Firefox

Excellent article on combining the power of BitTorrent with Firefox. It discusses popup killing, mimetype management, direct searching, site customisation with Greasemonkey and BitTorrent integration directly with Firefox.

Fire up your popup blockers and check out these eeerie images of airplane graveyards over here...

Look at the capitalistic giant, Microsoft! Imagine that there were no free software movement and open source. Microsoft would be the ultimate monopolist, the whole world would be their empire. In such case, there would be no real progress and innovation because there is no force to drive it.

This history can be very educational to the new Linux user. It gives a definite flare and flavor as to how the open source and free software movement got started. I knew of bits and pieces of the history but All About Linux has put it in a nice concise form I have never seen before.

Onfolio Support: When I tried to access feeds last night, every single one of them gave me the red x icon, even the feed for this support forum. [later] I opened IE to see what was up with that program, and it told me that it was working "offline". When I told it to work online, it showed me that I had a proxy set up, and the proxy was not working properly (since I'm back at home). When I had checked the proxy information in Firefox, all was correct, i.e., no proxy.

µTorrent.com - Powerful, efficient and small BitTorrent client

That post put me to thinking. I like reading blogs about things that happen to people - snapshots of their day and so on. Now I feel that it is time for me to reveal a dark secret. When I created this blog, it was more in the nature of an experiment than anything serious; I was wondering how the free software installed by my ISP (Free.fr) actually worked. Then the idea of writing posts fascinated me, so I continued, and now, a hundred or so posts and four months on, I feel quite guilty if I don’t update regularily (not guilty enough to actually update, it seems…).

It seems a decent amount of people I know have made the switch already. Not to worry, if you know someone who has not switched over to Firefox, send them this way. It’s not costing them anything but time, time that they have wasted using other browsers that can’t standup to Firefox. Ask your browser “Browser, would you like to go in to the octagon with Firefox and tap out in five seconds?”. I think you know the answer. In case you don’t, your browser said “No thanks, Firefox looks like a beast. He’s gotta be on the juice”.

That will change, as the tools used by the great unwashed pick up and highlight RSS functionality. That’s not Newsgator or Firefox, but IE and Windows.

Got some real work done for a client. I’m really thankful for web standards like HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS. I did some conversion of some client web pages over to HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS. I tested in Mozilla/Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. Uploaded the finished web pages and notified the client. Then, I thought about doing a google search to see if there was a way to view the client’s web site using older browser standards. Whew! There was http://anybrowser.com and the client’s web pages degraded gracefully to the older web standards. Thanks in most part to HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS and the engineers who had the foresight to allow for graceful degradation. Thanks guys!

Ever since the Google Maps API was released, I have been waiting for people to start integrating these in novel ways (even I had some ideas), and whilst idly surfing earlier, I had the fortune to find the London Panoramas Google Map. Returning to the TLD I discovered literally hundreds of such implementations each containing a map and a varying degree of information.

I know most of you didn’t enjoyed using MSN’s hotmail, instead you all prefer Yahoo! Mail or Google’s Gmail. This post is going to talk Hotmail, get the most of Hotmail. As you know that hotmail only gave 2MB of free space for non-US users, so, I’m going to talk about how to get 25MB instead of 2MB, later the 25MB of free space will become 250MB if you stay active in next 30 days.

« Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is available

Microsoft is offering free software development tools for *free* at its website. Yup! The so-called “evil empire” is offering an “Express” version of Visual Studio and MS SQL Server 2005 for free and it can be downloaded here.

An hour into it they finally start the demo. The screen is blank, the guy is talking. It's live.com. The demo didn't work. A total demo disaster. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Doesn't work with Firefox. Screen shot.

Several interesting topics were covered; the purpose of DRM, how the public really use MMS messaging, the ins and (mainly) outs of outsourcing, the importance of User Experience in Product Development, how the French get a better Broadband deal than the British, iPaqs as Portable Media Centres, the dream pairing of BitTorrent and RSS and how more developers should fear the Grey Threat more than the Chinese or Eastern European one.

A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop. In fact, a TV and a media player is pretty much all the hardware that you need to provide basic education to a village full of children. That hardware (and some free software) would cost all of $200 a year, and if you pay about $2000 a year as salaries to a couple of village school teachers, you can educate a 100 kids for about $20 per child per year. Compare that to just buying $100 laptops for each kid.

I know what you’re saying: why would I ever want to touch IE once I have Firefox? Some sites still don’t support open-source browsers, so you’re forced to use IE. When you encounter one of these sites, you need to go find that burried application that you deleted the shortcut to becuase you never thought you’d need it again, and go from there. With this simple Firefox extention, you can now run an instance of IE as a tab inside of Firefox! Very cool!

US CERT, part of the Department of Homeland Security continues to recommend that users of Internet Explorer “use a different web browser”. The folks there can’t say it but we all know what they want to say and that’s use Firefox.

Just grabbed my copy of Firefox 1.5 RC 1. A few minor improvements. Beta 2 was a more significant upgrade, especially on Mac. Other than a few extensions I had to hack to get working, it’s been pretty smooth.

After listening to the NBaN host mention starting a petition to incorporate BitTorrent into iTunes, I decided to take some action and create one.

Our local newspaper here, the Star-Tribune, just rolled out their new website design. Interestingly, the site appears to be opitmized for Firefox, as the top navigation buttons have drop down menus that appear in Firefox, but not it IE. The doctype they use is HTML 4.01 Strict, and using my Html Tidy firefox extension, it appears that their html is rather clean. As I said, they just rolled the site out this morning, and the site was actually down for a few hours it seemed (at least for me, not sure what my deal is lately). Also, if you move your mouse over the top navigation buttons in Firefox, you can see three advertisement windows flash on the screen quickly, if you move your mouse quickly over the buttons, you can see who the ad is for :-) The flashing ad thing is definitely a javascript bug, I'm not sure where those ads are supposed to show up, but its rather annoying right now.

I’ve been using reader.Google.com as of late. Its not perfect but it has several things going for it. 1) its online, so it will keep track of items I’ve already read from wherever I access it. 2) its free. I had been using Onfolio with Firefox as my RSS reader. Onfolio is made by the guys who made Cold Fusion, so I have a natural desire to see them do well. Its a good product. It is probably the best RSS reader out there. However, it costs $30 and it only works on one computer. Google reader is good enough and with the cost and online advantages, it makes it hard to beat.

gDisk: “...is software that turns your GMail account into a portable hard drive so you can always have your important files accessible accross the Internet…”