Second Half

I just completed my third week in a new job. I am now employed by Princeton University, serving in the role of Associate Director for External Affairs at the new Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. The center is part of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Networking outside of the University is a key part of my job. However, there are a lot of people - roughly 5,000 faculty and staff and close to 7,000 undergraduate and graduate students - at this place. I have had need to find people's email addresses and phone numbers as I learn my way around.

To do that, Princeton has a wonderful web search service that serves to search the University site. It can also search for people. You can even do a Google web search from there. Hence, there are 3 choices once you get to the search page.

What I find myself wanting to do most often is a "people" search. However, the default setting is to do a "Princeton.edu" search. See for yourself.

So, what happens is that I go to the search site and 9 times out of 10, I enter a name and click "Go", which results in a bunch of articles, rather than a directory of people with that name.

Well, I couldn't take it anymore and had to find out a way to change the behavior of the page. That's where Javascript comes into play; and not only that, there's Greasemonkey that lets me do it in a way that I can share it with all of you (assuming you're out there somewhere...hello? anybody there?). Ok.

First, for Greasemonkey to work for you, you have to be using the Firefox browser. If you are, you can find Greasemonkey here. If you've come this far, just follow those directions when you get there.

Once you have it, you can install my "PU People First" script, which can be found here.

Once it's installed, go ahead and reload the Princeton search page. It should now have the "Princeton people" radio button selected, instead of the "Princeton.edu" button.

I hope you find this helpful.

Update: I added a feature to the script that puts the cursor into the search box after the page loads, saving a tab to get the cursor into the field.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:51 PM | Permalink

LASIK@Home is a DIY Lasik kit. I find it hard to believe and I certainly would not advocate trying this at home.

Update: According to this, the site and product are a hoax. Glad to hear that! Thanks Steve.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Who 'da thunk it?

UPDATE: Having now thought about this for at least some portion of the last 10 hours, here's where I think Apple is headed with this. Given that Leopard will not arrive until mid-year (and likely in developer preview mode at that), I am imagining that the end game for this technology is to allow Windows to be operating within an OS X "window", ala Virtual PC. This would yield all the performance benefits for both environments and make it far more useful than simply dual-booting. Until start up and shutdown time become instantaneous, having to reboot to switch environments is a non-starter for wide-spread use in my opinion. And even with instantaneous startup/shutdown, it's far less useful. However, operating simultaneously and sharing file spaces would be the ultimate in usability and with OS X as the "host" and Windows as the "slave", you can see where the perceived upper hand would be. I'd also expect that the reaction from the larger developer community would be to move more Win-only apps into the OS X environment.

UPDATE 2: This is what I'm talking about. If you don't want to click, it's a beta claiming to be the "First Vitualization Solution for Intel-powered Macs" that claims concurrent use of OS X, Windows as well as Linux. While this is a geek-step, it won't get broad use (in my opinion) until Apple includes similar capabilities as standard fare with OS X.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 8:39 AM | Permalink