My Geekdom

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.