Posted March 14th, 2009 by Michael
A long time ago I wrote a GreaseMonkey script dubbed “FB_PIC” for Facebook. The script has one simple function: when you mouse over profile links, it’ll show the full-sized profile picture for that given user. Today I noticed Facebook altered their interface so I decided to make some updates to FB_PIC.
Please note that due to how the Facebook UI works, FB_PIC has trouble keeping up with page changes. I am still working on an efficient work around to coupe with Facebook’s very unique UI. In the mean time if you notice that FB_PIC isn’t working as exepected just refresh the page. This will re-bind all of the nessecary events to the apporiate elements.
For more details exactly what FB_PIC is and how to get it, head on over the FB_PIC page and check it out.
Posted March 3rd, 2009 by Michael
At my internship I have been working on this really awesome in-house analytics systems. One of the database tables used in this project behaves as a self-referential tree. Since I am using Ruby on Rails for this project, I decided to go with the acts_as_tree plugin on this particular model. This plugin adds various tree related methods with a minimal requirement that a foreign key column named “parent_id” exists in the corresponding table.
This plugin functioned as expected and something can certainly be said for sheer simplicity that this particular tree structure employs. The complication arose when my application called for a full select of all the descendants from a given node. This particular tree structure doesn’t support an efficient way to grab all of the corresponding descendant records.
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