Firefox

Despite this awkward start, Mr. Ross agreed to the interview, and we met a couple weeks ago at a Palo Alto, Calif., coffee house so that I could get to know this tech prodigy and potential serial entrepreneur. Not surprisingly, he seemed bright, grounded, and with a clear vision for his near future. More surprisingly, he seemed not at all caught up in the hype surrounding him.

A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

Two software releases of note: Mozilla released an upgrade of Firefox, which includes several security fixes. They advise all users to download and install the upgrade. And the Open CD Project popped up on the radar with the release of a CD compilation of open-source programs that run on Windows.

So far, so good. I just upgraded to the latest beta of FeedDemon since they were acquired by NewsGator. And beta 2 is rumoured to be following soon. The syncronization rocks and I like the little tweaks made here and there to the look and feel of the interface. I think Nick is doing great things with this product. I haven't had the slightest desire to go back to Onfolio or Pluck!

You can send either the e-mail itself (as an Outlook file) or the message text (as a snippet) to your collection. You cannot use the add-in to capture just a portion of the text however. It also doesn’t like the NewsGator “Post” items (which use the newsgroup post format rather than standard e-mail). This is not such a big deal with the built-in RSS reader in Onfolio but if you elect to use NewsGator, Blogbot, or even bring standard newsgroup information (NNTP) into Outlook, you won’t be able to add it to your collections using the add-in. All of these data objects can be captured using Onfolio’s clipboard capture however - just copy the selected text and then choose the global “paste to Onfolio” keyboard command (Ctrl + Shift + F11).

Chu Yeow is a software developer by day, a blogger by night, and a sometime freelance Web developer. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the National University of Singapore. He keeps a well-read Mozilla-related blog titled redemption in a blog, where he posts the latest Mozilla-related news and Firefox tips, and reviews worthy extensions and random technical tidbits.

ColorZilla
Gets colors and stuff from the sites you’re on. Helps tons when coding sites.

Due to the fact that well over half of the US population are cell phone users, internet companies are attempting to capitalize on mobile web markets, by developing specialized software and services for cell phone users. Mozilla, for example, recently released a preview of a mobile-phone browser that will use the same code base as the popular Firefox browser.

Looks like Opera people are working hard at what they do best… release new updates to their excellent browser. Just yesterday, they released the final of the version 8.02 and today they were back with a preview release as Opera 8.10 Preview 2 is now available on their servers. This is basically a version of Opera with the Bittorrent support enabled which the company removed from the final version released yesterday.

En ja hoor… we doen weer een stap terug dankzij de ‘vooruitstrevende’ kapitalistische organisaties als mpaa en brein. Nu hebben ze ineens hun zinnen gezet op de tv serie torrentsites (mooi scrabble woord). Btefnet.net is dood, evenals tvtorrents en de meeste andere tvtorrent-sites.

Just days after the latest release of Firefox 1.0.5, Mozilla Foundation is going to release Firefox 1.0.6 as early as next week. This is due to the API changes in 1.0.5 unintentionally broke some extensions, which have caused some incompatibility between the browser and web-based applications.

(a) ask for a ‘delete all from spam folder’ button in gmail

I’m not sure I buy that. I bought my copy of HBP late Sunday. My wife left town on a business trip early Monday while I was only about halfway through the book. Rather than make her wait until she came back, I went and downloaded the ripped PDF over BitTorrent. Would I have paid ”$5 or $10” for something I already “owned” in dead-tree format? Doubtful. This was a convenience issue, and since it was so easy, it was the obvious thing to do. I suppose I “pirated” it, but to my mind, having a digital copy of something I’d paid for was legit fair use, but I’d have only do that at no cost.

That's right....another new blog. I've been waffling around since June 19 when my "old" blogs had a hiccup (via a problem with ftp publishing gone haywire) as to whether or not I would resurrect my Firefox Tips blog. I have finally decided that I do want to recreate the blog, if only to have all of my favorite resources in one central location. This time around, the title of the blog is going to be different, and I actually have a plan about what I'm going to include and how the layout will be. That is way more organized than it was the first time around. If you have ever had the experience of losing data, grinding your teeth to powder and screeching in frustration, then eventually rebuilding your work to have it actually turn out better than the original was, you can appreciate how I feel about my new Firefox blog.

Looks like we're seeing some interdiction of BitTorrent networks: "Difficult time for EZTV".

Apparently, the interdictors are trying to sap the bandwidth of seeding sites and downloaders (whose resources are considerably limited). While this is no problem for the large seeding sites, it's a considerable problem for the downloaders.

Microsoft announced today the actual, real name of its new operating system – apparently “Longhorn” was a working title. The new windows, Windows 2006 if you will, will be named “Windows Vista” – and its first beta shall ship on August 3, and probably be available on bittorrent within twelve hours. Hell it might be out now for all I know. The actual launch is set to take place in the second half of 2006, five years after XP – which is the longest it has taken Windows to get to a new round of products.

Social computing theories are about looking at the way computers are used and changing the design to better suit those needs. A good example of this is how google's gmail stores attachments. It would be easy to add 10000 more hard drives so everyone could have 1GB of email but that doesnt "solve" the problem, so what they do is they store ONE copy of an attachment and everybody "shares" that copy. Think about it... how often do you send the same silly video to like 1000 people, why have 1000 copies. Now, multiply that by the ENTIRE WORLD of internet users. You see the savings quickly.

By now you should be aware that Firefox 1.0.5 and Thunderbird 1.0.5 have been released. You can click on the links in the last sentence to download them.

Everybody that is an Opera 8 fan would probably know by now that the latest version of the popular browser: Opera 8.02, has added an interesting option that would become really handy for those people who are very keen on using BitTorrent. And that new option / feature is that Opera will now add support for Bit Torrent.

Several bugs fixed from the previous release and a number of tweaks have also been added. For those who don’t know, Shareaza let’s you take advantage of all the latest Gnutella features and connects to 4 networks: G1, G2, ED2k, and BitTorrent.

If you’re running Windows Mobile, you can now get a bitTorrent program for it coutesy of Adisasta and $20 after the trial period.

Finally, my favourite desktop application is the Firefox web browser. If you are still using Internet Explorer, and you use the web anything more than very occasionally, it is well worth updating to this much more modern browsers - it is more productive, more secure and more usable. The only other browser that even comes close it Opera. Firefox’s most amazing feature is its extensibility. I have 12 extensions installed, but the one that needs mentioning here, is the one that helps with website design, the Web Developer Toolbar extension. If you design or run a website, you need this.

Since Rowling decided that she didn’t want her latest Harry Potter book digitized, a few kind sould have taken the liberty of OCR’ing the latest and posting it on the bittorrent network. And don’t worry, the voice on this audiobook sound like a butler, not some computer generated robot voice.

That’s beside the point. I don’t really mind helping out Brain’s family. I’m here to talk about computer overkill…again. Last time I was over at Brain’s, I wanted to get online and show him the videos of Danny Way 360°ing the Great Wall of China. She had his computer buried in a mountain of stuff, so we had to try it on her spyware-ridden Dell. This computer…I can’t even describe how messed up it was. It took about 5 solid minutes to boot, and not only was her system tray LOADED with all sorts of strange icons, there were at least 20 unidentifiable processes running in the background. She had Norton anti-virus installed, along with Norton firewall AND the Windows XP firewall. 3 popup blockers were running, and shortcuts to 4 or 5 spyware remover programs littered the desktop, along with an “internet privacy tool” (read: pr0n history eraser).

It's official. Work on my Firefox blog is underway. Rather than having a mishmash of tips and all sorts of information with no real design behind it as was true with my first effort, I decided to do what I did in college when I was faced with any major assignment: Make a plan, an outline. That single decision has already begun to bear fruit. I opened my trusty NoteTab Pro, and made a list. Just a list of what I wanted to include in the sidebars, and in what order the items would appear. I put the list away when I had finished that piece. I took it out again later, and decided as long as I now had my sidebar planned, I could just code a few of the links in. Then I listed my favorite extensions.

Another TWiT is up and ready for download! If I’m not mistaken, Leo is still out this week and Patrick has it all taken care of, and it looks like another good TWiT for everyone to listen to! This week’s topics include discussion on whether or not BitTorrent really counts as mainstream, the shuttle launch tomorrow, thoughts on the new Willy Wonka movie, cooling and quieting your PC, the upcoming DefCon, giving up the land line, and much much more! Check it out!

Have you ever tried sending email to your Gmail id without the dot “.”? It will be still delivered to your inbox. So for Gmail fname.lname@gmail.com and fnamelname@gmail.com is one and the same thing, so any email sent to these IDs will be delivered to my fname.lname@gmail.com inbox.

It would appear I have a problem with Wordpress not sending comments and mail from the PXS Mail Form to Gmail.

The above screenshot is from the PDF version of the upcoming Agile Web Development with Rails book. They have these PDF-aware gerbils at The Pragmatic Programmer that generate (and regenerate upon request when a new version is out) PDFs on the fly, with your name on the bottom of each page.

Having your name plastered all over the place is one sure way to discourage sharing it with friends or on file sharing networks. Imagine what would happen if the publisher found out htat you’re the guy responsible for the book ending up on BitTorrent?

By now, I've become an avid blogger. A day is hardly complete without posting. I even decided to create other blogs, for different areas of interest (cooking, inspirational posts, and Firefox tips -- the latter of which is yet to be reestablished following a snafu in June.) Then I even decided to go looking for a free webhost, whereupon I found f2o. that led to my posting the beginnings of my personal homepage on the internet. That's a whole different adventure, but it dovetails into blogging because blogging was where I began to notice the possibilities.

If you have ever used a p2p program such as BitTorrent, you should have a basic understanding of how basic networks work.

The inertia of Web development is tied directly to that of the browser market. Browsers stagnated from late 1999 to early 2004 (from the release of IE5.5 to the first builds of Firefox and Safari), and development stagnated, having no new front end innovations to embrace. For most commercial work, developers are shackled with the limitations of IE, which haven’t really changed since 1999.

time for more delicious techy goodness. fire up those BitTorrent clients.

A nice tutorial to get you started with broadcatching using bittorrent and RSS

This Evening, I stumbled across this beauty: Onfolio (found on scobleizer here). And holy hell, it's amazing. Not only does it give you the awesome syndication features of Thunderbird, but the Onfolio Newspaper View is amazing. It has a firefox extension that is very well done (and an IE one, but if you're using an RSS aggregator, you probably aren't browsing in IE6). I'd say that I'll post more when i figure out how to work more of it's features, but i'd just be lying, as i'm pretty lazy.

Is Tech TV being ressurected? It surely seems so. With Leo Laporte starting up the ‘This Week In Tech‘ Podcast, Kevin Rose’s and Dan Huard’s ‘the broken‘ and ‘systm‘, Yoshi DeHerrera’s ‘From The Shadows‘, Diggnation, and Command-N it just seems like this is the resurgence of Tech TV, but on the internet. These shows take advantage of BitTorrent and other programs like IPodderX to get their content around. These guys(and girls) seem to be quite content with keeping their stuff on the web, and that’s a great first step for the future of quality internet multimedia.

One way to know if you site is running is to use a third-party solution. There are many companies that will check your site, some are free. 2 that are good are: www.internetseer.com and www.watchmouse.com. Both offer limited free services, checking your site every few hours, sending you an email when it goes down.

…so it seems that yet another web annotation and social bookmarking service has been getting some traction…i’ve already taken long hard looks at furl (read the interview with mike giles) and spurl (read that interview with hjalli gislason too) and also caught up with shimon, the guy behind frassle …but this is a different angle completely…this is about a company that already makes installation software, similar in spirit to netsnippets (best of the lot by far, and now offering a free version) and the oft-maligned onfolio (like nancy wilson from heart before the gastric bypass)…the company is pluck and what they’re offering is shadows…

This morning I tried to sync the RSS Feeds I read through Onfolio on my laptop and desktop, which got me thinking about back when I asked Jesse what good dev Blogs/resources I should be reading. He sent me a big pile of urls, most of which had rss feeds I could load into Thunderbird, then Onfolio. Here's the List : Opml (as much for my benifit, as for the 2 people who read this blog).

The main system for talking over the Internet is something called SIP (Session Initiated Protocol), which like many modern standards seems to be designed by hardware makers to get people to buy expensive stuff. However, the open source/free software people are moving in and have made some good progress lately. See Gizmo, for example. There's also a Skype competitor called Jajah that allows you to talk with Skype users. There will be more options in the future, but at the moment Skype is king if you want it to just work, and work very simply.

I was more than impressed by the cine, that I went on to watch the first episode and absolutely bamboozled! I thought I should spread the word around; thankfully people can download the series using BitTorrent. What they need, if they have not have it yet, is to install the freeware BitComet, available on the net. Then, go to Bittorrent.com, and type in ‘30 Days’ in the search box. The next obvious step is to download the appropriate epidose. I have not watch the other series, but the 1st episode and the 3rd episode, are clean and extremely good. Make your brain thinking, they do!

Also, going with another codec for the video cast is just not an option. I know I may seem like an Apple geek right now but the only reason I had to start doing Pod/Videocasting was because iTunes did it all, letting me, for the first time, deliver media to the masses without being tech support. Dealing with questions/explanations on how to use bittorrent, DivX, or any other superior possibility is something I cannot do. Honestly, we live in a one click world, and iTunes is the only thing that can do one click audio/video delivery for the user.

I’ve disabled comments on all new posts, and will probably go back and disable comments on all my previous posts as well. I’m just getting too many spam comments, and even with spam blockers I can’t keep up. I’m actually getting about 50 comments per day that don’t even have links in them. Just random lines about trying online poker. What is the point of spam with NO LINKS???

With Gmail crashing Firefox? Am I the only one experiencing this?

According to Heiss Online, Google is not longer handing out Gmail accounts in Germany, in an attempt to avoid a local trademark dispute over the Gmail name. Rather, they are handing out GoogleMail.com accounts.

There are plenty of sources of free topographic maps that someone with a GPS and some good GPS mapping software can use. (Yes, I paid for MacGPS Pro. It works, and the free software I’d played with was pretty unreliable.) Most of the topographic map files out there are in GeoTIFF format, or something similar, which means that they have pixel to lat/lon data built-in. But I’m more likely to need street maps than topographic maps. I could buy something like Microsoft Streets and Trips, but I’m using Mac. Route USA 2004 is the only street map software I can find that runs on OS X, and it doesn’t appear to be very good. I couldn’t find a source of free high quality street maps online, so I rolled my own. Here’s how:

If you put my grandfather in a room with God and gave him one question, he would not ask for the meaning of life. He would not inquire as to the existence of poverty or the vagaries of human nature. No, he would ask, and I quoth: Do you use Firefox? My grandfather, an avid watcher of our SpreadFirefox counter, claims to have personally converted the 4 million people in his “inner circle,” or what we call “Florida.” God would make 4 million and one.

Another bug which is extremely strange is with the Javascript rollovers for the thumbnails in Mozilla Firefox. I have my blog open in 1 tab and the Perodua Myvi website in another tab. When I rollover my mouse on the lower left thumbnail, the main image changes to a resized version of my Malaysia Topblogs button! WTF? I have not tested this in Internet Explorer.

Great news (right?) from my favorite browser. Opera 8.02 is said to have support for BitTorrent natively, making it even closer to being the perfect browser for a power user. An announcement on this is said to come from Opera directly tomorrow.

New students: I would recommend that today you take a look at Firefox, a web browser that we use extensively in class. You can learn more about Firefox in this tutorial Using Mozilla Firefox. You will find Firefox and the available extensions very helpful in class.

Firefox allows you to get a plugin "Wizz RSS" and I use a utility called "Akregator" to get the updates of these feeds.� You might ask, why?

در آخر سعی کنید قالب فارسی شده را با مروگرهای مختلفی مانند IE ، FireFox و Opera آزمایش کنید و مشکلات احتمالی پیگیری و رفع کنید. و به سلیقه خودتان در صورت نیاز تغییرا ت کوچکی در فواصل و اندازه ها اعمال کنید.

This is a very cool script for the awesome Firefox Extension called GreaseMonkey. The script is called TechnoProxy and was written by the guys over at Peer Pressure.

All this began when I discovered jamendo. Shortly, it’s a website where you can listen CC-licensed albums and download them using BitTorrent or another networks. I found quite interesting albums and I decided to try gnome-btdownload for downloading them.

Trixie is to Internet Explorer as Greasemonkey is to Firefox. It lets you remix the Web via scripts. You may do this to either make it more readable, fix bugs or to even add little features to make the site more usable to you. Trixie by itself does none of this. It is just a plugin for Internet Explorer that enables executing chunks of JavaScript code and thus lets you use the Web the way you want to use it.

my local tiddlywiki this link doesn’t work, I need to cut&paste it into firefox’s address line

In my opinion there is absolutely no free software available today that is cooler than this. Google Earth, a 3D interface to the planet. Here’s some screen shots for ya:

Huge wins for large media companies and cable companies, however. Grokster and other file-sharing companies are toast. It’ll be interesting to see how this affects BitTorrent, which is getting a lot of legitimate use (like distributing Linux releases). Consumers also lose with the overturning of a prior decision forcing cable companies to open their lines to other broadband providers.

'Viva Software Libre!' talks about 'Latin America's free software revolution challenges U.S. corporate domination', which is very much true in description of what is happening throughout Latin America through Free Software and Open Source. And he mixes it in with the Banana Wars. Of course, not many people know about where the phrase Banana republic came from. And it's sort of disturbing that a clothing chain gets a capital 'r' for Republic in the Wikipedia.

The purpose of ther GPL is not to make people accept open source software - the GPL is about Free Software. Open Source software is in a legally and morally weaker position than Free Software. In addition to this the GPL contains within it a fundamental social goal which Open Source does not.

Bittorrent if you don’t know, is swarm based downloading. For more information you can go here. I use it mostly to download Linux torrents, and game demos from sites such as 3dgamers.com. I have used Azureus for over a year in windows and in Linux. Being java based, once I installed Java 1.5 it ran flawlessly in osx. Woo! Some of its great features is that it can download multiple torrents at the same time, along with rate limiting your upload. This helps keep my latency down on the network, and speed up downloads.

Finally looks halfway decent. I found that OnFolio was exporting the OPML file incorrectly. I was able to render the OPML to HTML using this tool I found at Inès' Crib