Per­for­mance results for the tested URL shorteners

The guys over at Watch­Mouse did a really inter­est­ing com­par­i­son: The set a bunch of URL short­en­ers against each other to see how good they really are. Watch­Mouse mon­i­tored 14 pop­u­lar URL short­en­ers for a month and took a long, hard look at avail­abil­ity and speed. Inter­est­ingly enough, only goo.gl and twt.tl were always avail­able dur­ing the test­ing period.  In terms of speed, Facebook’s fb.me ist by far the slow­est of them all and goo.gl reigns supreme.

Also, it seems that only a few of the short­en­ing ser­vices opti­mized their DNS servers for inter­na­tional use. If you’re in the same coun­try as some of the ser­vices have their servers stashed, you can look up the IP address half a sec­ond faster than an inter­na­tional vis­i­tor. In addi­tion to these find­ings, Watch­Mouse fig­ured out that bit.ly’s pro ser­vice – a paid ver­sion offer­ing more options – is slower on aver­age than the free counterpart.

Per­son­ally, I don’t use URL short­en­ers because I like to see where a link gets me. There are a few add-ons and/or user­scripts for Fire­fox to keep you on the safe side though, by expand­ing short­ened URLs. Any­way, if you can’t avoid the use of such a ser­vice check out the new web­site the guys from Watch­Mouse have set up: the site pro­vides real-time sta­tus reports for URL shorteners.

A few min­utes ago I stum­bled over an inter­est­ing arti­cle over at Life­hacker. The new beta at Bubbl.us allows users to do some pro­duc­tive brain­storm­ing by offer­ing a free, web-based and sim­ple to use soft­ware. You can start to pro­duce good-looking mind maps with­out reg­is­ter­ing. If you want to save your mind map though, you should reg­is­ter. It’s free and they don’t want your e-mail address.

Bubbl.us is very easy to use and you will intu­itively grasp its options. Most options are very stream­lined and can be accom­plished with­out ever need­ing your mouse. Best of all, apart from print­ing your mind map, you can export it to JPG or PNG. If you did reg­is­ter, you are able to share your mind maps with oth­ers. It’s very speedy although it took me a while to prop­erly save a mind map I created.

It’s good to know that there is a free, web-based solu­tion out there that’s easy to use. If you are not into web-based prod­ucts, take a look at Free­Mind which is a mind-mapping soft­ware writ­ten in Java. Free­Mind offers some attrac­tive fea­tures licensed under GPL. Let’s get to work and sketch out your ideas for world domination!

I don’t really have time to fix my user­script Tweak Game­trail­ers but I just did any­way. The lat­est changes over at Gametrailers.com intro­duced a new flash player and ban­ished Quick­Time and Win­dows Media Player. In addi­tion with few mod­er­ate changes in the nam­ing scheme my script didn’t work any­more. Now it’ll work again and it’s even smaller than before.

Ah, just to let you all now: Obvi­ously, the guys over at Game­trail­ers made some big­ger changes. Effec­tive imme­di­ately you only need to reg­is­ter to com­pletely bypass the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Of course, my script still will take care of that annoy­ance. Have fun!

So, dur­ing the last few weeks I’ve been look­ing for a pass­word man­ager. I recently stum­bled over Robo­Form which is a quite inter­est­ing prod­uct if you’re look­ing for a pass­word man­ager that runs in your browser and acts as a form filler. I tested it for a few days but I didn’t really like it all that much. Robo­Form is con­ve­nient but it only works within your browser. I’d like to have my pass­word man­ager avail­able to me all the time, though. Plus, you absolutely have to pay for Robo­Form after a trial period  of 30 days or it will become seri­ously crip­pled in its functionality.

That’s why I once again turned to KeeP­ass which I’ve used for a short while a few years ago. So, I installed KeeP­ass on my sys­tems and dropped the heav­ily encrypted data­base in my Drop­box account. After con­fig­u­ra­tion I imme­di­ately dis­cov­ered the awe­some poten­tial of a fea­ture called Auto­Type: Just set the focus on the con­trol accept­ing your user­name, press your defined short­cut and the magic hap­pens. KeeP­ass logs you in with the cre­den­tials you pro­vided. Nice, you might think. Well, it didn’t work all too well in the browser. I dis­cov­ered a few scripts on Userscripts.org but not one of them worked as I wanted them too.

No prob­lem, I thought. Just cre­ate one your­self … and here it is: KeeP­ass Auto­Type Enhancer. This script sets the focus on any user­name field it detects on a web page. You can con­fig­ure the script to even focus con­trols that are out­side the view­port so that the browser scroll as nec­es­sary. If you don’t, it will ignore con­trols out­side the view­port. I’ve imple­mented the short­cut CTRL+ALT+S to man­u­ally focus on the user­name field. The short­cut will always set the focus on the appro­pri­ate field even if it isn’t inside the view­port, thus ignor­ing the switch pro­vided in the script. Enjoy!

This morn­ing there wasn’t much to do at work so I tried to make my only User­script – Tweak Game­trail­ers – even bet­ter. This script tries to make brows­ing Gametrailers.com a lit­tle more pleas­ant. It removes the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion and pre­vents Flash based videos from play­ing auto­mat­i­cally. I imple­mented the lat­ter fea­ture today and I hope that I can make it even bet­ter. Right now, it looks a lit­tle like Flash­block. A user sug­gested to start play­ing videos in full screen mode. I’ve looked into it today and it sure looks like I’m going to imple­ment this with the next release.

Funny. I started out with a lit­tle script to make brows­ing Gametrailers.com more pleas­ant and now I’m think­ing about fea­tures I don’t really need. Well, that’s the way it is

Unbe­liev­able! I almost missed this one, can you imag­ine? Any­way, first things first. I already wrote about FarScape a while back. The execs from SciFi canned the show and left the fans hang­ing in the air with a major cliffhanger. Even though it had good rat­ings. And now they’re gonna bring it back? At least sort of, we’re talk­ing webisodes here. Well, that’s a mys­tery to me but who am I to judge. Any FarScape is way bet­ter than no FarScape. And that’s it, as far as I’m concerned.

Still, let’s take a closer look. Over at Gateworld.net I found the first piece of infor­ma­tion which sent me into the depths of the inter­net, look­ing for more infor­ma­tion I could get my hands on. So, SciFi announced that there will be 10 webisodes of FarScape, set to be released on SCIFI.com. At Comic Con 07 Brian Hen­son him­self told the audi­ence that there will be “at least 10 webisodes of Next Gen­er­a­tion Farscape”. In addi­tion, they were talk­ing spin-offs or movies but there has only been some devel­op­ment as far as the webisodes are con­cerned. Finally, SciFi has whipped up a site where you can “be first to get news about the web series”.

Sounds good? Well, take it with a grain of salt: Each episode is antic­i­pated to run for 3 to 6 min­utes. “The char­ac­ters, crea­tures, pas­sions, con­flicts and barely con­tained lunacy of the ‘Farscape’ uni­verse have never stopped. We just haven’t had a win­dow into that uni­verse lately to see what’s cur­rently hap­pen­ing there. Well now we do. And it ain’t calm, and it ain’t pretty, and it ain’t like any­thing any­one is going to expect. But it is totally ‘Farscape,’” promised O’Bannon, exec­u­tive pro­ducer. Accord­ing to his words, the webisodes should stay true to the orig­i­nal and be dif­fer­ent on the same time!

I don’t know what to think. The peo­ple in the SciFi forums are quite excited about all this. Even though I feel quite enthu­si­as­tic about the “come­back” it sounds a lit­tle shal­low to me. And who knows what they mean when they talk about it not being “like any­thing any­one is going to expect”? To my mind, SciFi is try­ing to see where the new trend of webisodes is going. Change isn’t going to slow down and you has to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, dig­i­tal con­tent, and, of course, new mar­ket­ing vehi­cles. Let’s hope they don’t screw it up.