Google on Lorenzo Bolla

500 on YouTube on non-existing videos

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Now, this is embarassing… It looks like requesting a non-existent video on YouTube causes a "500 Internal Server Error"!

For example:

Valid url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5CeNunbHto
Invalid url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtf

Surely, a better response would be something like the one returned when the videoId is missing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=. It seems like predictions became true.

Case sensitive Google search

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Google does not support "case sensitive" searches (and here and here). It does seem to return slightly different results depending on the case of the search query, but if you are only interested in the exact "case sensitive" matches you're on your own.

To solve this problem, I've written a small Javascript snippet that shades results from Google searches if not exactly matching the case-sensitive search query.

You can download it as:

Secure GMail Notifier

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

As you might have noticed, GMail Notifier uses the url http://mail.google.com/mail to access your personal mailbox. This is quite annoying for who cares about security. Here is a simple hack to make it use the secure url https://mail.google.com/mail. (It works for the Windows version - for the Mac version there is already a solution).

Create a backup copy of gnotifier.exe (usually in c:Program FilesGoogleGmail Notifier);
Open gnotifier.exe with an hex editor (emacs hexl-find-file will do);
Find the string http://mail.google.com/mail and substitute it with https://mail.google.com/mail;
Save the file;
Close any running GMail Notifier and launch it again.

Yes, it is as simple as that.