Firefox

After a one week hiatus (if you didn’t notice, there was no TWIT last week) another TWIT is in the can! This week’s hosts are Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, John C. Dvorak, and Alex Lindsay, with special guest Lawrence Lessig [ http://lessig.org/blog ] of Creative Commons [ http://creativecommons.org/ ]! This week’s video is already up and available via bittorrent, as you’ll see at the episode notes page. Sadly, I have to admit that this week’s TWIT isn’t really the format that I would have liked; I prefer the larger panel discussions and the traipsing from topic to topic that lends itself to massive show notes and a great deal of information, but this week’s seemed to be a bit more slow and dull, although the subject matter was very interesting. I like departures like this, delving deeply into important topics (and Creative Commons is very important!) but at the same time it was missing the vividity and life of the previous TWIT podcasts. Oh well, can’t hit them all out of the park, or please everyone for that matter-I’m sure lots of people loved this week’s!

Think of all the old TV shows you’d like to download and watch on demand. A quick scan of the Bittorrent sites today reveal complete seasons of Desperate Housewives, Xena and Star Trek TNG all ready available for download in iPod compatible formats. Mirroring the demand for MP3 “discographies” I suspect we’ll be seeing even more of these “episodographies” available shortly.

Check out “Flock” (a FireFox derivative) here - www.flock.com.

-Lisa asked what BitTorrent is. Instead of a long drawn out explination you won’t understand, go to this page in the Wikipedia instead.

Microsoft announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against groups that use zombie computers. The software giant took the action after learning through a company experiment that use of infected PCs to thwart spam blockers and pass along immense quantities of junk e-mail is more widespread and disruptive than Microsoft expected.

I recently heard about a new webmail client from my friend Justin, who’s infatuated with it. RoundCube, a “browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface,” is the latest and greatest webmail client. It’s only in the alpha stage of development, which explains the jagged installation procedures, but that doesn’t mean it can’t kick some major squirrels. RoundCube is much smaller, scalable, and less resource intensive than another competitor, Zimbra, which weighs in at 150 megabytes. The interface is the stunning with lots of AJAX magic as well as user configurable via XHTML and CSS 2 skinning. I love RoundCube so much, I’m declaring it better than Gmail. Yes, you read that correctly. Hopefully by the end of this article you will have a fully functioning RoundCube webmail client on your server.

Phonifier is an open source mobile transcoder. Like loband, I wasn’t able to get it to work with any of several phones and emulators from Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola and Openwave. In all cases I got either a blank screen or a screen with some text but missing the text field for entering the target url and/or the submit button. I think the problem is that Phonifier uses the same html page for both mobile and desktop browsers. There are separate stylesheets for media=’screen’ and media=’handheld’. The handheld stylesheet makes all of the extraneous text invisible. Mobile browser support for media=’handheld’ is still very limited and apparently none of the browsers I’m using support it correctly. This is a pretty inefficient way to make a mobile page as the browser still has to download a lot of content that it ends up throwing away. A better solution would be to have a separate mobile specific homepage with it’s own url. I was able to see how Phonifier is supposed to work by using Firefox and the Web Developer extension to force the use of the handheld stylesheet. I was also able to load the site on the Access Smartphone browser but even here the browser did not use the handheld stylesheet!. Fortunately, only the initial Phonifier page where you enter the url you want to transcode has this problem.

Sorry I missed the announcement, but OpenOffice 2.0 is no longer beta. Read the press release, or go to the download page immediately.

The first thing I noticed was how clean the desktop was… it was empty! I am used to it being littered with links to the distribution’s website or trivial shortcuts to “home.” The user interface is simple and pleasing with a nice icons and cursors. Ubuntu is a powerful operating system, with the version 2 of OpenOffice.org, a BitTorrent client, Mozilla Firefox, and gAIM instant messenger, among others, preinstalled. Ubuntu is much faster than OS X on my computer in terms of booting and general system tasks. It has a lot less to load up and doesn’t have to load any fancy graphics. I did not notice any lag in the menus or the file explorer, nautilus. I was impressed at how all of my hardware worked flawlessly. The only thing that did not work was Wi-Fi via the Apple Airport Extreme card but I already knew about that. Just for a test, I plugged in several USB devices and all were recognized and functioning. This is a major relief as I remember my Gentoo Linux days where I would have to enter some lines in the terminal to mount or unmount anything.

I am currently trying out the new browser called “Flock.” It has this awesome intergrated blogging feature but it’s basically Firefox 1.5 with some extensions and a skin.

So for the past six months or so I’ve been using Azureus as my faithful Bittorrent client. Very nicely done program, good interface, lots of features. But, it is an amazing resource hog as it is a Java based application and can cause the Java runtime environment to reach nearly 200MB in memory usage. My machine has no problems handling the load, as it is a Dual Core CPU with 1GB RAM and RAID 0 SATA Drives, but this is just really more than I am willing to give up just for sharing some files. I’ve spent lots of time perfecting my Bittorrent configuration and have things working beautifully, but I finally decided to switch to a new client that is less resource intensive.

And finally, before I end this briefness today, I think Bill Maher’s Real Time program (download it off bittorrent those of us outside the US) is actually a dam good show. It’s filled with occasional crap and Bill himself is often sexist, racist, and all-around annoying. But when it comes down to it, the man makes great points and I absolutely loved Spike Lee on there this past week.

As soon as you mention the word VoIP, everyone responds with “Skype?” This immediately gets me into an discussion why people should not use Skype. The fact that your computer is used as a link to route traffic, much like BitTorrent. That it is based on a proprietary protocol, only known by Skype, so no other manufacturers can make compatible equipment without permisson (and probably a big fat wad of cash) to Skype Corporation.

Today I stumbled upon Flock, which is basically Firefox's cousin that likes to keep in touch with everyone. It is built off of the same code (Mozilla) so you know its rock solid, though they underpromise. Well it is really good at helping you keep track of sites through starring, which makes a tag and a comment, and then you continue surfing. The star is like gmail, when you star a favorite message, though it uses del.icio.us (stores a list of your favorite sites online). The next thing that is cool is integrated flickr (online photo album) which goes best with the integrated blog, in my case blogger. You get a window that you can drag flickr images in, create tags for organization and searchability.

Downloading the latest OpenOffice.org release, the much-anticipated version 2.0 final, via BitTorrent. I’m getting 3.85 Mbps, which is about as much as I can possibly hope for, considering my download pipe is supposed to max out at 4 Mbps. Freakin’ sweet, man. This gets me a 75 meg download in under 3 minutes.

i thought the logo in the top left of my gmail google email account looked a little odd this morning

Today, I tried to edit the new GSR-website with an editor under Windows. No, I'm not crazy. This is all because we now have an employee at the GSR who'll update our website with new contact-info, meeting reports, news,... He's a windows user at home, so I needed to find a sufficient editor for that platform. Requirements: free software (as in free beer) and keep my original files in utf-8 character encoding!

themediaslut got hold of a video recording at a security forum event recently held in Singapore.

Don Sambandaraksa, for the Bangkok Post, post a question asking about the feasibility of OS developers, like Microsoft, embedding security applications in their OS in the future.

Once the critical mass of music blogs has been reached, there is enough content spread across the internet so that new tools are developed to make searching a locating the music easier. For examle, the top two results from the Google BlogSearch on “Arctic Monkeys” would provide you with an adequate introduction to the band and let you listen to pretty much all the songs that are floating around the internet. Additionally, by going to Blogdigger.com and doing the Audio/Video search you can see different blogs that link to the band’s songs and videos. The main advantage of finding music this way, as opposed to downloading the songs from Kazaa/BitTorrent/etc, is that besides listening to their songs you can find out what the band is all about, read about their concerts and participate/review the disscussions in the comments sections.

Here is the Bittorrent link and direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for October 14, 2005.

Let’s say, an online community where I can find a good friend, share my notion. You can find in at id-gmail (the largest online community in my country I even join). This community provide me with fresh idea, smile, good people, and many more. We also have our TAO.

My dream recommendation, given any amount of resources being made available, is that OO.o be ported to Gtk. Then, it would be restructured to be the Firefox of office software - a lean core functionality and a flexible “Extensions” mechanism. This would hopefully lower the barrier-to-entry for programmers sufficiently as to encourage wide participation by people interested in improving the office suite. The lean core could then be focused on and maintained more effectively than the massive bulk of the do-it-all office program.

I continue to be more and more impressed with BitTorrent…it’s the Napster of the 21st century; the guy who wrote it is a friggin’ genius IMO.

This is one of the biggest changes in the history of modern content, but not for the reason you’re thinking. Sure, being able to buy a TV show or music video or animated short to watch on your iPod is neat, but the real story here is video podcasts. If you’ve got the money for bandwidth, or Apple includes BitTorrent, you can roll your own TV show. Am I the only one who sees this? If Wil decides he wants to start acting again, he can go buy a DV camera, fire up iMovie and attach it to his RSS feed. Then someone subscribes to the feed in iTunes, and can watch it on their Mac or their iPod. No networks.

Azureus is one of my favorite BitTorrent client, this site will show you how to set it up.

Earlier this evening an article I had written about configuring the Azureus bittorrent client was posted on the frontpage of LifeHacker.com. A few minutes later I found hits coming in from Digg. Less than 20 minutes later, I was on the frontpage of Digg! This is a huge deal to me because I visit Digg several times a day and to have my article on there is an awesome feeling. Right now I am just sitting back, RedBull in hand, keeping an eye on my Mint stats. At the time of this post I’ve received over 2,500 unique hits within the past 2-3 hours. Compare that to my regular 100-200 unique hits a day. You can check out the Digg page here.

The first thing that stuck out was the post from September 30th and it links to a great site made Samsung. If you check it out make sure you have your popup blockers turned off. It is basically two concurrent flash animations that take place in two different windows but are meant to look like they are the same animation. It’s really cool. I went back a couple of weeks and the author highlights some web designers’ work that he finds interesting (at least I think that’s the case given that it’s in German) and also some corporate sites (like the Samsung one). It is really quite interesting and I wish I could read German because given the content that he links to it seems like he knows what he is talking about. Google doesn’t seem to do a great job translating this site. It’s probably because of all the technical/webspeak that the author would be using.

I don’t know what is going on right now but email is arriving up to 22 hours late to my inbox. Well, 22 hours as of yet so it must have started at about 8pm last night. I would think there might be a reason for this if it were email going through my hosting provider or something, but this is gmail! I’m going crazy! I don’t know whether people aren’t emailing me or if the emails just haven’t gotten to my inbox.

Oh, and speaking of hackers, have I mentioned this is all built exclusively on top of free software?

On the other hand, Firefox 1.x has 3 out of 25 Secunia advisories that are marked as “Unpatched”, and a partially patched bug. Opera 8.x so far is free from any vulnerabilities.

Bram is the guy behind BitTorrent, a program that enables our audiences to receive our productions whilst reducing the burden on our own bandwidth by sharing the distribution task. BitTorrent is making a bit of history right now, and a lot of tools developers are climbing on board with implementations and variations.

Kayko (Parmeshwar) and I were discussing about Gmail and Yahoo interfaces … and both agreed that AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) components indeed provide Gmail the upper hand. In AJAX, only user interface elements that contain new information are updated; the rest of the user interface remains displayed without interruption. Also the request/response can be asynchronous, disconnecting user interaction from server interaction. As a result, the user can continue to use the application while the client program requests information from the server in the background. When new information arrives, only the related user interface portion is updated.

Alas, the kiosks are glorified vending machines. Before I looked into the technology, I wondered whether it was feasible to build a DVD kiosk out of a DVD burner, a credit card reader, and a high-speed internet connection running, say BitTorrent. Not yet, maybe. Not that Hollywood would be likely to go down this road, but a studio that licensed its library and created a real Celestial Jukebox — at $1 to burn a disk — might put a real dent in Blockbuster’s business, and even take some wind out of the DVD-burner supply house known as NetFlix.

This is a chronicle of my self exploration, with BitTorrent.

Meeting the Web 2.0 critereon Google Reader is in Beta, and probably will be for at least a year - so I'm not complaining - and with the development of this service we may see closer links emerging (and disappearing) between email and RSS. In other words, if gmail eventually offers RSS subscription services I can get rid of my email subscriptions, replace them with RSS subscriptions - and hopefully do what all readers I've seen so far don't do - archive content!

Looking around for current browser statistics, I found the w3schools statistics. w3schools is primarily visited by the web development community. I was curious if Firefox was still slumping in popularity, which it is. In fact the decline has started picking up in pace.

I find this interesting. Back in the day when I first started using Bittorrent, SuprNova was my prime source for all things. I knew of a few other torrent websites but they did not compare. Then SuprNova went down because of lawsuits, and a ton of new bittorrent websites popped up. One of my favorite websites, lokitorrent.com, eventually got shut down because of lawsuits I believe as well. After that, I looked around and there were literally hundreds of bittorrent sites. Recently there have been a ton of invite-only websites, invites given out similar to the way that Gmail’s invite system works. Can anyone remember something similar happening a few years ago, possibly a lawsuit against Napster? That spawned the outbreak of many new P2P clients, such as Kazaa, Limewire, WinMX, and others.

It’s a real shame that Bittorrent has such a ridiculously bad rap - it’s a great way for legal fileswapping. Amateur film developers have their movies distributed through Bittorrent - and apart from saving the huge bandwidth costs associated with online hosting, seeing the amount of seeders and leechers can give someone a decent idea of how popular the file is.

Azureus is a nice tool for downloading BitTorrent files. For first time users it can be a bit hard to get your mind around.

I am now hooked. I admit it. I haven’t yet scheduled my life around Lost, but I do make *darn* sure that I watch each episode. BTW - if you miss an episode and have high speed internet you can download them via BitTorrent. Which is nice, until someone takes that away.

I was just reading a post on Alan Levine’s CogDogBlog, Not so great moments in Web design, and was reminded about a recent experience that I had with poor website design.

I have successfully installed “Bork Bork Bork!” plugin for Mozilla Firefox. What is this Bork Bork Bork thing? Well, it is related to the swedish cook that used to appear in Sesame Street. Wanna know more about him? You have some info here, but you can also see the Bork Bork Bork edition of Google, and the Opera Bork Version.

It’s been a while since I’ve sent out the Photo Lines newsletter. This was for a number of reasons including TIME and so much of the mail not getting through because spam blockers from some ISP’s are increasingly filtering out even wanted mail.

The actual session extension server hit must not affect the current page for fear of corrupting the user's input. Loading a simple (blank?) aspx sever page into a popup that I immediately close (but prone to popup blockers), or into a hidden or zero size frame or iframe should satisfy this requirement.