The notes of an Internet addict

Two nice screenshots from Factiva.com

A couple of screenshots with search results from Factiva.com related ot the Belene nuclear power plant project.

A script to debug Coremetrics tagging

(UPDATED)

If you have ever tried to debug Coremetrics analytics tagging on your e-commerce application, you would be amazed how annoying this could be.

Coremetrics provides a browser plugin for Internet Explorer that installs requiring computer restart - not quite my preferred choise of development set up. Additionally, the plugin outputs much more information than I usually need. And what I need is only what tags are thrown and with what parameters.

So I set aside some time to create a script that can be added to the pages where I want to debug Coremetrics. The script should be included just after the inclusion of the cmdatautils.js file. I use a condition based on a site setting whether to include the script or not. The debug script is very rough on the edges so please excuse any issues with it - for me it works just OK.

And here's the script - download link. The script is now available on github at this address - https://github.com/dichev/coremetrics-console-debugger

Give it a try and tell me what you think. I will also be more than happy if you wish to contribute to it.

UPDATE

A new version of the debug JavaScript file can be found at the following link: cmoverride-1.2.js

Table for conversion of CSS typographic size units (em, px, pt and %)

Here’s a chart that approximately makes conversion between points, pixels, ems and percentages. It is not absolute and still depends on font, browser and OS.

More about the units

•  “Ems” (em): The “em” is a scalable unit that is used in web document media. An em is equal to the current font-size, for instance, if the font-size of the document is 12pt, 1em is equal to 12pt. Ems are scalable in nature, so 2em would equal 24pt, .5em would equal 6pt, etc. Ems are becoming increasingly popular in web documents due to scalability and their mobile-device-friendly nature.
• Pixels (px): Pixels are fixed-size units that are used in screen media (i.e. to be read on the computer screen). One pixel is equal to one dot on the computer screen (the smallest division of your screen’s resolution). Many web designers use pixel units in web documents in order to produce a pixel-perfect representation of their site as it is rendered in the browser. One problem with the pixel unit is that it does not scale upward for visually-impaired readers or downward to fit mobile devices.
• Points (pt): Points are traditionally used in print media (anything that is to be printed on paper, etc.). One point is equal to 1/72 of an inch. Points are much like pixels, in that they are fixed-size units and cannot scale in size.
• Percent (%): The percent unit is much like the “em” unit, save for a few fundamental differences. First and foremost, the current font-size is equal to 100% (i.e. 12pt = 100%). While using the percent unit, your text remains fully scalable for mobile devices and for accessibility.

Splashy Icons: An Icon Pack of 460+ Pieces

Splashy Icons is a free pack of more than 460 icons. New icons are added regularly.

Considering the number of icons, this icon set includes almost any type of symbol - from arrows to actions or user icons to e-mail icons, so it's quite suiatble for web applications.

The format of the icons is PNG and the size is 16 by 16px size.

Click here to preview the whole set.

EntityCube: a new Microsft search summarization experiment

As Microsoft states "EntityCube is an entity search and summarization engine, which automatically summarizes the Web for the long tail, not just celebrities! The Chinese name of the project is called Renlifang."

EntityCube is an entity search and summarization system that efficiently generates summaries of Web entities from billions of crawled Web pages. The summarized information is used to build an object-level search engine about people, locations, and organizations and explore their relationships.

Specifically, EntityCube automatically generates:

• A biography page for a person.
• A social-network graph for a person.
• A shortest-relationship path between two people.
• All titles of a person that are found on the Web.

ReadyBoost Changed My Mind Replacing Vista with XP

I am a huge fan of Thinkpads ever since I saw the first one. I became even bigger fan after having the chance of using one of them at Comverse during a training. I was then so happy to get one of them for myself last year.

Not for long as it had Vista installed as default so I opted not to change this and try to cope with my stuff using vista. However, my joy of using my Thinkpad did not last for long as it really underperformed regarding what I expected from it even though it has good hardware. As the number of files on my laptop grew in detriment of free space, I was feeling the system slower and slower which was occasionally leading to some applications freezing and my losing my temper closing them after too much time looking at frozen windows.

I intentionally don't mention any specs or numbers - it's because I am talking about the experience of using a newly built laptop from a reputable brand.

Then a colleague reminded me of using Vista's ReadyBoost as a way to speed up my OS and thus applications. Next day I bought a 4 GB MicroSD card and made Vista use it - this changed alot. I did not expent such a drastic change in applications' performance when using this feature and this also made me rethink my plans to change the operating system while waiting for a new version that fixes the slow speed problem. Or buy more RAM.

Happy user again.

Bulgaria Tax Authority Eyes Blog Advertising Revenues

Bulgarian bloggers are feeling the head because of a letter in which the head of NAP (Bulgaria's Tax Authority) explains how internet advertising should be taxed, local news portal news.bg quotes the National Radio (BNR).

Writing personal blogs has been getting more and more popular recently and can be done completely free. The question is what happens when companies decide to advertise in popular blogs.

Within the last several days Bulgarian Internet space was filled with the rumor that maintaining a website is a professional activity and thus subject social security payments.

To be updated...

My Take on the Bulgarian Translation of the New Harry Potter Movie

The new Harry Potter movie's translation to Bulgarian is very strange to me still, particularly the translation of "half blood" which in Bulgarian sounds like "impure blood".