Adding Shortcuts to Yahoo! Mail

I find it annoying that Yahoo! Mail doesn't provide more keyboard shortcuts, especially for tasks performed all the time, like going to the previous/next message, or replying to an email. If you are using Firefox, you can fix this right now:

1. Install the Greasemonkey plugin (click on the link for the latest version in the box in the upper right section of the page)
2. Restart Firefox
3. Load my Yahoo! Mail Keyboard Short Greasemonkey script (click on this link)
4. Go to Tools / Install User Script and click OK

That's all. The available shortcuts are always displayed at the bottom of a page when you view an email. As shown in this screenshot.

Known bug: The shortcut list at the bottom of the page appears twice. If you figure why this is, please let me know!

GMail Not Fixed Yet

On the web, we want to be in control. In particular we want to choose the email address we are using. Why are some free email providers trying to force us to use emails at their own domain. As Ashutosh Kadakia noted in his blob:

It’s seemingly unprofessional to use free email accounts and furthermore it may confuse people that email me. If they send a message to me@askthefool.com and get a reply a few days later from askthefool@gmail.com they may not put the two together.

His solution is to access his GMail account through POP3 and send emails with his address of choice through his own SMTP server. Of course, that solution has limitations: what happens if he wants to access his email from another machine? He will be able to access his email just fine through the GMail web interface, but not to send emails from his address. Hopefully GMail will recognize that there is a need for this feature and offer it soon. I would even be willing to pay the $20/year Yahoo! is asking for this!

The icon used in this post has been create by multivitamin

Where Is That Which?

Yesterday afternoon I installed Oracle 10g on my Windows notebook. After doing so, I notice that typing java on the command line run Java 1.4.2_03, while I had version 1.4.2_07 just a moment ago. So I type which java; it tells me that the java.exe is the one in \windows\system32 (apparently Oracle decided to overwrite a pre-existing copy of java.exe that I had in \windows\system32). At this point you might be wondering: What is this which command? Did't the guy say he was running on Windows? Is he using cygwin? This is no cygwin, just a batch file written by my friend and Windows guru Dan Small, and published here with his permission. How to install? Copy the code below into a file called which.bat and put the file somewhere in your PATH. Enjoy!

@echo off
setlocal ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION

if "%1" equ "" (
 echo %0 file to find on path
) else if "%~nx1" neq "%1" (
 echo %1
) else (
 set exts=%~x1
 if "!exts!" equ "" set exts=%pathext:;= %
 for %%i in ( !exts! ) do (
   set name=%~n1%%%i
   for %%j in ( !name! ) do (
     set fqn=%%~$PATH:j
     if "!fqn!" neq "" (
         echo !fqn!
         goto :EOF
     )
   )
 )
)