Allah Sulu's Massive Tool
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| Monday, July 13th, 2009 | 9:08 pm
[allah_sulu]
 |
More Fun With Browsers
If you're viewing this using Internet Explorer, than the text in the box below should be in English. If you're using just about any other browser, you'll most likely see several rows of gibberish hiragana characters. First, these posts (from 2005!) explain how I coded an English sentence using an HTML Ordered List. That's standard HTML, and will work in every browser – ordered lists are normally enumerated with numbers, letters (upper or lower case), or Roman numerals (ditto). However, later on (but still in 2005), I added new options for HTML lists, including the ability to specify any image to be used as the bullet points in an Unordered List. I also added CSS options for "Expanded Ordered Sets", which include Greek characters, Hebrew characters, Japanese characters, and so forth. However, Internet Explorer didn't support those options back in 2005 and IE 8 still doesn't support them now. That means that if I construct a list, with a message in the text labels, and then overlay that with the CSS code for hiragana characters, Firefox and its friends will show the hiragana characters just as instructed… but IE won't recognize the hiragana CSS code, and will default back to the normal alphabet. Not really very useful (although I was having fun in another community by making an ordered list which some people saw enumerated with Roman numerals and other people saw enumerated in lowercase Greek); but interesting, nonetheless. Below is the code used to generate the above list, with a table around it for a border. Highlighted in orange is the standard HTML option to create an alphabetic ordered list; highlighted in green is the CSS code to override the alphabetic characters with hiragana (which IE ignores). The values highlighted in blue were calculated by the Massive Tool (again, as seen in this old post) in order to generate the desired English words; a side effect of this style of coding is that, even if someone looks at your raw HTML code, they still won't see the message which is concealed under the hiragana. (View this post in Internet Explorer, or copy and paste the code below into the Massive Tool, to see the English translation.) <table border="1"><tr><td><br><ol type="A" style="list-style-type: hiragana; margin-left: 1in"><li value="357181"> </li><li value="62977"> </li><li value="253"> </li><li value="7523452"> </li><li value="355544"> </li><li value="9845412"> </li><li value="239"> </li></ol></td></tr></table>
Unfortunately, I cannot do this in reverse, concealing a message in an ordered list so that only Firefox users can read it, since none of those CSS expanded list types use the normal Roman alphabet. That would require a different trick. EDIT: It's possible that, due to the LJ style used in displaying your friends page, that you see a series of numbers in the box above. If that is the case, click here to view the post by itself, and the message should be clear. That's just (yet another) case of LJ playing silly buggers with HTML/CSS codes, and rendering the same code inconsistently on different pages and/or under different styles. EDIT II – EDIT HARDER: Apparently, the way to correct that issue mentioned in the previous EDIT (which was spotted by  thetaet, BTW; I shake my fist at her LJ style) is to include the style-specifying code (both types) on each and every line of the list. <li value="9845412">
becomes…
<li type="A" style="list-style-type: hiragana;" value="9845412">
…and so on.
| | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | 1:15 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Update Your Firefox (If Applicable)!
A new version of Firefox (v3.5) has just been released. Some highlights include: - Support for the @font-face feature which, as I mentioned here, is already available in Internet Explorer and Safari. Rather than relying on the fonts which the user has installed on their system, which may not be the same as the ones installed on yours (especially if you want to use a specific but uncommon font); you can now provide an URL for the font you want used (I know people who use Rocky Horror or Star Trek fonts on their pages, for instance) and it will be loaded and used for displaying that page (or parts thereof). I haven't done any experimenting with this feature (yet).
- Firefox now supports a text shadow effect. Internet Explorer already supported a different version of the shadow effect. (Depending upon which version of which browser you are currently using, you may see either "Firefox" or "Internet Explorer" with a blue shadow in this sentence.) By combining the two different coding formats (as I already do with Image Opacity), I can create a shadow effect that should be visible to both browsers!
- There are other CSS effects as well for Internet Explorer and Firefox, with some overlap. I mostly ignored these when they only worked on one or the other, but not both, browsers; but now that it's possible to achieve some of these effects on IE and Firefox (with Safari and the others already onboard or on the way), you may see some of these features creeping into future versions of the Massive Tool.
- (Firefox 3.5 also includes a number of other updates, such as a Private Browsing mode; but these aren't really relevant to the Massive Tool so I won't be discussing them here.)
Only one of my add-ons, CustomizeGoogle, is not compatible with the new Firefox. EDIT: Correction to the above – for whatever reason, LiveJournal removed the IE shadow code from my post. The shadows aren't there when I open this page in IE; and when I view the page source, the IE code is simply not there. This is far from the first time I've noticed LJ deleting certain types of code in certain contexts (all CSS on your profile page and several types of CSS from your comments, for instance), but I have no idea why these particular codes are being stripped from posts… especially when it's only the IE versions of the code that are affected, in this case (and in the case of image opacity codes in comments). EDIT: Here is another method of shadowing on Internet Explorer which appears to work on LJ, but doesn't look as good.). EDIT: And now the other ones are suddenly working again, even though I didn't touch them. Grumble grumble grumble... | | Monday, June 29th, 2009 | 7:51 am
[allah_sulu]
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Tips For Embedding YouTube Videos
10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About has a number of things you might find useful when embedding YouTube videos into LJ posts. For the video below, I added the settings highlighted in yellow to the embed code; they tell YouTube to use the high quality version of the video (if one exists) and to de-activate the search box and related videos that pop up whenever your mouse passes over the video. (I'm making a macro command to stick those parameters into YouTube videos for me.) Other tricks on that site allow you to specify where in the video you want it to start playing (so you can jump over the boring parts and just show the good bits) and how to make a video loop or autoplay – which is NOT something you should ever do for videos on LJ, unless they're under a cut (and possibly bearing a warning). Nobody wants to check their friends page and have several videos all start playing at once (especially if they're at work). The bits of code highlit in blue are the ones you need to add to YouTube's embed code in order for LJ to embed it (unless you have LJ's update page or the Massive Tool handle that for you). <lj-embed><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2a4gyJsY0mc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&hq=1&showsearch=0&rel=0&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2a4gyJsY0mc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&hq=1&showsearch=0&rel=0&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></lj-embed>
| | Friday, June 12th, 2009 | 8:39 am
[allah_sulu]
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A Couple of Useful Links, and a Wry Comment
I read this webcomic this morning, and the commentary underneath is written in Morse Code. I was going to whip up a macro in the Massive Tool to translate it for me, but then sanity returned and I remembered that there are already sites on the internet which will translate to and from Morse Code for you. So, I'm posting this here for my own future reference, and also for the rest of you in case any of you are suddenly struck by a surprise attack of Morse Code in your own daily lives. Another link I found recently is the Generator of Sparkly Text. It comes with a couple of dozen sparkly backgrounds (and dancing bacon) and will generate HTML code for you to use those backgrounds (along with a few other text effects, like RAINBOW TEXT). Just about all of these options (except for the RAINBOW TEXT) are available in the Massive Tool; but you might find this site useful if you're unable/unwilling to use the Tool (if you're on someone else's computer and/or on a non-Windows computer and/or just don't like using the Massive Tool application, only the web site-based functions) or want to sample a different set of backgrounds than the ones I've created/collected. Some of you may recall that I've made comments here and in my own journal about the changes they've been making to the network and the internet connectivity here at my workplace. This is why I added the proxy settings option to the Tool, for instance. Well, part of the changes are firewall/filtering software that block certain sites and images for a variety of reasons (albeit inconsistently – some of the images they block on the  randompictures community are perfectly work-safe; and some of the ones that they don't block aren't). Anyway, amusingly enough, among the images which they block (because they're categorized as "advertisement-pop-ups", of all things) are the standard LJ journal icons:     . Good thing I don't use those in my posts. | | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | 5:30 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Massive Tool - The Movie
Previously, I mentioned that I was using draggable code within the Massive Tool to create quick and dirty animation. I created an image for the background, and then created several movable elements for positioning over it in various orders and combinations, and then created animation stop-motion-style. In other words, move things into place, do a screen capture, move things again, do another screen capture, lather, rinse, repeat. When you're done, string all of the screen captures together and then crop to just the portion of the screen containing the animation you want. This was the result, part of a ten minute long music video which provided the backdrop for a performance at a Rocky Horror convention which parodied certain elements of the fandom. (The performance went over well with the audience, even though some of them were also targets of the parody.)  
I wanted to simulate a Windows desktop, where the user was reading several Usenet posts each in their own window. The image above to the left was the background I used for the desktop, and all of the posts consisted of the image to the right with different blocks of text superimposed over them. I dragged the posts, one at a time, onto (or off of, depending on the scene) the desktop, capturing frames for the animation as I went along. To see an example of what this process looked like, go to this sample page and slide the posts around the screen. If you load that page into any HTML or text editor (including Windows Notepad or, of course, the Massive Tool) you can easily change the text within the document images, and use copy/paste to make as many more as you want. If you're in a Rocky Horror cast and you wanted to make your own simulated Windows session for a video, you can very easily do so with this file (and you have my permission to use the code and images included therein, as long as I'm credited). You may wonder why I did this in the Massive Tool, rather than in my specialized DragShow program. That's because the DragShow program, at the time, could only use images or strings of formatted text as draggable items, not the blocks of HTML code required to combine an image with text on it. I have subsequently added the ability to input blocks of HTML code into DragShow to use as draggable items; the latest version of DragShow can be downloaded by right-clicking on this link. Once you've downloaded the new version of DragShow, right-click here to download the above sample draggable desktop as an editable DragShow file. | | Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | 6:46 pm
[allah_sulu]
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A Little Trick
<span style="background:url(http://DammitJa.net/lj/bg/sparkle.gif);">This is the code to create sparkly text.</span>Lots of people use this code, or code similar to this, in order to post in their journals with "sparkly" text. (Or with some other background effect graphic.) It's pretty well-known and easy to use, even for people who don't have a lot of HTML knowledge (or a Massive Tool). However, that code works by employing a CSS style="" tag; and as I've commented many times before, style="" tags are automatically removed from the bio you post on your profile page. Well, if you really want to have sparkly text or some other background graphic on your profile page under the text,¹ you can accomplish it by using <table> code, like so: <table background=http://DammitJa.net/lj/bg/sparkle.gif><tr><td>This is alternate code to create sparkly text.</td></tr></table> |
¹This post was inspired by this profile. | | Sunday, May 10th, 2009 | 5:16 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Ray Harryhausen Would Be So Proud
I've found another use for the DragShow program/code – quick and dirty animation. Set up the background and the various elements you want to use, and then you create the frames of your animation stop-motion-style. Move things into position, screen capture, move things again, screen capture, and so on. I'm using the DragMe code within the Massive Tool (rather than the standalone DragShow program) so that I can make more complex image/text/HTML draggable elements to create some animations which will be revealed in the near future to select audiences. | | Thursday, May 7th, 2009 | 6:07 pm
[allah_sulu]
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[Update] Allah Sulu's Massive Tool version 3.5.3
There is a new version of  Allah_Sulu's Massive Tool available, which can be downloaded either in  Windows installer format ( setup.exe etc.; good for first-time installers but may not work with Windows 9x/Me) or as a simple ZIP archive of files which can be extracted into your existing Massive Tool directory over the current files (in either event, make sure that you are not running the Massive Tool while you're trying to install/extract the update!) New changes include: - The "Links" tab on the "Preferences…" screen (from the Edit menu) now contains data elements for entering and enabling proxy settings. Currently, this is only relevant for the "Update Icons/Tags" button on the "Post to LiveJournal…" window, the "Poll Results…" function on the LJ Menu, and some commands in the internal FORTH language that directly access the internet (such as the
LJ Latest Images.RIM macro). - The "Reference Pages" tab on the "Preferences…" screen (from the Edit menu) has been removed. Some of the items from that tab have been relocated to the bottom of the "Links" tab, and the others have been eliminated. (To see all of the background graphics currently loaded into the Massive Tool, you must now run the
Backgrounds.RIM macro.) - The "Images…" screen on the HTML menu now has the ability to create the code for my browser trick for you. There's a pull-down menu on the third line with "mouseover" as the default value; if you change that to the other option, "IE/FF layers", you'll be able to create the browser trick simply by entering the "IE URL" and "non-IE URL" values for the two images. Several of the other options on this screen are disabled when you're generating the latered image browser trick, but the others (such as "Alt/Title Tag" and "Border") are still available. Remember that both images should be the same size!
- The "User Tags…" screen on the HTML menu has an additional option called "HSpace" (it's just to the left of "Height" and "Width"). This can be used to add one or more pixels of empty space to either side of the user icon, in cases where the icon is right up against characters on either side of it. For instance, in this post, I added an extra pixel to either side of the user icon for my sister since it didn't look good with the parenthesis right up against the left side. At some point in the not-so-distant past, I noticed that LiveJournal had started doing something similar to this, adding a blank pixel to the right of the user icon in between it and the user name – however, the method which they use to accomplish this doesn't work in Internet Explorer (unless they've fixed that in IE8); my method works in IE and in Firefox (and presumably in other browsers as well if it works for both of them). I also chose to add the extra pixel(s) to both sides of the icon, not just the right, for the reason given above. The default, of course, remains zero.
- The "Alt/Title" field on the "User Tags…" screen has been renamed "Title Text", and is coded slightly differently.
- The "Post to LiveJournal…" screen (from the LJ menu) now has a pull-down menu for the new pingback feature (although only Paid and Permanent accounts will actually recognize/support this feature).
- Also on the "Post to LiveJournal…" screen: I don't think I've mentioned this before, although it's been a feature for a while; if you right-click on the "First Line" button next to the "Subject" field, the text in the subject field will be converted to Title Case.
- The "Break at EOL" (that stands for "End of Line") option on the Window menu (and the toolbar) has been modified. Previously, it ignored blank lines and just put a
<br> at the end of each nonblank line (that wasn't inside an HTML tag). Now, it will replace two (or more) carriage returns in a row with a <p> tag. - For the sake of consistency, I'm trying to get the Massive Tool to put quotation marks around all parameters (e.g.
border="0" rather than border=0) – just as, in the past, I've made sure that all of the HTML tags are in lower case and provided the option to insert closing tags for HTML codes that don't normally require them (</p> et al.) This doesn't affect the functionality of the code generated; it merely makes it more consistent with some established standards… Although some sites (like LJ) can be fussy about code that isn't formatted "properly". Way back, I discovered that LJ doesn't consistently recognize hexadecimal color codes without a pound sign (#) in front of them (for backgrounds, for instance). And I just noticed now that Firefox doesn't render borders when the color is missing a pound sign – but has no problem with missing pound signs for text and background colors… Anyway, all hexadecimal color codes generated by the Massive Tool have had a pound sign ever since then; and I may have missed one or two, but I'm trying to enclose all of the parameters within quotes. - I've also sped up some of the code used by the internal FORTH language in such macros as the batch download, although the major limiting factors for that program are still your connection speed to the internet and the bandwidth of the site from which you are downloading.
- There several new icons (including but not limited to the Doctors Who in
Allah_Sulu.TMI and some more smilies in Dopple.TMI) and also a few new backgrounds.
There is no progress to report (yet) on increased DreamWidth compatibility, although I have done a bit more reading in the DW FAQs for relevant details. If anyone wants me to make this a higher priority, please say so. | | Monday, May 4th, 2009 | 6:04 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Changing Default Icons in LJ/DW
I know this has been mentioned and linked to before; but in case you've missed it or just want an easy copy/paste method for changing the default user/community/etc. icons is S2, here's a post by  matgb with directions and code for both LiveJournal and DreamWidth for changing the icons into a Doctor Who theme. (Naturally, you can just put in different URLs, and change the dimensions, to use any other images which suit your mood/fancy.) Long story short (and duplicating the code here with permission just in case)… For LiveJournal, go HERE¹ and paste this:
For DreamWidth, go HERE and paste this:
¹For LJ, this requires S2. For DW, you only have S2 as an option. | | Friday, May 1st, 2009 | 9:06 am
[allah_sulu]
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| | Friday, April 24th, 2009 | 2:33 pm
[allah_sulu]
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| | Sunday, April 19th, 2009 | 10:17 am
[evilgrins]
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haven't been setting these up so much lately...
...but I did one last night and thought I'd share the lot, in case someone wanted to add them to the tool, from this last year: LJ User name hyper-1 format (Foot)  Serafina·SoxLJ User name Giant Man format (Zack)  ZackLJ User name loopy2 format (Faery_C0rpse)  Faery_C0rpseLJ User name wonky format (Avril_Killer)  Pixie_NessLJ User name aroused format (Laura)  LauraLJ User name nuts format (Shiova)  ShiovaLJ User name ugh format (BurglePig)  BurglePigLJ User name green cyclops format (Eme)  StuberylLJ User name smileydraw format (DeleriumsChild)  DeleriumsChildLJ User name flippy licky format (Photognome)  PhotoGnomeIt was actually that last one I did last night but I hit up the tool first to see if I could find something and was surprised it wasn't there. Didn't it used to have a gnome? Oh, by the by, the tool currently has double images listed under 'zombie'. Current Mood: creativeCurrent Music: Real Time with Bill Maher | | Monday, April 6th, 2009 | 2:11 pm
[allah_sulu]
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More LJ Inconsistencies - Comments
I've noted, several times in the past, that LiveJournal interprets the same HTML/CSS code differently under different conditions. The earliest examples I found involved background colors and text alignment in tables, which is why the "Tables…" screen (from the HTML menu) has a checkbox for "<div> align" to use a form of code which LJ does interpret consistently (rather than the default <td align=""> code). I've also remarked more than once on the fact that LJ strips out all CSS codes (anything in a style="" statement) from anything (primarily your Bio) that you post on your profile¹ page. Well, I've recently been seeing more and more bits of my code disappear down LJ's memory hole. It seems that some, but not all, CSS codes are removed from the text which you post in LiveJournal comments. Recently, I've noticed that image opacity codes are affected – they both work fine in the main post, but in comments the Firefox-style opacity codes are left in but the IE-style opacity codes are stripped out. This will obviously have an effect on anyone trying to do the layered image trick in the comments in someone else's journal. You can use either style of code from that entry as a main post in your journal; but if you want to use the trick in a comment, you need to use the second example, with the IE image on top. I seem to recall having problems at one point using font stacks when commenting in someone else's journal, but I can't seem to duplicate the problem now. Maybe that's not a generic LJ problem, but involved an incompatibility with a specific journal style that a certain person was using? ¹Go ahead, click it! If you're reading this on your friends page right now, then that link ought to open up your profile page… whoever you are. | | Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 | 8:19 am
[allah_sulu]
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Browser Question, The Return Of
Do you remember how, in this post, I invented a trick for hiding one picture underneath another picture? The end result of this was that different users would see a different picture, depending upon what browser they were using. For example, Internet Explorer users (up to IE7, at least) will see the IE logo below; and most other users (Firefox, Netscape, Opera, and Safari) will see the Firefox logo.  |
The reason I'm reminded of this is that  28bytes has once again been making use of this trick in his journal (posting a quiz on April Fool's Day which asked people to identify the images, but displayed different images to different people). He pointed out, in his answer key post, that non-IE users (Firefox users, at the very least) could see the hidden IE picture by right-clicking on the visible picture and selecting "View Image" from the context menu. If you're using Firefox, and do that to the image of  , it'll open up the picture of Jared (from Subway) which is normally visible only to IE users. You can do the same with the image above. You cannot, however, do that with the image below. I reversed the HTML, so that the image below has the IE logo underneath the Firefox logo instead of above it. You should still see the same logo both above and below; but if you right-click the top image and save the picture to your hard drive, you'll get the IE logo. If you right-click and save the bottom image to your hard drive, you'll get the Firefox logo. The image on the bottom also disables 28bytes's trick of right-clicking the Firefox image to see the hidden IE image.  |
The other reason why I've brought this up again is that browser options have expanded since the time of the original post. I am very curious as to whether or not Google Chrome users also see the Firefox logo (in both images above!) rather than the IE logo, and also which logo IE8 users see displayed. Internet Explorer 8 is supposed to be more compatible with existing standards, rather than continuing to ignore them and make up their own; so I wonder if IE8 users might see the Firefox logo in either of the images above (in standard mode as well as the "compatibility mode" which restores the functionality of older versions of IE). I don't have Google Chrome on any of my machines (Firefox and IE are sufficient), nor have I bothered yet to upgrade the IE that came with it from version 7 yet. So, if any of you reading this have IE8 or Chrome, please let me know what you see. And if anybody sees the IE logo in one image and the Firefox logo in the other, I'd also love to hear about that (as well as which browser you're using). EDIT: A couple of people have told me (elsewhere, in other places where this trick is used) that Google Chrome behaves the same way as all of the other non-IE browsers. I've also been told that IE8 behaves the same way (in relation to these HTML tricks) as earlier versions of Internet Explorer. EDIT: ( The code! ) EDIT: I've also found another browser (the only other one that I know of) that conforms to IE, not Firefox, for this type of coding: ArmorSurf. I forgot that it was on my USB thumb drive and just tried it out. | | Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 | 6:29 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Poisson d'Avril
Almost four years ago, I asked people if they had "any requests/ideas for features or modifications" that I should put into the Massive Tool.  tbone's response was: "I want a big red button that doesn't do anything except make people ask you what it's for." Since I am nothing if not helpful and responsive, I put his button into the next update (version 2.75). The big red button, when pressed, would simply display a random sentence. However, at the beginning of the next year, when I offered a new version of the Massive Tool (version 3.00) rebuilt from the ground up, the red button was gone. I didn't put it into the new program because, for one thing, at the time I didn't have anywhere to put it. (Although, not long after that, I added the toolbar.) And so, the button was gone. RIP, 2005-2006. Several months ago, for no particular reason, I put a red button with the random list of sentences back into the Massive Tool, up on the toolbar. However, it's only visible on April first. (I'd actually forgotten about it, until I ran the Tool this morning and saw it.) So, if any of you have used the Massive Tool today and wondered what was up with the red button … now you know. And you also know who to blame. ;) Unfortunately, not one of you commented and asked me what it was for. EDIT: In any event, you must admit that it's a lot less annoying than my other idea would have been. | | Monday, March 23rd, 2009 | 5:35 pm
[allah_sulu]
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[Update] Allah Sulu's Massive Tool version 3.5.2
This is an extremely minor update, since  nostariel told me she was having problems with the installer that came with the last update. So, you can now download Allah_Sulu's Massive Tool two different ways: The installer is probably best for first-time installations, as it will create a shortcut on your start menu, provide an uninstall option, and so forth; but after that, you can just download subsequent updates by extracting the ZIP archive into your Massive Tool folder. And as long as I'm already putting both versions up there, I might as well include a couple of minor tweaks I've done since the last update: - The "Open URL…" option on the File menu no longer has a problem with proxies.
- I renamed "Hyperlinks…" on the HTML menu to "Anchor / Links…" because I thought that a hotkey of Ctrl-Alt-A was more intuitive than Ctrl-Alt-H – since the anchor tag begins with <a .
- The "User Tags…" screen on the HTML menu and the Reference Pages now support two more LJ-esque sites: JournalFen and Dreamwidth (see this post for more information). I've also removed GreatestJournal, since it appears to be well and truly dead; if it does make a comeback, I can always put it back in.
| | Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | 8:30 pm
[allah_sulu]
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| | Friday, March 6th, 2009 | 7:13 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Son of a Batch
In this post I described the dl-images.rim macro that came with the previous version of the Massive Tool. A great deal of tweaking went into this function before it was even released, and the tweaking continues even afterwards. For instance, I mentioned in that post that LJ images (which include both avatars and scrapbook pictures) would not be recognized because of their lack of extensions (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc.) There are a few ways to grab all of the pictures off of a web site, but these are the two main methods: - Look for any URL that ends with a recognized images extension (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc.) and download it. This is the method that the first version of dl-images.rim used. The strength of this method is that you get all images that are linked from the page, not just the ones displayed. For instance, some pages only display thumbnails and you have to click on the smaller image to see the full-sized image (I mentioned in the original post that for some sites you'd get multiple images, the thumbnails and the full-sized versions). For the most part, this is the superior method.
- However, an alternate method is to grab any url in an <img> tag and download it. This one will only get you the images displayed (see the thumbnail issue above) but it will also get you the extensionless images from LiveJournal pages.
Since each method has its strengths, I decided to have the new version of dl-images.rim do it both ways. However, that leaves you with another problem, in that you'll end up with some image files with no extension. Just as an example: When you view and then right-click on LJ images to save them, the browser determines what extension to add for you – but if you really wanted to manually right-click and save every single image on a page, you wouldn't be using this macro. I recently had to download 84 GIFs (all from an LJ scrapbook and therefore without extensions) to string together into an animated GIF icon for  Ray. The entire process (using the Massive Tool) took me under five minutes; it would have been a royal pain in the ass if I'd had to do it all manually. By convenient happenstance, it turns out that I had already written a program (a small utility that ran from the DOS prompt) over a decade ago that's the answer to this problem. Back then, when I was downloading files from Usenet, I often ended up with some files with missing extensions (due to some people and/or programs being confused by the new long filename format that came with Windows 95, and/or the conversion of files between PC and Macintosh systems). I dug up that code, rolled it into the Massive Tool, and now you can access it via another macro named fix-ext.rim. When you run that macro and select a directory, it will test all of the extensionless files in that folder to see if any of them are in a recognized format (primarily images; I used to have it recognize more, but some of them are obsolete and/or not likely to be an issue). If it does recognize the format of the file, it will automatically add the appropriate extension. | 7:07 pm
[allah_sulu]
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[Update] Allah Sulu's Massive Tool version 3.5.1
There's a new version of Allah Sulu's Massive Tool available for download. New changes include: - The Massive Tool now comes with a standard Windows setup.exe installer, so that it will extract all of the files and create a shortcut on your
 start menu for you. Just double-click on the setup.exe file. This should make installs and updates easier. - I added a "Count…" command to the Search menu. It simply tells you how many times a given text string appears in your document without making any changes. As with the "Find…" and "Replace…" commands, you can use the "Match Case" checkbox to turn case sensitivity on and off.
- The "Date/Time…" option has been removed from the Insert menu. A macro with the identical function (named INSERT-DATETIME) can be found in commands.rim (see below).
- I simplified the "Font Size" options on the HTML menu's "Font / Format…" screen. Now there are only two methods of selection rather than three – there is the pull-down menu (with sizes, superscripts, headline codes, etc.) and there is the numeric selector where you set the size based on a number and a unit of measure (pixels, point size, percentage, etc.) Any selection on the first option (the pull-down menu) overrides the second option (the numeric selection). To use the numeric selector, make sure that the pull-down menu to its left is empty (the top menu item). This is easier than having to click buttons to select which option is dominant, and the number of options was reduced by sticking the headline codes (which were a third, separate pull-down menu option) onto the bottom of the first pull-down.
- The reason I did that was to make room on the "Font / Format…" screen for a new Font Stack option. When you click on the "Stack" checkbox, the two normal font controls (a button and a pull-down menu) are replaced with a single, wider pull-down menu. The menu contains a number of predefined font stacks (either from this page or created/modified by me), each of which starts with a short description (up to 15 alphanumeric characters) of the stack. Right now there are ten stacks available (evenly divided between serif and sans-serif selections, with monospace and unicode options), but you can add more using the "Add Font Stack" option on the "Font / Format…" screen's Edit menu.
- The ability to select monospace font options through the generic font face pull-down menu or the font stack pull-down menu has made the the "proportional / fixed width" button redundant. I removed it from the "Font / Format…" screen (which made the other buttons, "boldface" et al., wider). If you want to do preformatted text, you can still stick in <pre> or <tt> tags manually, or access them through the "monospace" option on the Insert menu's "Paragraph…" screen (depending upon what choice you've selected for "monospc") on the "Document" tab of the "Preferences…" screen on the Edit menu).
- The "Post to LiveJournal…" command on the LJ will now warn you if you attempt to exceed LiveJournal's maximum entry limit of 65,535 bytes. (Thanks to
 porridgebird and  the_stowaway for that one.) - There's another function which I added an update or two ago, in my continuing effort to more fully tie the editor and macro language together, but hadn't mentioned yet because I was still tweaking it. Assuming you have the "Macros" toolbar enabled (Edit → "Preferences…" → "Program" tab), run the macro named "commands.rim" (Macros → "Run Macro…") and then right-click on the "Run Macro" toolbar button (it's the one with a light bulb in front of a folder). You'll see a pull-down menu appear (but only for ten seconds) listing the FORTH aliases currently defined in memory. (There are normally none when you start up the Massive Tool, but commands.rim holds several common, simple ones.) Selecting any of the aliases causes them to execute and the pull-down menu to disappear; selecting none of them causes the menu to disappear in ten seconds. This is a quicker and easier way of accessing functions such as "uppercase", "rot13", etc.
- There are a few more icons in allah_sulu.tmi, and a bunch more backgrounds in the Massive Tool as well. There have also been additional upgrades to the macro language (new functions include finding the median and standard deviation of a list of numbers – if this is useful to you, let me know and I'll explain how to do it), and new, improved versions of dl-images.rim and search.rim (I added TVtropes.org – a highly addictive site, I warn you).
I haven't done anything else about proxies yet; but then, none of you have said that you were having any problems with them, so it's dropped down on my list of priorities. | | Thursday, March 5th, 2009 | 1:46 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Whoops!
I just took a quick look through my spam folder before emptying it. (This is something I do occasionally, but not all the time.) I found a letter in there from someone that I know who was asking me about my Massive Tool. I wonder how many other letters have ended up in my spam folder because Google Mail thought that the phrase "your Massive Tool" meant that they were penis enlargement ads? |
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