technology

web browsing

I recommend Firefox as a web browser, and a variety of extensions:

• Decluttering
  • NoScript cuts down on cross-site scripting attacks and berserk use of JavaScript and plugins. It can take a while to train.
  • Adblock Plus does a good job of removing garish advertising.
  • Flashblock replaces each Flash animation with a placeholder, which cuts down on download time for web pages.
• User interface
  • Tab Mix Plus puts a lot of details of the tabbing system under your control.
  • Neo Diggler makes it easy to meddle with URLs without switching from mouse to keyboard.
  • Geo shows if web pages define their locality.
  • Link Widgets exposes the navigation information in web pages.
  • Operator lets you see Semantic Web information encoded in web pages.
  • PDF Download saves you from the extreme wait as Firefox loads the Acrobat plugin when you mistakenly open a PDF link.
• Convenience
  • BugMeNot is useful for reading news stories without having to sign up for yet another site.
  • del.icio.us bookmarks is a must for anyone using del.icio.us.
  • Dict is great for logophiles like myself who want to look up the nuance of a word on a moment’s notice.
  • Download Statusbar avoids cluttering the desktop with external windows when showing downloads.
  • Forecastfox Enhanced makes it easy to check the weather forecast with a glance in the toolbar.
• Professional
  • Web Developer has a lot of useful tools for anyone developing web pages.
  • LiveHTTPHeaders lets you watch the exact HTTP conversation going by, and is quite useful when debugging.
  • User Agent Switcher comes in handy to test different behaviors of web sites for different browsers. (On Windows, you can even install IE Tab to use Internet Exploder from within Firefox.)
  • Nuke Anything Enhanced comes in handy when a web page has a gigantic object screwing up the layout and you just want to see the page without it.
  • Firebug and its extensions YSlow, Page Speed, and Firecookie are handy for dealing with the internals of web pages.

instant messaging

I recommend Pidgin, an open source multiprotocol client.

music

I rip my music to MP3 format using grip and lame with variable bit rate encoding, and play it back on an iPod. I chose the iPod because lots of people were producing third party interface hardware for it; I can plug it into a dock on my stereo to play music in the living room, into another one at my bedside to serve as an alarm clock, or an iPod2car adapter in my car to listen on the road. I manage it using gtkpod; I have never actually run iTunes, nor downloaded a single song from Apple.

Ultimately, I’d like to have a player that can use the FLAC codec and re-rip my entire collection to lossless format, but the portable music players aren’t quite large enough for that yet.

operating systems

I prefer Ubuntu Linux. Linux is coming along very well as an operating system, though it still needs someone technical to handle oddities like I want to use an HP OfficeJet printer with my machine.

this site

I created the top-level page using JSON APIs from delicious.com and LibraryThing, and gadgets from Google Friend Connect. The LiveJournal JSON is created with a custom style I wrote.

I have a particular interest in Semantic Web technology, so I’ve been adding microformats to the site: the home page (validate it!) has hCard and XFN data, and my résumé (validate it!) has hResume data (which uses hCalendar to handle stretches of time associated with experience and education and hCards to represent those places, and rel-tags to represent skills.)

The home page also links to an RDF document for the Friend of a Friend Project, another Semantic Web initiative.