Obama can win Georgia

In the primary, more Democrats turned out than Republicans by a slight margin. (1,060,851 to 963,541). The last time this happened was in 1992 when Clinton edged Bush I to win the state.

In the democratic primary, Obama received 704,247 out of 1,060,851 votes. In the Republican primary, McCain received 304,751 out of 963,541 votes. This bodes well for Obama.

In 2004 Bush, rec'd 1.9 million votes to Kerry's 1.36 million. I believe that Obama will need 1.8-2 million votes to win. Not an impossible task. I estimate that 2.3 times more people will turn out for the General Election than did in the primary.

Finally, there are just 21 days until October 6th (the LAST DAY to register to vote)!

Top Five Dead or Alive

Ludacris & DJ Drama Talk New Gangsta Grillz Mixtape

God Bless You, Mr. Totem

Phenomenal stuff.

Status Update

"Progress does not march forward like an army on parade; it crawls on its belly like a guerrilla." --Michael Lewis

New Girl Talk: Feed the Animals

Name your own price :)

Emoticons for Gmail

Finally: a greasemonkey script for gmail that transforms raw emoticons like :-) into their image-based counterparts.

Feeling lucky? Click here to install the script. It's a work in progress, but I'm excited by the results so far and want to begin testing on a macro-level. If you install this version, check back soon for an updated version.






Lots of work left to do. Among other improvements, I will add an 'emoticons bar' to the compose menu so users can insert icons with the click of a mouse. But this is a start. The code is complete with comments and contains a 'to do' list and a list of known bugs.

For a 'key' to the emoticons supported by this script click here.

SUMMARY: Google search bar hacks

I amended the file "nsSearchService.js" to introduce two new functions to the Google search bar in FireFox:

1- Search the current site with the syntax "site:this"



2- Conduct a Google Image Search with the syntax "img:"



To install this hack, re-name your current 'nsSearchService.js' file (just in case you want to remove the hack) and replace the original with this one:

New and improved 'nsSearchService.js'. See lines 733 and 855 for the edits.

On Vista (and presumably XP), 'nsSearchService.js' is located in this directory: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components

On Linux, the file is located here: /usr/lib/firefox/components/nsSearchService.js

This solution is not very modular; the file must be installed or deleted manually. However, it does offer some advantages:

- Functionality is directly integrated into the Google search bar so there is no need for a separate search engine

- No need for a custom bookmark/search via the location bar --- this keeps the suggestions from the Google tool bar in tact. (You can add the special syntax to the end of your search terms.)

- No need for a special button; just type the command in the search bar.

- No need for Google's Advanced Toolbar for Firefox. (Google's Advanced toolbar has buttons for searching the current site and conducting an image search; however, there is no syntax that I know of to automate this procedure. In addition, for searching the current site, the regular expression used in my hack removes the 'www' from the current domain which enables a broader search. Google's Advanced toolbar does not do this; it searches 'www.stanford.edu' rather than 'stanford.edu'.)