Firefox

Other key elements in website design such as font size, navigation, page length are explored in this report. An interesting finding is that a smaller type face encouraged focused reading. Larger type face on the other hand promoted scanning. Short paragraphs are looked at for greater periods than longer paragraphs. The report suggests that “longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.” Also a one column format was viewed more. This study also found more eye fixations and longer viewing with right-column navigation than left.

Yeah tbh this BitTorrent client is totally worth mentioning. It does all the important things that Azureus does, and with none of the crap. And here’s the best part: the file is 82k, its an exe that you can just run, it uses about 2.5megs of ram (on my computer anyway…compared to the 50megs that azureus took up). So that’s pretty safe. Check it out.

Systm: This is a show produced by Revision3 (aka, Kevin Rose and Crew) aimed at the slightly Geeky “Joe Computer User”. They’ve so far covered topics such as A Warspying box, MythTV, AV Cables, Podcasting and a slightly Shorter episode (cleverly dubbed a “subSystm” ) that covers how to crack open the iPod Nano. There are direct downloads for older files, but using Bittorrent is highly encouraged.

We just updated the OPML parser in order to accept exported OPML files from FeedDemon and Onfolio.

I like that they use the Bittorrent technology to distribute Opera (as an alternative to regular downloads!).

The recent case of the Mambo Content Management System for websites shows that these issues aren’t a problem in the free software world. Following a split from the company that held the copyright in Mambo over the direction of the project, the entire development team took the existing code with them to continue working on it as "Joomla", something made possible by the free software licensing of Mambo.

Let’s rewind back to yesterday afternoon. I got out of class and decided I needed to work on some insurance information and make sure it was all up to date and the like. As I’m following the instructions about registering online, I fire up Opera and proceed to load their web page. I’m greeted by some MSPaint concoction of some whackass smiley face telling me that I’ve been “pwn3d”. My first thought was, “Shit, I hope for my sake I haven’t already registered with this insurance company.” Next course of action is to fire up Skype and call this company to inquire about a possible security breach and if any of my information had been leaked. It was the middle of the afternoon here which meant it was outside of normal business hours. I made a mental note to call them late last night and went about my way surfing the web and whatnot only to find that all of the images on all of the sites I was browsing were replaced with this same graphic. This worried me; was my laptop compromised? Did I load up a trojaned binary by chance? Is Opera being screwy? I quickly launched Firefox and discovered that I couldn’t escape this image. “What the hell is going on?” I thought to myself.

After writing my last post I went to the Panel Discussion The Future of RSS: Beyond Blogging, in which Amar Ghandhi (GPM on the RSS platform), Doug Purdy (LPM on WCF), the CTO of Newsgator (forgot his name), the Chief Architect on MBS (forgot his name too), the RSS Evangelist at Amazon (you get the drift), a PM on Start.com, aswell as Robert Scoble. The discussion was okay, but was pretty main stream. As Erik Dibbern Röser and I talked about, it would be interesting if Microsoft explained their vision with RSS, not just that it should be used, but how it correlates with Web Services and the WCF stack, and when should it be used.

Combining del.icio.us and Live Bookmarks leads to some pretty interesting results. It pretty much amounts to a community link blog where anyone can contribute a cool new link that they found. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve stumbled across a ton of stuff I would have never seen otherwise (see my last two posts). To give it a shot, go to Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks in Firefox. Click on File->New Live Bookmark and enter “http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/java” into the Feed Location field. Give it a name and hit Ok. Now go to your bookmarks and find your newly created Java linkblog. You can change “java” in the url to any word that comes to mind. I’m currently monitoring popular, java, software, programming, web, linux, tech, internet, webdesign, technology, business, science, ajax, webdev, php, css, funny and firefox. This amounts to a huge waste of time, but it’s pretty interesting.

Anyway, go ahead and download (using BitTorrent), get yourself a hot cuppa tea, and let Orson Welles genius enchant you!

I’m currently working on a new website design for my friend, musician and guitar-maniac Oliver Pfänder. He was looking for a simple layout that combined his love for music and especially guitars and that is able to hold lot of content without the need of scrolling too much (talking about the fixed-width vs. fluid layouts discussion). The website should also represent and his person and reflect his personality. Therefore I decided on a floating CSS layout with a sidebar that could hold extra information and/or news and links, and a main content area that accomodates itself to the browser-width. This screenshot is taken at 1024x768 resolution, so that you know. Furthermore I used a pale green color and duotone pictures to reflect his music style that varies from metal to accoustic guitar and everything in between. :-)

The main effect of the Gmail success is that the biggest companies that offers web-based email systems (like Microsoft and Yahoo) are working to improve their tools.

In 2003-4 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) spent more than $200,000 on an ‘educational’ course for schoolchildren, bizarrely entitled ‘What’s the Diff? A Guide to Digital Citizenship’. This was nothing more than a lesson in IP dogma. ‘If you haven’t paid for it, you’ve stolen it,’ students were told – eliding fair use, public domain works, Free Software, and alternative licensing in one sweep of the revisionist hand. Teachers worked from a -page classroom guide, explaining that the use of a computer to download files was ‘morally and ethically wrong.’ Students played roles such as ‘The Film Producer’ and ‘The Starving Artist’; at the end of one session, according to an article in the Boston Globe, a teacher asked a boy: ‘’Will you stop copying music online and download the right way?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I’ll go to the music store and buy more CDs.’1 Alongside the propaganda comes bribery: for writing essays about why file sharing is bad, students are offered incentives such as free DVD players and DVDs (first one’s free, but they’re hooked forever), movie tickets and trips to Hollywood.

Yeah. Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out. I’ve gotten to give some demos to some people and it’s been pretty fun. A few more demos tomorrow and then demos till Firefox 1.5 final release.

A little while ago I blogged about the fact that I now use Gmail for all my email and Bloglines for my RSS feeds. The thing I noted that was missing was the ability to write documents and sotre files online.

Well, that day has come. Take a look at ThinkFree office. It’s a nice set of MS office compatible apps that all run online through java. You get online storage thrown in too.

Bart Decrem and some programmers in Palo Alto, California, are soon to launch a new browser called Flock. This will be an open-source browser and it will be a beta launch in early October (so they say). This browser is based upon the most popular open source browser Firefox.

So I googled arount and in some seconds, I found two very useful tools for Firefox: The Adblock Project which is a simple but powerful adblocker for the Firefox browser and the Adblock Filterset.G Updater, which fetches the newest filterset from the internet.

Long time users of BitTorrent will be familiar with the website ‘SuprNova‘ which once reigned as the undisputed champ of the BitTorrent community, serving hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per day.

According to Pitchfork, the band will be releasing their entire new album for free via BitTorrent on their website on Sept. 20, and via direct download a week later on the 27th. Those cheapskates who plan only getting the free version will be missing out on 9 extra B-sides and outtakes that will only be included with the retail version.

I haven’t posted anything on Japanese here in a while, but that’s mostly because I’ve had other stuff occupying me. Now tonight while looking for something else I found this guy’s site. He’s got a Firefox plugin called RikaXUL which lets you lookup kanji from within Firefox.

Here’s a good reference for explaining how Bittorrent works to friends.

New Vulnerability in Firefox Browser September 11th, 2005 A vulnerability has been reported in Firefox which could allow malicious sites to compromise computers running the browser. The security hole, which is rated highly critical by Secunia, affects all versions, including Firefox 1.0.6

The state of Massachusetts is considering a proposal that would require all state documents to be compliant with the Open Document format rather than requiring proprietary software. The Open Document format is part of Open Office 2.0, a free software suite that is currently under development. Saying that the proposal is not “an anti-Microsoft initiative,” Peter Quinn, chief information officer of the Commonwealth, pointed out that 200-year-old papers remain readable in their original format. He said he hopes that today’s records will remain accessible far into the future, regardless of the comings and goings of various vendors and their products. Quinn said he hopes Microsoft will decide to support the format, which allows documents to be readable by any computer, similar to Adobe PDF. Microsoft’s Alan Yates said the company would not agree to the Open Document format. He noted that Microsoft provides a free XML schema that allows users without Microsoft Office to read documents created by that suite of applications.

One thing that did not escape my notice was the male/female ratios on the course, leaving me wondering if this was representative of the website design industry - 11 males, and only 3 females (one of whom is me obviously). Incidentally, I don’t feel that old - there are at least two students who are about my age on the course. The rest look like they’ve just been released from Nursery, but at least I am not alone.

I had the ID “content” set to a zero margin and padding, but when I went to preview the results there was about 10 pixels of margin above the DIV. I started to play with negative margins to shrink this gap down, but I was getting different results in both IE and FireFox. After a lot of fiddling around, I finally set the margin on the paragraph tag to zero and suddenly things fell into place. Strange, but I would have expected there to be space between the paragraph and the DIV.

still using internet explorer? what the hell you think you're doing? still using Firefox? good for you.

Phelios announced the release of an offline internet software tool for webmasters called, "RSS Writer." The free software application is being offered to website owners who would like to offer an RSS feed of their own sites.

Onfolio - easily capture and organize content (html, email, documents, etc.) as well as manage rss feeds (could not live without this)

Next, I'm moving on to cover free development softwares - softwares used by software developer. How entrepreneurs in software related business can leverage on free softwares written by their counterparts.