My how-to for restyling Google Cal­en­dar is by far this blog’s most pop­u­lar post so far. Right from the start, peo­ple had requested that I adjust the code to accom­mo­date Google Calendar’s mini-mode. It cer­tainly was pos­si­ble using the tech­nique I used, but it did break the agenda which was flaky to begin with given the fact the fea­ture was exper­i­men­tal. Every once in a while, I’d check on the sta­bil­ity of mini-mode to deter­mine if it was ripe for some hack­ing. Then one day the mode sim­ply didn’t work any­more. It was weird, but after fur­ther research I found out why. Mini-mode was super­seded by the Google Cal­en­dar Gad­get. The con­fig­u­ra­tion form does pro­vide some cus­tomiza­tion of the style, but it is cer­tainly lim­ited. So just like before, I poked and prod­ded the code until I was able to find the means to restyle the gadget.

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Inspired by a cou­ple of arti­cles and even a screen­cast, I wrote a short batch file that cre­ates a Rails appli­ca­tion and auto­mat­i­cally loads it into a sub­ver­sion repos­i­tory. It works by first cre­at­ing a temp folder, gen­er­at­ing the rails app there, renam­ing the app folder to trunk, cre­at­ing the accom­pa­ny­ing branches and tags folder, and then deleting/renaming a bunch of non-essential files. Once that’s done it imports the three fold­ers into a spec­i­fied sub­ver­sion repos­i­tory. Once the import is com­plete, the temp folder is deleted and then the trunk is checked out. Finally it cleans-up by copy­ing the database.yml file and ignor­ing the tmp and log fold­ers. That’s it.

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I decided to try my hand at hack­ing Fire­fox. I’m a big fan of the Way­back Machine and after check­ing out the list of Fire­fox search plu­g­ins, I noticed one for the WM was miss­ing. See­ing how they give you instruc­tions on how to cre­ate one of your own, I fig­ured I’d give it a go.

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So I went test dri­ving cars this past week­end. One of the cars I sam­pled was a Honda Civic. The 2006 redesign is one slick puppy I must admit. Accel­er­a­tion, han­dling, and respon­sive­ness are top notch for a car in this class. Unbe­liev­ably, my tall frame can actu­ally fit in the back­seat. Plus it sips gas, an all impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion, now more so given ris­ing gas prices. It has an impres­sive list of stan­dard fea­tures and it pretty much comes down to not which pack­age but which trim you want—whether it be the one of the three stan­dard trims, the eco-friendly hybrid (though the Prius is still the reign­ing king in this class), or the sporty Si. There are avail­able options for cus­tomiz­ing the trim even fur­ther, but other than fog lights, many are sim­ply super­flu­ous. Yet, since I’ve been con­sid­er­ing the Mazda3, the MazdaSpeed3 and the Sub­aru WRX, I found it rather odd that a 5-door Civic was lack­ing in Honda’s line-up. I cer­tainly recall a 5-door being avail­able in past iter­a­tions. It’s not that Honda doesn’t make them, it’s that they don’t sell them to North Amer­ica. WTF, Honda?!

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