Monthly Archives: April 2009

Viscosity and Search Domains

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I’ve really enjoyed Viscosity as my openvpn client for Mac OS X (instead of Tunnelblick). It’s stable, bounces back after system sleep, and is well supported.

After upgrading from 1.0.3 to 1.0.4, I found that my search domain configuration from the Network Settings control panel wasn’t being respected anymore while the VPN was up. I got the following reply (in 30 minutes, no less):

The 1.0.3 behavior was actually a bug (your system should use any search domains associated with the VPN connection for security reasons, rather than local search domains).

You can specify search domains to use while connected instead like so:

1. Edit your connection in Viscosity
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Add the command “dhcp-option DOMAIN mydomain.com” (no quotes) where mydomain.com is your search domain
4. Repeat step 3 for each search domain you have
5. Click Save and try connecting

These instructions worked perfectly. Thanks!

Greasemonkey script to disable emoticons in Jira

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If you’re using Jira, you’ve seen it take your SQL and mangle it into emoticon nonsense:

jira-emoticon

Here is a simple greasemonkey script to undo this madness. It is enabled for all urls that match “jira” (you may need to change this to match your installation). It walks through the DOM looking for img elements with the ‘emoticon’ class, and replaces them with a text node. May your journey be free from extraneous gold stars, forevermore.

Social Search with Aardvark

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A friend of mine invited me to Aardvark a couple days ago.

It’s an interesting concept — in all the recent companies I’ve worked for, there’s been a “spam” alias that most of the employees subscribe to. People submit questions that google can’t answer — like “I need a good tax accountant in San Mateo,” or “Anyone know of a good chiropractor in the city?,” or “Where’s a good place to go and have fun in Napa?” — and the answers are always interesting.

Aardvark is smart-filtered crowd-sourcing — they don’t spam the world with each question, but only those people in the “great spam brain” that had expertise or interest would be queried. It’s pretty slick.

The only thing that Aardvark misses is the idle spectator benefits — there’s serendipity that they miss by not letting people seeing all the questions and their answers fly by.

The IM interface also seems a bit bolted on by an engineer. After using it for a couple days, the IM interface gives real-time interaction with answerers, though, and results in faster results to the question. Geeks may not mind using a cheat sheet to get Aardvark to do their bidding, but it seems like it would be an easier and more intuitive user interaction if they had a web interface to ask questions and submit answers, too.