wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

Another great tool built using Amazon web services. Pricenoia lets you check prices for the same item (book, DVD etc.) on all the Amazon sites (.com, .ca, .uk etc.) while also showing you a price history.

However, it does miss out by not checking “used and new prices” from third party sellers. This A Camp CD seems cheapest on Amazon.ca if you don’t check out the merchant prices for it on Amazon.com.

December 15th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I’m an unabashed pizzaholic and I’ve been looking for decent pizza in the Seattle area for a while now. I finally found one worthy of a repeat visit. Many repeat visits in fact!

Coyote Creek Pizza Co. in Kirkland and Bellevue have some truly great and unique pizzas. Try the Texas Fajita. It’s as spicy as they claim. If the jalapenos are fresh today then you’re in trouble.

December 14th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I finally fixed the comments for this blog (thanks Sajida). Some obscure MovableType configuration of course.

Finally found help via the MT support forums here.

December 14th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Auto suggest as you type from Google – based on search relevance. Cool enough to make it a part of the default google.com page.

Background on slashdot.

December 14th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I may be one of the last people in Seattle to have a Piroshky at Pike place market. I tried the marzipan, apple cinnamon and potato/cheese/onion Piroshkys. The marzipan one was the best.

Good breakfast.

December 13th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

This is so cool. You’re standing in a store looking at a book or a CD and you wonder what the “real” price is (on Amazon.com of course). Until you manage to set up your cell phone to read the barcode and show you reviews on the Amazon site try www.amabuddy.com.

December 8th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Just finished Half Life 2 and wondering what the heck is going on? See the story timeline here.

And speaking of Half Life, it’s interesting to see the long and convoluted development timeline here.

November 28th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Well, not a bug per se… but an incompatibility. There’s a movable type feature that works on IE, but not on Firefox. In short, there are buttons missing whenver I try to create a new entry using Movable Type. Seems to be a known problem.

October 13th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I’ve been using Firefox more and more now. It’s good enough to make it my primary browser from now. It’s not quite there yet in terms of making it my only web browser. I’m comparing it to IE with my favorite plugin: Avant browser.

The good:
- Extensions in general. These are the key to Firefox’s success. Need an obscure feature that you loved in another browser? Someone’s sure to be already working on it.
- Adblock. Works extremely well. It even stopped flash advertisements.
- Gmail notifier. One step closer to making it as convenient as hotmail with msn messenger installed. Now if only gmail could make deleting mail a single click operation…
- Correct rendering. I was getting so used to IE bugs that I forgot they were there. Until of course I saw pages rendered as they were intended to be.
- Find text on the page. Highlighting as you type. So cool.
- Infinite text resizing. For the people like me who are blind but insist on running at resolutions of 1800×1400 and above

The improvements needed:
- Tabbed browsing. Avant had it right. I installed an extension for tabs, but it’s still missing features. I want middle clicked URLs to load in the background not foreground. When I close a tab I want to go to the tab that I was on previously, not the tab that’s next to it on the bar. Bookmarks should open in a new tab by default.
- Search shortcuts. If I type “w 1977″ I should be able to look up the search term 1977 in the search engine of my choice (w would make to wikipedia in this case). I know that the search bar allows switching search engines. But I don’t want to touch the mouse. I want to ALT-D to the address bar and type in a search query using a specific engine. Again, Avant had this done right.
- Search bar is too small and can’t be resized. And for some reason I can’t see my search history.
- Usability overall. Many options and tweaks are obscure and it’s not clear what they do without some trial and error. I can live with this but if the browser is to become mainstream, it needs a little work in this area.

October 13th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Two very interesting articles on the “long tail” phenomenon of online sales for retailers like Amazon.com.

Venture blog has a post on the death of the 80/20 rule and Wired has an article about something very similar. Credit goes to Amazon’s personalization team for pioneering the use of product recommendations.

October 11th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Very nice! A gmail notifier for Firefox is available. Just tried it, and it works perfectly. This browser is growing on me.

October 8th, 2004 | | | Comments Off