Jared McAteer’s Blag - jaredmcateer.com

I’ve created a new Greasemonkey script called “Reddit light district” it enables easy identification of NSFW links on the Reddit site. People were complaining that NSFW links were getting seeded into the main page with little distinction. I quickly created a simple solution to this problem, now when browsing links that have NSFW in their title or are part of the NSFW sub-reddit will appear are red in the list.

Technorati Tags: Greasemonkey, Reddit, NSFW

Popularity: 53% [?]

Watch as President Bush gets booed at the season open of the Washington Nationals. I really don’t have anything more to add to that other than I don’t know whether it’s funny or sad.

Source: HuffingtonPost.com

Technorati Tags: George W. Bush, Washington Nationals, Booed

Popularity: 63% [?]

I procrastinate, a lot, I know it’s a problem and I’ve done a lot of things to try and counter this problem. There are times when I think that I must have Adult ADD because my ability to concentrate on work is extremely poor when I’m not interested in the work, I definitely have a lot of the symptoms that are listed for ADD but I always thought it this disorder was over diagnosed. It’s bad enough though to affect my work and I have been determined to find a solution (that doesn’t involve prescriptions.)

My problem is that when I run into something that interrupts my work (ie. compiling/building) I switch to reading websites, the problem is that compiling/building or whatever may only take a few moments to a couple minutes but I will spent the next 15 minutes to an hour surfing. Then I wonder where the time has gone, and my line of thought on the code I was working on is long gone.

I’ve tried using “break” timers, manually blocking websites (via hosts and greasemonkey scripts,) music, all sorts of things. Then the other day I stumbled upon a counter-intuitive solution. I was working from home, and just got season of How I Met Your Mother so I decided to watch a few episodes while I worked. Surprisingly I worked almost the whole time the show was on, I had very few urges to go surf the web, whenever there was a lull or interruption in my work I’d focus on the small video window I had open but then get right back to work when the compiler finished.

It seems strange that something that is as distracting as TV is the solution to my problem of being easily distracted, but I am pretty happy to have found it as my productivity has easily doubled.

If anyone is out there reading, feel free to post your methods of keeping focused.

Technorati Tags: Procrastination, Productivity, Work, ADD

Popularity: 48% [?]

I just launched a simple IP geolocation service at Where is that IP from?. It’s mostly for me but I figured other people might get some use out of it. It uses a free database so it’s incomplete on specific cities and latitude longitude coordinates, but it will definitely give you country as well as Whois information on the registered owner of the IP address.

In the near future, I plan to hook up the google maps API and give a point location when possible as well.

Technorati Tags: Geolocation, Whois, IP address

Popularity: 61% [?]

Now that all major browsers support the Acid2, or at least have announced they have development builds that pass it, Ian “Hixie” Hickson has begun work on the Acid3. The exciting news is that it is going to focus on ECMAScript (aka. Javascript) and the DOM. The first two Acid tests focused mostly on error handling and emerging technologies of CSS. A lot of people tend to assume that if you pass the Acid tests your browser is standards compliant but they fail to realise that CSS is only a portion of Web Standards. They are important, don’t get me wrong, but most browsers are progressing along with support these days and I’m excited the focus is being shifted to an area that is somewhat neglected.

I do a lot of development in ECMAScript and work heavily in the DOM so it’s no end of frustration to support all browser’s quirks. Having the next Acid test focus on this makes me giddy, this will hopefully force Microsoft to support DOM levels 2 and 3, as of right now they only support DOM level 1 and poorly. I’m sure the guys that develop libraries like Prototype.js and jQuery will be equally as excited.

Technorati Tags: Web Standards, Javscript, ECMAScript, Acid Test, Acid 3, Browsers, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, DOM

Popularity: 80% [?]