Posted: March 3rd, 2009
Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark
1: It’s exactly the same as Windows Mobile 6… er, 5.
2: The interface improvements are still way behind the curve.
3: The UI tweaks are mostly just skin deep, and third-parties have already gone way deeper.
4: It doesn’t support capacitive touchscreens.
5: It’s not due out until “later this year.”
6: You probably can’t upgrade your phone.
7: No Zune integration. Not even a new Windows Media Player.
8: Where’s the keyboard?
9: The browser is still weak.
10: It doesn’t innovate in any way.
Posted: December 21st, 2007
Sadly, the most important addon I use, Google Browser Sync is still not compatible with Firefox 3b2. Google needs to stop slacking… or would need to if it had competition :/
Anyway a few other addons I use are also not compatible yet: Google Gears, DownThemAll, Adblock Plus and the Growl addon.
Oh well, guess I’ll have to wait in memory leak land for a while – at least until Google releases a compatible browser sync.
Posted: December 19th, 2007
* HTML5
* JS2
Posted: October 15th, 2007
Let’s skip the part about the why – that’s for another post, maybe. I want to create an application that has browser windows inside it. I’m hardly the only person to want to do this but there seem to be surprisingly few ways to do this if you consider cross-platform support a must.
Java can’t do it. In fact after searching I was only able to find 2 options:
Option a) wxMozilla – I already knew this one but considering the last version of it (0.5.4) came out in 2005 and there are at least few posts/emails around the web seem to indicate some problems – though I haven’t investigated this thoroughly.
The big plus of wxmozilla is that I believe this is what was used to develop gush and what I want to do (want != will) is very similar to gush in terms of GUI.
Option b) GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# – this is the solution that I’m leaning towards.
Does anyone out there know any other options? Preferably something usable with either Java or Python (I really don’t feel like coding in C++) and Linux/Mac/Win support would be nice though only Linux/Mac support is strictly required.
UPDATE: having looked at things in more detail I don’t think GtkEmbedMoz/Gecko# is a good solution for me based on the OSX support and the fact that I’d rather use python for this. That leaves me with wxMozilla as the only option for now (and I’m not sure that it will work).
UPDATE2: while what is (was?) the main page for wxMozilla doesn’t show it, there is an April 2006 version of wxMozilla on the sourceforge page.
Posted: June 13th, 2007
It might not be all that great if a simple action (like say clicking in a thumbnail) does something completely different and not really better than what the user is expecting just to show some eye-candy (like say blank the browser window and display the larger image with a confusing set of icons in non-standard locations and a weird frame around it).
Just my 1 cent.
Posted: June 11th, 2007
Good to see Jobs infamous distortion field is still intact – I was afraid it was no longer active now that Apple is treated as a serious company as opposed to the industry joke it had been up until the ipod and the move to intel processors.
To boldly claim what no one in his right mind has claimed before: Safari – The Most Innovative Browser. I’ve been told Jobs managed to remain serious while this phrase was on the background, I would’ve cracked myself up rolling on the floor laughing if I tried to make this insane claim. This one should get an award of some kind.
Posted: March 13th, 2007
Note To Self: take a look at firekeeper – project page, project weblog.
Firekeeper is an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for Firefox. It is able to detect, block and warn the user about malicious sites. Firekeeper uses flexible rules similar to Snort ones to describe browser based attack attempts. Rules can also be used to effectively filter different kinds of unwanted content.
Other features of Firekeeper include:
* Ability to scan incoming Firefox traffic – HTTP(S) response headers, body and URL and to cancel processing of suspicious responses.
* HTTPS and compressed responses are scanned after decryption/decompression.
* Very fast pattern matching algorithm (taken directly from Snort).
* Interactive alerts that give an ability to choose a response to detected attack attempt.
* Ability to use any number of files with rules and to automatically load files from remote locations.
Posted: February 1st, 2006
I’ve been a firefox user since 0.5 or 0.6 something like that. Before I was a mozilla user and for a while before that I even used Netscape. It’s safe to say that i’ve never been much of a fan of IE. I’ve used IE (even on linux over wine) too browse some IE-only webapages on a few occassions but most of the time I use it to access one specific webpage: it’s a local webpage that acts as a sort of “customization” of a remote website. It uses a bunch of ActiveX controls, javascript and stuff. It is a IE-only webpage. I decided to try out the new IE7 beta2, obviously I didnt make it my default browser and when I tried to open the local webpage with it, it opened it in firefox. Talk about being useful… IF I WANTED TO OPEN IT IN FF I WOULD’VE DONE IT WITHOUT IE! Damn stupid browser… sigh. Only 10 seconds into the new version of IE and I’m already trying to uninstall it – that’s a record. And yes, I said “trying”. Why? You would’ve thought that a company that incorporated an “Add and Remove Programs” app to their Operating System would’ve used it, especially with beta software… sigh. So I had a non-useful browser installed that I couldn’t install its slightly more useful previous version until it was removed – I knew that without even trying it, it’s the “Microsoft Way” not allow you to replace programs with their previous version. That’s when the hero of this story stepped in, CCleaner:
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! 
It can also uninstall programs, in this case it uninstalled IE7 and I’m back with IE6. And that’s how CCleaner saved the day. Thank you CCleaner
UPDATE:
OK SORRY! I was a bit pissed off when i wrote this post and a few people (namely Pedro Fernandes and Relax) already pointed out to me that you can remove IE7 as an update via the “add an remove programs” app.
Posted: January 12th, 2006
It has been all over the news for the past couple of weeks or so. The US-CERT released its Cyber Security Bulletin 2005 Summary and while I’m not one to doubt human incompetence the fact that this report was put together by someone who supposedly understands the concept of “operating system” makes me think it might’ve been more than just incompetence. At issue is the fact that the bulletin for some reason decided to divide the vulnerabilities by what operating systems they affected, to quote the report: “Software vulnerabilities are categorized in the appropriate section reflecting the operating system on which the vulnerability was reported“. So far so good. Unfortunatelly whoever put it together, apparently, doesn’t understand what an “operating system” is. So according to that Cyber Security Bulletin only two operating systems exist: Windows and Unix/Linux. And so under that classification, the US-CERT bulletin states:
“There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities”
We all know how competent and umm… competent the press is. There is no point in blaming this on the “Microsoft Press Machine” though I’m sure they were happy to give a hand to the more useless members of the press, the fact is they didn’t have to. Out of the majority of the reporters out there, the few that actually understand anything about what they are reporting on are usually incapable of doing anything more than just copying a press release into a text processing program and changing the words a bit as well as occasionally asking for quotes from “experts” – people usually attached to a big company that has something to lose by telling the whole truth. And I’m not even going to mention their need for sensationalist headlines… oh wait I just did. All this said, it was obvious to everyone with half a brain that the words in the US-CERT bulletin were going to be interpreted/transcribed by the press as “Windows is more secure than Unix/Linux” or even more appallingly as “Windows 3X safer than Linux“.
I don’t know what makes me more sad: the fact that the tech press still doesn’t know that security of an operating system cannot be effectively measured by number of vulnerabilities alone, the fact that they don’t know that “Unix/Linux” actually consists of a large number of different operating systems OR that the US-CERT doesn’t know it – or at least decided to pretend it didn’t know, in which case the question becomes “Is it worse to be incompetent or corrupt?”
And now, for the facts. First of, like I said before, “Unix/Linux” isn’t an operating system but rather a large number of very different operating systems like for example IBM’s AIX, Apple’s Mac OS X, RedHat Linux and NetBSD. As if this mistake wasn’t big enough, somehow, the US-CERT decided that a vulnerability in firefox was a “Unix/Linux”-specific problem even though the majority of firefox users are probably runing it in Windows. You can argue that most open-source OSes include firefox as the default browser and this a firefox vulnerability is more or less analog to a IE vulnerability in Windows (even though IE’s integration into Windows is much greater than FF’s in any Linux distro) but the bulletin in question makes no distinction between software integrated into the OS and third party software.
When the vulnerabilities are properly broken down by OS, the picture we get is quite different:
All of Microsoft’s discovered security exploits for Windows only amount to a pretty reasonable 44. Microsoft products in total (including MS Office, Internet Explorer, ASP.NET and the like) comes to 122.
(…)
Individual Unix distributions faired very well: Apple Mac OS X clocked in at 21 vulnerabilities, tied with IBM’s AIX. HP-UX had only 15 vulnerabilities. SCO had only nine.
For the top Linux distributions, things look peachy. Red Hat had seven vulnerabilities; Suse 12; Debian 10; and Gentoo a mere five.
Non-Linux open souce distribution FreeBSD clocked in with 13, while ultra-secure NetBSD maintained its reputation with two vulnerabilities reported.
And like NewsForge pointed out, US-CERT’s own Technical Cyber Security Alerts shows a different picture:
* 22 Technical Cyber Security Alerts were issued in 2005
* 11 of those alerts were for Windows platforms
* 3 were for Oracle products
* 2 were for Cisco products
* 1 was for Mac OS X
* None were for Linux
And more:
US-CERT’s list of current vulnerabilities contains a total of 11 vulnerabilities, six of which mention Windows by name, and none of which mentions Linux.
And like RedHat said comparing Linux with Windows: “fewer vulnerabilities were critical and patches were brought out more quickly.“.
And to make matters worse, all this talk about windows being more secure than the so called “Unix/Linux” operating system, the whole WMF drama is unfolding: first an Exploit Released for Unpatched Windows Flaw, then a New IM Worm Exploiting WMF Vulnerability, followed by Microsoft to Patch WMF Exploit Early and what is a drama without a hero? More dramatic. In typical MS fashion, the final exclamation point: Two New WMF Bugs Found. For 7 days a fairly serious vulnerability remained unpatched by Microsoft… what more can I say?
As a result the computer security community will be drinking its milk from a carton with the word “MISSING” in the back, right above a picture of US-CERTs credibility. Will it ever be found?
Posted: November 10th, 2005
Kill Bill’s Browser – Switch to Firefox – That was funny. Gotta look into it’s sister page or wtv – Explorer Destroyer.
I’ve been busy up until this week and now I’m catching up to emails – down to my last dozen or so!!! I’m planing on blaming gmail for the emails that “never arrived” (and I’m sticking with that story). Someday I’ll catch up to my feeds… it just wont be any day with the next 1000 years or so…
Posted: September 6th, 2005
Winamp 5.1 Surround Edition:
* New: CodingTechnologies AACPlus encoder!
Awesome at low bitrates too!
* New: Grand Prize Winner of the Internet Surround Music Project!
KAJE – Hey Buddy (featuring Afrika Bambaataa)
* New: SHOUTcast Wire – A Media RSS Browser and Subscription Service
* New: Predixis Smart Playlist Generator
(Mix your tracks based on what they sound like!)
* New: AOL Radio featuring (((XM))) Free Sampler!
* New: CD Ripping now available at 8x in free version!
* New: Microsoft WMA encoder
* New: Over 200 new Milkdrop presets!
* Update: in_vorbis now returns bitrate in getextendedfileinfo
* Fixed: WMA stuttery playback
* Fixed: out_ds copy button on status tab now works all the time
* Fixed: Much improved ripping and playback with Sonic engine
* Fixed: Video window now resizable regardless of Sidecar
* Fixed: Length of long mp3′s now reported properly
* Fixed: Silent install switch now works properly
* Fixed: Simultaneous CD Playback and Ripping
Posted: July 30th, 2005
I installed Netscape Browser 8.0 and was positively suprised by it. It’s basically Firefox with some additional (mostly useless) features like weather&news. But the real nice feature is being able to switch between the firefox rendering engine and internet explorer’s rendering engine. All the additional features make netscape a bit more complicated to configure. Netscape has become my 2nd browser of choice, after firefox, effectively replacing mozilla. Mainly because I have certain scripts that only run in IE. Try it out if you haven’t. It’s certainly worth it if you have the free time.
Posted: May 28th, 2005
Yesterday I had a problem with my Firefox and I ended up deleting my profile. That meant I had to install all my exxtensions again as well as configure everything again. Here’s the list of extensions I installed:
adblock
bookmarks synchronizer
greasemonkey
ieview
Magpie
PDF Download
ScrapBook
Slogger
Foxylicious
Resize Search Box
Tabbrowser Preferences
BetterSearch
SessionSaver
Single Window
Posted: October 18th, 2004
I just plugged in my old CRT monitor in a dualview mode. I had the idea to do this ever since I had this extra monitor lying around but I finally got to it when I saw this article. I placed my feedreader in the second monitor and firefox in the first. When I click on a link in the feedreader it opens a new background tab in firefox, courtesy of my favorite mozilla extension: Tabbrowser Extensions. Too bad my old monitor really sucks. I can’t believed how I tolerated it for so long.