Firefox

Chops, to answer your question, one can watch BOTH family guy and entourage thanks to a program like bittorrent, especially if one just watches and deletes. Based on the latest entourage, looks like Vince may be in some hot water.

The news reader that I use is called RSS Bandit, but there are many out there. Some are simply web-based (Bloglines), some are stand-alone apps ( RSS Bandit, FeedDemon) some are browser plug-ins (OnFolio, Pluck) and some are integrated into Outlook.

A few people have asked me for links to some blogging resources, so voilà! — here’s a link to my Onfolio collection of blogging resources:

Since I prefer Camino to Firefox for my daily use (I use Firefox for development testing mostly), I created bookmarklet versions of these scripts as well.

In Vabavere we want to focus on open content and free software in education. We would also like to include other topics we are interested in, such as social software, network culture, etc. Vabavere will become a central information channel for all our open source projects: IVA, VIKO, KooliPlone and Krihvel. We are also planning to have one category in English language.

I appreciated finding Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and Guide. Give it a look. Also appreciated Rush Limbaugh talking today about stupid legislators who think they can resolve piracy problems by outlawing software like BitTorrent.

I have come across some interesting bad behaviour from Firefox and the Flickr site. I recently started using Flickr after holding out for quite some time. And when I finally get around to doing my photo album upgrade and turning it into a right, proper WordPress plugin I will be trying to ensure people who use it can host their photos on Flickr if they wish.

Aardvark is a Firefox extension for interactively manipulating the content on a page. It's like a second cousin of GreaseMonkey. Once it's activated you can mouseover all the elements in a page and manipulate each one by making it wider, narrower, removing it, viewing source etc. I couldn't see a way of making these changes persistent between visits but it's a neat little tool for making adjustments to pages for readability or printing. Besides, it's just cool that you can even do this kind of thing. (via Jeff Barr)

The idea here is that because the focus is on streaming video rather than downloading it, they will be able to avoid the copyright infringement pitfalls that have befallen other p2p networks. Unfortunately for them, this very technical argument will be lost on the copyright regime enforcers.

Last March I attempted to apply for a Google Adsense account and what denied because I was not 18 years of age. Since I was unable to use Google Adsense, I researched and found an alternative. This alternative was called TextAds and was similar to the idea of Google but not as advanced. TextAds had businesses apply for advertisements, the businesses looked through a database and found which site they wanted to advertise on. TextAds was certaintly not as advanced as Google Adsense because it did not display relevant ads, it displayed whatever ad someone wanted to display. After, not using TextAds, because of the lack of technical support and the non-user friendly interface I decided I would wait for my birthday. Well, upon turning the age of 18 I immediately re-applied for the Google Adsense account and was accepted. Within the past week I have made enough money to pay for my website hosting for the next 2 months.

Some bright guy developed a search toolbar for FF that can search Code Project to find articles and other stuff. For anyone looking for samples or references for source code this might be really useful.

As I sit here, tapping away on my Mac, I have two web browsers open (Safari and Firefox), both of which have built-in RSS support, as well as a dedicated RSS aggregator (NetNewsWire Lite).

The dumbest thing about it, I fired up my favorite bittorrent search site and guess what, 2 copies of the new album ready to be downloaded. Idiots.

forevergeek.com has a useful guide on speeding up firefox for broadband users. basically after getting to the hidden config settings you set the browser to request more data that it usually does.

Sans aucune prétention autre que de les faire connaître, voici quelques extensions fort pratiques que j’utilise pour mon installation de Mozilla Firefox.

(And for you illegalists out there, San Andreas is out for PC on BitTorrent right now- I would link you there, but my ISP might not like it. Hey, wait, I *am* my own ISP…hmm!)

The Prodigem BitTorrent service has become open to anyone to sign up. Prodigem used to be invitation only.

Here’s an interesting one: Microsoft Takes On BitTorrent - Forbes.com

if you have x.y@gmail.com and your friend happens to write to xy@gmail.com by mistake you still get the email. Vice versa works as well.

The GNU General Public License (“the GPL'’) has remained unmodified, at version level 2, since 1991. This is extraordinary longevity for any widely-employed legal instrument. The durability of the GPL is even more surprising when one takes into account the differences between the free software movement at the time of version 2’s release and the situation prevailing in 2005.

As you regular readers may have noticed, we added a large amount of Firefox tips to the site today. This is because we have a new staff member, Scott Kingery, who has been running a Firefox tips site and also a Google Desktop tips site. After some negotiations, Scott has agreed to come onboard TipMonkies to help us continue to grow. If you’d like to learn a bit about Scott, you can check out his blog, Tech.Life.Blogged. Scott will be continuing his work from those sites here on TipMonkies so expect lots of great tips from him in the future. He will also be joining us on the podcasts occassionally to give us some of his tech insight. Welcome aboard, Scott!

Short note: Two great developments are available that build on the Greasemonkey tool for the Firefox browser. Platypus allows you to modify a web page from your browser, and then save the changes for next time you browse through. Julien Couvreur has released a very nice Ajax debugger that shows XMLHttpRequests in real-time and techno-color.

Both frameworks are based upon a XML markup language that is rendered into Macromedia Flash (6 for Laszlo, 7 for Flex) that is displayed on the users browsers. As Flash is now a standard component on IE (with XP SP2) and Firefox, penetration should not be that much of an issue. Also, both can be compiled into native Flash (swf files) that can be hosted on a standard Web server, without the necessary application server (that becomes a development/test component), allowing a wider development community to use and host these frameworks at little or no cost. For more complex applications, support is provided for remote data access through RPC, etc, requiring some form of server data source, but this could be as simple as XML file or a traditional LAMP setup. Laszlo therefore can be deployed at no cost onto a typical ISP configuration, not requiring complex J2EE or Servlet containers to be developed.

Thomas Breitner has released his (German) thesis "Freie Software - Motivation und Engagement" which examines the motives of Free Software developers for working on Free Software.

BitTorrent, the beloved file-sharing client and protocol that provides a way around bandwidth bottlenecks, has become the newest distribution vehicle for adware/spyware bundles.

Joyce obtained copies of the re-examination of the Unilect Patriot done by the state of Pennsylvania, and I've ripped those to a video format the should be view-able under Windows. If you've got BitTorrent -- which can be downloaded for Windows here:

OK, http://www.start.com/myw3b/ does not work well with my Firefox. This is what I am using:

In fact, paper is nearly impossible to search without a great filing system. Aaah, another one of my pet peeves — the inability to organize and locate information! Why is the company Google so successful? Why do I see information manager after information manager? (From Evernote to Onfolio to Backpackit to Mindmanager) — its incredible how many gizmos exist to help us organize our minds.) Why do I wish I could buy books in electronic format (not so I can pirate them, but so that I can search for things and find information more easily)?? [Will someone ever solve the problem of DRM?]

Mas há escepções! um exemplo é o google, que gratuitamnente oferece o seu serviço de pesquisa na internet, tendo assumido a missão de organizar o caos da internet, tornando acecível a informação verdadeiramente relevante. Outro exemplo são as aplicações P2P (peer-to-peer), como Kazaa, o Emule, o BitTorrent, entre tantos outros, que nsão programas que permitem a troca de ficheiros entre utilizadores da rede, tornando possível obter qualquer informação, quer em texto, som, vídeo ou outro formato qualquer. Mas o melhor de todos os exemplos é o Wikipédia (www.wikipedia.org). Um projecto que começou já há alguns anos, consiste numa enciclopédia online completamente gratuita, e que pode ser editada por qualquer pessoa! Esse conceito é muito importante: significa que, qualquer internauta que visite o site pode acrescentar informação que disponha a um determinado artigo que esteja incompleto, sem precisar de se inscrever em nada, e muito menos pagar, podendo inclusivamente iniciar um novo artigo sobre um assunto que ainda não esteja abrangido pela enciclopédia.

SiliconBeat points to a GreaseMonkey script that adds a “delete” button to Gmail, which doesn’t normally have one. Very cool.

I decided to use Ourmedia for the video storage, though with the low volume I certainly could have used our own dedicated servers and bandwidth. To save on bandwidth expenses for delivery I could also have gone the BitTorrent route, but that takes extra time and one of my goals was to keep the time down. Time is my most least available resource. The process of tagging the video and publishing to Ourmedia took less than five minutes and the video was available within an hour.

I’m currently downloading a copy of the tape na nagpapakanda-leche leche sa Pilipinas ngayon. A co-worker leeched it off a bittorrent server and I asked for a copy kasi I wanted to listen to it.

i caught the second half of the third episode of Hell’s Kitchen last night on FOX, and proceeded to download 1 and 2 off bittorrent. man, this show is awesome. i love watching the wannabe chefs scramble when gordon ramsay screams at them. basically, gordon is just horrible to these people, trying to break them. he figures if they can put up with him, they can put up with anything and they can run their own restaurant. it’s a good philosophy, my dad was kind of the same way. he’d scream and scream and scream and eventually i’d be able to block it out and not take it personally. the people on the show aren’t quite there yet, some of them nearly break into tears when he looks at them. seriously. anyway, it’s awesome.

While talking with Tiffiniy Cheng of Participatory Culture earlier today for our next Gear Live Podcast, she mentioned the website put out by them called iTunes Per iPod. Essentially, it aims to show that while many people walk around with iPods filled to the brim with their favorite tracks, barely any of them are from the iTunes Music Store. Granted, the data is a bit outdated as it is from April 2004, I think it is safe to say that the data probably hasn’t changed all that much. Based on their calculations, in April 2004, if you divided the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods out there, you would find an average of 21 iTunes songs per iPod. Now I understand that many people rip CD’s that they have purchased legally to their computers as well, and this accounts for a percentage of the music on iPods - but I will go out on a limb and say that is a small percentage as well. Gotta love Bittorrent.

I know, I have had nothing but problems since I got Windows XP, due to the security, slowness and the spamming!!!......its indescribable. Now, I am considering their e-mail product, which is free as well. They have a download for their e-mail program with spam blockers. It is called Thunderbird.

I’m not looking to WIN or any other publication to be assaulted with advertising, and yet at the same time if I enjoy the content I’m definitely willing to pay for it. We went down this road with popups and look where it took us? Almost every major toolbar now has popup blockers. Programs like GreaseMonkey are borne out of users totally frustrated that they have to constantly read around the not so cleverly placed noise to get to the ever diminishing signal.

A fantastic article on EvHead, about how to base your entire small business infrastructure around web apps like basecamp, gmail etc.

Interesting articles now over at Business Week on e.g. mass collaboration online … noting collaborative innovations such as Skype, BitTorrent, and online idea hubs run by HP, Lilly and P&G.

Oh and by the way kids (I mean, kids with HBO and/or BitTorrent), if you were wondering, both Lisa Kudrow’s ‘The Comeback’ and the season premiere for ‘Six Feet Under’ were fucking fabulous. It makes me cry to think that these kind of shows are so few and far in between, that is shows that assume that the viewer is intelligent, not a nimrod.

Bittorrent is a peer-peer protocol used for file distribution. What is good about it is that every downloader also acts as an uploader. The file is divided into smaller sized chunks, each with SHA1 hash. This is great for countering “slashdot effects”, downloading the iso images immediately after they are released. I doubt, though, if it is very useful for longer term links…

In investigating OnFolio (thanks to Spike's comment), I found that I could give it a URL to a web service. In OnFolio, you can specify your blogger settings. It supports standard blogging environments like blogspot, or, it can take a custom command.

I created a web service that in turn calls SharePoint's Lists web service to create a new item in a SharePoint list (my 'Blog' list, in this case). I did this because the lists web service takes some fairly complex parameters in its "UpdateListItems" method.

My web service simply accepts a Title, Body and URL. It then formulates the correct parameters for the UpdateListItems method and calls the method on the proper WebService.

I spoke in an earlier post about the possibilities of high quality free software for small businesses. There is another interesting aspect to this theme....that of businesses as software companies. As an industry analyst, for years one of the platitudes I have used when discussing priorities with corporate IT organizations says "Your board doesn't think you are a software development company, so why are you doing ......?". However, the more I think about this, the more I am coming to believe it is exactly wrong. Business not only are software companies,...

Below is a list of some of my favorite Firefox extensions. We’ve discussed some of these on TipMonkies before, but check them out. You can find these and more at the Mozilla Update site.

If you are interested in publishing your podcasts via bittorrent and don’t want to hassle with running your own tracker, register for an account here. I hope to have most of the interface working by the end of June.

While listening to This Week In Tech earlier this week they mentioned a show one of them is involved in called From the Shadows. It’s like a tech show, but it’s not on TV, it’s a download, kind of like a podcast, but with video. Topics so far have been light sabre replicas that can be used for full-force dueling, WarDrving/Flying, WEP Cracking, and wireless mobile gaming. It’s really really cool! A bit hefty on the d-loads (the episode on WIFI was 200+ megs divx) but using bittorrent it was pretty fast.

What brings me to mention BitTorrent here is a rather well-known hosting company with several branches worldwide, 1&1 Internet Inc., who have recently told one of their customers they can’t distribute their own content through BitTorrent, presumably because of its use by pirating rings.

If you have a video camera/webcam and a PC (or better yet a Mac), now is a great time to start experimenting with these technologies. I'm seeing more-and-more quality content hit the web on an almost daily basis. Speaking of which, yesterday my friend Amber (co-host of CFH Canada) emailed me a link to their latest indie downloadable tech show 'Command-N'. In this episode they cover some current tech topics and even roll-in a BitTorrent howto. This is a great example of just how easy it is to create your own downloadable show...

Da qualche giorno (io me ne sono accorto oggi) è possibile utilizzare la casella di posta elettronica su Gmail utilizzando un qualsiasi client di posta elettronica (come Outlook o Thunderbird sia in ambiente Win che Mac che Linux) che sfutta il diffuso protocollo POP.

I log all my conversations (to find old facts or links), but since I use 3 different computers, the log I need to read is usually on another machine. Problem solved, has created a cool plugin that automatically logs all conversations to GMail.

I’ve tried a few of the scripts that are floating around the net for backing up del.icio.us to Gmail. The easiest one by far to get up and running with minimal dependencies would be Bill Mill’s version. The end result will backup your entire del.icio.us links collection to your 2GB Gmail account.

Apparently, AOL is releasing a 2 GB webmail service for its AIM users. I could care less: I use GAIM (so I wouldn’t get the alerts for new messages), and GMail is superior in almost every way imaginable. Personally, I think this is without purpose for the general public. It is horrible compared to its competition, there is nothing unique about it, and its just flat out not worth the time and effort.

The position concerning potential end user restrictions on usage of code embedded in open source applications is unresolved. The commission has taken the extraordinary step of allowing Microsoft to take its argument to court rather than rule itself and so put Microsoft on the back foot. Understandably, the Free Software Foundation Europe is angry and frustrated.

Microsoft will be releasing free software upgrades for Outlook users so they can wirelessly access their corporate email on their mobile devices. Free upgrades will be available for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and the soon-to-be released Windows Mobile 5.0.

Earlier today I noticed that things were running slowly and I fired up the Windows Task Manager. Firefox was using over 120MB. Now I had not logged off or even restarted Firefox in probably a week. I just leave it running. I also had probably 15 tabs open.

One way for a hacker to attacked your computer is by using a spoofed site. Spoofed sites are also used by spammers, spyware creators, and all sorts of people you don’t want taking control of your computer or information. Spoofed sites are made to look like a legimate sites (eBay is a popular one to spoof), but redirect you to another page. In order to detect whether a site is a spoofed site or not, check out Spoofstick, a completely free extension available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox users. Spoofstick displays a toolbar on your...

Gamespy's reporter is writing about the shut down of a single torrent site. The BitTorrent client and technology are very much still active. This writer is just an idiot. Or maybe it's the editor, who knows over there anymore.

DaveN pointed at a cool new FireFox plugin that shows the IP address your search results are coming from.

I found a really (and I mean really) cool Firefox plugin today. It allows you to view price comparisons at major bookstores automatically.

Here's a random question that came to me this morning. I download a lot over BitTorrent. Mostly shows from taper friendly bands, so it's all legal. I wrote a long time ago how I thought BitTorrent was the ultimate hippie application and I still continue to believe this. It's great to be able to get all these shows and the everyone helping each other nature of BitTorrent goes along very well with the culture of the jam band scene.

What is the difference between IPTV, the Internet Protocol-based TV paradigm heralded by major telecom providers and large media groups and the Internet Television painted by the Long Tail phenomenon, Ourmedia, the Internet Archive, Brightcove, and the availability of amazing new technology opportunities such as faster and faster net connections, free unlimited storage space, BitTorrent, MPEG4 and powerful low-cost hardware and software production tools?

I used to feel my gmail was spammer-proof too, although i have noticed a few slipping in lately. This could be due to the fact that I am forwarding all of my catchall “webmaster” accounts to my google address after I noticed it’s great spam catching ability.

Gmail is down, can't find the reason why, but there are quite a few posts on it on the blogshpere. It's a non-essensial service to me, as I'm using it as a secondary email, but that is disturbing to say the least, as far as I can tell, it's down for at least three or four hours.

It’s fully customizable which is something which the other portals dont have and it also works well with my Gmail. All hail Google!

A list of popular BitTorrent torrent websites currently online!

If you download a video file say thru BitTorrent and find that you can play it; it is most likely because you don’t have DivX installed.

There were a couple of great training sessions I attended however and one in particular more than made it a worthwhile investment. As they always say, the ‘devil is in the detail’ and there was one point about website design and lead capture that I had overlooked on one of my affiliate sites that should ramp up the profits. Now all I need do is implement the changes…

…to figure out how to use Firefox’s Adblock extension to block their extremely A N N O Y I N G javascript ad ticker. KTUL’s was easy enough.

AJAX is JavaScript based and JavaScript is usually used to add convenience and to pretty up web pages. Because sites had to work without JavaScript, usage was limited to extending the HTML or saving on the odd page request. Then came GMail. Suddenly we have lot’s of web developers “enhancing” the browser experience with behind the scenes XML fetching back to the original site. I cannot think of a worse collision of technologies than low level user interfaces with requests over the internet. The delays and failures of internet traffic...

I re-published a very interesting tutorial I found on a blog (with permission) which explains how you can create your own extension for Mozilla Firefox (CLICK).

After that my night broke down into relaxing and watching television with the wife, skimming through the new issue of PC Magazine (which has a few fairly cool articles on things you can do to tweak Firefox’s performance,) chased a kitten around the house like a lunatic on crack, etc.

As the old techie saying goes, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in 76 languages—and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. (An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don't know who used it last.) Loyal Wikipedians argue that collaboration improves articles over time, just as free open-source software like...