Image courtesy of purplemattfish on flickr

Google Translate is awesome but fell a few feet short of my requirements on a recent project. What I was looking for was full control over what portions of my web content get translated when the user requests a translation and not the entire page. If you have used Google Translate, you know that the way translation works is that it will translate the entire page.

Question now becomes, how do you do inline translation and get control over what gets translated? Enter JQuery-Translate. JQ-Translate allows you to get that granular control and do inline translation which ends up looking really slick. The [translate] option that you see on top of this post uses the same framework but in the form of a wordpress plugin and if you use that to translate this post into a language of your choice, you will see that only the post gets translated and not the entire page….sweet!

Ways to “opt-out”:

1. Install the Google Analytics Opt-out browser extension. It works on firefox, IE and Chrome. Get it here. This will prevent your browser from sending back any data to the Google Analytics service.
2. Opt out of Personalized AdSense Ads. This can be done here.
3. Install the following extenstions (for firefox):
   • Google Sharing: Provides an additional layer of privacy by anonymizing your Google “unique id”. Google sets a unique id for every browser/user.
   • Beef Taco: Despite the strange name, this extension automatically installs appropriate cookies that opt you out of most of the online advertising networks (doubleclick, yahoo, google, etc, etc)

If you are mega paranoid, you can always block the google.com domain from setting any cookies on your browser.

First you need to get the Julian day number for your start date. Start date is the date from where you want to begin the randomization. Use the following SQL statement to get that number…

SELECT TO_CHAR(TO_DATE('2010-01-01', 'YYYY-MM-DD'), 'J') FROM DUAL;

When you run the above SQL query, the cursor should show ‘2455198‘. Now that you have the julian value for your start date, you can use the following statement to generate a random value between your start date and any number of additional dates. In the example below, I am adding 120 additional days to my start date so my range will be Jan-01-2010 till Apr-30-2010.

SELECT TO_DATE(TRUNC(DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE(2455198, 2455198+120)), 'J') FROM DUAL;

From here, a simple update statement should do the trick!

UPDATE table_name SET column_name = (SELECT TO_DATE(TRUNC(DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE(2455198, 2455198+120)), 'J') FROM DUAL);

Hope this saved you some time!

Warning! by proceeding you may subject yourself to bouts of “OH MY GOD” or “CRAP, THIS IS UNREAL”!

….go ahead, click here to see how much Google knows about you. This is not a hack or any kind of special trick, it’s a service that Google provides (out of the goodness of their own hearts?) to all it’s users (albeit it’s  buried in some obscure area of your profile). Does it not just raise your spirits to know how much one company knows about you, your personal life (including your friends, preferences, habits, etc, etc, etc)? I knew that they provide a ton of free services and that all of these services collect some amount of identifiable data but seeing all the data that they collect/have access to laid out this way….gives me the creeps.

This is one reason why I turned off Google Buzz today (an encourage you to do so as well…read this post for a reality check). I liked the idea behind Buzz, it’s the implementation that was a major FAIL. Hopefully they will fix it…soon.

You can opt out of Google’s interest based advertising here. Or better yet, use the Network Advertising Initiative to opt-out of several ad networks at once.

Rock on.

To enable all of these, you will need to type in about:config in the URL bar and accept the warning that is displayed. (Hint: to change the value of a property, just double click it and it will flip from its current value to the next value in the allowed list. So if you double-click a property that is marked as true it will become false.)

1. Tab Previews: To see a preview (instead of just cycling through the tab windows) of the open tabs while you cycle through the open ones, enable the following property: browser.ctrlTab.previews to true.
2. Open links to the far right: In Firefox 3.6, links opened from a page (middle-clicking on them or from the context menu) open to the right of the current page to keep related content closer by default. To restore the previous behavior (open pages to the right of the last open tab), access the advanced preferences by visiting about:config, then look for a preference called browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to false.
3. Keyboard shortcut for tab previews: To quickly access the all tabs preview panel (once enabled using hint #1 above) and search press Shift + Ctrl + Tab.
4. Preview open tabs via menu button: This property will enable a button at the far right of the tab bar that when clicked will show a preview of all open tabs. Handy when you have several tabs open! To enable, set browser.allTabs.previews to true.
5. Forcing extension compatibility: Firefox 3.6 requires a new method to enable forced extension compatibility. The earlier method, which required you to turn the extensions.checkCompatibility property to false will no longer work. To force compatibility in 3.6, you need to add a new boolean property called extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to false. To add a new boolen, right click anywhere on the about:config page listing and select New->Boolean
   

1. Try the command line:
Open up Terminal.app and go to the trash folder that you want to empty:
cd /Volumes/<name of your drive>/.Trash/
rm -rf <directory you want to delete> (usually its 501)

2. Delete backups from within Time Machine to empty out space:
Fire up Time Machine. By default, you should be in the current time (now). In the Finder window that open’s up, there’s a small gear icon. Click it and select the option “Delete old backup’s for xxxxxx”. Easiest way to free up space!

Granted that SD card offer a lot more variety than just storage but I think that the real reason for the inclusion is to create differentiation in the laptop product line. Notice that the earlier Macbook got bumped up to a macbook pro category leaving w.i.d.e open spaces in the traditional macbook category for new entrants. Could these new entrants be a Apple Netbook or the ever so elusive Apple tablet? I certainly hope so!

This seemingly simple and straightforward message that gets generated every time someone elects to follow a user on twitter got a person concerned at my workplace cause they thought that someone was actually following them…following as in stalking! Begs the question…does going mainstream mean that content has to be “neutralized” so that it gets adopted easily? I cannot help but wonder how many other people think that there are now people following them around (literally) because they signed up for a Twitter account.

The venturebeat blog has an interesting post on how twitter, by being talked about on Oprah, has now reached the end of it’s hype and that from now on no one can exclaim along the lines of “look, it’s this new thing…”. Is this good or bad? Does going mainstream imply that you loose your originality as well as your hype? I personally don’t think so. As long as the innovation continues and the masses are continually entertained, the uniqueness can be maintained.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter fairs up a year from now. I, for one, have full faith in @ev and @biz