Habitually Good

For the past 4-6 months, it seems that I have been surrounded by dragons (not in real life, thankfully). There is so much of it, that I had to put it together in a post. So, here goes, in no particular order, my experiences with Dragons this year:

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Everyone is always making fun of Facebook about privacy and how it doesn’t do enough to protect the users. Well, it was in this context that I saw this box on my Facebook side bar today:

Well, I thought – nice, so Facebook is letting people with poor privacy settings in place know that they can actually do something about it (another problem with Facebook has always been that even though users can do better with their accounts settings – and protect their privacy better, sometimes they just don’t know about it).

So I clicked it wondering that what privacy options have I left open – and how nice of Facebook to let me know. Anyway, what I saw was not what I expected. It was a screen for the protection of my account (damn, that is what it said on the section, why wasn’t I reading; why did I think it was to do with privacy). Anyway, it was about the security of my account (you know, alternate email addresses, etc.). The reason I was getting this alert was that I didn’t have a security question configured for my account. You know those “what’s your pets name” questions.

Well, here’s what Facebook presented me with:

These are the only 4 options for questions “that only I can answer” as per Facebook. I don’t know about the others, but for three of them I will have to ask my mom. I don’t remember the last name of my first grade teacher (not sure my mom would, but she might). I have no clue where my mom was born – do people normally know this? And I have no idea about the street name where we were living when I was 8 years old. Seriously, if I have to ask my mom for the answers to these questions, then where’s the security.

And the last one – the 5 characters of my driver’s license – that assumes that I have a driver’s license (well I do, but not everyone does).

How difficult is it to have me define my own question to which only I know the answer.

Apple may be designing the best hardware on the planet currently, but when it comes to software, they still have a long way to go. My hate for iTunes has been documented before. So, it is no surprise that I am finding myself writing again against iTunes.

I was installing iTunes recently on a computer (which is a 64 bit Windows 7 machine), and on Apple’s website, there is a special link for 64 bit Windows. So, I downloaded that. The file that was downloaded is called “iTunes64Setup.exe”. Now, I fully expect this to be a 64 bit app.

When I run the installer, this is what I see by default:

Notice how the destination folder is Program Files (x86). For those who don’t know what this is – it is the default location where 32 bit programs running on 64 bit Windows are installed.

Now two things are possible:

• Either the “64-bit” version of iTunes is not really 64 bit – so it’s being installed in the right place.
• Or, the developers at Apple didn’t even bother to configure their installer to install iTunes in the right place.

Either way, this is very irritating.

Very recently, I saw a presentation where there were certain slides which were left for the audience to scan through, with little or no voice from the presenter. These slides had simple text which you would scan through, or most likely ignore as an audience. However, there was one small difference on these slides – as you scanned the text, selective words in on the slide were being emphasized – drawing your attention to key points on the slide.

I found that effect very useful, and tried to put it in my next presentation. This is where things got stuck. PowerPoint doesn’t allow you to animate selective words in a text. You can apply animation effects to complete sentences only. This means that there needs to be a hack to get that effect which I saw. To clarify, I made a video of the effect that I am looking to achieve (embedded below the disclaimer).

Disclaimer: a lot of you may already know how to do this, but it took me a bit to figure it out (specially since I kept thinking how to do it natively in PowerPoint).

So, now that it is clear what I am trying to achieve, let me explain how I did it.

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Last weekend, I wasn’t feeling very well (and most of the last week too) – and I couldn’t concentrate on my work either. So I needed some mindless activity to distract myself – and because I had a bad headache to go with all this, I couldn’t resort to my normal escape of gaming on my XBox – besides, that is not so mindless. I needed something to give myself a break.

So, I decided to see how difficult it is to make a Google Chrome extension. It turned out that it is super easy to make one. So, I decided to make a very “Hello World” type extension which I would actually use as a fun tool in my current favorite browser: Chrome.

Presenting Tab Statistics:

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