The Myspacing of Facebook

So, I didn’t get enough sleep this morning so the neurons are firing and I am being random…

Goddammit, Facebook sucks, It’s turning to MySpace nowadays. Useless crap is being added at an incredible level, people are probably behaving like monkeys clicking on everything clickable on their stupid pages. You had email chain-letters and in the old days you’d get 4 or 5 copies if your have enough dumb people who have you in their address books and you have a lot of loops in your network of email friends. On Facebook is n idiots who all decide they have to paste the same stupid Flash video or pixely image into your “Super”-Wall (Note to self: 1) Make a Facebook app called Hyper-Wall. 2) … 3) Profit!).

And if someone isn’t getting crap from his/her friends, he/she is putting crap on his/her own page. Hey, how about a f’ing name analyzer that turns OMG, your name, into an acronym of feel good words that supposedly describes you. At least it’d be interesting if it involved AI which can read your mind, but it’s most likely just PHP with output += feelgoodword[i] for each i being the letter of your name.

And with all that, the main idea, of connecting people (TM, (c) Nokia!) is being lost.

But wait… maybe I’m just being anal. Why not let people have their fun the way they like it?

Yeah, I probably am. But I have a feeling with all this “fun and games” the actual idea of allowing people to communicate and connect to each other is being lost. We’re not talking anymore. It’s easy to talk to somebody, it’s just one wall post (what is it with people abusing the wall for personal messages anyway, are people that narcissistic and want to be seen talking to the other person?), so we don’t do it.

I don’t know what the point of this rant. Maybe it’s to proclaim I hate the so called “social networks”.

Oo, Geeky: Opera Wikipedia Direct Access

Anyway, I usually access Wikipedia articles by trying to predict the URL of the topic instead of using Wikipedia’s in-built search (which, when I tried it back in the old days, was usually overloaded and not working) or Google. It’s very easy, just figure out what you want to read about (e.g. “Formula One”), convert the spaces to underscores (“Formula_One”), and append this term to the end of the Wikipedia URL (“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One”).

Opera, like other browsers, support searches using the “%s” parameter, so that before today, I’ve automatized the 3rd step, saving me the typing of the long URL before the search term. But until now I’ve been manually adding the underscores.

But I tried something today, and it worked!

Apparently the search also support javascript: URLs (there’s probably an exploit in there somewhere), so I used Javascript to convert the spaces to underscores, and to go to the Wikipedia page.

Anyway, the “search” URL turns to:

javascript:searchstr="%s";window.location="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"+searchstr.replace(/\+/g, '_');

As you can see, this breaks when the search term contains the double quote. You might also notice the function replaces the plus character, instead of the space, with the underscore. This is because Opera’s already replaced the space with the plus-sign before converting it as the search URL.

Damn, apparently if you want to search something that really contains the + sign, it also breaks. Ah well.