Eddie Awad's Blog » Firefox

★ Add These Oracle Related Search Engines to Google Chrome

Eddie Awad — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:00:12 +0000

A while ago I created and published a bunch of Oracle related search engine plugins for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Google Chrome did not exist then. Now that Google Chrome is rising in popularity, here is how you can create and use these Oracle search engines in your Chrome browser.

Unlike Firefox and IE, Chrome does not have a separate browser search bar. It has only one bar, the address bar (sometimes called the “omnibox”). It sits at the top of the browser window and doubles as a search box. You can use it in many different ways.

You access and use your search engines from the address bar. To manually add, edit, or remove search engines, follow these steps:

Right-click anywhere inside the address bar
Click on “Edit search engines…” on the pop-up menu
Click “Add…” on the Search Engines window

(Here is another way to get to the Search Engines window)

Now, let’s add the Oracle Blogs search engine. Copy/paste or type the following in each of the “Add Search Engine” fields:

Name: Oracle Blogs
Keyword: ob
URL: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=006891324877144204544%3Akvrje889mqc&ie=UTF-8&q=%s

Click OK to create the search engine. By the way, you can enter anything you want in the Name and Keyword fields. I usually like the Keyword to be very short and the Name to be descriptive.

The fastest way to use the search engine you just created is to hit Ctrl + L (this will take the cursor to the address bar), type in the search engine’s keyword (ob in this example) followed by a Tab, enter your search query and hit Enter.

To create the rest of the Oracle related search engines, follow the same steps described above and copy/paste the corresponding URL from the list below:

Oracle Forums: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=006891324877144204544%3Aqdnd3hjcj8u&ie=UTF-8&q=%s
Oracle Sites: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=006891324877144204544%3Abohrbm812ik&ie=UTF-8&q=%s
AskTom: http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/asktom.search?p_string=%s
Oracle Documentation – All versions: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/print_hit_summary?search_string=%s
Oracle DB 9.0.1 Docs: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db901/db901.drilldown?word=%s
Oracle DB 9.2 Docs: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db92/db92.drilldown?word=%s
Oracle DB 10.1 Docs: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db10g/search?remark=quick_search&word=%s
Oracle DB 10.2 Docs: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/search?remark=quick_search&format=ranked&word=%s
Oracle DB 11.1 Docs: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db111/search?remark=quick_search&word=%s
Oracle DB 11.2 Docs: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db112/search?remark=quick_search&word=%s
Oracle DB 10.2 Error Messages: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/error_search?search=%s
Oracle DB 11.2 Error Messages: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db112/error_search?search=%s
Oracle DB 10.2 Virtual Book: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/search?remark=advanced_search&format=ranked&vbook=1&word=%s
Oracle DB 11.1 Virtual Book: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db111/vbook?search=%s
Oracle DB 11.2 Virtual Book: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db112/vbook?search=%s

This post was brought to you by:

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★ 6 Interesting Things You May Have Missed on 2010-07-28

Eddie Awad — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:03:23 +0000

We All Are One (Oracle Technology Network Blog)

On July 27, Oracle completed the migration of all non-obsolete content from developers.sun.com, java.sun.com, and BigAdmin to a completely re-architected, re-designed Oracle Technology Network site. This site – which offers different entry points for Java Developers, Database Admins and Developers, System Admins and Developers, and Architects – reflects the full diversity of this huge technical end-user community.
Oracle's Ellison Tops List of 25 Highest Paid CEOs of Decade

Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of software maker Oracle Corp., topped the list of best-paid executives of public companies during the past decade, receiving $1.84 billion in compensation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of CEO pay.
How to Conduct Effective Code Reviews

Code reviews are very important in any software project. More often only "superficial" reviews happen, the types where you get review comments like, "You know the documentation for that method doesn't have the version number", or "this variable is unused", etc. Although this is an essential part of any code review, it doesn't cover the subtle aspects of a real code review. It takes more than just a static code analyzer to perform a good code review. In this article the author shares a few points on how to make code reviews really effective.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love SSH

Before there were VPNs, there was ssh. And when you don’t have access to your VPN or can’t set one up, you can still get most of the functionality over ssh.
Firebug is beautiful

Firebug is one of the most famous extension for the Firefox web browser. In the past years, the functionalities offered by this plugin alone sold Firefox as the platform for web development over Internet Explorer (besides the respect of W3C standards that characterized Firefox). Then, Chrome had not been invented yet and when it was released, it incorporated some of the innovations of Firebug like a functional JavaScript console.
Tuning Linux for Oracle

Partition Alignment, Choosing a file system, Optimizing ext3, Enabling Huge Pages, Using Async and Direct IO, Tuning Swapping Priority and more.

★ Where Is That Oracle Virtual Book?

Eddie Awad — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:00:42 +0000

The advanced search in Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) documentation library gives you the option to format search results into a virtual book.

This is a nice little feature that formats your search results as a single combined table of contents, making it easier to scan through similar topics from different books. For example here is a virtual book about materialized views. It took about 15 seconds for the search engine to return results formatted as a virtual book, not very fast.

What about Oracle Database 11g?
It seems that the virtual book option is missing from the Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) documentation library. I could not find it on the advanced search page. If it is there and I missed it, please let me know. Until then, I figured out a simple way to transform an 11g search result into a virtual book. Just append “&vbook=1″ to the end of the search results URL. For example:

http://www.oracle.com/pls/db111/search?word=materialized+view
http://www.oracle.com/pls/db111/search?word=materialized+view&vbook=1

Even though the virtual book format option is not exposed on the advanced search page, it is mentioned and explained on the 11g search help page. Hmm!

You could also bookmark this page http://www.oracle.com/pls/db111/vbook and use it whenever you want to generate a virtual book for any search term.

A new search plugin
Finally, the easiest option of all is to install the Oracle DB 11.1 Virtual Book search plugin in your browser (Firefox or IE7). If you use Google Chrome, here are the instructions on how to add a new search engine.

★ New RSS Feed for Oracle Database 10g Documentation Search

Eddie Awad — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:00:10 +0000

How do you create an RSS feed for a web page that does not have one? you use Dapper. That’s what I did with the Oracle database 10gR2 search result page. I used the Dapper generated RSS feed for this page in my oradoc Ubiquity command.

John already had an RSS feed for the 11g documentation search results. He commented on my Ubiquity post:

A lot of the potential RSS goodness is tied up with the Web 2.0-style stuff in the 11g library. E.g. there are URLs for RSS feeds for new books, but have to find the right place(s) in the UI to link to them; for example, perhaps in the left navigation bar for each book. But the RSS feed for search results doesn’t have such dependencies, so it shouldn’t be a problem to backport.

So, a few days later, John email me the URL for the 10gR2 documentation search results RSS feed:

http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/search?word=search_term&format=rss

and for 11gR1 it is:

http://www.oracle.com/pls/db111/search?word=search_term&format=rss

I have updated the oradoc Ubiquity command to use the new 10gR2 feed.

Thanks John, you rock!

★ New Ubiquitous Ways to Search Oracle Documentation and More

Eddie Awad — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:40:39 +0000

If you use Firefox, you’re in for a treat. If not, please download it and resume reading about Ubiquity and how you can use it to query the Oracle database documentation library and do other neat stuff using simple commands.

Jake was struggling to define it, but basically, Ubiquity is a Firefox extension, a powerful one. Here is a short video that gives you an introduction to what it can do.

Cool, isn’t it? Go ahead, install Ubiquity 0.1.1 and give it a whirl.

OK, now that you have Ubiquity enabled in your Firefox browser, visit the following page:

http://awads.net/firefox/ubiquity/commands/ubiquity.html

When you are on that page, you will get a message offering you the choice of subscribing to my Ubiquity commands which are also listed on the page.

Currently, I have only one command: oradoc. It is similar to Don’s command but it has the added feature of displaying the search results in Ubiquity’s preview area.

Currently the preview is for Oracle database 11g and 10g documentation libraries. This was possible because John provided an RSS feed for DB 11g search results. I used Dapper to create the DB 10g search results feed.

I use and parse the feeds in the command code to generate the preview using jQuery’s AJAX and XML Goodness.

By the way, you can use Ubiquity’s “search” command to search with your Oracle Search Plugins, or other search plugins, installed in your browser’s search bar.

Here is a short screencast that demonstrates how to use the oradoc Ubiquity command and shows you other neat Ubiquity features: Click here to see the screencast.

★ AskTom Search Engine Plugin Revived

Eddie Awad — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:49:10 +0000

I went to AskTom to add the site’s search engine to my Firefox’s Search Bar but too bad the search engine link was broken:

So, I went ahead and created a new AskTom search engine plugin.

If you are browsing this page in Firefox 2 or above or IE7 or above, click here to install the AskTom search plugin.

Check out this page for more Oracle related search engine plugins.

★ MetaSearch Using Oracle MetaLink Search Plus

Eddie Awad — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:00:55 +0000

Oracle MetaLink Search Plus is a very useful Greasemonkey script. It adds links to more search options from inside the Oracle Metalink search results page.

What does this script do?

After you install the script (see below for instructions), whenever you use the Quick Find to search for something on MetaLink, links are added just below the Quick Find search bar. The links are shortcuts to search results using the following search engines: Oracle documentation, blogs, public forums and mailing lists, AskTom, search.oracle.com and Google. Clicking on a link will open the corresponding search results page in a new window. The search is executed based on the search term that you have entered in the MetaLink Quick Find search box; You do not have to re-enter your search term.

How do I install the script?

Follow these three steps in order:

Install Firefox: If you do not use the Firefox browser, now is a great time to switch. Skip this step if you already have Firefox, otherwise download and install it from mozilla.com.
Install Greasemonkey: This is a Firefox extension that will allow you to manage and run user scripts from within the Firefox browser. User scripts are bits of JavaScript code that allow you to customize the way a web page displays or functions. Skip this step if you already have this extension installed, otherwise download and install it from addons.mozilla.org. Make sure you restart Firefox after you install Greasemonkey.
Install Oracle MetaLink Search Plus: Just click on this link and then click the install button. It will be added to the list of available user scripts as shown below:

How do I use the script?

Just login to MetaLink and simply perform a search from the Quick Find bar.

Who created the script?

I did. I added links to the most common Oracle related search engines in addition to Google, but if you have other suggestions please let me know.

Are there other useful user scripts out there?

Yes. there are hundreds of user scripts on userscripts.org. From the screen shot above you can see that I use a couple of them: Google Cached Text and Google Cache Continue. I wrote an article a few months ago about how you can use these two user scripts to browse the Web safely and anonymously.

★ Add Any Search Engine to Your Browser, The Easy Way

Eddie Awad — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:00:13 +0000

Whether you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, you probably know about this handy search box usually located at the top right corner of your browser window. This search box puts search engines at your fingertips and makes them easily available to you whenever you need them.

I have recorded a short three and a half minute screencast, with voice, that shows you how you can add any search engine to your browser’s search box, in just four clicks: Continue reading...

★ Oracle Bookmarklets, Search Plugins and New Features Updated

Eddie Awad — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:00:54 +0000

The following now support Oracle Database 11g Release 1:

Moreover, the index of What’s New since Oracle Database 9i Release 1 now includes 11g Release 1.

(Thanks Yas)

★ Here is A Different And Handy Way to Search in Your Browser

Eddie Awad — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:45:16 +0000

Whether you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, you probably know about this handy search box usually located at the top right corner of your browser window.

And if you are a long time reader of my blog, you probably know about the handy Oracle related search plugins that allow you to search Oracle documentation, sites, forums and blogs.

But, what you probably do not know is that any active search engine you set in the search box will be automatically added to your mouse context menu that pops up when you highlight and right-click text on a web page. This is all done by default and without requiring any additional Add-on like ConQuery for example.

I noticed this Firefox-only feature by coincidence the other day. So here is an example of how it works:

Select a search type from the list of search engines, for example Oracle 10.2 Docs:

Right-click a highlighted text on any web page:

Notice the search Oracle 10.2 Docs for “the highlighted text” option. Very handy indeed.

Now, change the search type to Oracle Blogs for example:

Highilight and right-click text to read what the Oracle bloggers have written about it.

One other way to accomplish a similar functionality for Oracle specific searches is to use these Oracle bookmarklets that work in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.