How to ungrey "Download to Picasa" on PicasaWeb

I notice that when I run Picasa and "Import from Web Albums," many of the albums never download all of their pictures. For example, in one album that has 373 pictures, Picasa downloads a seemingly random 272 of them. Others who had this problem on-line said that using the "Download to Picasa" link on PicasaWeb (under the "Download" menu) would fix this problem. That is, that link would download all pictures. Unfortunately, all of the "Download" links are greyed out in my browser (Firefox on Linux).

To fix this problem, I installed the Greasemonkey firefox addon and then created this simple Greasemonkey script to trick Google into "ungreying" those download links.

Now I can click "Download to Picasa" and have it download all of those photos. My first trial download hasn't finished yet because it doesn't seem to care that 272 photos have already been downloaded, and so I'm not quite sure what the ultimate outcome will be... However, I think this is progress.

NOTE: For Linux users, adding a single line to the file ~/.mailcap that has in it:

application/x-picasa-detect; false; description=Picasa Installation detection

(in all one line; no wrapping) will also ungrey "Download to Picasa". Unfortunately, that only seems to convince PicasaWeb that Picasa2 is installed. To get all four options ungreyed, the force script is needed.

Is an SPSS monster like a SAS bunny rabbit?

A friend of mine had a Google Talk status of "Now I'm the SPSS monster" today. Lately, I have picked up the contagious habit of making fun of people who use gooey (GUI) SPSS, and so I responded by e-mail, "Is an SPSS monster like a SAS bunny rabbit?" She responded, "Could be. Or an R-invader." I couldn't resist letting this snowball turn into the avalanche it really could be, and so...

Kick S. Way to JMP on that one and even Z-score. Such a rejoinder makes me want to click away to one of the Minitabs of my browser. Phew, all of this stat talk makes me want to regress back into MATLAB; even if I am still centrally limited there, at least I can feel normal again.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to be mean. If I was, I hope you won't log this transformation and hold it against me later. I'm certain I can transcend and function better in the future; a higher power law need not intervene. Hopefully this hypothesis is correct and you will see some significant change. That should help you restore your confidence.

On a different note, I saw some Monte Carlo tulips at the zoo last weekend; it seems risky to have planted those at this time of the season, but hopefully they will Excel. If they do die, I'm afraid this story will have a heavy tail indeed.

By the way, yesterday for graduate appreciation day, Jessie got a coupon for $1 coffee at the expensive campus Starbucks. With the discount, prices are about normal. I guess there is no such thing as a scale free lunch. Shoot, I'm afraid my coffee has gone cold and is starting to taste a little bit like Poisson.

Well, enough of this. I'm sure if you remove the outlier that is e-mail thread, you'll find that the remaining e-mails are far less skewed and better fit the distribution you have come to expect.

I hope all of your days are better than average! --
Ted

There are parts of that that I'm not that excited about, but overall I'm pretty proud of myself.