Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Don't Use Yahoo! Web Services

Here's why: they are shutting down the Yahoo! Briefcase. If you're going to shut down a web service, why start it in the first place? Okay, I digress, Google shut down The Google SOAP Web Service, which a lot of SEO's and spammers liked very much. Although, to Google's credit, they closed it down to signups for new API keys, and to this day continue running the service for existing keys. Remember when Yahoo! shut down it's music store and took its DRM server with it? Although they rethought their actions and gave customers refunds, just the idea that they would consider shutting it down so quickly is scary. From a consumer/user standpoint it makes me trust them that much less. Make some good decisions for once Yang! Yahoo! is the Microsoft of the Internet Age. Why? Because everyone uses Yahoo! for no good reason other than they were there first.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Login To Multiple Gmail's/Blogger/Google Services With Chrome

Have you ever wanted to open multiple gmail accounts or use other Google services all at the same time for testing purposes? In the old days there was CookiePie for firefox (which never really worked with Gmail). Just use Google Chrome's Incognito mode by pressing Ctrl-Shift-N. That is it! Your original (aka non-incognito, non-InPrivate, non-Private-Browsing) windows will continue logged in as normal when the Incongito windows are closed. It seems that each Incognito window shares cookies between that windows tabs, but not among any other windows, Incognito or not. Make sense? You can open as many different copies as you want up to your amount of memory, since nothing is ever written to disk, but rather is stored in memory.

This should also work with any other service that doesn't tie logins to IP addresses, but to cookies like Facebook, Mypsace, etc.... I don't really know if it works with IE8's In-Private browsing because I'm allergic to Microsoft software, and use it only when forced to.

Be careful composing in Blogger or using another service though, as nothing is cached at all. If you go back a post that wasn't saved as a draft will be gone.

Update (April 23, 2009): It seems that you can only login to two Google accounts at a time, one in an incognito window, and one in the regular window. Also it seems that playing Windows Media Player videos in Incognito mode leaves traces in Internet Explorer!

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Scribd.com DjVU Support

I contacted Scribd.com via their feedback page, and was pleasantly surprised to have actually gotten a response from a real person. It appears that they will support DjVU documents in the future. I pasted their response below:

Hi Justin,

Thank you for contacting Scribd.

We do not support djvu files at this time, but we are working to provide support in the future.

Regards,

Gary