Friday, July 25, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Dealing with cat pee is no miracle
So we had a couple of families over for dinner on Friday, and then sure enough Sophie peed on our bed sometime after everyone left. This time the pee soaked through the mattress lining, so we sprayed it with this solution called "Nature's Miracle". Next morning it still stunk. I gave it another drenching, waited an hour, and it was still bad. So I hit the net and got some advice.
Cat pee is mostly ammonia, so a 50/50 solution of white vinegar took care of that, and then I applied a paste of baking soda and water to neutralize the vinegar. As soon as I vacuum up the residue we'll have a clean bed again for the neurotic cat (and us) to sleep in.
But I had a look at that "Nature's Miracle" label. For eight bucks, you get water, "Nature's Enzymes", isopropyl alcohol, and "citrus scent". Something smells here, and it's not lemon fresh. From what I recall from my bio-science courses, all enzymes are nature's, and isopropanol probably does a good job of denaturing them. But it is a good disinfectant.
So here's my plan. I'm going to pick up some isopropanol for a fraction of the price at the drug store, and mix it with 2 parts water in the spray bottle. Next time Sophie pees on the bed, I'll try the cheap miracle to disinfectant the area, followed by the vinegar and baking soda, and report back here.
Cat pee is mostly ammonia, so a 50/50 solution of white vinegar took care of that, and then I applied a paste of baking soda and water to neutralize the vinegar. As soon as I vacuum up the residue we'll have a clean bed again for the neurotic cat (and us) to sleep in.
But I had a look at that "Nature's Miracle" label. For eight bucks, you get water, "Nature's Enzymes", isopropyl alcohol, and "citrus scent". Something smells here, and it's not lemon fresh. From what I recall from my bio-science courses, all enzymes are nature's, and isopropanol probably does a good job of denaturing them. But it is a good disinfectant.
So here's my plan. I'm going to pick up some isopropanol for a fraction of the price at the drug store, and mix it with 2 parts water in the spray bottle. Next time Sophie pees on the bed, I'll try the cheap miracle to disinfectant the area, followed by the vinegar and baking soda, and report back here.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Tabhunter picked up by mac.softpedia.com
I haven't even submitted it for Mozilla review, but Tabhunter was picked up and made available for download by the mac.softpedia.com site (http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Internet-Utilities/Tabhunter.shtml)
Meanwhile the downloads off the google-code page are nearing 100, not counting my own test runs.
And I'm actually using this thing, constantly. Apparently a few other people are too. It would be great to hear from them.
Meanwhile the downloads off the google-code page are nearing 100, not counting my own test runs.
And I'm actually using this thing, constantly. Apparently a few other people are too. It would be great to hear from them.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Tabhunter - A Firefox Extension for the Tab Hoarders Among Us
First, let me get the obligatory apology for being too busy to blog. And like George Carlin's memorable moment, it's gone[1]. Let's move on. We've got a lot of work to do. For one thing, work, or at least my work, has become increasingly more web-based. And since I never was one to write URLs on post-it notes, and I find the bookmarks manager tedious to clean up, I developed a habit of using my pile of tabs as an ever-present todo list. It was convenient, but with 50 or 60 tabs spread over 3 or 4 windows it was getting harder to quickly find things. Especially partially filled in bugzilla reports.
So rather than streamline my work habits (and clean off my desk while I'm at it), I took the developer's usual way out, and wrote a Mozilla extension. It offers two main ways to navigate to any tab in any window -- either use the Tools|Tabhunter popup menu, or try out the Tabhunter Panel, where you can type a substring (actually a JavaScript regex), and it will show all tabs with matching URLs or title fields. So now I can easily switch between bug reports I'm working on, plow (ActiveState's source code search engine), mxr (Mozilla's), "^att" to see the attachments I'm currently working on, and any other pages I'm working on. Finally I don't have to close any tab before its time has come.
Just like building freeways temporarily reduces congestion, only to see an increase in total vehicle usage, I now typically have 100-120 tabs loaded these days, as opposed to the 50 or so I was struggling with a short month ago. And it's a snap to find the tab I need. Yes, you probably want to have a decent amount of RAM to really take advantage of this one. My FF3 sessions tend to run at 300-350 Megs, which these days couldn't cost much more than a pack of post-it notes.
I submitted Tabhunter a week ago to addons.mozilla.org, but it doesn't seem to have gone live yet. But you can get a sneak-preview at http://code.google.com/p/tabhunter/downloads/list (at version 0.6.0 right now). Unfortunately code.google.com doesn't serve XPI files as Mozilla extensions, so you'll need to save it and open it in Firefox manually, and do the usual extension song-and-dance. Tested with Firefoxes 2 and 3 on the big three platforms, and just for fun, Flock 1.2.1 on Vista. Mozilla rocks.
If any of you are wondering why my side projects always seem to pay homage to pop-culture folks, well, hi David. Once I had the concept down, the name quickly followed, and I couldn't resist passing up the chance to write something with that name. That it turned out to be useful, at least for me, is icing on the cake. For the rest of you wondering what I'm talking about, Tab Hunter (or as I prefer to pronounce it to avoid any confusion, "Tab Space Hunter") is an actor whose career made a meteoric double-start in the late 50s with both #1 songs and Hollywood starring roles (mostly in movies that, shall we say, have not held up over the years). With the arrival of the British invasion and the demise of the American B movie, Tab's career shifted to television, first with his own show, then mostly in supporting roles. People in my generation probably first saw him in the revival of his film career in John Water's Polyester -- we were old enough to know he used to be famous, but too young to know what for. You all know how to google and wikipedal for more info.
I'm reminded of a more recent film: There Will Be Bugs. Please report them to http://code.google.com/p/tabhunter/issues/list. In particular, I'd love a better icon, especially one that combines elements of hunting crossbar scopes and that early-1960s look with champagne glasses and pastel colors.
[1] Apparently NBC reran the very first SNL episode after Carlin's passing. I still remember one of his routines, where he tried out a you-had-to-be-there-and-stoned piece on the momentariness of moments. But in that same routine there was that classic line about how everyone on the road is either an idiot or a maniac--and isn't it amazing with all the idiots and maniacs out there, things work pretty well?
So rather than streamline my work habits (and clean off my desk while I'm at it), I took the developer's usual way out, and wrote a Mozilla extension. It offers two main ways to navigate to any tab in any window -- either use the Tools|Tabhunter popup menu, or try out the Tabhunter Panel, where you can type a substring (actually a JavaScript regex), and it will show all tabs with matching URLs or title fields. So now I can easily switch between bug reports I'm working on, plow (ActiveState's source code search engine), mxr (Mozilla's), "^att" to see the attachments I'm currently working on, and any other pages I'm working on. Finally I don't have to close any tab before its time has come.
Just like building freeways temporarily reduces congestion, only to see an increase in total vehicle usage, I now typically have 100-120 tabs loaded these days, as opposed to the 50 or so I was struggling with a short month ago. And it's a snap to find the tab I need. Yes, you probably want to have a decent amount of RAM to really take advantage of this one. My FF3 sessions tend to run at 300-350 Megs, which these days couldn't cost much more than a pack of post-it notes.
I submitted Tabhunter a week ago to addons.mozilla.org, but it doesn't seem to have gone live yet. But you can get a sneak-preview at http://code.google.com/p/tabhunter/downloads/list (at version 0.6.0 right now). Unfortunately code.google.com doesn't serve XPI files as Mozilla extensions, so you'll need to save it and open it in Firefox manually, and do the usual extension song-and-dance. Tested with Firefoxes 2 and 3 on the big three platforms, and just for fun, Flock 1.2.1 on Vista. Mozilla rocks.
If any of you are wondering why my side projects always seem to pay homage to pop-culture folks, well, hi David. Once I had the concept down, the name quickly followed, and I couldn't resist passing up the chance to write something with that name. That it turned out to be useful, at least for me, is icing on the cake. For the rest of you wondering what I'm talking about, Tab Hunter (or as I prefer to pronounce it to avoid any confusion, "Tab Space Hunter") is an actor whose career made a meteoric double-start in the late 50s with both #1 songs and Hollywood starring roles (mostly in movies that, shall we say, have not held up over the years). With the arrival of the British invasion and the demise of the American B movie, Tab's career shifted to television, first with his own show, then mostly in supporting roles. People in my generation probably first saw him in the revival of his film career in John Water's Polyester -- we were old enough to know he used to be famous, but too young to know what for. You all know how to google and wikipedal for more info.
I'm reminded of a more recent film: There Will Be Bugs. Please report them to http://code.google.com/p/tabhunter/issues/list. In particular, I'd love a better icon, especially one that combines elements of hunting crossbar scopes and that early-1960s look with champagne glasses and pastel colors.
[1] Apparently NBC reran the very first SNL episode after Carlin's passing. I still remember one of his routines, where he tried out a you-had-to-be-there-and-stoned piece on the momentariness of moments. But in that same routine there was that classic line about how everyone on the road is either an idiot or a maniac--and isn't it amazing with all the idiots and maniacs out there, things work pretty well?
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