There was a post on G+ calling for a Chrome Extension to be made which adds “With A Poop Flinging Monkey” to every headline.

I, obviously, had no other choice than to create it.

Download NYTimes With A Poop Flinging Monkey, the chrome extension

Update: Based on Scott’s comment on the post I dug deeper. There are 2 settings that affect the UserAgent string on the fire: The “Accelerate page loading” and “Desktop or mobile view setting” (both under menu-> settings while in the browser)

Update: I made a simple javascript that can detect a Kindle Fire based on the existence of Silk/ and Silk-Accelerated in the UserAgent.

Is it a Kindle Fire?

Here’s the breakdown:

Mobile – no Silk

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; en-us; Silk/1.1.0-84) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 Silk-Accelerated=false

Mobile – Silk

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; en-us; Silk/1.1.0-84) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 Silk-Accelerated=true

Desktop – no Silk

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us; Silk/1.1.0-80) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16 Silk-Accelerated=false

Desktop – Silk

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us; Silk/1.1.0-80) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16 Silk-Accelerated=true

Automatic – no Silk

Either Mobile – no Silk or Desktop – no Silk (Depending on the site visited)

Automatic – Silk

Either Mobile – Silk or Desktop – Silk (Depending on the site visited)

Based on this, the best bet at marking Fire traffic is to search for Silk and/or Silk-Accelerated in the UA.

I started seeing a lot of traffic with a network named “amazon.com inc.” in my Google Analytics account, specifically to my Kindle Fire market opener post and apk. The browser data showed Mac OS X and Safari, I was puzzled until I figured out that the Fire pretends to be Safari on OSX 10.6.3 and shows amazon.com inc. as the network instead of the actual network. Is it an Amazon oversight or is there a reason for this? It kinda messes with trying to decipher how much kindle traffic you are getting. It’s got Silk references so it can be identified but, as far as I know, GA does not offer up the entire UA string.

A few weeks back, I was inspired by an instant css documentation search: http://instacss.com so I took a couple hours and threw together an instant android SDK reference search.

The hardware behind the search is a little lacking,
so under load I assume that it would be not quite as instant :O

Check out andinstant.com

The source is available on github too!

If you’ve rooted your Kindle Fire and installed the Android market APK, you may have noticed that the Market icon does not appear in the stock launcher’s app list. Market opener fixes for that problem. It’s a simple shortcut that launches the underlying apk via an intent.

Update: Irock23 has made an updated version with the new play icons, and my market opener now has 2 versions, on with market icons and one with Play icons. You can download any of the apps below. All apps now appear properly in the MRU list thanks to Irock23 as well.

If you haven’t rooted your Fire and want to, try one of these threads:
Windows: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1348830
OSX or Linux:  http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1349613

Also, the thread for info on installing the android market:
 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1351283

Get The Kindle Fire Market Opener
Get Kindle Fire Market Opener With the Play Store Icon
Get the source

Get Irock23′s Play Store Opener
Get Irock23′s source

Note: When firefox updates, it shows the add-on as not compatible. It is actually compatible, but there seems to be some crossed wires somewhere and I’m looking in to it. In the mean time just re-install the add-on from here and it will work again (verified on Firefox 7.0.1 and 8 beta) This should be fixed now, if you download elasticfox from here again, firefox should not disable the plugin after updates.

I was unable to find a version of elasticfox that was compatible with newer versions of firefox, so I pulled the code and made a simple update to the install files and the chrome (in ff>5 the menus in elasticfox went transparent and made it annoying to use.) The result is basically the same plugin with extended compatibility. I punched the max version to 20.0 to avoid having to rebuild each version, but can’t guarantee it will work for any version above 7beta.  Anyway, click the link below to download the xpi.

Get Elasticfox for Firefox 7 beta and up

Just in case you are lost and wondering why like I was: If you have a wordpress site and the admin bar isn’t showing up, make sure you have a call to wp_footer in your footer.php file. The function to add the admin bar is called from there.

I am pleased an appalled with myself today. Last night I located and fixed a major bug in Swarm that was holding off the v1.2 release. It was a ridiculously simple error in a loop. heres the post on swarmbt.com: http://swarmbt.com/2010/09/29/complete-face-palm/

I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but today I went to my site to find the dreaded Error Establishing Database Connection message. A quick look at the mysqld.err log said that there was no space to write the .bin file and that it was waiting for someone to free up some space. I promptly deleted the extra bin files (which dated back to mid 2009) and was back up. A quick google search netted the expire_logs_days key in the config. It’s simple just give it a number of days to keep old logs and it will auto delete those pesky old bins. I used 60 days for no reason in particular, but you can make a more informed decision if you wish.

I bought a Vibrant today so that I can test reports of lag/slowdown on Swarm. Since it is a 1GHz phone, there should be absolutely no issues. Now I can get to the root of these problems and get fixes ready soon.

In a dual effort to become more familiar with MongoDB and to alleviate some of the stress on Mysql on my server I’ve switched the 1.5mil row relational UPC database to Mongo. I’ve got to say, I’m liking the whole NOSQL thing. Queries feel so much better (not to mention faster) when they are not in a natural language-esque programming language. No more strings that declare SQL commands:

$sql = "Select Foo From Bar Where Bip='Baz'";

mysql_query($sql);

//etc, etc, etc

It’s now:

$query = array("bip"=>"baz");

$collection->find($query);

Much nicer IMHO