Firefox

80% of the people I know would be perfectly happy using Writely, iRows and Gmail and saving the $200-300 they normally spend on MS Office. Once someone implements a "disconnected mode" that allows users to edit files without internet access, and to download and backup our files, I'm going to start advocating pretty hard for this golden combination of simplicity and convenience.

Let's face it, we're all reading these blogs because we are looking to optimize our systems to become the most effective in getting things done. The creation of sites like Lifehacker are manifestations of our need to increase efficiency in our lives. We're all becoming productivty experts. I am as guilty as the next. Constantly tweaking my system to gain that 1% increase in my ability to get the job done. I've recently done in-depth studies on how Web 2.0 applications can better help me get the job done (in fact, I am writing this blog post in Writely, which then posts to Wordpress…)

I was directed there from a link in this article describing in detail how one person got Capistrano working at Dreamhost. It directed me to a section about the svn:externals property, which I’d been meaning to read for a while. So I did. It helped me get Ruby on Rails 1.1.2 set up as an external for a project I’m working on, and it’s actually extremely easy to do. I’ll step through that, though it’s kind of trivial (and not quite related to the point of this post). For those of you who can’t think for themselves, this can be easily modified to use trunk (or any release) instead of v1.1.2.

I’m starting to enjoy programming again, no thanks to Microsoft. Ive recently dug into Ruby and the Rails framework for building web applications. Things just make sense. I have decided to use Ruby on Rails for two of my current projects. One is GoalExec and the other is a tool for folks in construction. More to come on the latter of those projects as details are hashed out.

Firefox 質問スレ part 31 に、Web Developer のツールバーのラベルの文字列を少なくしたいという質問が出ていました。メインメニューの表示を変えるには、Shortmenu を使えば簡単に出来るんですが、拡張機能のツールバーだとそうは行きません。ということでどうにかできないかと考えました。

i really do get a kick out of junk mail. i love the way they dodge using those sort of “red flag” words and how they get around the spam blockers. it’s actually really creative. anyway, i got this one to day–get a load of the address they link to at the end.

There’s little point in having all this media playback ability unless you have the ability to… uhh… get more media. For this every computer user needs a Bittorrent client and a couple of good tracker sites. Luckily, Azureus is available for Linux. Azureus is one of the most popular bittorrent clients on the net and because it is based on Java it is available for Linux too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole LAMP thing, but the computer scientist in me can’t help railing against a language that proclaims its “type freedom”. Give me something with a proper type structure any day and I’ll feel much more comfortable. First idea is to see if I can get my transputer running online, initially in a kind of ‘batch processing’ mode, but possibly slightly more interactively at some point in the future. Can anyone else sense some AJAX coming on?

Dave Child has posted a number of Web development related cheat sheets in .pdf and .png format on his blog. These include CSS, xHTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and MySQL.

I’ve been working on a flyout menu for NS tonight and I was able to make it work. Except it only worked in Firefox, and not in IE. I personally thing the whole world should be using Firefox … but from looking at the site logs, 56% of the visitors use IE, a total of 38% use Firefox, and a scant 6% use Safari.

But beyond the slow factor (which may or may not be a short term thing), there's the ugliness factor. By default it shows a bunch of irrelevant stuff that I don't care about. Sure I can customise it so it shows content I'm interested in - but that takes effort to learn how, and Ma and Pa Bloggs from next door aren't going to go to the effort. Sure it can be customised to what I want - but so can the bookmarks in my browser. It's incredibly simple to set up buttons in Firefox that will bring the local weather up with one click, bring the white pages up with one click, bring google search up with one click - bring my other most used sites up with one click. It's a hell of a lot more simple to do this with the browser than it is with Live.com. Also - why would I want to deal with an overloaded screen each time the browser loads? The answer is - I don't. There's too much noise in my life - I want less. (MS packaging of Ipod anyone?)

During the 2nd Blogging Summit, i.PH officially announced the upcoming re-launch of their blogging service. I didn’t get to see the presentation and asked some questions although one of their executives briefed me on the new ajaxy features later that day.

Google have released the Google Web Toolkit — “Build AJAX apps in the Java language”. At first I thought this might just be their version of the Yahoo UI Library, but it turns out to be a completely different approach to the same problem. The YUI Library (and most other Ajax libraries) allow you to build a Web UI directly, using HTML and JavaScript. With GWT, you write a GUI application in Java, and GWT translates it into JavaScript and HTML for web deployment. It’s a less flexible approach, but could make it easier for Java developers to develop web applications with desktop-style GUIs — if this is what they really want.

With the whole web 2.0 hysteria a new breed of webapplication is finally available. Instead of of using your word processor or any other application from your local computer you get it all over the web. Complete office packages as well as nifty single applications (Writely and Kiko, are already waiting for you and your data.

build_form is a lackluster attempt at emulating the scaffolding feature in Ruby on Rails—but just like with Rails, the main purpose of this function is for quick data entry—not actual production use.

Use this script to remove sessions more than a day old. You may add it to cron to automate.

Martin Fowler wrote a piece on Ruby today called EvaluatingRuby. I've been researching Ruby and Ruby on Rails pretty heavily the last couple of months and I'm impressed. Now that I've gotten a new StructureMap release out of the way, I'm diving into a new Ruby on Rails/AJAX project on the side just to start learning.

But then there is the issue of an antispyware app bundling adware to keep it free. I am sorry but that is stupid. With that mind set, McAfee and Norton should start bundling viruses with their products, popup blockers should have their own popups that they show you, spam filters should start sending you spam from them. It just doesn’t make any sense. It defeats the whole purpose of and antispyware program.

This is a compelling platform, if it works, and it’s now going open source in hope of garnering a greater number of developers contributing and using. The same folks built a DotNetNuke ("DNN") administration console based upon this.

In search of using calm technology in our project, we have come up with a friendly-looking stuffed-rabbit that speaks out your gmail, according to your preset preferences on the web. This way, you do not have to solely rely on your personal computer to retrieve your emails. The user has the freedom to preset the importance of his emails, and categorize them as well as be alerted when a new email is received. They can also have personal messages recorded, allowing for the voice to be transmitted. Essentially, we have chosen to use RF (Radio Frequency) as a method to transmit and receive data between the doll and the internet, and a set of walkie talkies to output the emails using Text-to-speech technology, while also allowing for the use of personal speech. Radio Frequency can travel up to 125ft and the walkie talkies transmit and receive up to a distance of 5 miles.

After surfing across Lifehacker’s post about how to easily get a Yahoo! Mail Beta account, I decided to take it for a spin. Following those directions was easy enough and I found myself with a new Y! Mail Beta account within 5 minutes. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had seen screenshots of the fancy interface, which was purported to mimic a desktop email client, floating around the internet months before. Hopefully Yahoo has their eyes set on the future with mail beta and plan on setting themselves apart from Google and their popular Gmail.

Here (.mp3 25Mb, .ogg 21Mb) is an interesting talk with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and funder of the Ubuntu project. It provides some interesting insights into the direction of the project and Shuttleworth’s vision for free software in general. He make it quite clear the Ubuntu with Gnome, and Kubuntu (Ubuntu + KDE) are equal citizens and will be promoted, developed and funded as a such. My person favorite moment is when the German interviewer almost spits on the ground while asking why Gnome is the default desktop instead of KDE.

Slide deck from the INDC - Building Web2.0 Applications with WCF and Atlas/AJAX

The whole idea of Rails is to approach the world of web application development in a pre-emptive fashion. Allow yourself to be clueless. Let the philosophy of Rails be your guide. Relax, take a deep breath, and take that plunge that’s going to change your life forever. Admit to yourself that, when it comes to the radical new way of doing things, you pretty much don’t know anything. By taking this huge step backward, you’ll be opening up the vista that’ll take you farther than you could ever imagine possible.

Summer’s almost over, and this summer I’m going to build a computer, so I’m not restricted to my shared computer. I’m thinking of converting to Linux 100%, but I don’t know if I can or if I’ll just install it Dual-Boot. I can navigate linux pretty good (without GUI :P) since I’ve been messing with shell accounts and things. Not to mention my favor of irssi. My bud claims he can play Counter-Strike: Source using WINE. So I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving that behind, I’m not sure if I can WINE XFire, Trillian, etc… but then again there is gAIM (Not that I favor gAIM) but yeah. I’m not sure if I’ll go all the way, I’ve already converted from mIRC -> irssi (Yep, except DCC cause I don’t exactly have unlimited bandwitdth on the shell im irssing off.) So I’m not sure what to do. I’d like to take the plunge and become a full linux user. Anywhos. Everything’s going well on this end. Talk to you all later, maybe I’ll post about Perl, or Bittorrent or something technical.

When thinking about BitTorrent clients for Windows, several come to mind: Azureus, uTorrent, BitComet and BitLord. Azureus has all the features and extensive plugin support but is slowed down considerably by its use of the Java VM. uTorrent is quite the opposite with a lightweight application that doesn’t hog system resources. You can find out more about other BitTorrent clients with this detailed comparison chart on Wikipedia.

I really want to know if this is true, and if so, what technologies are involved. Actually BitTorrent, or some other p2p system (unstructured or structured)? NAT hole-punching (presumably the iChat AV guys have some experience with this very thorny problem)? Possible impact on overall system performance (and ISP traffic-shaping effects)? [Friends at Apple: I will keep your whispers in closest confidence.]

So Yahoo Mail has a new Ajax interface, but it’s still in beta testing and (I believe) is not available for everybody yet. My colleague at the office shared how to try it out in your current Yahoo account, though. Just log in to your email, click Options, edit your account information, then change your content preferences to English-UK instead of English-USA. Log out and then log in, you’ll find an email in your inbox inviting you to try out the beta service.

For those that have played with Instant Rails in the past, and thought the cookbook demo app was a bit naff, download the new version of instant rails and you'll get the typo blog app - a much better real world app to explore. You can then pull the app into RadRails - a free Rails IDE. I've had some installation issues with RadRails - but it's pretty cool.

I found the UI of Google lame, for sure it’s been well engineered with Ajax deftly applied, but the fundamental ‘what you can see on the screen’ Vs. ‘what you can’t and scroll / click for’ is all wrong. Ironic, since their email (Gmail) is drop-dead gorgeous.

I picked this off the Drudge Report this evening from the New York Times: New Microsoft Browser Raises Google’s Hackles. Give me a break. Google complains about IE 7’s search box in its upper right hand corner. Its just stupid. Google thinks the IE 7 search box puts Microsoft in a unfair advantage for its default being MSN Search (Microsoft’s search engine). Ok so if Microsoft can’t put a search box in the upper right hand corner of their browser, is it fair that Firefox can? I mean Firefox pretty much uses the same concept already and has been for quite some time now. I’m tired of double standards.