A hint to the programmers at paypal: When your feedback form is too fragile to accept more than a sentence or two, DON'T TRY AND TELL ME IT'S MY FAULT. I couldn't even tell paypal about the issue, because their feedback system is so crap.

In other annoying trying-to-contact people news, I am having to try and contact someone else's web hosting company, and all I have is an email address. However, I am told that they do not read their emails because they get too many of them. In a web hosting company. Brilliant.

So I finally got my "set feed channel opacity relative to the unread count of that channel" script to work on Google Reader via XBL and the DOM, instead of relying on the names of functions and variables within google's code. The result being that the script should continue to work even after google makes changes to their code.

Installing it is not too hard, and is done thusly (I assume you're using firefox, although in theory any mozilla-based browser will work):

• Download this XML file to Firefox's resource folder. For mac, this is /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/res. For windows, this will be something like C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\res.
  Linux users can hopefully figure out the eqivalent path, as I don't have a linux box handy.
   
• Add the following code to your userContent.css file (in your profile directory):

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://www.google.com/reader/view/"){ li.unread > a > span > span:last-child{ -moz-binding: url('resource:/res/greader_binding.xml#item_filter'); } }

Thanks to Mihai Parparita for pointing me in the right direction (I'd never heard of XBL before this...)

Sometimes my computer vision class can be a bit slow. This can lead to random explanation diagrams that are perhaps more detailed than necessary.

In fact, I doubt I really needed a diagram at all to remind me what a ground-plane is. But there you go ;)

So I recently switched from Bloglines over to the newly-redesigned Google Reader. I miss having email subscriptions, but Google reader is so much better in other ways that it's totally worth it.

Being who I am, it wasn't long before I figured out how to write a greasemonkey script to do much the same thing as I already did for bloglines. Google (being the cunning folks that they are) don't make it easy. Their javascript code is immense, and it's clearly been run through a compressor which strips out any verbosity (and meaning) in the code - all variables are random sequences of one or two characters, and there are no comments or formatting.

But I managed, eventually. The problem is now that every time google makes the slightest change to their code, the variable and function names all jump around again, and I have to re-do my script. This is incredibly frustrating. Does anyone know how people got around this when making gmail greasemonkey extensions?

Update: Huzzah, I got it working :)