Ever need to make some minor edits to a HUGE file? Like a 30GB XML file? Old standbys like vim don’t handle it too well. Fortunately, there’s tweak. Recommended!

Last summer, tired of Firefox 2’s slow and crashy performance on OSX, I switched to using Safari as my primary browser. Though I still opened up Firefox to manage research sources with Zotero and to debug web apps with Firebug, Safari plus Inquisitor was fantastic for everyday browsing–until the recent update to Safari 3.1. Suddenly my fast and sleek browsing experience became a nightmare of crashes. Uninstalling Inquisitor didn’t help, and neither did uninstalling Flash. So farewell Safari, and on to Firefox 3. Firefox 3 turns out to be really nice, and all the key add-ons I need seem to be working for it. I installed Firebug 1.1 and the current development version of Zotero. YSlow works too, although you need to edit its install.rdf and change the maxVersion from 3.0b4pre to 3.0b4. Now I’ve got a browser almost as fast and good-looking as Safari, with far less crashes, and no need to switch applications when I want to save citations or do some debugging. Thanks, Firefox coders!

I’ve posted a new version of my amazon2melvyl Greasemonkey script. This is a very minor change to handle Amazon’s new search-engine-optimized book links, which feature the book title in the URL. Click here to install, assuming you have Firefox and Greasemonkey already.

I noticed that amazon2melvyl wasn’t handling some of the Amazon links at CiteULike, so I tweaked the link matching logic to better handle affiliate links.

Latest version of amazon2melvyl Greasemonkey user script

I’ve posted an improved version of the amazon2melvyl script, which automagically adds Melvyl (UC Libraries Catalog) lookup links to linked Amazon items. This new version takes advantage of Greasemonkey’s new XMLHTTPRequest support to look up related ISBNs via OCLC’s xISBN web service, vastly increasing the chance of a successful lookup. It also uses in-line data: URIs for the icons, saving my bandwidth and your privacy (not that there was any snooping going on, but still). Thanks to Jeremy Dunck and Phil Ringnalda for these great suggestions. You can get the new version here.

Remember those bright kids I was writing about? One of them just responded to the furor over Google AutoLink by quietly releasing Butler:

Butler enhances Google search results by adding links to competitors. It also removes ads, changes typography, and a few other useful things.

Touché.

Yesterday I was perusing my Amazon wishlist, looking up the books I have bookmarked there on Melvyl, the combined UC Libraries catalog. The cutting and pasting was getting a little tedious, until I realized that Greasemonkey could come to my rescue. So I whipped up a little user script that looks for links to books at Amazon, and adds links to look up those books on Melvyl. You can get it here.

Just downloaded and installed Picasa 2. Good lord is it sweet. It’s been awhile since a piece of software blew me away like this. Probably the last time was when I stopped using GNUStep and found Enlightenment, back in 1999 when I was a novice Linux user. Like the Enlightenment folks, I assume they must be taking advantage of 3D hardware or something to speed up rendering–the interface just flies, it is so responsive. I immediately uninstalled Photoshop Album and its annoying upgrade offers.

Yuki doesn’t like it though, I was showing her some pictures and she made me switch to the Windows XP built-in image viewer. She said the photos as displayed in Picasa “hurt her eyes.” So your mileage may vary. But I’m a sucker for eye candy like the Picasa timeline, which makes a stylized black & white background from one of your images, and the way the photos fly up the screen as you roll through with the slider…