Fix out of sync subtitles with Angular

In what seems to be a never ending series of posts on how to fix out of sync subtitles… here’s how to do it using Angular! 🙂

First things first: here’s a link to the webpage that you can use to fix your out of sync subtitles. Just go there and follow the instructions, it’s really easy. Trust me, I’m the author 😛

A little background on why I made that page. About a year and a half ago I started toying around with AngularJS, because we decided to re-write the SketchTogether HTML client in it. Since I’m mostly taking care of the server side of the app, I spent a lot more time reading Angular code than writing it; even if I think I got the basic concepts relatively quickly, I wanted to have some first-hand experience with the library to really grasp what it means to develop an app with it, even if just a basic one.

Since back in those days I was fiddling with a toy python script to fix out of sync subtitles, I decided that it could have been fun to do the same thing in Angular. I wrote a rough implementation of the script’s functionality in about two weeks of my off time (about 10 very fragmented hours all in all, and I must say I was happy with it, considering how Angular is known for its steep learning curve), and left it there. Fast forward to 4 months ago, I decided to make it look a little prettier, and publish it on GitHub. And then, it took me 4 more months to find the time to write this blog post about it on a Sunday night 😛

My experience with Angular so far has been positive. For one thing, it’s not as hard to create a non-trivial webpage with it as most people want you to believe. Data binding can get you pretty far, and it’s relatively straightforward (one basic thing that left me wondering though is the from-dashed-to-camelCase directive name auto-conversion… that felt a bit like unneeded magic to me).

It does get a bit convoluted when your application grows and you want to add some piece of functionality that’s like 4 lines of code in jQuery, but which takes a new directive definition, changes to the HTML, and maybe a new scope, just to follow the Angular way. But then again, it could be my limited knowledge of the library (which I intend to keep expanding, because there’s so much to learn!).

As with most things Javascript, there tends to be an oversupply of sub-libraries to do pretty much anything. For subslider.js, for example, I found a lot of angular plugins to take care of pagination, with no clear winner. The same applies for drag-and-drop support (which in the end was implemented as a directive in the app). It really takes some time to simply understand which of the many plugins suits you best… just look at how many plugins are listed by ngmodules!

Oh, and one last thing. The “there should be a dot in your model” rule should be re-stated everywhere in the documentation. Once you really understand what it is about, you experience one of the major bumps in the famous “feelings about angular over time” graph from this post 🙂

Logging in Javascript and filtering by tag

I’m not a fan of loggers in general when it comes to simplicity. They all require you to spend (waste) some time on understanding their configuration syntax, maybe dealing with XML files (what am I, a caveman? :P), and they often require you to adapt to their philosophy. By that I mean, there’s plenty of questions on StackOverflow similar to this, and I definitely share this guy‘s feeling about the issue.

In Javascript, I’ve seen some libraries for logging, and they all look quite complicated to set up. Or, quite complicated considering it’s Javascript we’re talking about. JSLog doesn’t require that much configuration, but most of the times I don’t even care about log levels in JS “apps”, I just want to filter messages according to their context. So I may be interested in all ajax-related logs at some point, but not in DOM manipulation messages. At some other time, I may be interested in DOM manipulation logs, but not in ajax-related messages. These can be though of as log tags (the “DOM” tag, the “ajax” tag, the “user-input” tag, and so on).

A quick and dirty way to deal with all of this is to define some Log functions named after the “context” in which they’re called, and assign them to a no-op function when you want to filter them out.

In Chrome, these could be the log functions (let’s say they’re stored in log.js):

function Log() {
}

Log.message = function(message) {
    console.log(message);
};

Log.dom = Log.ajax = Log.message;

Then, throughout your code, you may have calls like:

Log.dom('adding sidebar');
// in some other place...
Log.ajax('new msg received from server');

All you need to do to disable e.g., all ajax logs, is just change the Log.ajax function to a no-op in log.js, like this:

Log.ajax = function(){};

you can even do it live using the Chrome Developer Tools!

So a question could be: aren’t those calls to a no-op function expensive? Javascript function calls are expensive, right? Why not add a flag like this:

if (logAjaxEnabled) {
   Log.ajax('new msg received from server');
}

to all log calls?

Well, it’s a pain to add all those checks, that’s why 🙂

And your mileage may vary, but in all browsers I’ve tested, calling a no-op is not that bad. It’s way worse than using the flag, but it’s in the same ballpark (assuming you’re not writing some very CPU intensive code), and it’s WAY less painful to use, cause you don’t need to write all those if statements.

I put together a dumb benchmark on JSPerf to see what’s the performance drawback for using this method, you can try it!

It’s also interesting to note how browser performances for something like this vary that wildly.. ah, the JS world!

I’m sure I’m not discovering anything here (I mean, just look at the first few links for a simple Google query like this), but I haven’t seen this approach being used that much (filtering by context, and not by log level). It’s something very close to what Android’s LogCat does, and I really like it!

Change page styles with Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey

This is not a guide, as you can find plenty of them on the web (well, at least for Greasemonkey)…

This is more of a quick and dirty solution to the problem “I just want this thing to be bigger/smaller/a different color” for some web page, and I’m highlighting the word “dirty” here 🙂

I’ll take feedly as an example.

I’m enjoying feedly as a replacement for Google Reader, but I can’t stand its oh-so-narrow central frame when I’m on a 1080p 24” screen.

This is how I “fixed” that.

First, you’ll want to produce the final result you’re aiming for with chrome/firefox developer tools; in Chrome:

1. right-click on the element whose look you want to change and choose “Inspect element”
2. move the mouse pointer up and down in the developer tools frame until you see a blueish highlight over the element you want to edit
3. take note of the element’s type (a <div>, a <p>, a <span>, an <img>, whatever it is) , id or class
4. use the developer tools to change its looks (just add a custom style on the right under element.style)

Google’s official tutorial on the subject is here.

Once you’ve got a decent looking page (in my case I changed some width and max-width attributes) you’re ready to create a greasemonkey/tampermonkey script that automatically applies those changes for you when you visit that page.

First, install greasemonkey or tampermonkey.

Then, create a new script (tampermonkey has a small icon with a page and a green plus on the top bottom right corner). In the header, the important tag is @match, which tells tampermonkey which pages this script must apply to (in my case, http://cloud.feedly.com/*).

Then, you can copy & paste this piece of code (that I found on the web, it’s used by many user scripts):

function addGlobalStyle(css) {
    var head, style;
    head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    if (!head) { return; }
    style = document.createElement('style');
    style.type = 'text/css';
    style.innerHTML = css;
    head.appendChild(style);
}

It’s a function you can call to add CSS rules to the page’s final CSS style.

Then, just call the function for all the styles you want to change using the CSS rules you found at step 3 before, in my case:

addGlobalStyle('.entryBody { max-width: 900px !important; }');
addGlobalStyle('#feedlyFrame { width: 1230px !important; }');
addGlobalStyle('#feedlyPage { width: 900px !important; }');
addGlobalStyle('.entryBody .content img { max-width: 850px !important; width: auto !important; height: auto !important; max-height: 600px !important;}');

All the !important markers are the dirty part: unless the page’s author used those herself (bad, bad author! :P) that tag ensures that your styles are being applied, no matter what. The great thing about !important (which is also the very bad thing) is that it makes styles overwrite definitions even if they’re specified within a style attribute in the element itself!
For example, in:

<div class="wide" style="width: 800px;">

the width value is always overridden by a CSS rule like this:

.wide {
  width: 900px !important;
}

which is both awesome and awful depending on the context 🙂
Feedly has some style definitions like that, and that’s why I needed the !important flags.

Then, save the script and test it!

You can do a lot more than just stuffing your filthy CSS code, of course. I found this great userscript that makes feedly look like google reader (isn’t that what we all want from an RSS reader?), and if you look at the code the author works around the style problem by adding event listeners for DOMNodeInserted, because feedly has a webpage that is built with DOM manipulation performed by javascript. Much more sophisticated 🙂

The lesson here is: search userscripts.org first, and only then create your hacks!

Change default date range in Google Analytics

I don’t know the reason why Google chose to set the default date range to the last 30 days excluding the current date (maybe I’m the only one interested in today’s stats), but it’s definitely annoying not having the option to change that default.

There used to be a bookmarklet to overcome the issue, but I’ve not been able to find an update for that after Google’s changed how URLs are managed in Analytics.

So, here’s the update 🙂

The “easiest” way I found to make a bookmarklet works like this:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account
2. Look at the URL, it should be something like https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en&#home/a12345678w12345678p12345678/
3. Copy the last portion of the URL, in the example it’s a12345678w12345678p12345678
4. Open a text editor, copy & paste this code on a new file you can call analytics.html

   <html>
   <head></head>
   <body><a target="_blank" href="javascript:(function(){function d(a){a=String(a);a.length<2&&(a='0'+a);return a}var c=new Date,b='';b+=c.getFullYear();b+=d(c.getMonth()+1);b+=d(c.getDate());location.href='https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?#report/visitors-overview/a12345678w12345678p12345678/%3F_u.date00%3D'+b+'%26_u.date01%3D'+b+'/=';})();">Google Analytics</a></body>
   </html>
   

5. Replace a12345678w12345678p12345678 in the file with the code you copied at step 3
6. Save the file and open it with your browser (tested with Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac OSX)
7. Drag the link to your bookmarks bar

Don’t delete/move/rename the HTML file if you’re using Chrome or Firefox, for some reason they need it even after you’ve added the bookmarklet.

This bookmarklet sets the date range to today only, you can play with the javascript to change that (now only b is used, you’d need to create a new Date and set it at the end of the URL). Also, it takes you to the visitors overview page, you can change that by looking at the other pages’ URLs.

Steps 2, 3 and 5 are not technically needed, in that if you leave the bogus URL I put in the code, Analytics is going to tell you that something’s wrong with your credentials, but will set the date anyway (and update that part of the URL). I guess that’s your session ID, so I’m not sure if it’s better to use an existing one or just leave the dummy and let Analytics generate a new one every time. It’s probably hackish to use an old session ID, but it gets rid of the warning dialog and it works!

Ok, this was to create a bookmarklet, but what I actually did was create a Chrome Extension that does the same thing, but has an icon and most of all is listed on the new tab page. If anybody is interested in that, let me know in the comments and I’ll add a new post to explain how it’s done :).

[Edit – June 27]: so here’s the promised extension