“Dear Twitter Is it too much to ask to add a follower marker so I can know if someone is following me and not just if I am following them?”

I think that Twitter could benefit from displaying more information on the home page, and this idea was easy enough to code up. It should save some time and make the Twitter homepage that much more useful.

The script displays a tiny icon on top of the portrait of people who are following you back on your Twitter home page. It leaves your non-followers alone, though it would be easy enough to develop a version that puts silly mustaches on them.

This is only a first version, and I welcome your comments and suggestions.

If you already have Greasemonkey installed, get the script here, or install it from here as a Firefox extension thanks to the script compiler.

The icon is a free icon courtesy of famfamfam.

Just text 41411 with whereami <username>, where <username> is a username that you or someone you know is likely to use.

For example, if you text whereami hmason to 41411, you’ll see a response much like the image to the left.

This app works on the principle that people tend to use the same username for many applications. The WHEREAMI script will search through a variety of web services for a result for that username. All of the information is public and available without logging in.

Right now, the script will search Brightkite, then Dopplr, and finally Twitter. If you know of another site with public user location information, please comment below and I’ll add it!

Open tab count extension in the status bar

How many tabs do you have open in your browser right now?

Did you have to count manually? Are you using Firefox? Try the open tab count extension!

I created this extension because I wanted to explore memory management in browser tabs, and I was curious about the Firefox extension architecture. I’m not quite as eager to explore memory hacks in Firefox now that Google Chrome is out and handles that issue natively, but I’m still using this extension to monitor my tab (over)usage.

The extension puts a small icon in the status bar alongside the number of open tabs. If more than one window is open, the extension shows the number of open tabs in the current window / the total number of open tabs.

Please let me know below if you have any comments!

I’ve always been skeptical of and fascinated by personality tests. On the one hand, it’s your personality — who could possibly know more about you than you do? On the other, there’s something alluring about quantifying your characteristics, especially when you can compare them to others.

These are my results from the Path101 personality test. Go see how you compare!

I lead the Immersive Media Lab at J&W University. Several of our projects have utilized Second Life, including Virtual Morocco (cultural exchange and tourism promotion for the country of Morocco) and SLMetrics (a study of behavior modeling in virtual environments).

This isn’t a Second Life blog, but you will find LSL scripts and other related ephemera around.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this site, or find out more about me at HilaryMason.com.

I was talking to my web programming seminar about regular expressions and made an allusion to the xkcd comic on that topic. Unfortunately, none of them had seen it, probably because none of them were familiar with xkcd.

Students should become familiar with the concepts and practice of the discipline, but also with the culture and in-jokes that will help them fit in when they get into industry or graduate school. I also like to get people to laugh in ways that are relevant to the subject material (yes, I use a lot of cheesy geek jokes — ask me to tell you my LISP joke sometime).

I asked the Twitter community what other geek cultural elements I should introduce the students to, and here are the answers:

• The comics: xkcd, Penny Arcade
• The cute things: Kitty Hell, Pink Tentacle, Cute Overload, icanhazcheezburger (which is also, apparently, a business)
• Current events: Fake Steve, The Onion, Fark
• The blogs: Boing Boing
• The IRC: bash.org
• The shopping: Think Geek, Jinx
• The field trip: ROFLcon (Who wants to go?)

This list is thanks to (in order of appearance) @mediacrisis, @rubaiyat, @techpickles, @mattgillooly, @hempstyle, and @inkedmn.

This script is in LSL, for Second Life. Just copy and paste it into a script, throw a few notecards into the object, and you’ll be ready to go!

//  Notecard Selector
//  by Ann Enigma
//  This script presents users with a list of notecards in a dialog box, and allows them to select one
//  Note: The names of the notecards must be less than 24 characters long
 
// This script is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
// http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
 
// configurable options
string message = "Which notecard would you like to read?"; // the message on the dialog box
integer command_channel = 616; // the channel on which to listen for commands (you probably won't need to change this)
 
// the script
list notecards;
 
default
{
     state_entry() {
          integer i = 0;
 
          // read the title of each notecard into a list
          for(i=0;i<llGetInventoryNumber(INVENTORY_NOTECARD);i++) {
          notecards = (notecards=[]) + notecards + [llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_NOTECARD,i)];
          }
 
 
          llListen(command_channel, "", "", ""); // listen for a dialog button press
 
          }
 
     touch_start(integer total_number)
     {
          llDialog(llDetectedKey(0), message, notecards, command_channel); // present the dialog
     }
 
     listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string message) {
          if (llListFindList(notecards, (list)message) != -1) { // this is a valid notecard
          llGiveInventory(id, message); // give the user the notecard
     }
}
 
     changed(integer changed_bitfield) {
          // if the object's inventory changes, reset the script
          if (changed_bitfield == CHANGED_INVENTORY) {
               llResetScript();
          }
     }
}

I coded up a quick app that allows you to great a group of twitterers and see their latest tweet on a mobile-friend page. Check it out.

Comments are welcome!