The recap will be brief.

Updated the Safari extension. It now shows 5 releases in the toolbar instead of 3. And the design now matches Safari 8.

Source code on GitHub.

Install extension.

Hooray, it finally happened. TELE2 launched 3G in Saint Petersburg today. They will enable it for everyone gradually over 3 weeks, but if you can’t wait, you can call 611 and ask the operator to turn it on right now. I’ll leave this screenshot here so that in a couple of months I can measure the speed again and compare whether it got better or worse :) They say they want to launch LTE in summer 2015. Progress finally reached TELE2.

I finally updated my work Hackintosh from OS X 10.9 to 10.10. It took a lot of time. Here is how I did it and what problems I ran into.

Once browsers realize that a site can be opened over https, they no longer want to open it over plain http. Firefox and Chrome definitely behave like that. VKontakte is an example. And once a site is opened over https, some resources on the page may still be loaded over http, but not Javascript files. Those get blocked and must be loaded over https only.

Today I was making a simple iframe app for VK. Basically it was just a lightly styled php page into which I inserted the php code of a ticket booking and purchase system. After setting the URL in the VK app, I discovered that VK works over HTTPS and my page was also trying to load over HTTPS. Since my server did not support https, I had to configure it.

I got the certificate from StartSSL for free. I configured everything, everything started working (my blog could now also be opened as https://arm1.ru — I turned that off and left only http for now, because all Disqus comments and social-media likes broke :) and I do not really need https on that domain anyway), hallelujah, the script started loading. But the PHP code of the ticket system essentially returns its own HTML, and that HTML loads various js code over http. Since that gets blocked, nothing works again :) It is a hellish chain, really. VK -> iframe -> my server -> ticket server. Now I am waiting for them to set up https on their side and serve all js code over it.

But I did get a couple of useful lessons out of it.

1. Whenever possible, load external js not as “http://site.com/code.js” but as “//site.com/code.js”. The // means “use the current connection protocol”. The browser handles the check, so you do not need to check the protocol in code yourself.
2. Experience gained from bringing up and configuring https on my own server. Two guides so I do not lose them:
   1. Getting a free SSL certificate (via StartSSL).
   2. Configuring an HTTPS server in nginx.

Now the main thing is not to forget that in a year the SSL certificate will need to be renewed.

I stop by Funkysouls from time to time looking for new music. I scroll through the first few pages, check the tags to see whether it might be interesting, then copy the artist name, go to VK or Yandex.Music, paste it there, and listen to a couple of tracks. If I like it, only then do I try to get the album.

I got tired of all that copy-pasting and wrote a Safari extension (I had been wanting to learn how for a while).

The extension does only 2 things:

1. When you open Funkysouls, each release gets 2 Play buttons, as you can see in the screenshot. The red one searches for the artist on Yandex.Music, the blue one searches for the artist on VK. No more copy-pasting. 2 clicks and you are listening.
2. I got slightly carried away while writing it and also added a browser toolbar panel. The extension fetches the site’s RSS feed every 5 minutes and shows the latest 3 releases in the toolbar. So you can follow them without even opening the site. Naturally, if you click a release title in the toolbar, a new tab opens with that release page on Funkysouls.

If you want, you can take the extension code from end.js and button.css, paste it into something like the Control Freak extension in Chrome, and get the same 2 Play buttons in Chrome. I assume you could do the same in Firefox through Greasemonkey.

Source code on GitHub.

Install extension.

I recently made a promo page for Dolphin’s site for a book of poems that is coming out soon. During the discussion I suggested making it in the form of video, so the animations would look nice. Along the way a few nuances surfaced.