontal movement. The multiplier can take a value between 0.1 for those times when you want to be scrolling a pixel at a time and your hand is a bit shaky (or, more likely, your mouse needs a cleaning) to 8 which allows you to scroll through almost any web page in a single movement from the bottom of the page to the top (ie: you move the mouse 1 screen and web page scrolls through 8). I like to keep mine around 5.5 for quick scrolling.

Besides the multiplier, it has a feature called "flick". This allows you to push down the mouse button and give the mouse a filck to enable one of four operations. You can either do a scroll one page up or down (depending on the direction of your flick), or a scroll to the top or bottom of the page. As an aside to the functionality provided by Grab and Drag, I must mention that, while not one for esthetics, Grab and Drag is darn pretty. By default it never scrolls and comes to a jarring halt. It scrolls and then slowly decelerates to a stop. This is, of course, customizable in its well-designed control panel.

Well, having saved the best for last, Grab and Drag has a feature called momentum. As you have probably guessed, if you grab the page, move it, and let go in a motion bigger than a flick, it starts scrolling and keeps scrolling. It will stop when you grab the page again, when it reaches the top or the bottom of the page, or, if you have set up friction, it slows down and eventually comes to a stop potentially before the top or bottom of the page. I use this feature just all the time. The trouble is, it does not work in any other application (eg: Adobe Reader, Word, etc...). While it is not a big deal in terms of functionality, Grab and Drag only works on the page portion of Firefox. This leads to me routinely flicking my bookmark window or some other window that just does not respond the way I want it to :-)

Grab and Drag has some features to make it work with a tablet or other touch-screen enabled computer. It even has a You Tube video showing how cool it is. That being said, I don't have a touch-screen computer (excluding my Treo, of course) and hence do not care about these features.

In summary, Grab and Drag presents several twists on scrolling that I have never seen before. Furthermore, it does it with such skill and elegance that I'm totally hooked.

PS: If you wish you can download a slightly older version of Grab and Go from the Mozilla website. Extensions there to be a bit behind the Mozdev site but Mozilla takes time to certify them, hopefully producing greater confidence in their quality.

This is off-topic but i thought I'd give it a quick mention. My  wife recently showed me a site109 that has weekly math puzzles aimed at different age groups.  It has an elementary and middle school  challenge as well as two open challenges: one in algebra and one in  general math. The latter have no age  maximums while the first two do (although having a young age maximum does not make it easy).

Correct answers (which are actually verified by hand - I guess it is good to have cheap student labor) are rewarded by putting you in a drawing for a t-shirt as well as posting your name on the site. They archive the puzzle each week along with the list of people who got the question correct. They also post the percentage of correct entries they get. They have a list of their top-ten hardest where the worst has a correct answer rate of only 18%.

Hope you enjoy the site and I encourage you to give it to your children's teachers to do in school. Too many people find the way math is taught dull and a puzzle with a prize seems a great way to help reverse that. 

I have found an interesting site that claims to list the "Best-ever" freeware utility programs. Besides listing the best freeware for each of 46 categories, it discusses other contenders, explains the pros and cons of each, and is generally informative. The site is aptly named The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities. 

Another very good site for freeware is ZDNet's Software. This site has the software categorized and many entries within each category. Not all of the software is free but you can filter the free software in each list of programs to get only freeware. As far as I can tell, ZDNet does a great job of filtering out malware (e.g.: trojans, viruses, etc...) so you can download and install pretty much anything they provide with impunity. Of course, there is no guarantee that the software will do what you want, but at least you know you can remove it with ease.

What I find most helpful from these sites is Window's utilities. Windows (which I pretty much have to run on my work machine) gets slower and slower over time. The only real fix is to reformat the disk and start from scratch. That being said, cleaning your registry routinely helps. ZDNet has 213 freeware programs that have the word "registry" in their description. Many of these are free registry cleaners. In general, they are just a good site for high-quality free Window's utilities.

Perhaps you'll find something useful at one of these sites.

Also, if you have another favorite freeware site, let me know or simply reply to to this posting. (Feel free to plug your own site if it is apropos.)

Outlook has a nasty habit of getting duplicate, or even sometimes triplicate entries for a contact. While during normal use this can happen, it is not terribly common (especially if you check the "Check for Duplicate Contacts" checkbox in the options window. But, I find it does happen at unusual times such as when synching my treo with Outlook and under unusual circumstances (eg: a new computer, a new treo, treo get's disconnected during synchronization) or when recovering from a disk failure or something.

This problem seems to pop up about every 6-12 months for me. I have over 1000 contacts as I never believe in throwing out an address until I'm certain I will never need it again. Now I'm a PDA user for 18 years and I've migrated my data from PDA to PDA so I've collected quite the collection. Furthermore, long before I ever heard of "tagging" entries, I was adding what I thought of as "keywords" to help me find entries (I have an abysmal memory for names). A typical case could be that one Dr. A, my primary care physician, recommends Dr. B, an orthopedic surgeon to look at my broken toe. So, in Dr. B's contact information (typically in the company name or role), I'll include the string "Dr. A orthopedic orthopedist bones surgeon broken toe". I might also put in a few words Then, if all I can remember is that I want the name of that dude who fixed my broken toe, I'll search for "broken" or "toe" and find the doctor.

The reason I mention this is that, when the contacts get duplicated, they pretty much never copy all those fields. So if I lose my keywords, not only might I not be able to find Dr. B's entry very easily, I might not even recognize who Dr. B is when I stumble upon the entry.

So I need a tool that is going to do some clever deleting and merging. I've looked around and can there are many such tools but they all cost about $30 and I can never justify spending $30 just to help me with a 1-time problem (OK, it is a recurring one-time problem but I always assume that this time is the last time). 

Well today must be my lucky day because I just found, not one, but two free tools. I found them both on Slipstick Systems site (the site is a must for Outlook users - IMO, among the best technical sites anywhere). One of the free tools is ODR5 (Outlook Duplicate Remover 5). A pointer to it can be found here. I must be honest, I don't know exactly where I found the other pointer on Slipstick but the site is here (curious that even Google's "link:http://www.anti-dupe.com" seach didn't help - learn about link: searches).

In any case, I've downloaded both and triend Anti-Dupe (I chose it because "A" comes before "O" and hence I found it first in my download directory). It seems to have worked brilliantly so far. And, with me not being willing to go through my 1000+ contacts by hand, it might be some time before I find out if it messed anything up (eg: next time I search for "toe").    

As I've been playing around with various web thingies, I've become interested in adding "social bookmarking" to my blog. For those of you who don't know, social bookmarking, is a relatively new web technology that is intended to add some ordered to the web. While there are some variations between different social bookmarking sites, the functionality they tend to have in common includes:

1. Move or copy your bookmarks from your browser to a web site. Typically bookmarks are kept in your browser. The major advantage of this is that, with bookmarks stored online, you can switch computers and have all of your bookmarks accessible. Sites such as Yahoo! have had functionality like this for years. The difference between the "old fashioned" bookmark online storage such as Yahoo!'s and the newer flavor is that in the older technology, your bookmarks were private. That is, you had to login to the site to see them. In the social bookmarking sites, while most provide a means of having private bookmarks, publicly viewable bookmarks are highly encouraged.
2. Labeling of bookmarks rather than a folder-based storage. The social bookmarking sites all allow some form of categorization (AKA: "labeling" or "tagging"). The difference between this and the folder-based organization strategies (by folder-based organization, I mean the tree style of bookmarks that IE or FireFox use) is that you can only place a bookmark in one folder. You can copy the bookmark to multiple folders but then you have copies of the bookmark, not a single bookmark. For example, say you wanted to bookmark my blog that you are reading right now. You might want to put it in your "Web Information" folder because, like this, I talk about basic web habits. Perhaps equally appropriate would be your "FireFox Add-Ons" folder or your "Windows Tools" folder or any of several others. Tags solve this by totally removing the concept of folder. The bookmarks are basically all stored next to each other. The way you organize them is to "tag" each bookmark with one or more keywords that describe it.  Going back to this  bookmarking this blog, you could tag it with "webinformation", "firefoxaddons", "firefox", and "windowstools (some sites allow spaces or punctuation in tag names but some don't - lowercase is also typically used). The sites then allow you to show all your bookmarks that contain a specific tag or tags. So, for example, you could ask the site to show you all of your "firefox" sites and this site would appear in it. You can also ask for "webinformation" sites or "windowstools" sites and you also find my blog.
3. Bookmark aggregation. Up till now, everything I've discussed is nice but rather far from revolutionary. But the aggregation functionality is revolutionary. For example, go to del.icio.us (one of the better known (and cooler named) social bookmarking sites), go to the search box in the top right and type in "firefox" and press the "search" button. You will get a list of sites much like a search engine. The difference is that a search engine uses web crawling, sponsorships, and other technologies to figure out in what order the links should be displayed. But on social bookmarking sites, sites that are appropriately tagged (e.g.: "firefox" in our example) are ordered based on how many users have tagged them. You can view social bookmarking as a site popularity contest where everyone gets to vote.

One of the advantages of social-bookmarking is that you only get the primo sites. Google has nearly 200 million hits for "social bookmarking" but del.icio.us has about 108 thousand, about 2,000 times fewer hits. The key is, social bookmarking (theoretically) excludes crappy sites that nobody would bookmark. If a site isn't bookmarked at least once, or if it is bookmarked but isn't tagged with the tag you are searching for, then it won't be returned in your search. By sorting from most tagged sites to least, you presumably get the best sites at the top of your search results.

Social bookmarking sites frequently provide browser plug-ins so that they can be used in a manner similar to the browser's built-in bookmarks. Also, many sites add little tags saying things like "Add This Site To Yahoo!" that give you a one-click strategy to bookmark the site. This brings us back to my initial interest in social bookmarking. I had to decide whether I wanted to have an "Add This Site to Yahoo!" icon, an "Add This Site to Del.icio.us", any of the maybe 20 other social bookmarking sites that I could add, or perhaps even all of them.

Now I've come full-cycle and am back to the title of this blog entry. AddThis is sort of a one-stop-shopping site for all those little "Add This Site ..." icons. AddThis provides you a single icon that, when clicked, provides you a list of many of the social bookmarking sites. Simply click on one of them and you've bookmarked the site. The "Add This Site to ..." icons are only one-click while the AddThis button requires two, but it certainly is simple to implement and keeps my site from having a dozen buttons on it.

So, if you use social bookmarking already, I hope I've made it easier to bookmark my site (which I feel confident you want to :-). If you don't use social bookmarking, click on the "Bookmark" icon and you'll see a long list of sites. You can either just select a site and then start an account there. As an alternative, you can visit the site's home page as some of them have distinctive flavors. Del.icio.us is probably the biggest and, as such, has no serious specialization. On the other hand, Slashdot.org is definitely technology/geek oriented. Choose the one that fits you most. Most of them support some export and import facilities so if you decide to switch it is likely no big deal.

When searching through long lists of items on the web, there seem to be two ways to go. Some people seem to prefer what I'll refer to as the "short list" style while others prefer the "long list". The short list, as you may have guessed is one where the number of items listed fills up only a screenful or two of items. They then hit the "next", "more", or page number button to see more items. The long list style people prefer getting many screenfuls on a single page. For lists that are only many screenfuls long, they probably prefer all of the data on one page. I'm assuming that nobody actually prefers to see all 2,872,124 Google hits on one page but perhaps there are.

Most sites give you some adjustment when searching between how many results you see on one page. Unfortunately, for me, a seriously long list guy, most sites don't provide enough for my tastes. For example, let's say you wanted to read all about me (for the sake of my ego, let's pretend that would interest somebody besides my mother), you would go to Google and enter the search term of: "Neil Smithline" -"dr." -"m.d." (I have a 2nd cousin, once removed with the same name - he's a doctor so eliminating pages with "Dr." and "M.D." pretty much eliminates false positives).

At this moment Google is giving me 838 hits (190 without duplicates). That means you'll have to hit the "next" button to read them all as Google, while allowing the number of hits per page to be set in the search preferences page, it only allows 100 hits per page - not nearly enough of me for my tastes.

So, in comes the repagination add-on for Firefox. The way it works is simple, do a search, on Google or practically any other site that ends with a "Next" or "Page 2" link, click on the link and select "Repagination-->All" and the search page you are looking at grows (you can watch the scrollbar shrink as the page grows - cool to watch). All of the pages in the search get concatenated to the first page. Then you can just scroll through the single page and, continuing with our example, select all of the links to Web pages talking about me. Better yet, if you are looking for a specific type of link, you can search through all of the hits without having to search and re-search with different keywords in Google.

And, while I'm on the topic of search enhancements, Linky allows you select links then open them in separate tab. This way, you can select all 190 pages about me and open them in 190 tabs. Linky even seems to have some clever options and algorithms to remove duplicates, only open links that are images, etc...

Oh, in case it isn't clear by now, both of these add-ons work for sites other than using Google and tasks other than researching me (although what could be more important than that ). In fact, they work quite well on most sites.

For about 20 years now I've tried a bunch of software tools that provide the illusion of having multiple desktops. I've tried switching, scrolling and dragging desktops (see Wikipedia definition) and some that combine multiple types. The basic idea I was trying to implement begins with grouping windows into tasks, that is, a set of windows that I use on a related project. I would then have one virtual desktop per task. On it I'd keep all of the windows associated with that task open. When I wanted to switch tasks, say from reading email to a work project, I'd simply switch virtual desktops. Many people have other uses for virtual desktops but this was the one that I thought would work best for me. Unfortunately, all implementations I tried came up lacking and I soon decided they weren't worth the overhead.

Well, I might have accidentally stumbled on one that I'm going to stick with. It's called Dexpot (don't ask me why but I bet I'd think it clever if I spoke German). It has a whole bunch of features that I feel are essential. Some of them I always thought were required while others I've just discovered and fallen in love with in Dexpot.

1. It is not a switching desktop. This means, if I move a window so that it is half on and half off of a screen, parts of it won't appear on other desktops.
2. It has a desktop preview. That is, a single window that shows you what windows are open on which desktops. Surprisingly, while I've always considered this a requirement, expot has an option that I've enabled which actually replaces the windows preview (a miniature of the window) with an icon. It just seems less cluttered.
3. It has keyboard keys mapped to switch desktops.
   
4. It implements a "roll-up" feature. I had never heard of this before (seems it is common on Unix systems but I've been cursed to a Windows desktop for years now). This allows you to "roll-up" the window just into the title bar (thinking of rolling up a window shade). I don't use it most of the time but it is a quick way to uncover what a window is hiding without while keep it handy.
5. It implements a "minimize to systray" feature so that you can minimize any application to the systray.
   
6. You can set the transparency on windows so you can see through one to the one behind it.
7. It implements a feature like Windows' Ctrl-Tab that allows you to scroll through all of the windows in all desktops (lots of configuration switches around this).
8. The program was written in German and localized for English but the process name still comes up in German. OK, this isn't that exciting but I'm running out of good reasons and "top nine" didn't seem nearly as exciting as "top ten".
   
9. Dexpot has a GUI that lists each virtual Dexpot and the windows on each one. You can use this to move windows between desktops, copy windows to multiple or all Dexpots, etc...
   
   and (drumroll please)...
10. Tons of customization. You can assign keys to specific functions, mouse clicks on the windows, positioning the mouse along the border or in a corner, and about a billion other things. You can also change backgrounds, desktop logos, etc... depending on which desktop you are on. I have my initial desktop background as gray and then the next eight as the colors of the rainbow so I can quickly look at the background and tell which desktop I'm in. You can also name the desktops. For example, I have one labeled "Work" and another "GMail". When I first went to customize Dexpot I actually had information overload and actually had to go back several times to figure up all that coudl be done.
    

Now, of course, I'd recommend *nix over Windows if that works for you (probably MacOS 10), but if you're stuck on Windows, Dexpot is one way to make it less painful.

Oh, and let me not mention, its free.