Brian White

A friend expressed his annoyance at not being able to search for YouTube videos in Firefox via the search box in the upper right. One can click “Manage Search Engines” at the bottom of the search box dropdown to add search engines that may be missing from the default list. To my friend’s chagrin, YouTube was not among them. I dug around a bit to try to help him.

I quickly found the Mycroft Project at Mozdev lists a bunch of custom search engines you can add to Firefox (including Firefox 3) to fill your needs, with one click.

I’m assuming people are hunting these down historically as they’re missing from the defaults. The latest Mycroft stats page from the end of March shows the popularity of Search Engine plugins as thus:

• YouTube
• Dictionary.com
• isoHunt
• The Pirate Bay
• Mininova
• Thesaurus.com
• IMDb
• Google Images
• Youtube + Google Video

Lo and behold, my friend’s need for YouTube search happens to match the top downloaded Search plugin. One click and he was happily searching YouTube from Firefox.

Didn’t find what you were looking for in the top 25? There’s a search interface to find a huge selection of search engine plugins.

It’s also interesting that those I listed conform to A9’s OpenSearch plugins specification, which is purported to work in both Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7+ (going by the legend at the bottom of the stats page.)

If any particular plugin is missing from the search plugins dropdown in Firefox 3 and is a candidate for inclusion in the default, it’s probably at or near the top of the Mycroft downloads list.

Two years ago I threw a couple thousand dollars at Prosper.com as I thought the concept was cool. Over two months I loaned money to 16 different people. I didn’t have much of a strategy, but made micro-loans on gut-level intuition. After funding those loans, I felt like I was putting too much time into finding loans, and let the ones I funded ride without re-investing the proceeds.

Two years in, I have 75% of my money back, but half of my loans have defaulted or are in collections. I made a decent amount of interest before a few of these defaulted, as some had APRs of 25%. Judge me as lending at loan shark rates if you wish, but these people were doing things like getting out from under 100% APR “Payday Loans” schemes or trying to establish credit after an ex-spouse trashed their combined credit.

I estimate I’ll reach mid-2009 making about $100, which is better than losing money (which can still happen). But it has been a fun learning experience, and I’m just taking the proceeds out and not re-investing. It’s pretty risky, the lack of repayment makes me angry, and it takes too much time to do research.

I learned something interesting from one of the people at Prosper who I met along the way. Affinity credit cards, like a Stanford or Berkeley credit card (powered by Visa or Mastercard etc) tend to get paid promptly at a much higher percentage of people than a comparable “generic” card. The theory is that people feel like they’re disrespecting their alma mater when they miss a payment.

For some reason, my Feedburner feed was empty as was the Wordpress-generated one. I was bouncing back and forth between the two, looking for clues, and was thinking it was a chicken-and-egg problem. With the Feedburner plugin, it redirects some of your feed files to your ‘authoritative’ Feedburner URL. The one for my blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BrianWhite. I wasn’t sure where the problem was, but suspected it was the Wordpress side, as wp-atom.php, wp-rss2.php etc. were all blank.

I found a solution searching for [wordpress feed empty], the result being http://wordpress.org/support/topic/170629. Based on the info there, I added this code to wp-feed.php before do_feed();:

query_posts('showposts=10');

It’s a hack, but for now it works until the next update

This bug tracking page was referenced in the aforementioned support topic, and the ‘milestone’ field says 2.5.2, so I expect that when I use the Subversion method for updating the blog, fixed versions will overwrite my hack.

It also appears that this happens on blogs like mine, where I publish at the root instead of in a /blog/ subdirectory.

Dave Winer wrote that, in reference to Google App Engine.

If you agree with Dave, and you’re new to Python, I recommend focusing on the first chapter of Python Essential Reference. It’s the best 10-page overview of a programming language I’ve ever come across, and refer back to those pages often. I’ve written numerous scripts and have grown to really like Python over the years (it’s big inside Google), and this book has been indispensable.

I think I’m getting a taste for using Twitter as a Marketing Tool!(tm).

My Followers total has surged since I posted this update:

I dare not resume Twittering for fear of turning off potential new Followers…

The posts are starting to trickle out of the time zones that are ~ 9 hours ahead of Mountain View, and into the feedreader.

Here’s one I spotted on Google Operating System:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/opengoogle.html

You’ll be able to select from a list of approximately 100 ranking signals like: the page’s self-importance, the number of original ideas, the IQs of their authors, the number of links from Wikipedia, and decide their importance.

Heh, nice…

Looking forward to more.

Update:

Waxy and Anil have (will have) this covered in spades.