Using browser search keywords

Published March 17th, 2009 by Lachlan Cooper

One thing I spend a lot of my working (and playing) time with each day is my trusty web browser. Naturally I want to get things done as efficiently as possible, so it makes sense to reduce the time I need to spend on the most common tasks. One of these is searching.

Traditionally, a search engine was used by typing in the site’s address or clicking a bookmark, waiting for the page to load, clicking to select the search field, typing the query, and hitting Enter. That’s two separate page loads, and a whole lot of unnecessary mouse movement and clicking or typing.

More recently, browsers have started providing a built-in search box, into which you can enter a query and get results with only one page load. That’s a big improvement, but the box takes up a fair amount of useful screen space. If you use more than one search engine, constantly clicking to select between them also makes the process a lot slower than it could be.

Fear not: there is a solution which reduces the time taken for the entire search process to just a second or two! Mozilla Firefox calls this feature smart keywords.
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Bug report: “all” does not mean all, for some values of “all”

Published November 18th, 2008 by Barney Desmond

We’ve discovered some interesting things about Windows, and they never fail to cause some head-scratching. We had cause to go rooting through a customer’s wordpress installation recently to hunt down the cause of PHP errors, and discovered two WTFs here.

The first was the breakage of various scripts in the wp-admin directory. Through means unknown, every array definition was broken by the addition of a file path. If you grok PHP, you’ll recognise that this isn’t syntactically valid:

$defaults = array(
'show_option_all'../../../wordpress/wp-includes/ => '',
'show_option_none'../../../wordpress/wp-includes/ => ''
);

Python is our preferred in-house language, but breadth of knowledge is more important for a sysadmin. Cleaning up the PHP was a snap, but it’s a mystery as to how this happened in the first place; according to the customer it “just stopped working”. It looks a bit like someone got busy with a site-wide find-and-replace. This isn’t implausible, but it seems far less likely given that this is on a Windows machine.

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