Food for thought from TheHuey

This is a follow-up post to my last post Microsoft is desperate. After writing up a quick Anagram solver for Chicktionary, I’ve fixed up the script to handle some other games as well. Now the new GreaseMonkey script can help with Flexicon, Clink, CrossWire and Dingbats. To get the most out of them (for Club Live), you should
(more…)

While reading the business news on NYTimes today I noticed an appealing ad for an anagram game at Microsoft’s new club.live.com offering. After clicking over and playing their little game, I realized that they are trying to artificially boost their search volume. Most of the games are somewhat intellectual and requires some searching to come up with answers, this is fine and all, but the game Chicktionary fires off a search for every word attempt. This and the fact that they are awarding ‘points’ for the play seems to point at a desperate grab by MS to increase their daily search volume. The implied value of their points is rather high, you can get a Xbox 360 game machine for 35,000 points. Seems to peg 100 points at over $1. Games award between 10 to 20 points from what I have seen so far.

They must have just launched this because I played 1 game of Clink and actually made their high score list! Seems like the existing scores are all random inserts.

I wonder how long before this hits the news? You can find more at Microsoft is Desperate

Monkey See. I was poking around Flickr recently and was amazed at the amount of ‘Interesting Photos’ that users have tagged. Some of the sunsets and scenery photos are absolutely stunning. Naturally, I wanted to fetch and use it as my desktop background. However, (understandably) Flickr doesn’t like people downloading (or referring directly to the images) so they have gone to some lengths to obfuscate and hide the actual image url. If you try to right-click and copy image source, you get an annoying little image called spaceball.gif. How does Monkey get around this?

Monkey Do. Having recently downloaded and installed the GreaseMonkey plugin for FireFox, I searched and couldn’t find a suitable userscript to handle the situation. Being the obsessive type, I went ahead and wrote two quick scripts to help me get at the actual image urls. One, ‘Flickr Img Src Exposer‘, exposes the image url on an individual photo. It adds a link ‘IMG LINK’ underneath the image allowing for easy copying. The second script, ‘Flickr Download Links‘, works when you are exploring the last 7 days’ interesting photos. I got tired of clicking on each photo and then saving the image, so I put a ‘LINK’ under each photo in the page. Clicking on the link takes you to a gallery of all the available image sizes. You can click on the download link to get the image downloaded or copy the images source from the image displayed. The largest size may not be available and you’ll find out if so after clicking on it. I chose not to display the largest image size to save Flickr some bandwidth.

Monkey no get spaceball.gif. This has proved somewhat useful for me and I thought I’d share it with others. You can find the scripts on ‘http://userscripts.org‘.