Firefox

Hey all, we are part of the Stanford U team trying to spread firefox. We have recently started firefoxies.com to spread the word on firefox and get some fun laughs and smiles from the many users of firefox. Most of the time we don't actually get to see each other, so we thought that this may be a great way. Best of all, you get to vote who the most "firefoxy" firefox user is.

My girlfriend and I watch very few shows that dont air on the regular over the air (OTA) broadcasts. Luckily, we are pretty central in houston and have pretty good HDTV reception for all the major networks. So, why do we pay > $50 a month to Time Warner Cable for our TV? Ah, thats right - the DVR - our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD. The functionality of being able to record our shows and watch them whenever keeps us hooked. So, why not build my own PVR! If I try and keep the cost down, it will pay for itself in the money we save not paying Time Warner Cable.

After an invitation from Brad I’m using Writely, and have discovered that I can even use it to post to my blog, and in fact, almost any format of blog. This post in fact is sent directly from Writely.

Now I know why all the fuss about Ruby and Rails. Ruby is a dynamic object-oriented scripting language and Rails contains the activerecord gem that adheres to Martin Fowler's ActiveRecord pattern.

Espero que se divirtam tanto com ele como eu durante o desenvolvimento do dito cujo e me perdoem alguma burradinha que porventura apareça. ;-)” A nota foi enviada por Eustáquio "TaQ" Rangel (eustaquiorangelΘyahoo·com), que acrescentou este link da fonte para maiores detalhes.

With a bit of Internet Searching, I stumbled across one of the best bits of free software I think I have ever found, JAlbum (currently version 6.4). There's loads of skins available, simple to use and customise (assuming you understand the basics of editing HTT's) and does everything on my list apart from the last one.

Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is program that gives “student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period.” It’s the 2nd year for the program, which last year had 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations in 49 countries.

I don’t really get why archive.org isn’t making use of the BitTorrent protocol. I guess it would work pretty well with their content and with their servers being sooooo slow all the time it would be a real boon. Is there a reason why they don’t do it?

uTorrent was very slow for me until recently I applied a few tweaks. Here’s what I did.

I suppose, by now, everyone’s heard that Google has developed a Calendar. I think Google was smart to acquire Writely, which is one of the best collaborative tools out there — I’m not counting Wiki’s, of course, because they’re collaborative but way higher-functioning and for mass-user-revisions, unlike Writely, on which I’m currently writing/revising two articles with a few co-authors.

Writely is a full-fledged web-based word processor that you can access from anywhere. It can be thought of as Microsoft Word for the Web.

Favicons are a great way to enhance a website, reflecting the website design, it let's the user quickly find the right link in his bookmarks.

One of the newest and most exciting features of BitTorrent is RSS Torrent Feeds. Once properly configured, it lets you fully automate the procedure of finding, downloading the torrent files, and initiating the downloads to your movie folder, then finishing the download, and seeding it to a specific ratio.

While most of you were no doubt enjoying your first long weekend of the year, I was attending the first ever Ruby on Rails conference – Canada on Rails – in Vancouver.

Like the email spam blockers, it’s worth to have a good list of comment/trackback spammers in hand. So I will try to share my list with other guys and highly recommend it to others. This can help blogosphere to have clear sky!

Ruby on Rails is the killer app that is propelling the Ruby language into the spotlight. It is a web application framework that takes the HTTP request/response model that we've all become familiar with and simplifies it to a point most people didn't think was possible.

When a database like Oracle decides to write an article on Ruby on Rails, one may think it is time to take a closer look at Ruby on Rails.

I’m already working in the port of my photography site Temujin Photo to Ruby On Rails, nowadays its just plain HTML. The design will remain the same, the idea is to add a bit more of flexibility on the server side, implement the current external services (stuff like the newsletter and the guestbook) and do a couple of other things; all of this while exploring a new web framework.

At a glance, I thought the Writely is a suitable tool for my school team writing project. However, its FAQ didn't mention anything on multiple checkout on a single document. It may still require some manual editing during merging. I never used Writely personally. However, the screenshots looks promising. It seems like it is more of a team document collabration tool rather than a web WYSIWYG word processor. The Writely supports importing from a number of popular file formats, including OpenOffice, MS Word, RTF, etc. It can even export to PDF, a feature mostly supported by commercial word processors.

Begininng today at http://www.google.com/calendar, is designed to make it easy for users to add entries. Gmail, Google’s mail service, has been modified to automatically recognize when messages mention an event so recipients can seamlessly add it to their calendar. Users can also add entries in simple text, such as “Coffee with Mom on Sunday at 11 a.m. at Cafe La Boheme,” eliminating the need to fill out forms.

Muss erst selbst ein wenig damit rumspielen. Ein erstes extrem positives Feedback, insbesondere zur GMail-Integration bei Techcrunch. Aber testet es am Besten selbst mal unter http://calendar.google.com.

Otras características interesantes incluyen la posibilidad de crear varios calendarios, la integración con Gmail (se pueden crear eventos o citas a partir de mensajes recibidos), la creación rápida de citas ("desayuno de trabajo tomorrow 1pm"), las áreas de discusión para cada evento, y la facilidad de invitar a otros usuarios a un evento, y pedir confirmaciones de asistencia.

The latest buzz is around a technology known as "AJAX" - meaning Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ok, so you are probably still none the wiser! Let me explain.

Yahoo! Maps has released a new version now with global coverage, aerial maps, and hybrid views. Along with these features being added to the beta version of the mapping product, you can now access them through the Flash, Flex and AJAX Map components available through the Yahoo! Developer Network.

ruby está nos trilhos. Só que o trem também.

So I seem to create new rails apps often enough, whether for a new client, to demonstrate a particular feature, or just to try something out in a clean environment. And I always use Subversion to keep my source code (heck, I even keep my home directory in an svn repository!). So I’ve created a script which will setup the repository layout, add in rails, capistrano & exception_notification, configure a few bits, ignore all the generated content, fix any stray shebang lines and create the appropriate databases. Just in case it’s useful to any anybody else, you can grab it here: new_rails_project.sh

For people who don’t know about AJAX, Wikipedia gives good info. Ajax in one line is a technology by which you can send and receive data without the page being reloaded, so it looks more ‘dynamic’. I guess this could be the dummy way of explaining it.

37 Signals is selling an ebook, Getting Real, from their Signals vs. Noise blog. 37 Signals used the very same process that they wrote about in Getting Real, to launch Ruby on Rails and other web applications. Mark Bernstein sees the success of the publication of Getting Real as a watershed moment for self-publishing on the web. He notes that 37 Signals sold 1750 copies of Getting Real on the first day.

I’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately trying to catch up with the present. I’ve been learning the Ruby language and Ruby on Rails. I think that RoR represents the bleeding edge of not just website development, but software engineering in general. No, it isn’t perfect and it’s still pretty immature, but the ideas around it are pretty revolutionary. As I’ve said before, I think that software like Ruby on Rails is going to eventually evolve into something which will put most software engineers out of their jobs. And, even though that affects me as well, I think it’s a good thing.

Greasemonkey and Platypus are extremely cool to play around with, but how much do you actually use them? Are you OK with restarting Firefox every time you want to use Gmail Space? For faster performance, disable extensions you don’t use often, and uninstall those you never use.

That being said, if you find Univ.Bin’s for your favorite proggies, you’ll be golden. I’m using Camino, which everyone should be using anyway (http://www.caminobrowser.org/). Firefox ate system like a pig in a patato patch. Camino= better looking and works great. I also am using Adium for my Instant Messaging, which isn’t as pretty as MSN for mac, but supports display pics and your basic emoticons (in a huge range of IM protocols) and is very fast.

Germany just agreed on a new law that makes it possible to put downloaders behind bars for two years. This is if you use the movie for personal use, commercial downloaders face up to five years in prison. Germany is considered to be one of the leading filesharing counties in Europe so this law will probably have a huge impact.

Inscris depuis quelques temps pour bénéficier du traitement de texte en ligne de Google, Writely, j’attends toujours une réponse du moteur de recherche Américain.

With the EWA, it’s harder to know when a session is no longer needed. It is hard (if not impossible with some popup blockers) to figure out when your browser closes down or when it navigates away from the page. That means that there’s a good chance that sessions that will be created from the EWA will actually linger for the full timeout period if we allow them. That said, one of the bigger scenarios for using the EWA is in dashboard scenarios where it is simply used to display information and does not need to actually do any operations. In those cases, there is no need for us to actually keep the session for a long time – we can get rid of it quickly – and since the user did not do any operations on it, they will not lose anything. For these two reasons, we have the short session timeout setting which will be assigned to all EWA sessions until the time when the user actually makes a request to the server, at which stage; the session will be assigned with the regular Session Timeout setting.

The best part of using the dot jp was in firefox if you type in a dot com IDN Domain it will resolve to the punycode. With the IDN dot jps Firefox never resolves to the punycode. It stays as a native Japanese term in the browser.

A couple of days back, I noticed that a few of my colleagues were using Firefox. But.. both of them had no plugins installed and in fact, one of them was still using Firefox 1.0.1.

So, after working a bit on AJAX, I found myself pulling my hair out in frustration. The reason? The “Get another” function for the random quotes block (look below) just doesn’t seem to want to work in Internet Explorer (but it does now). What’s more frustrating is that it work in every other browser. Turns out that the problem is caused by the way that IE handles AJAX. This led me to discovering two issues with my AJAX guide. First problem, which caused most of my problems, is caused by the stupid way that IE decides to handle AJAX. And the second, is due to my oversight. The changes have been made to the post. The problems are:

Many wordpress plugins… especially the ones that use Ajax also use prototype.js.

Ars Technica: great site for the computing enthusiast, read it everyday. Today they have have an article on Duke Nukem Forever. Duke Nukem has apprarently been a game long in development, because developers want to make it multi-platform. Ars claims that as a solution, the developers have decided to build the game utilizing the latest Web 2.0 technologies: Ajax, built on Ruby On Rails. The game will run through any web-browser on any platform.

The recent trend to create rich internet applications with AJAX has put preasure on Macromedia and it’s Flash technology. Products like Backpack, Writely, etc. make heavy use of Javascript and and XML. They interaction allows for dynamically adding items, drag-drop, even searches like “Windows Live Search” are done using AJAX.