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Jan
23
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Two things to be pissed-off about this morning. First Performancing (which produce the spiffy Firefox blog editor plugin I use) looks like they''ve gone belly-up. According to TechCrunch the demise may not be as swift and as clean as you might hope for. I hope the blog editor lives on - I rather like it (though support for the Roller's tags would be nice).
Second blogrant - I'll be on the road for some of this week and next so was just setting everything up for working on the road when I noticed my Treo wasn't able to collect mail from Sun's edge mail service. I tried a bunch of stuff (that mere mortals shouldn't have to know about) but couldn't make it work. The Treo just kept insisting it was out of memory shortly after connecting to the IMAP server. I'm not one to give up easily (especially when fighting electronic stuff) but don't really have time to debug right now. So instead, I installed ChatterMail and was up and running in no time. In hindsight - I probably should have switched from VersaMail a long time ago - ChatterMail is a fine piece of software and I'll probably buy it when my 30-days are up. This is a pretty common complaint I hear about Palm's products - the included apps are generally OK - but you probably want to replace them with much better commercial apps. of which there is an abundance. Kudos to Palm for creating the business ecosystem to allow that - I wonder if that's the path that Apple will take with the iPhone.
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Jan
15
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According to the Mozilla wiki - the next major version of Firefox (due the end of this year) will support both OpenID and Microsoft's Cardspace. The wiki doesn't explain exactly how OpenID (or Cardspace) will be integrated or more importantly what the user experience will be - which is what I'm really interested in (as a user). It will be interesting to see if Mozilla support will increase the adoption of OpenID.
For me, Id. Management built in to the browser is a big deal and I'll probably be looking at some of the beta builds to see how it evolves. Getting the user-experience right will be important if Mozilla really want this to compete with Cardspace (which looks very slick, IMO).
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Aug
21
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After a bit of Googling I found a solution to my slow firefox problem with Ubuntu; though I still don't know exactly what the cause is. The general consensus seems to be that Firefox doesn't handle IPV6 well - in my case it seemed that the name lookup was timing out after about 20 seconds (ie. looking in IPV6 space?). There are a couple of solutions :
1. disable IPV6 in Firefox. Type about:config in the address bar, filter on "IPv6" and set disableIPv6 to true. Restart Firefox.
2. create a file called "bad_list"* in "/etc/modprobe.d/" with the single line "alias net-pf-10 off". Reboot.
The second option will obviously effect all applications - ie. the IPV6 problem is likely to exist in Thunderbird as well.
Anyone know why I have to do this ?
[* the default Ubuntu install doesn't have a root password so you'll need to do "sudo passwd" - unless your happy doing everything with sudo]
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Jan
2
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Best Moment
That's a tough one - between England qualifying for the 2006 Word Cup, winning the ashes;) and watching my kids grow up - I'd have to go with my kids. Specifically - my 18 month old son Jack doing number ones on the potty (he's been doing it for a while for his Mum but did the honours for me over the Christmas break too) - you have to have kids to understand this one.
Worst Moment
The July bombings in London.
Best Blog
Just scanning through my subscriptions (in Google reader - reminder - must find a better blog reader) - I've decided that there isn't a single blog I read that religiously, however I have subscriptions to at least 8 Sun bloggers and read many others. So the award goes to to Sun bloggers - all of them.
Best Gadget
It was a good year for gadgets. By far my favourite was the personal fabricator I saw at Robo Nexus - but cost-wise it's a little out of my league. So for me it was the GlobalSat Bluetooth GPS receiver I bought in September - which I use from my Treo650 (running TomTom) - I've used it a great deal already (in 3 US states) both cycling, driving and walking. I look forward to some more location aware applications in the future.
Worst Gadget
I got a free WiFi detector freebee from some show (can't remember which). I just don't understand how these things are useful. If I know I really must be connected when I'm out of the office and away from home I go somewhere where they have an internet connection that I can use (Airport Lounge, Coffee Shop, Hotel, etc.) - I don't wander around the streets with my little Wi-Fi detector. For one thing it can't differentiate between a secure network, a P2P network and a freely accessible base station.
Best Book
This one is easy, despite having read (listened to) some really good books this year - it has to be Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (which I reviewed back in January 2005). As well as achieving an unprecedented 5 stars on my blog it also won a Hugo award and a clutch of others so it can't be all that bad.
Best Film
Pretty Tough - just scanning back through my Netlifx ratings - there were 3 or 4 films that I gave five stars but I think I'd have to go with the Bourne Supremecy (released in 2004).
Worst Film
Easy. Ocean's Twelve. I'm sure they enjoyed making it but it was almost painful to watch.
Best Talk
In December, I had the pleasure of listening to Michael Raynor (co author of the "Innovator's Solution" and all round smart, interesting guy) - great content and perfect delivery and as a bonus he only really used a couple of slides.
Best Application
This is tricky - Flickr started the year as the main contender but I've been a little bit disappointed with progress since the Yahoo acquisition (it hasn't gotten worse and I still think it's great but it hasn't really improved much either). So I think it's going to have to be Firefox (I'm currently on 1.5) - an application that I use every day, rarely encounter problems.
Biggest Disappointment
Sadly, I have to say it was the long awaited release of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (on DVD). It wasn't really a bad film and in some ways was probably a little better than the 80's TV series. I guess it was a reasonable film of one of the best stories ever so I guess that makes it above par. It'll be interesting to see if they adapt the other books in the series. NB. I'm more than a little tainted having grown up with Douglas Adam's work - listened to the radio show, read (all) the books several times, watched the TV series, played the game, etc.Have a great new year, Rich.
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Oct
20
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I just had a (really) quick play with the Flock developer preview - it looks promising. It extends the browser to handle some of the more recent web technologies / phenomenon - feeds, social bookmarks, blogs, etc.
One really neato feature is the blog editor - you can drag pictures from your Flickr "TopBar" into the blog editor, it's fully WYSIWYG, you can launch the blog editor by right licking on any page or link and selecting "Blog This" - very neat. Unfortunately it doesn't (yet) support Roller so I couldn't get to have a decent play - if anyone else has managed to make it work with Roller - please let me know.
More when I get time to play - this could be interesting - though I actually think this is just some feature on top of Firefox - I don't think it is a new browser; and I think I actually would've preferred some Firefox plugins instead. That said - this is still an early preview - I guess it would be wise to reserve judgement.
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Oct
19
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One of the challenges for OSS is that not everything can be achieved through the intellectual contribution of the suporting community. Some things need hard cash. Moziila is experimenting with Community Funding for its Firefox 1.0 launch - as a very happy user of Firefox (and Thunderbird) and very concerned about not having a choice - I made my financial contribution today.
If like me, you use a browser a lot, every day - give a little to ensure there will continue to be a choice.
