Musing for Thursday June 24,2004

Well apparently Hotmail is following Yahoo's lead in upping the mail file size to a more reasonable amount (250 MB). All I can say is, I still a want Gmail account. Read about it on Cnet

Well the impossible happened today, my opinion of Darl Mcbride lowered. Thanks to this Wired article that I found out about thanks to Groklaw. If you want to know more about the whole fight between SCO and Linux( IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Autozone and DC. Check out Groklaw.

Ok on a happy note I found an article on DesktopLinux.org about cool app that is not only cross platform, and free but also allows you to use your computer as a free point to point ip phone. No long distance charges, just pure voice over ip, no service to sign up for or pay for, just ip phone. I still got to play with it myself until I can officially recommend yet. Hopefully I can convince someone from a far away place (cough Michigan) to help me test it out. Well if anyone checks it out and gets it work (or not) I would love to hear from you either via email or the comments section. Happy playing. You can download it here.

Matt

There are 10 type of people out there. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

Firefox 0.9

I'm sure this isn't news to some people but last week FireFox 0.9 was released. They have did some major rearrangement of the Theme manager and Extensions manager. Ok maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. FireFox is a browser that is based on Mozilla with the objective to create a lighter and faster version Mozilla while keeping all the browsing features. It was originally called Phoenix, then change its name to Firebird until its renamed again as FireFox (hopefully for the final time) Anyway gone are IRC chat client(Chatzilla) and mail client. Mind you mail client now lives as a very versatile stand alone app called Thunderbird. Well that's another post I'm sure. Anyway the new Firefox has a slightly noticeable performance increase( I have been happy with the speed and stability since 0.7)over the last version. I had a chance to use it both at home and at work for the last few days. This product is showing serious signs of macerate. If your an IE users (or a Netscape/Mozilla for that matter) and are wondering what everyone is talking about give it a whirl. Its only a 4 mb download. IE users will notice right off the bat the lack of popups. Mozilla/Firefox has one of the best butane popup blocker out there. You need popups to make a certain site work doing a site by site by site exclusion. You can just double click the icon in bottom left hand corner and select the site and hit unblock. That easy. Don't get me started on tabbed browsing, one o f the most powerful browsing feature out there. My suggestion is to get in the habit of using them. They will decompiling your browsing forever. Themeing (read: skinning) gives you flexibility that IE can not do without a third part app. They also centralized and improved the website that has all new themes on it. I generally been using FireFox without any extents. This is the first version I ventured to using some. I have to admit, I'm not too sure why I haven't been using the GoogleBar before. Now I need it on all computers I do research on. Its too useful. I could go on for hours about this ( especially about tabbed browsing) I promise you if you give it chance, and get used to the small nuances of the Mozilla style browsers, you will mumble in disgust when you have to use IE on someone else's computer. Give it a try, you wont' regret it. But that's just my humble opinion. Its available for the window's, Linux and Mac OS X at Mozilla.org

Matt

Would love to hear your comments. Click on the comments link below and post. Open to all.


Edit:
I have found the coolest feature on the googlebar. Mind you I have never really used the Google Bar in IE so this might be old news to some. If you right click on the googlebar then go to "page info" you find something interesting, a Translate to English" option. Once you click on it will make an icon availble that will facilatate your translating needs. Have found a chance to use it but I'm sure I'll come accross one. See the picture below for more details.

Gmail

Ok I admit it, I originally signed up for this service because I heard you got a Gmail Beta account. Anyway I have been watching this whole Gmail invite thing play out. I have seen anything from begging to offers of children, virginity or votes, just for a mail account(a big one mind you). I'm not sure if its just because everyone else wants one ("Tickle me" Elmo anyone)or its just an elitist thing. On the upswing there is a site that is trying to distribute these accounts to the troops. So there is a positive swing of things to wanton greed. Oh well I might have to wait till the official release to get one. I'm not going to waste too much time on getting into the beta.

Matt