Bhabishya Kumar

Today, I wrote my first Greasemonkey Script! Woo-Hoo!

I always wanted to try out my hand at Greasemonkeyness and today turned out to be that day. I was doing a Google Image Search for Hot Lyla from Friday Night Lights and as always I had to go through a number of clicks to open the photos that looked “promising” in new tabs before starting to view them.

So, being a long weekend, I thought why not do a NetFlix kind of Popup for Google Image Search Results so that I don’t have to go through this clicking routine everytime I am searching for a hot girl!

My Script is a mashup of the original script by Patrick Cavit and a Dynamic Drive CSS Library.

Although, Eric Hamiter & CustomizeGoogle have already fixed the most irritating issue of having to click twice on search result to get to original image, I wanted to take it a step further by not having to click at all (atleast for small/medium images). Instead of opening images in separate tabs, you can view it in a CSS Popup on Mouseover.

Unlike NetFlix, who have fixed size Popup for Movie Info, I had to figure out the least ugly way to position Popups since the images are of random sizes.. The default CSS Library was always positioning the Popup below the search result with a little left offset. This was looking very ugly for the search results on the right & bottom portion of the page. I was not able to fix this issue through CSS because of my limited knowledge of it. So, I had to write some ugly JavaScript to take care of this.

You can find the Script here & here.

I can’t help checking the Install Count at UserScripts.org every now and then to boost my ego.

Update - 08/06/2008 - On megamorphg’s request, added the resize feature. The large images are now resized to fit the available screen area, no need to scroll any more. This feature is dynamic in the sense that the same image will open in different sizes up to its full size depending on the position of its thumbnail on the screen when mouse is hovered over it.

If you think that web2.0 sites are toys for teens, you should watch these videos about infrastructure behind MySpace

Running a Megasite on Microsoft Technologies

The Megasite: Infrastructure for Internet Scale

Is using Microsoft Excel. same as developing Microsoft Excel? No!

Is using Websphere, Oracle, IntelliJ IDEA, Perforce same as developing them? No!

Is using Struts, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, Dojo, DWR same as developing them? No!

Guess what? These Products & Frameworks didn’t fall from the sky one day! Some real people developed them. As a Programmer, would you rather be developing one of these or using them for some repetitive, monotonous project?

You might think that there are only so many Frameworks and not everybody can get a chance to work on them. Well, there are 37 Frameworks just for JavaScript! So, you can guess how many Frameworks will be there if we combine all the technologies.

In fact, these new Frameworks are coming at such a pace that by the time you know about them, they are already outdated!

Then there are millions of Plugins & Extensions for these. Everyday I hear about a new Plugin or Extension in the Blogs that I read.

But if everybody starts working on these cool stuff, who is going to create Enterprise Applications? That’s what India is for! That’s what companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and hundreds of other companies in India do. They have millions of employees who are more than happy to use Products and Frameworks developed in US to work on projects for Clients based in US! Its their bread & butter. Now, you wouldn’t want to take food out of their mouth, would you? (chuckle)

US on the other hand is supposed to provide them all the tools. Have you ever heard of a universally accepted Product or Framework coming out of India! They are not going to develop them. Its none of their business.

So, lets not disrupt this perfectly balanced ecosystem. Lets just stick with developing Products, Frameworks, Plugins, Extensions, whatever we can do to make life of people in India easier.(smirk)

Outsourcing might have started as a means to save money. But, in fact, it was a very clever strategy to send all the dirty jobs to India so that US can concentrate on all the cool stuff.