Firefox

If you have a real browser, it just got easier for you to check your mail. An extension is out that notifies you of how many e-mails are in your Gmail inbox. I just leave a tab open and check the title every so often to see if there's new mail, but this is a great next step.

Sarah Lane posted some links to cool apps that you can use with Gmail.

Among them are a POP client, notification app, e-mail importer, and a registry hack that makes mailto: links go to GMail.

Second, these functionalities that you refer to as "bugs", are in fact functionalities. Microsoft, for the first time in their history, is making a serious push to security. So far, they have released anti-spyware software, upgraded the windows firewall, made significant improvements in IE popup blocking, and they are currently in the works to release a virus definitions. Maybe I missed it, but where are the "bugs"? Don't forget, FireFox has had security holes, Linux has had security holes, Mac has had security holes. ...

For those using Bittorrent, this really scares me. If they’re only targeting people using Bittorrent for movie, music, and application downloads, then why are TV sites pulling themselves offline? Thank goodness a few are sticking around like tvtorrents. Did you hear? The MPAA is blaming BitTorrent on the illegal Star Wars vid floating around. Next, they might blame the internet or everyone’s computers for accessing the internet. Blame the people who misuse it, not the software itself.

The first search I attempted was for something legal, Firefox. The entire site, front page and results page, look a lot like Google, but I suppose that's typical of most any search engine these days. Anyway, there were 22 results for Firefox, and not one of them was the latest version. In fact, the latest version I could find was 1.0.2, which is two versions behind.

Somehow, having had a look at some of this stuff, Bleeding Edge is pretty sure it's going to end in bitter disappointment for them. The Web was a great place to find TV programs and download them via BitTorrent - before the studios turned their attention to destroyhing that - but we just can't see it replacing the television set.

You can get a compiled version of firefox for almost any platform (mac osx/linux/windows). Microsoft should really be using their old Internet Explorer strategy and make sure that IE7 runs on all the aforementioned platforms. That is not going to happen though, we all know about IE’s nasty habit of binding to the Windows Operating system.

If you use Firefox, there is a great solution - PDF Download, an extension for Firefox by Denis Remondini, which lets you choose whether you want to view the PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML) or download it.

I’ve just started a new job and they are heavily based on Microsoft technology. Some in the company may not think so, but install a version of the fantastic web browser Mozilla Firefox and watch all the Internet technologies come crumbling down. Internet technologies that should be standard.

What is also interesting about the Netcraft article is that this is the first time an organization such as Netcraft took it's screenshots using the Mozilla Firefox browser rather than Microsoft Internet Explorer.

What's not to love about a band who uses the Mac start-up sound in a track and who openly supports Firefox in their website's opening page?

Jumping forward to the present date we can see a very interesting situation forming. IE has slipped below a 90% market share for the first time in years and Firefox has been quickly rallying support from users across the internet. Whether you are "taking back the web" or rediscovering it, FireFox is en vogue right now with groups as diverse as IBM, web developers, and college campuses. This is due to its tight security, quickness, extensible platform, tabbed browsing, and accurate reproduction of page coding.

Weather forecast plugin for firefox now has doppler radar and severe weather alerts. Nice.

Ten people suspected of involvement with the EliteTorrents webserver were served warrants by homeland security agents. According to the U.S. government agency, this is the first criminal enforcement action taken against violators of copyright law who use the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file swapping software. The operation, codenamed D-elite, targeted administrators and content providers working through the EliteTorrents website.

Bram Cohen has posted a beta of a trackerless BitTorrent client. Once it goes final it’s expected to make the MPAA, BSA and RIAA’s elaborate game of litegation Whack-a-Mole even more difficult, as noted by ZDNet Australia. As well as that, it should speed things up, presuming that torrent files will now get wider distribution and swarms will become bigger. Here’s Slashdot’s lowdown:

I've been testing out a great new product called Onfolio 2.0 for about a month now - these guys have done some terrific work.

Onfolio lets you capture website links (like IE favorites), save web content (for offline or permanent reference) and includes a top notch RSS reader. Onfolio integrates with IE and firefox - and is very effective for consolidating web research and staying on top of industry developments.

So we have My Yahoo that everyone knows all about, but now Google has Google Personalized. It is still in beta, but it is a step in the right direction. As soon as they put RSS feeds in, it will be really nice. But the reason I put this is that you can now get a Gmail account. You don't have to have an invite from someone or anything. You just have to go here and then go to Sign in and get an account. Gmail is nice and getting nicer.

So, back to GMail - never before has it put an email from a private address in the Spam folder. However, on this occasion an email request for private assistance went directly in there. Now, I want you to know that I have never hit the "Report Spam" button on any email like this, so I have never trained it for these emails. I simply respond to them suggesting they move back to the forum and let the message float away into the masses of email in my GMail account.

A German court ruled it illegal for Google to use the email domain “gmail.com”, as Golem reports. Google already changed their email’s name to “Google Mail" for German users, but the gmail.com extension prevails so far – now the state court of Hamburg said Google may not offer emails with this extension to German users. Daniel Giersch owns the trademark “Gmail” in Germany and isn’t willing to give up easily. He already rejected an offer from Google to buy the name from him, Giersch said on Golem. I wonder if he should truly have any more rights than to the domain Gmail.de?

In these days of such worthy IE alternatives as Firefox, I’m not sure why anybody would bother wanting to use it, but before you try Netscape 8 (which is not actually related to previous versions), be ware that it breaks IE’s XML capabilities.

Then we get on the subject of standardized specification - something that FireFox and IE can't agree on. FireFox is very rigorious with the way it interprets the javascript language. The problem I ran into is the onChange event for a drop down control. The spec states that the onChange event is only suposed to fire once the value of the control is changed and focus has been lost. FireFox does this. The problem is that IE doesn't, and personally the IE model makes more sense to me. The onChange event fires whenever...

Netcraft is now offering a Firefox version of its excellent anti-phishing Toolbar.

The toolbar runs on any operating system supported by Firefox and displays the hosting location, country, longevity, popularity, and an abstracted risk rating for each site visited.

well since the downfall of #BT on EFNet I have been in depression mode. However, tonight I decided to end the depression and create a pseudo-BTonEFNet by using other torrent sites’ rss feeds. I’m not too sure about the legalities of this, so to take a precaution I won’t be hosting it myself. The site is yet to be named, I have to test it out on the site first since I have a feeling that the outbound rss read may not work properly on all sites. The database tables however are created and it shouldn’t be long before everything is ready to go.

This kind of thing has a limited lifetime, because Bittorrent has gone trackerless. What this means is that once a full copy is out there somewhere, the network becomes very resistant to taking down any particular copy. I’ve written about the MPAA’s problems with this before, but I feel the need to reiterate: this is not something that you can just make go away. It’s not a technology, it’s a technique. The ability to reconstruct a whole from disparate parts, without a central resource means that it doesn’t help to shut...

I have feeds from Blogdigger, IceRocket, MSN, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, Yahoo News, as well as feeds from our customer forums. I read every single one of the posts that come into these feeds. If you forced me to stop using Onfolio (or any other feed reader), this is what I would miss more than anything. Interestingly, these are also the feeds that generate the most junk for me (ads in some, 30% junk rate, etc...). I can live with that to be notified when someone writes something about Onfolio, though!

On the other hand, if well done, free software can be a liberating force in the developing world. Namibia was lucky to have Schoolnet.na, a home-grown organization that focused as much on the human side of computing as the actual hardware.

The Netcraft toolbar is one of my current favorites and now it’s available for Firefox:

New release of Piggy Bank, the Semantic Web extension for Firefox. It harvests data as you browse (when you click a status bar indicator), which can later be searched and viewed in a facetted browser.

One of the headlines they offer is Slashdot. As a frequent visitor to Slashdot, I went ahead and added that headline to my page. The very next day I started Mandriva up, opened Firefox, and there was my new home page…with a notice from Slashdot saying that my news aggregator had been banned. The statement from Slashdot said that this action had been taken because of the frequency of the pulling of headlines. I suppose Google checks for headlines as often as it checks for new mail in Gmail, once a minute. Some servers won’t put up...

Apparently the MPAA, no longer content with getting Spanish academics fired, has decided to up the ante. They’ve convinced the Justice Department to start filing criminal charges against organizers of BitTorrent networks. In a press relase pulished to the interestingly named file starwars52505.htm, (at least they’re honest about what’s really going on) the Department of Homeland Security – who knew? – announced the “First Criminal Enforcement Against BitTorrent Network Users” yesterday. The sad thing is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to defend people who put up torrents of “Revenge of the Sith” six hours before it was released so the important points will, as usual, be overlooked, such as the outright silliness of shutting down networks because to get at criminals use them as means of transport.

More discussion about 'river of news,' this time coming from Nick Bradbury, author of FeedDemon. Looks like the new surfer view has the goodness of the 'river of news' and the some of the interactivity of the Onfolio Newspaper (and it looks nice too). Nice!

It is curious that everyone focuses on open development and open source as the potential source of free software for businesses, when in fact it is also possible that this software will come from business service providers who want you to use their services, and where developers will get paid for their work. It also suggests an alternate business strategy for an organization like Compiere.

By the way, if you're using Firefox/Mozilla, the best RSS Aggregator I've come across after some reading has been Sage. Very nice.

The Elite Torrents network, found online at www.elitetorrents.org, relied on a technology called BitTorrent that allows users to quickly download digital movies and other large files by copying them from many computers at once.

BitTorrent rocks. So many people use it to exchange movies, commercial games and seedy seedy porn. And why not? However, finding torrents has not always been that easy (although suprnova.org made it easier — thanks government for shutting that one down). Anyways, BT inventor Bram Cohen has launched bittorrent.com/ - a sweet BitTorrent search engine.

Some other research on website design showed that high uncertainty avoidance countries prefer restricted options and simple controls, while low uncertainty avoidance countries prefer multiple options and complex controls.

Whats another example? Well I guess I can mention Safari, since I haven't for a while :). Sure Safari is also a "fork" but let's ignore that for a while. The main developer of Safari, David Hyatt, worked on the Netscape, Camino and Firefox browsers prior to working on Safari (and KHTML). The man obviously knows his stuff, and hence MacOS users get a browser that is compliant with the latest web standards (plus it's open source as well). Whoever hired Hyatt was pretty smart. I'd bet than even if Apple didn't get the head start they did from...

And Firefox does have one clear advantage over Galeon: it can read RSS feeds. As I mentioned before, I’m reading RSS with Gnus in XEmacs these days. Which is better than not having an RSS reader, but it feels a little silly, because when a new article appears in a feed, I just click on the link to bring it up in Galeon. So why not eliminate the middle-man? Also, I’ve run into one annoying bug, and Gnus doesn’t handle new versions of RSS (Atom), which is occasionally an annoyance now and will, I suspect, be much more of one in the future.

"...the content industries may find the [new] BitTorrent search engine too useful to mess with. "The copyright owners can now identify the most-trafficked materials that are infringing their copyrights and go after them in a more efficient way," says Lemley. "It's kind of ironic.""

Greasemonkey can add persistent searches to Gmail with such transparency that you forget Google doesn’t provide this feature.

Book Burro is awesome! If you’re using Firefox and you’re a bookaholic, then you’re going to love this great little script based on the Greasemonkey extension. When you are buying a book online, Book Burro automatically finds prices at other bookstore sites and lists them in a transparent window.

For some reason my ISP software made Firefox stop working about four months ago. Tonight, while cleaning/rearranging my desk, I disconnected the phone line from my laptop then plugged it back in post-cleaning. When I started Netscape online software again after doing this simple unplug-plug, Firefox worked again. *shrug* I'm just glad I can finally rejoin the 21st century by using Firefox and stop using IE, the web browser that is the equivalent of a rusted-out Datsun with no wheels.

And, it's getting safer. Since it is not a peer to peer network (like Kazaa, BitTorrent, and others), it is harder for the Authority figures to track the people who download files from them. That can mean less liability for the end user, and a huge freaking headache for said authority figures.

It looks like TorrentSpy was sent a DMCA takedown notice. (I haven't seen this covered anywhere else. )

When you search for "Family Guy" you get a nice friendly error message:

A friend of mine who’s brand new to the whole fansubbing thing was asking me what anime’s are out there worth downloading right now. So, I’m going to start slapping together lists a few of my current faves and posting them.

But the MPAA wants to make my life much more difficult. One of the biggest things that gets me going besides the whole evolution debate is this one. First the MPAA sued the site that I used to find the shows, btefnet, which caused them to stop releasing them. Actually, this site didn’t contain the shows. It contained links that opened up Bittorrent, which is a program used to transfer files. It is fundamentally different from programs like Napster, in two ways. First, unlike Napster, there are no “central servers” for Bittorrent....

If you use Firefox, get the plugin from Mozilla extension update and start stumbling. What a name, what an idea, what an execution. This is definitely one of my "woah!" in a long time.

Web Browsers is another field where they entered late, but managed to beat everyone else to become the most used brand around. So much so, that they became complacent and as a result, we have not seen any real development in the browser for years now. If it was not for the pressure from the alternative browsers Mozilla Firefox and Opera, they might not have even considered developing the Internet Explorer 7 for the current generation Operating Systems.

Remember all those things RIAA used to say about music piracy and Napster. Well, do a “find-replace” with MPAA and BitTorrent, and you get the same hysterical statements. MPAA president Dan Glickman says, “We must stop these Internet thieves from illegally trading valuable copyrighted materials on-line.” MPAA is blaming BitTorrent for Revenge of the Sith piracy. That’s like calling matches, not cigarettes, cause cancer. How about learning from music’s mistakes, and figuring out ways to sell the content legally?...

Disruption in the media and technology space is trending towards putting control in the hands of the user. Adoption of technologies like BitTorrent, RSS, and web services are providing the foundation on which users are building tools to consume content on their own terms. To figure out what users want in this space, it's often useful to look at and think about user behavior (not user opinion) to figure out how to fill unmet needs.

“There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith. The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.

At least two copies of the film, which was first shown in theaters in the early hours of Thursday, have been posted to the BitTorrent file-sharing network — a new and increasingly popular technology that allows users to download large video files much more quickly than in the past.

[deadpan]Wow. I’m shocked. Who would have thought that somebody would steal the Star Wars movie?[/deadpan]

Azureus is, bar none, the greatest BitTorrent client ever. Of all the BitTorrent clients I have ever used, it has the most pleasent and extensive UI for the most demanding torrenters, and a number of awesome plug-ins. Version 2.3.0.0 of this torrent beast finally gives us decentralized tracking… so now, torrents from the long-dead SuprNova or Lokitorrent now have a way to “finish business.” Thus, it can also encourage the speed of today’s torrents by introducing us to a wider audience. Words can not express how much joy this program gives me.

Con la nueva versión de BitTorrrent publicar contenidos se vuelve muchísimo más fácil ya que no hay necesidad de usar trackers. Esto representa otro gran paso a la distribución masiva de contenido independiente por todos y para todos. Por la forma en que el BitTorrent funciona, no es necesario tener contratado servidores o mucho ancho de banda para poder distribuir música, software o videos.

I'm sure everyone knows what BitTorrent is, but it is the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for sharing large files. Before you had to have a tracker to create "torrents" which coordinated this sharing, but now you don't. This should make it even easier for people to make BitTorrent enclosures in blog entries and otherwise use BitTorrent to share files. Having said that, there are value added trackers like Prodigem which I'm sure people will use to charge for and otherwise track their files.

It takes pretty big balls to hand out pirated copies of the final Star Wars movie. I won’t deny I’ve “borrowed” and “shared” a few movies in my time. But I’d be hesitant even just googling “Revenge of the Sith DIVX”, let alone firing up a bittorrent download of it. George Lucas is the Metallica of the movie industry. He’s just itching to get somebody’s nuts in a vice over movie piracy.

Clearly this is linked to the fact that Brits have become accustomed to downloading American TV shows via BitTorrent rather than suffer the months-long wait for new programs to jump across the pond. Now we here at BBB can live just fine with almost every Asian country being more advanced technologically than us. However, our blood boils over when even the Limeys have us beat. Isn’t there a reason for that whole little revolution thingy? They have a monarchy! These people are about as cutting edge as tea with crumpets and they’re ahead...

Northwest VC has a lengthy post on his blog about the tool Onfolio and how he finds it indispensable.

“Onfolio is a PC application for reading RSS news feeds, collecting and organizing online content, and publishing to email, weblogs and web sites.”

With all of this innovation coming on the Mozilla/Firefox side, you have to wonder how far libraries could take all of this. I want to push a lot of this with our SWAN catalog and create various plugins and toolbars, highlight them all on a single page, and let SWAN members either point to it or copy the code onto their own sites. Rich Allen sent me a link to NOBLE's Firefox Tips and Tricks, which comes close to this. It even mentions Smart Keywords, including how to use this with EBSCO. My only quibble is that all of this is hidden from their home...

Now we have our blogs and many marketers have also embraced the use of blogs to help their business, and in many cases, like mine, they are also used to help spread our writing (like my fantasy articles).

I, personally, love getting feedback from my readers and don't ever want to have to change that, because it makes me feel good to read what you think about my writing (whether it's my articles and posts about marketing, or my fantasy stories).

And what happens????

Some morons have come out with BLOG BLASTERS!

Gmail Hard Drive.com is an awesome way to take advantage of the 2+ Gigs of space in your gmail account! Why only store e-mails or take forever composing and attaching the files and sending them to yourself to store them?

Gmail Hard Drive.com aloows you to directly connect to your gmail account and to quickly upload any file you want and then you can download the file

No sooner have I just got the hang of it, and something like this crops up!http://www.blogherald.com/2005/05/12/google-considering-integrating-blogger-and-gmail/

Honestly, I love the idea of P2P TV. And yes, networks and other copyright nuts will hate it, of course. Where is TV technology going? Apparently to TiVO like top boxes in which you can easily search and record your favourite shows and watch them when u want, how u want, record them if they are precious enough for you, etc, etc. This sounds like perfect.

A lotta people are finding my blog via Google looking for a TVTorrents status report, so I thought I'd post what's up.

According to their IRC channel, their main server that redirects to one of the 2 mirrors is down meaning that www.tvtorrents.tv is down. However, both mirrors are up!

There's a great new app floating around that automatically downloads and saves your favorite programs via bittorrent. I haven't used TVtorrent before so I'm not sure how complete it is, I bet you'd have to stick to fairly popular shows if you really wanted to get every episode.

I have been encountering a weird problem lately. At times, my browsers (IE and Firefox) won’t load google and gmail. When this happens, the load time of other search engines slow down as well. Could there be some kind of a spyware in my PC? Or is this is a server problem? I have a couple of security programs such as anti-virus, anti-spyware, adaware and a firewall but still, it doesn’t seem safe without SP2.

I have just finished reading the 2nd edition of Google Hacks (2005), by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest. This edition is packed with new hacks and new ways to use Google. Most of the hacks require the ability to use code, but some of them can be used from the web. This edition includes chapters on Google Images, News, Groups, Desktop, and Gmail. Two examples of what I learned: Gmail supports plus-addressing, which I was not familiar with. Using this, you add a + to your Gmail address, to create a special Gmail address to use for web sign-ins, etc....

Well I finally got back to my gmail posting script. Now both Pictures and Text are working. At the moment the images posted to WordPress are full size, I plan to add a resizing thumbnail feature down the road. I’ve attached a picture of my current computer setup with this email just to show that it works :)

If anyone is interested in the script you can download it here.

I’ve just been informed that users of Internet Explorer cannot highlight and copy text from either Phatic Communion or Phatic Verse. Checking out my version, IE 6.0, reveals the truth of it. Because I use Firefox almost exclusively, except for when I check out the appearance of my blogs, I never knew I had this problem for IE users. (Opera, like Firefox, allows easy highlight-copy for text.)

Surprisingly, the most important part of good website design has really nothing to do with what most people think. It is true that they all play a big part:

[There is a} growing gap between the really savvy web users and the plain old web users. For someone with a pimped up Firefox install, Greasemonkey, ad-blockers, flash blockers, spam filters and spyware free machines, the net is a completely different place to the one found by your average IE using office bod.

Lessig argues that culture should be “free,” in part so that creativity of this type is not stifled by legal action or the threat of it. As an example of this danger, one need only remark that Walt Disney is now a corporation notorious for litigation and lobbying. I won’t try to summarize his book here. I won’t even explain what he means by “free culture,” save to say that the views expressed in this book have much in common with the views of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Well, I stumbled across this one in the logs this morning... Somehow I have got to believe that there is a better search results for "firefox es3 rpm" than my post on disk cache in linux. And for whoever was searching for it, install Gentoo, and save yourself from the pain of RPM, up2date and all the other Redhat blunders to come.

I guess no one at google is reading my blog, because I am also the top hit for "install firefox es3" as well... what can you do?

In case you didn’t catch it: Firefox (incidentally, I just found out that it recently pushed ie’s market share below 90%) has released version 1.04 (download at mozilla.org), which addresses the serious security flaws found in previous versions earlier this week. It’s interesting to me that there was such a huge amount of news surrounding the vulnerability, but you could basically totally miss the fix that came three days later if you weren’t paying attention. Anyway, we can all turn our javascript back on now.

I started to blog last year, discovering a number of brand new things: RSS, flickr, gmail, firefox, wordpress, del bookmark…

Email spam has been a problem for years now, resulting in spam blockers at the ISP, on website servers, and on everyone’s email accounts.

With the increased interest in blogging and RSS feeds, is it any wonder that spammers worldwide would turn their sights on this technology too?

Just how are spammers aggrevating the growing blog communities?

The Crea8asite Forums and Kim's blog, Usability, SEO and Web Design, are two of my favorite resources for getting a broader view of website design, blending as they do SEO and usability. The blog post Search Engine Optimization Wins Over User Centered Design and the thread It's the SEO that counts, not user centered design address this particular mixture head-on. Both reference the somewhat puzzling article from C|Net entitled Is search ruining the web?

I really like the ability to search cached pages. I’ve been using Onfolio for a few weeks to save Web pages to my hard drive, which I’ve been trying to use as a replacement to paper print outs (much more portable). I’ve been double saving to both Onfolio and Yahoo! My Web for the past few days and I have to say, both are equally cumbersome – it’s enough of a pain to click on numerous windows to save that I started doing it less and less. But that’s just me – others may find it a fair trade-off.

A number of people have commented that Spotlight will revolutionize the way we do business by eliminating, or almost eliminating, the need for hierarchical folders and similar Finder organization. It’s kind of like Gmail: with such powerful search abilities, why bother filing stuff in folders?

Easily done with mailbucket.org. And each Gmail account has an RSS feed too. Or if you’re a user of Mailinator.com, then you’ll be glad there’s a similar service called dodgeit.com but with RSS feeds.

So if you dont allready know Mozilla Just released the latest version of Firefox 1.0.4 officaly. This is a fix two a few recent critical vulnerabilities discovered in the browsers code that involved IFRAME Javascript URLs and input passed to the IconURL parameters. I sugest if you havent allready done so that you upgrade your browser to this new version.

The installer on Firefox 1.04 still doesn’t run smoothly. If you download and do a fresh installation it does, it runs like a dream, but if you download and just install over the top of a previous release you may have bugs. It’s supposed to be installed into a “clean” folder, which requires that you uninstall (via the control panel) and previous version.

All this destruction and reconstruction is due to a nasty virus I couldn't eliminate. My PC had already been dragging anyway, despite vigilant firewall employment and Ad-Aware checks, so I decided to throw caution to the wind, reformatting and reinstalling XP with SP2 (I'm still not going back to MSIE, though; the tabs in Firefox are just too convenient).

It seems that Google is considering integrating its Blog application - Blogger - with its email application - GMail if recent comments by Google’s Biz Stone are anything to go by. He also says that there is the possibility of an ‘enterprise Blogger version’ as well as new features like image hosting and private groups which would allow limiting of access to blogs to selected people.

Ecco un altro trucchetto davvero utile per installare il nostro benamato browser Firefox su una penna USB.

Und jetzt ist es wohl so weit. Auf der Firefox Download Seite ist die Version 1.0.4 bereitgestellt worden. Derzeit ist aber nur die englische Version verfügbar. Es kann aber nicht mehr lange dauern.

Hätte ich den ersten Bericht mal richtig gelesen und nicht quer. Ich arbeite an einem Linux Desktop *sigh*. Und ich Depp steige auf Opera um für die Zwischenzeit. Nicht das Opera schlecht wäre, aber ich mag mein Füchschen. Opera ist wieder eingemottet und Firefox 1.0.3 flitzt wieder.

Can't argue with the crappy-ness of the Online Edition of TOI - I downloaded FireFox just so I wouldn't get any of the spyware on their site or have to deal with popup windows! That being saidm, their ePaper is readable, and I highly recommend that to anybody with a high-speed net connection.

Daniel Wallace is a solo software developer and critic of the open source movement; see, for example, his comment to this post of mine. He argues in that comment that the GPL is a contract, not merely a license. Wallace’s ability to prove that claim will be central to the pro se lawsuit he recently filed in federal court against the Free Software Foundation, alleging illegal price-fixing.

WEBIT, a UK website design competition, has honored Bilal Mohammad and Imran Khan for their efforts in the “Fabulous Fiction” website, which they tout as “the ideal way to get into reading”.

A while ago, I was chatting via email with my pal Mike when he mentioned that he had all of his personal email forwarding to his Gmail account. At first I didn’t really see the point, but then I started to think about this scenario. Moments later, I setup all of my personal email to forward to my Gmail account as well. I’m pretty sure Mike uses this setup for the same reason that I do. Here’s why:

Just tried the firefox greasemonkey — I was trying to use it for enhancing the batch website snapshot-capture script: One problem of the current script is that the mozilla remote control command is asynchronos so it does not know whether the current page has been fully loaded or not before taking the snapshot and moving to the next web site; what it can do is simply to wait for a constant period of time between two web sites. Using a user script that applies to all web sites we can make sure the snapshot-capturing script is notified when every web page is completely loadedbefore it takes the snapshot.

After looking into BlogBridge … later that same day … I stumbled onto Onfolio, a web research program I had used years ago. I must say, I am impressed with Onfolio’s evolution, even with its $79 price tag for the professional edition. Aside from handy web research collection tools (which I have not tried yet), Onfolio includes a pretty good and easy to use news feed and blog aggregator, and this may be the killer part of the app. Not only can I collect data along the way during web research, but I can also monitor blogs...

The marketing landscape is changing. Real users are taking the stage once exclusively owned by actors with fake smiles and cheesy catch phrases. Mind-hooking jingles are being replaced by tens of thousands of personal testimonials. The grass roots are growing fast and they're lifting up quality products for the world to see. SpreadFirefox is just the beginning.

I tried to import my firefox bookmarks into blogrolling and found that it only accepts OPML but not html. So i wrote a small utility that converts html to opml.

We've confirmed that this solves the security issue so if you're looking for ways to help out, testing to make sure all your favorite websites still look and function correctly, plus if you've got time running through the Firefox basic functional tests as described here would be a great place to start.

I made a new Firefox search plugin today, for the blog serach engine Technorati. If you search for keyword(s) on Technorati, you get a list of blogs mentioning those keyword(s); if you search for a URL, you find blogs linking to that URL (e.g., blogs linking to me). I love Technorati almost as much as I love Google News :), so I was very surprised no one had made this plugin yet! [CORRECTION: Some people already had. I was going off of the "official" Firefox plugin directory, which does not list a Technorati search plugin. But I should have known...

Website hosting is becoming the proverbial Gillette razor — given away to sell razor blades. Companies offer low priced hosting packages, in order to sell additional services and products.

Picasa 2.0 will happily resize and email images to flickr. A really simple way to send images to flickr, the only downside is that you can’t tag the image as it is uploaded this way.

Gmail has also become an awesome knowledge base because of the vast amount of storage space. I rarely delete a myITforum mailing list post, I just archive them. I now have almost 6 months of mailing list archives that I can search and find relevant answers on when I need them.

Two vulnerabilities have been discovered in Firefox, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks and compromise a user’s system.

Here’s a nice article on some possibilities with Greasemonkey, the super-powerful scripting extension for FireFox. Right now I’m using Greasemonkey to run BoingBoing Butler (removes ads from BoingBoing), Book Burro (finds competitive book prices), and Linkifier (turns URLs in on-screen text into hyperlinks). If I’m feeling motivated enough I might try to augment Book Burro to search abe.com as well, but first I should probably dig into my pile of unread books.

Switched to Firefox again and to my dismay I find that the ChinaRed theme isn’t playing so nice. So I’ve now switched to the “Desert Theme” by “Evil Bert”. It seems to work well with both Firefox and IE. It also features the calendar and has a more consistant look from post to post and page to page.

Just got an email from AUSCERT, there has been an alert issued for Firefox, as two issues have been discovered that currently are not fixed. To add insult to injury, proof of concept and rumor has it on other sites and forums that there is code exploiting these vulnerabilities.

In response to recent post Easy Firefox 'open in a new tab,' dozens of Lifehacker readers wrote in more tabtastic (yes, I just said that) Firefox tips. In summary:

Maybe it is just me but this scares the crap out of me. It is the exact antithesis of something like Tor. I know Google has a "Do no Evil" policy, but what with my life time cookie; correlating gmail, google news news and Google usage; storing all my e-mail and now checking out my websurfing including basic username and passwords (e.g. bloglines doesn't use https); not to mention other things like desktop search and Blogger, I am a little freaked. Especially with their head-quarters in America which doesn't have the best track record...

Can't bear to be without your Gmail? Got WAP? www.gmailwireless.com is for you.

Cnet.com discusses Firefox hacks to make it cool (i'm just psyched that it doesn't crash, although it does have some awesome mods like the Down Them All extension)

I'll note that we never use IE except to test websites. My personal favorite is Opera, but Firefox has gained about 10% of the marketshare:

JamRoom is a Musician's Website Manager for independent musicians and composers to help them EASILY present and sell their music online to their fans and friends. Since its inception, JamRoom has become much more. Internet Entrepeneurs, such as SunFields, are now using JamRoom to offer full service music hosting to a growing market of musicians who want to share their artistic vision online. Similar to services such as mp3.com© and Soundclick.com©, JamRoom can manage the songs, lyrics, information, images and data for all your music business requirements on one dedicated server. Since JamRoom can be customized to such a great extent, it has become the perfect choice for those who want to ensure their site has a personalized look and feel.

Take a look at this spam that I received today. Apparently, Jesus thinks that I need Norton Internet Security 2004. It also appears that Jesus prefers Yahoo! mail over Hotmail. Maybe someone should send Jesus a Gmail invite? But, being the Son of God, shouldn’t he already have one?

Based on an implementation by Richard Case I wrote the same version of his task, but a bit more powerful and using the standard naming for the attributes. Using this task you can extract text from an XML file at the locations specified by an XPath expression, and return those texts separated by a delimiter string. If the XPath expression specifies multiple nodes the node are seperated by the delimiter string, if no nodes are matched, an empty string is returned.

Huh? So, why did FireFox prompt me to auto-update? Is this FireFox's fault, or FlashBlock's fault? Why can't the extension simply be updated?

Come on, guys. I love FireFox, but let's get on the ball. If we're ever going to even compete with Microsoft on this front, the little details need to be worked out and standardized.. this goes along with what I said earlier, about FireFox missing the mark when it comes to extensions and threading.

Speaking of the tracker, I hate our tracker. It’s not compatible with Firefox. I have to use IE to be able to update tasks. And I hate IE! Hmpft. I’m thinking of logging a request to the programmers. Ask them to check what’s preventing Firefox from making the damned thing operate properly. Our tracker’s actually a customized version of dotproject. Sana they can find a way to make it work in Firefox. Hay.

Seth Godin’s put up a thought-provoking post where he posits a new digital divide - instead of the computer-literate vs. the computerless, he sees a divide between the ‘digerati’ and the ‘left-behind’. One group uses Firefox, another uses Internet Explorer. One group has a blog, knows what RSS is, gets news from Google… one doesn’t. Seth goes on to note that the ‘digerati’ are the most-influential of all customers, and they need to be understood by any marketers that have a chance of being...

I remain a fan of Onfolio, which began life as kind of a personal knowledge manager for Web-based content, but has evolved to also handle RSS feeds and provide more publishing capabilities. I have used it for quite a while now to maintain my eForms Resources page, and am currently using the new version, 2.0, which supports Firefox, which is now my primary browser.

I've gotta conclude that after the Gmail hysteria, Google could see the GWA firestorm coming. GWA must be so strategic and central to Google's future that they pushed forward with it in spite of the public backlash.

This is Google’s specialty: a simple, easy to use interface, accessible to all levels of users. Though there is no indication that anything like this is in the works, one can easily imagine a streamlined Google OS on its own hard disk partition, separated from the entertainment, gaming, and media production environments. In addition to Google’s signature services—a high-powered internet, media, and local disk search engine—it would likely consist of an office suite, a lean web browser, and various other applications and utilities....

It's nice to see the ISPs realizing that it's in their own best interest to make security as easy as possible for their users. I guess they finally did the math on having to handle all the support requests, network traffic, and abuse complaints associated with having thousands of infected and compromised PCs on their network. Hopefully as ISPs take a more active role, it will begin to clean up the Internet ecology a bit. I really don't think it's useful trying to push much of this responsibility onto the users. When was the...

MPlayer is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented multimedia techniques. Also threatened are the many programs built upon MPlayer and the other free software multimedia players, like xine, VLC, avifile, gstreamer and especially FFmpeg, which provides the framework all of the above players use.

Multimedia is a patent minefield. All important techniques and formats are covered by broad and trivial patents that are harming progress and alternative implementations, such as free software multimedia players.

But I've run into an obscure and annoying bug. At work we run m0n0wall, a tiny firewall based on FreeBSD (and which I can heartily recommend). The only access is via a web front-end (mini_httpd with php). I found that accessing the m0n0wall with Firefox under Tiger causes the mini_httpd in m0n0wall to crash. The firewall is still running, you just can't view or change settings. It took me 3 or 4 crashes to associate them with Tiger, but then I was able to reproduce the behavior, and it was confirmed by another member of the mailing list.

So based off of work pointed out here and here, I’ve made a crude search server plugin for the JHU Library catalog. Download jhucatalog.src and save it in your /searchplugins. On my home system (Win2k) it is: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins. Make sure after you save the file that it is saved with the .src extention (not with a .txt or some other extention).

If you arent using RSS Feeds, and more specificially Live Bookmarks on Firefox you are really missing out. Check out these images (click to make bigger) to see what Im feeding myself these days. Also drop a comment saying what sites you feed!.

Then go get the Google Scholar Monitor Greasemonkey script: http://scholar.dforge.cse.ucsc.edu/scholar.user.js. When your webbrowser is viewing the javascript, click “Tools”->”Install User Script”.

I find it amazing how much the web/web-user interface has altered from what it was just a short while ago: Firefox, with all its plugins and Greasemonkey extensions (provided that the whole thing doesn't end up broken); what I noted Mike calls 'a galaxy of API-enabled web-services … exploring the all-of-one-type-of-thing-everywhere path'; the first shot (from Larry Gadea) at integrating Gmail with Google Desktop Search; the almost daily initiatives that both Google and Yahoo! are making with their search engines; the only just a bit slower rate...

Only tests could say if this tool really speed up your surfing experience, but I think that in the next day (when the tool become popular) we'll see some privacy concerns also here, exactly like Gmail (all your traffic will pass from Google's servers).

The friendly people from tweakguides.com have an article on how to tweak it even more here

Corante is an interesting collection of blogs. Unfortunately, it renders so slowly in Firefox that I basically can’t stand reading it. I don’t know if it’s Firefox’s problem (IE seems to do ok), but in the meantime it’d be nice if the Corante folks fixed it (yes, I mailed a comment in)…

Anne writes about all the nice things that will be a part of Firefox 1.1. I can’t wait!

Lists used to be for displaying bullet points on a web page, but now it seems that they can play a big part in your website design, such as using a list for navigation with CSS to style it (Sitenetics uses such a technique). The most commonly used type of list is an unordered list (ul). The other type is an order list (ol) which displays the list with some kind of semantic meaning such as numbering each item:

I’ll try to keep you posted about the server stauts. I have downloaded and implemented about 4 seperate spam blockers and these assholes manage to bypass each and everyone. I’ve taken some serious drastic measures and hopefully this latest solution will be the key. I almost want them to try.. I need to see if MY OWN recipe will work.

I installed Onfolio 2.0 yesterday and the program messed up my system.

Onfolio 2.0 is advertised as a cohesive research assistant akin to Furl It and another big selling point for the program is an embedded RSS reader.

Onfolio 2.0 is supposed to be a ground-breaking way to store and manage information.

Onfolio 2.0 does not work with my standard Firefox 1.03 installation.

The Onfolio 2.0 RSS feeds take forever to load at the default installation setting.

Soko writes “Yes, it’s real. The crack team of Daniel Wallace and Maureen O’Gara have ganged up once again to protect their version of “The American Dream,” he by filing a lawsuit in Indiana court saying the GPL is nothing more than a price fixing scheme designed to drive software vendors out of business, she by parroting the proprietary vendors’ “The GPL kills business” mantra (as well as a few well placed insults at the free software community). I found the story on Groklaw - no links to Ms. O’Gara...

Apple has released QuickTime Broadcaster v1.5, a new version of their free software to let you webcast QuickTime content. Based on Apple’s recently released QuickTime 7 software, QuickTime Broadcaster 1.5 features new capabilities like H.264 broadcasting, improved performance and better 3G video streaming.

Here’s an easy and free way to check your AdSense earnings. The tool is not as extensive as the AdSense Logs I previously mentioned, but it has the convenience of being on the statusbar of my Firefox browser.

How about this- as many people as physically possible decend upon the lawns outside Microsoft HQ, Firefox t-shirts, banners, the whole lot. Attract as much mainstream publicity as possible. Wind up M$ execs so they try to have you all removed from the area. Get it captured on film, get it publicised.

Once everyone knows 50 million others have tasted the Firefox experience, we’ll be heading towards 100 million before we know it.

Well, it appears that the XMLHTTPRequest approach is gaining some ground. It and other standard technologies like CSS and DOM, are being used in combination in a methodology called Ajax that is delivering some of the same promises that Smart Clients are supposed to bring. If you’ve seen Google’s mail service or Google Maps, you’ve seen just what it can do.

If the recommendation about the email encryption services is a little to much; there is free software you can use to encrypt the occcasional private note you send to others: Snapfiles.com has a good selection

The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser passed a significant milestone in adoption on Friday, with more than 50 million copies of the program downloaded, according to its distributors.

All in all, however, Safari seems like a solid replacement for Firefox or the Mozilla browser--and as such, beats the hell out of Internet Explorer every day of the week and three times on Sunday. There are more features I didn't go into here, but you can find them like I can--if you have a Mac, of course.

The thing I hate most about Firefox's search is that it makes noise like someone's biting off your testicles.