I’ve been thinking about writing a userscript to prevent loading of particular network resources. The problem is that particular FQDNs seem to either be blocked outright, or timeout by this Niometrics thing. This makes for a poor web browsing experience, so I made my own little list: http://*.addthis.com/* http://www.facebook.com/* http://connect.facebook.net/* http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/* http://*.fmpub.net/* https://secure.google-analytics.com/* http://www.google-analytics.com/* http://*.googlesyndication.com/* http://*.pinterest.com/* http://*.sharethis.com/* http://www.stumbleupon.com/* http://platform.tumblr.com/* http://platform.twitter.com/*` The good thing is that wildcard is a supported feature, makes things much less verbose than say a custom hosts file.

I have an all-important 71-track playlist on Windows, and have the same setup on my phone too. Use the Windows export feature, and so a .m3u file with relative file paths; e.g., #EXTINF:157,Zee Avi - Bitter Heart Bitter_Heart.mp3 I keep my .mp3 files in the same directory everywhere, and it works well on (Android) Winamp and miCoach, it could work in your setup too.

I used to strip all file metadata in my MP3 files. Then I found Jaikoz on Lifehacker. I am using the latest 4.5.7 version, and everything works as expected. There is MusicBrainz support and I tried that out a bit, but the accuracy didn’t seem that good, so I end up hand editing anyway. I did encounter an error message like msvcr100.dll missing, but that went away after installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86).

Just downloaded 2.1.1 stable to read a SQLite database. There’s a nice diagnostics page to welcome any developer, except it complained about my database config; e.g., Database connection “Sqlite” is missing, or could not be created. I thought it might’ve been a missing driver, or something, so I looked in lib/Cake/Model/Datasource/Database/; e.g., -rw-rw-r-- 1 waynekhan waynekhan 20K 2012-03-25 18:30 Mysql.php -rw-rw-r-- 1 waynekhan waynekhan 25K 2012-03-25 18:30 Postgres.php -rw-rw-r-- 1 waynekhan waynekhan 16K 2012-03-25 18:30 Sqlite.

Recently I encountered a bug in the system I support. Basically it consumes a web service, writing the results into database-backed logs. The problem was that not every entry was being recorded correctly, resulting in inconsistent data between my system and the web service. This coincided with a deployment of a new software release, and I puzzled over it, testing, re-testing and logging the sequence of calls. I couldn’t find the problem.

MVP hosts is a good start if you’re looking to block ad-serving domains. However, these entries have to be FQDNs – fully qualified domain names, so *.doubleclick.net or doubleclick.net won’t work. Furthermore, the scope of this setup applies only to your local machine. The large filesize (~16k lines) also means reduced performance since there are multiple lines for the same TLD; e.g., activity.serving-sys.com, bs.serving-sys.com.