Archive for September, 2006
MozSearch plugin
Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Tips & Tweaks, Web on September 30th, 2006
AsenDURE messaged me on MSN yesterday about having a search plugin for any site integrated into Firefox. After having a look at it, I gave it a shot and now this site has a search plugin which you can install into Firefox 2.0 and search directly from the search bar. ;)
Following the steps from here, your currently selected search plugin (by default Google) would glow blue when it automatically detects a search plugin. And the following screenshots on how to add and use it are rather self explanatory.
Adding it:
Using it:
There should be a 16×16 icon image for it, but I don’t have one for it now though. ;)
Firefox 2.0 (RC1)
Posted by Benny Chew in Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Web on September 30th, 2006
I’ve been using Firefox 2.0 since it was at Beta 2 a few weeks ago, and I am happy to say it has been relatively stable. I had it running for nearly a week before it got cranky, which is quite a long way since the days when I had to restart it every day at the very least.
Notable updates include the integration of functionality similar to the SessionSaver extension into Firefox’s history function, close buttons being added to each tab, anti-phishing filter, a redesign of the preferences dialog and minor user interface tweaks.
At time of writing, Firefox 2.0 is currently at RC1 (Release Candidate 1) which denotes a final product which is ready for release unless some serious bugs surface. Do note that installing Firefox 2.0 RC1 will overwrite your current Firefox installation and may disable some of your extensions which are incompatible (I’m using Nightly Tester Tools extension to get around this). However, if you would just like to try 2.0 out without having it replace your current Firefox installation, you can get Firefox Portable 2.0 RC1 which will run in standalone mode.
Firefox 2.0 is scheduled to be released some time in October, so you shouldn’t have to wait too long before your Firefox browser gets upgraded!
Screenshot:
Some random animated image
Posted by Benny Chew in Humour on September 30th, 2006
Using IE6 and IE7 together
Posted by Benny Chew in Tips & Tweaks, Web, Windows on September 25th, 2006
When you install IE7, it automatically replaces IE6 which can be annoying if you need to use IE6 for certain sites which have restrictions on the browser version or when you want to check for cross browser compatibility while developing websites. (credit to HMMaster for googling it for me :P)
There are a couple of ways to get around this, but I found downloading the standalone IE6 to be the quickest and easiest fix to get around this. You can get it here.
If you have not installed IE7 and want to try it out but not replace IE6, you can get the IE7 standalone instead here.
via Tech-Recipes.com
spherebox updates
Posted by Benny Chew in Site Updates, Web on September 19th, 2006
Did a couple of minor updates to the active blogs on spherebox yesterday. The list are:
- Addition of Creative Commons rights to the active blogs
- Added WP-notable and Lightbox JS WordPress plugins
Creative Commons was added to specify the rights we keep and what we give permission to freely. Our resident legal expert has a good writeup on Creative Commons and our choice of it here.
WP-notable is a plugin which allows quick social bookmarking (sites like digg, del.icio.us, Blinklist) for blog entries. Although it seems to work fine, it doesn’t seem validate to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard (will have to check on that later). Lightbox JS on the other hand allows thumbnailed images to be viewable in its maximised form without having to load a different page but in a pop up viewer instead.
Now for Han Kern to get the dormant community blogs going.. :D
GParted
Posted by Benny Chew in Linux, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Windows on September 19th, 2006
If you have ever partitioned your hard disk, Partition Magic would probably be the application you used for it. It’s probably the de facto software to use for doing anything with partitions with a very low chance of any loss of data (I personally have never got any issues on data loss/corruption). Unfortunately, Partition Magic isn’t free.
I recently tried out GParted (stands for Gnome Partition Editor) to repartition the hard disk on my Ubuntu server box. As opposed the Partition Magic which runs only on Windows, GParted can be used regardless of the operating system installed. It boots up via a CD or USB (which you can choose from the site) and is able to support the file systems currently in use by Windows and also Linux.
Its interface is very similar to Partition Magic, so it shouldn’t be too difficult if you have prior experience with the former. I managed to delete a redundant FAT32 partition I had and resized my /home ext3 partition without much drama. After restarting, everything was in a perfect order, so I don’t really have much to complain about.
Try it out if you’re looking for a free, open source alternative to Partition Magic.
Internet Explorer 7: Comeback of the king?
Posted by Benny Chew in General Tech, Open Source, Reviews, Web on September 16th, 2006
Internet Explorer (IE) has been largely synonymous to browsing the internet ever since Microsoft decided to bundle it with Windows 95 operating system. The much heralded browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape accelerated progressive innovation of new features to the web browser which ended with the demise of Netscape’s Navigator browser. Unfortunately, ever since Microsoft released version 6 of the browser released to the public about five years ago dominating the web browser arena, innovation of new functionality or interface tweaks have grounded to a halt.
The resurgence of a strong competitor to IE in the form of Mozilla Firefox has caused Microsoft to restart its efforts in this arena. After about a year and a half since the announcement that the 7th version of IE was in development, Release Candidate 1 (latest version at time of writing) of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has been released to the public for testing. A RC1 status would mean a close to complete final version where the goal would be to iron out bugs which appear before the final release is shipped. With lots of promise by Microsoft that this browser will help stem its eroding market share, here are the new features which have been introduced to regain its foothold.
News Alloy
Posted by Benny Chew in RSS, Web on September 16th, 2006
Khim Hoe recently told me about another web based RSS reader called News Alloy. After coming to a conclusion that Bloglines was by far irreplaceable in my previous blog entry on RSS readers, I went to try it out since he said it was pretty decent.
Initial impressions was that it has a similar feel to Bloglines, but with more Web 2.0-ish elements. As with my previous tests, I imported my Bloglines exported feeds into it. Importing went fine, but then a problem surfaced. Quite a fair bit of feeds which I knew were updated recently did not contain any entries in them which seemed something went wrong. The problem was that Newsalloy does not grab the feeds’ entries immediately after being added and is probably added to some sort of queue.
The AJAX interface has a similar flaw to Newsgator which is you would have to scroll down and up between reading feeds and going back to your feeds sidebar. After loading a few feeds that were available, I started to feel that they’ve tried to cramp too many icons/links onto the screen which made it feel cluttered. On the plus side, loading speed of feeds are pretty close to Bloglines.
I won’t be shifting from Bloglines to this, but for those who dislike Bloglines’s simplicity and Newsgator’s slowness, you could give this a shot.
Naming a bridge by internet voting
Posted by Benny Chew in Humour on September 16th, 2006
Portable apps
Posted by Benny Chew in General Tech, Open Source, Tips & Tweaks, Windows on September 14th, 2006
If you’re always having to use public terminals or friends’ PCs, you definitely would have been in a position where you wanted to or had to install an application to get some stuff done. In another situation, the applications might have already been installed on the machine, but the settings isn’t configured to how you want them to be, causing heaps of time wastage in reconfiguring it (and risking the wrath of your friend or sysadmin).
With USB thumb drive storage capacities skyrocketing in recent times, you can now have those applications you need stored in it, ready to be used right away with Portable Apps. The list of applications being made portable seems to be growing so there is a chance more applications will be added soon if the one you’re after isn’t listed. All portable applications are open source and seem to be updated fairly regularly.
However, with more and more traditional desktop applications being turned into web applications (e.g. Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Meebo) as well as internet access being available almost everywhere, IÂ believe the only portable application worthwhile having on a thumb drive would be Firefox Portable since everything else is available through the web browser. Hmm, I think I should stop before I start contradicting myself..
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