Firefox

Here are my various notes from the RailsConf sessions. You’ll have to excuse me as they aren’t the best notes in the world :-) Most are incoherent and I typed them quickly. If you want I also put them all in a PDF for download.

This is really a new kind of production in that it is not market driven and it is not centralized. We’ve had market-driven, decentralized production (standard firms in the US), we’ve had market-driven, centralized production (large corporations), we’ve had non-market, centralized production (governments and NGOs, non-profits). What we have not had is non-market, decentralized production. (This echoes Clary Shirky’s assertions about Perl being an act of love).

I love RIA technologies and Ruby on Rails. I always think combination of the these two could be greatest system framework. I’m glad Adobe recognizes that too, so do a few great guys. Here are the examples:

Then came the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, and things started to get a whole lot easier. The Firefox Firebug extension and the IE Web Developer Toolbar let you work interactively with the the two main browsers, albeit one at a time. I usually pick one or the other, get a design working, and verify / fix it in the other browser.

Buzzword, a Flex/AIR based word processor from VirtualUbiquity is amazing. It kicks the crap out of Google's Writely. Hell, it kicks the crap out of MS-Word and it's not even out of beta yet. That's the cornerstone of any office productivity suite. Now, toss in a speadsheet app and slide show app and you have the big three covered.

From the creators of PocketPCFreeware.mobi, this new site specializes in free software for the non-touch screen "Standard" version of Windows Mobile formerly called Windows Smartphone. Currently SmartphoneFreeware only has about 500 files for download compared with 6000 for on the Pocket PC site and 9000 on Palm freeware site.

I mean, $2500 is a lot of money and this guy even needs people to chip in to subsidize his website hosting. My own hosting was only $10 a year and it’s now even free and here’s this guy asking for donations and then saying that he would give away $2500. He has got to be kidding. I was even telling a friend that if he really has a winner, we won’t even know if the $2500 is in American Dollars or some other weak currency.

Mientras tanto, lo que para uno es perdida para otros son ganancias y así Firefox se lleva la mayor parte ganando un 5.64% de cuota seguido de Google Desktop (1.74%), Mozilla de forma genérica — seguramente alguna variante que use el motor Gecko — con un 0.41% y Opera con un 1.08%.

虽然网络一直蓬勃地发展，但在网络上充分地相信别人，总是有危险的。但我希望从买这个手机之后，我的家人可以对我多一些放心。同样是手机，我的索爱J300C去年买的时候花了不到700元。今年遇到的朋友们都劝我，该换了；智勇买了黑莓，不到600元，也和我炫耀~~。不是拿不出换手机的钱，只是缺乏需求。而在火车上，我居然发现Gmail居然有专门给索爱用的客户端，实在是惊讶。最近我们即将在HDU引入一个索爱的新项目，说白了就是拿学生来做小白鼠──不过我还是比较有欲望去体验下索爱的新业务的。连这个移动设备制造商也一头扎到学生中去，感叹做学生真好阿。

Every few months I get tired of Firefox chewing memory and hanging every 2-3 days, and decide to return to Safari. It’s a dilemma: Safari’s speed, elegance, and stability, or Firefox’s wealth of plugins? For now, I’m going to put speed and stability first and make Safari primary again. I can switch over when I need to do something Safari can’t do.

When we built the history management feature in ASP.NET Futures, we spent considerable time experimenting with the different behaviors of the main browsers out there. The problem with such a feature is that it has to rely on a number of hacks because browser vendors basically never anticipated this need. Now they're thinking about it, so all this may be simplified in a few years, but in the meantime, it's a very complicated feature to build. One of the things that struck me was how little reliable literature is available on the subject. There is a lot of partial information, lots of false or unverified information, but very little that's really comprehensive, reliable and up to date. Good references I found include Brad Neuberg's Really Simple History and Handling Bookmarks and Back Button as well as Mike Stenhouse's Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for Ajax Applications. But it was a lot easier to just experiment directly on the different browsers and verify our theories directly.

You know I run a website and I work for a company, we're always looking for new ways to advertise in both areas. The issue is that people have learned to ignore advertisements in general media, people flip during commercials or tivo them out. Online fewer and fewer people are paying attention to banners and popup's are pretty much dead since the release of new browsers and popup blockers. So where are companies going to look for their marketing needs in the future? Well perhaps if things continue on the path they will head towards Cellit Mobile Marketing. This group does something quite interesting by allowing companies to utilize the SMS messaging system as a way to reach their target demographics.