Wikipedia Footnotes Bookmarklet And Greasemonkey Script

I’ve recently begun reading Lukas Mathis’ blog, ignore the code – it’s pretty interesting and insightful. I usually read posts from within my feed reader and rarely actually visit a site, so I missed this neat script he has, which pops up a small ‘floating’ div when the reader hovers over the footnote superscript number. He explains why he does this as well as how on his post titled Footnotes. He's also modified his script to create a bookmarklet for Daring Fireball.

The first thing I thought was, this would be pretty useful for Wikipedia articles, where there are usually tons of citations and references. So I adapted the bookmarklet for Wikipedia. Now you probably wouldn’t want to load the bookmarklet for every Wikipedia page, especially if you really do read the citations often. So I’ve also modified the script for use with Greasemonkey.

This is what you should get after you use either of these scripts:

You’ll find both scripts on the project page on my site (along with some basic instructions on setup). Or if that’s too many page views in a day for you, this is the bookmarklet which you should bookmark, and this is a direct link to install the Greasemonkey script from userscripts.org.

The idea and most of the code, are both courtesy Lukas; I’ve only tweaked it a bit for use with Wikipedia. Any mistakes are mine. And JavaScript isn’t really my forte so the code is probably not as elegant as it could be. All the same, it works for me (the bookmarklet on Firefox and Chrome; the GM script on Firefox only, of course and Chrome 4. IE, with it’s non-standard event handling isn’t supported); if you do have some problems getting it to work, let me know.

 UPDATE [0006 01 May 2010]: Wow! The script was featured on everybody's favorite productivity and tips site Lifehacker, and I've been so busy with dead week, that I didn't even notice! That explains the 507 installs in one day!

 UPDATE [2210 02 May 2010]: Chrome 4 supports Greasemonkey scripts natively and most scripts should work properly; this one in particular does!

Unhandled Win32 Exception Crashes Firefox After Installing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (Just In Time Debugger)

The other day I installed Visual Studio 2005 Pro on my machine at office. A little later, I started Firefox and got this error from the Visual Studio Just In Time Debugger:

An unhandled win32 exception occurred in firefox.exe

I Google'd it and I came across this page on the Firefox support forum. None of the suggestions really worked for me but here's what did:

1. I started Firefox in safe mode
2. In the dialog that came up, I chose to disable all add-ons (you could also Continue in Safe Mode to first check if Firefox does start up and then disable add-ons from there)
3. I started Firefox in 'normal mode' and it worked.
4. I then re-enabled each plugin, one by one, to determine exactly which one was causing the problem.
5. In my case it turned out to be the QuickTest Professional 9.5 Plugin. These other plugins didn't seem to bother VS 2005:
   
   • DOM Inspector
   • Firebug
   • Free Download Mananger plugin
   • Google Toolbar for Firefox
   • IE Tab
   • Java Quick Starter
   • Live HTTP Headers
   • Modify Headers

The other suggestions in the forum said to disable the JIT debugger (doesn't really help, all it does is bring up a dialog saying that no debugger was found!), make a new profile/ reinstall ( I suspect that if this works, it's probably because all the plugins are removed ) and for a couple of people, the problem was with AVG Safe Search/ Search Shield.

So YMMV but this is what worked for me.