A few months ago, my dog, who has never really been housebroken, started making a mess on the carpet in my dad's "office" -- where his computer and all his computer-related stuff are. (Now that he's gotten Linux on his computer, I've made it my main computer also.) We no longer trust the dog enough to let him roam free while no one's home, but we've had to put up with the unpleasant smell of the carpet. Since it was old anyway, my parents decided to get new carpet and repaint the room while they were at it. Over the course of a few days, we moved all the stuff to other parts of the house.

So, over the weekend, I was kind of disconnected from the world. I could have used the other computer, and that's what I did end up doing for some things, but I want to immerse myself in Linux as much as possible, and that means making a Linux desktop my main computer before I go off into the world and get a laptop of my own. It's good to be back, though, and I see that I haven't missed much.

Actually, I spent much of my weekend (and last week) toiling away at the Greasemonkey user script I'm most proud of. Before I go any further, I should mention to the uninitiated that Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox (you know, the browser) that allows you to run bits of JavaScript called "user scripts" that change the look and/or behavior of web pages. Anyway, my favorite user script out of the ones I've written is Myspace Ignore Bulletins, which allows you to set specific friends whose bulletins you want to blacklist or whitelist. I've spent much of the past week improving it, and I'm satisfied with the results.

The script grew out of a need, as all of mine do, and it was simple enough at first. I wanted to be some people's friends on MySpace but didn't want to read the zillions of stupid bulletins they would post every day. Rather than ignoring bulletins altogether, I decided to write a quick and dirty little script to hide the bulletins from users that I would specify in the code. Figuring that others could also benefit from it, I uploaded it to userscripts.org, a repository of, well, user scripts. For such a not-very-popular script, I got a lot of comments on it, some of which clamored for the ability to see only bulletins from the users you'd blocked or the ability to see only bulletins from users you specify.

Realizing that these people were asking for the same thing, I figured out how to integrate that functionality into the existing script so that you could toggle between blacklisting and whitelisting with just a click. That was last week. I uploaded the new version of the script and got some more downloads. But I wasn't satisfied yet because you still had to tweak the code in order to add or remove friends from the list. So I came up with a visual interface for adding or removing friends right on the bulletin listing page. It's nothing fancy -- just a textbox with the user IDs in it -- but I think it will help for people who don't know enough JavaScript to alter a little bit of the code. As it happened, just before uploading the improved version, I got a comment from a user who liked the script but had to ask "the Unix nerd I married" for help with configuring it. This new version of MySpace Ignore Bulletins goes out to her and everyone else who wants to block MySpace bulletins from certain users or show bulletins only from certain users and doesn't want or know how to edit the actual code.

So yeah. If you like MySpace bulletins but don't like some of them (and you use Firefox), do check out the fruit of my labor, MySpace Ignore Bulletins.

Turns out that the annoying Nokia ringtone comes from an old Spanish guitar piece. Here's a page with some more info and an excerpt from the original work.

Are you not a big fan of facts? Do you see reality as having a liberal bias? Then Conservapedia is the web site for you. It's like Wikipedia, but instead of aiming for a neutral point of view, it aims to be biased! (See also: A (Conservative) People's History of New York City.)