With a spare second at the lab the other day, I was poking around the internet on one of the computers in the lab. Hitting up Google News, as I am accustomed to doing, I noticed under the “Science and Technology” heading that just the day previous (which would have been June 30th) Firefox 3.5 had been released! Yay! I do love a good release of my favorite browser from Mozilla, and 3.5 has been in the pipes for quite some time.

The release promised to be a speed boost for a browser that has historically been… well, not slow, perhaps ‘thorough’ is a better word. Firefox always takes forever to boot, a problem I’ve since resigned myself to by never shutting the damn thing down, unless in the event of a complete reboot of my computer. As far as browsing, I never noticed any problems, and I have no good way of knowing whether it’s my connection or the browser. In any case, I’m not leaving the ‘Fox any time soon, so the point is a little moot. I am glad it’s faster, though.

In that article though, there was a ton of other information that I had been entirely ignorant of, particularly all the crazy stuff going on at Mozilla Labs. I’m fairly familiar with the stuff that Google Labs puts out, because they always trumpet it from their homepage, which is my homepage, coincidentally (and has been since… god, I can’t even remember when!). I like that Mozilla has taken the cue, and set up their own “Labs” environment. I’m sure this was probably done with a fair amount of eye-rolling on the part of the developing community.

The nature of open source software means that Mozilla has been doing “labs”-type operations since they emerged from the ashes of the Netscape group in 1998-1999. The source code has always been available as nightly builds, and if you felt like it, I assume you could compile it yourself, and execute whatever was posted online. I’ve never done this, but that’s my understanding of how it functions, roughly, at least. Past that, you could say that the Mozilla people even further pioneered this idea with the addition of extensions within Firefox.

This fantastic move put a lot more control over the browser in the hands of third party developers, as well as the users themselves. The extensions [NOTE: They've since been re-named to Add-Ons, which has always irritated me, and I haven't been able to break the habit of calling them extensions] are modular, in that you can have as many as you want, and they all play nice with each other in virtually any configuration. The downside is that there is no central development, and so sometimes extensions will just kindof die, even if they’re useful tools. Odds are though, that if they’re popular, they’ll continue to develop.

So, how funny, that in spite of these two huge developments, Mozilla, to compete with Google, has to spell out the ‘labs’ idea. As nearly as I can tell, Labs seems to be for things that are bigger than any mere extension (despite being installed the same way) but not big enough, important enough, or complete enough to merit integration within the mothership of a milestone Firefox release.

So what’s up at the labs, you might ask? Lets see! There are a lot of things to play around with, and what distinguishes this from Google Labs is that these are actually in-progress works. I’ve never used a Google Labs tool that broke or was ugly; Mozilla Labs has liberated me from such an unfortunate state. If it breaks, you know someday it’ll be better, which is frustrating and encouraging all in the same moment.

Weave
A synchronization tool, this allows you to get access to your Firefox ‘profile’ across machines. The coolest thing I saw was that you get access to your web history in the form of the smart-bar transferring with Weave, and you also get your tabs! So when I have a tab-collection open on one computer, I could get a public machine with Weave installed to essentially “take me home” as far as tabs goes. Neat! It also brings your bookmarks along for the ride…

Strangely, I don’t care. I haven’t used bookmarks in years, and vis a vis have probably given Google an extra thousand searches when in actuality I was just too lazy to try and remember the URL. On the other hand, I manually type “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THING” when I want to know something about a THING, so. Whatever that means…

I haven’t actually started using Weave, because for the summer I’m confined to my laptop. I’ve never used the MacTop so intensively before, but she’s holding up quite well. I’ve also made some real pioneering leaps in terms of RSS feeds and e-mail portability, but I’ll get to that later. But yeah, I don’t want to build a Weave profile on my auxilary machine, and then push it to my primary, so that’ll have to wait.

Jetpack
This makes it even easier to program little mini-extensions for Firefox using web standards that more people are familiar with. I don’t fully understand it, but the tutorial makes it look pretty easy. Maybe they’ve finally dumbed it down enough that I could finally fulfill a lifelong ambition and contribute to the Mozilla community! I’ll probably play with it next week, and I’ll get back to you.

Ubiquity
Cool as hell, but probably a little to futuristic for me at this point. Glad someone’s got the stones to take on such a project though.

Personas
I almost dismissed this as just a corollary to the Themes system set up by Firefox right now. I played with Themes when I first got the browser, many moons ago, but ultimately nothing’s quite as clean and seamless as the default. Plus I have it use the little buttons so I can get more screen space, and they’re so small I just want something that’s no-nonsense, form-over function, you know?

Boy am I glad I didn’t pass this one over! On a whim, I installed it, just to give it a go. Imagine my surprise when, as I was browsing the gallery, I slid my mouse over one of the previews, and instantly my browser responded by skinning with the theme, preceded by virtually no lag at all! This makes it so easy to try out anything, or everything, and just click when you find one you like!

Hopefully, as the community designing these ‘Personas’ grows, there’ll be even more designs to choose from.

Snowl
-Preface-
Finally we arrive at the feature I was most excited for. I’ve really come to love Thunderbird, the red-headed stepchild of the Mozilla foundation. It doesn’t have the userbase, or the glamor of its older brother, but it tries hard. A lot of people at Truman are just kinda lazy, and use the crappy web-mail circa 1995 for all their e-mail needs. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s just clunky as hell. Couple that with my collective hard-on for all things Open Source, and you see why I’ve been using Thunderbird loyally since the summer of 2006.

Recently, Truman transitioned its e-mail service over to GMail. Despite my initial resistance, I’ve grown to like it. Part of why the transition period was so arduous was because, using the POP3 server, I’d been downloading copies of my e-mail to my harddrive, and then just blasting the copies on the server, since we were given such an abysmally small amount of storage. Now GMail comes strutting in, telling me I have 2.7 gigs of space, or something absurd like that.

Around this time, I also found out I’d be sans desktop for my time in Boston. I needed a solution to my e-mail problem fast. When the changeover day came, I began the slow process of pushing three YEARS worth of e-mail from my hard drive, back to the server, where there was now ample room. This took a long, long time, and suffered several restarts and slowdowns. The reason for this is I didn’t want to go the POP3 route anymore. I didn’t like that my primary e-mail machine was constantly at odds and out of sync with the server.

IMAP solves all this nicely. Thunderbird essentially transforms into a faceplate for accessing mail on the server-side. Any changes I make in GMail, for example, the numerous messages I’ve received and sent since coming to Boston, will be immediately and automatically reflected in my Thunderbird inbox when I return home. The setup works really nice, except Thunderbird is a lot slower now that it’s manipulating data server-side rather than locally on my harddisk. Mrh.

To compensate for that, I wanted to centralize my information more than I already had. I used to, for a while, use the open-source stand-alone calendar client, Sunbird. I’ve since fallen off using that tool, simply because I fail at keeping a decent calendar. I get lazy and stop adding things, game over. Last fall, Cody Sumter, god bless him, told me that you could get Google Calendar set up to send text-message reminders via SMS to your phone!

Having just become the proud-but-reluctant owner of an unlimited text-messaging plan, I figured this was the most dignified way to utilize it for the powers of good. Thus, began my foray into the land of Google Stuff, as opposed to just their search. Those reminders saved my ass countless times in keeping up with the battery of meetings and events I had to contend with last semester, and boy and I ever thankful! Recently I was able to integrate that Google Calendar pretty seamlessly into Mozilla’s Thunderbird-Extension Calendar application called ‘Lightning’. They sync well, and now I have got myself down to a single application again for both e-mail and calendar, and RSS.

However, after syndicating my RSS feeds through Thunderbird for almost a year though, I’ve run off with another woman. I made it maybe two weeks in Boston without my feeds. While IMAP ensures that my e-mail situation stays simple and synced, it is entirely ignorant of the RSS Feeds component of things. The only thing I could think to do was link Google Reader into the account with the rest of my Google Stuff, and get my information that way. Let me just say, it’s awesome.

As dumb of a complaint as it is, to handle each and every feed item as if it were a tiny e-mail is a really silly way to go about keeping tabs on a zillion things going on on the internet. Google reader just dumps them nicely in one giant pile, and there’s no clicking. You scroll; find something interesting? Stop. If you’re bored, or want to skip stuff, just keep scrolling. You can tag items, and then browse just by folder and all that, it’s fantastic: I’m a believer.

-Actual Discussion-
On the heels of that though, imagine my surprise when I see that labs is working on Snowl, an in-browser feed syndication app! I thought this was my chance to redeem myself, come crawling back to Mozilla, a crying, sobbing mess, promising to never leave her for Google and her short skirt ever again. This was… not the case.

Snowl, in a pre-release state, is rough as hell. The interface is awkward, it’s hard to actually manage subscriptions, many configurations are inoperative, and I simply can’t fathom the pedagogical differences in the List/Stream/River organizational schemes. I’m not being flippant, I just actually do not get it. There is also the idea that eventually you’ll route all your e-mail, RSS and social networking stuff to the same place… OK?

Immediately I think of the word “clusterf-” oh whatever. You get the idea. I feel bad, the poor little thing doesn’t seem to have a sense of direction… and yet… it has, in the course of two days, become indispensable to me. Huh?! “But Tom, it’s so crappy, you said!” Yeah, Snowl is for sure in the pre-release stage, and so it’s supposed to be rough. Even when it gets further along, I’m not sure I buy that it’s the silver-bullet for getting all you messaging needs in one place.

But it did outstrip Google Reader in one category, and that’s gotta count for something, right? I’ve always had trouble aggregating news-oriented feeds. My Thunderbird solution was to route the domestic news of the New York Times into a folder with the international news of the BBC. Daily, this folder would stack up 30-50 new news items. Burdensome as this was, I set a limiter on the folder that only the most recent 25 items should be kept, and throw everything else out. That way, when I wanted to check news, I only had to content with the recent updates.

Little by little though, isolating these updates in their own folder, and with as busy as I get, I quickly stopped reading them. Bad as I felt, there just wasn’t time to put up the daily struggle with making sure I had kept up with all that information. Even in Google Reader, this problem persists. Even with Google’s super-fast skim-and-it’s-marked-as-read technique, perfect for the 5-7 webcomics that I read per day, that’s not easy enough to get through 50 news items a day.

Snowl has this mode called “Stream,” which I’m absolutely smitten with. It’s a pane that pops up on the left side of the browser, and it is a list of the source and headline of every item in your collective news feeds, in aggregate. This irritated me at first, making it hard to find all my comics in the monsoon of news. Then, it dawned on me. The big-list-of-headlines is perfect as a sortof customized news ticker… and Google Reader’s very clean, image-friendly interface is perfect for comics!

And the rest was history. I deleted all my news from Reader, and all my comics from Snowl, and never the two shall meet again. While I’m typing an e-mail, or watching Gundam stuff on YouTube, or blogging, my eyes constantly flit to the left, seeing if there’s anything interesting. Already, this has served me incredibly well. I sat down after lunch, and saw, a mere hour or two after it happened, that Sarah Palin had resigned! Normally, I wouldn’t've heard that for a few days, or until I manually pulled up one of the news sites.

Now, I basically have the ultimate feed aggregation system. If Snowl could be configured such that the news pane would function more like a ticker, I might just wet myself with joy, because that’s what I’m really going for here.

That said, this post ballooned into way more than I intended for it. Sorry for the big ol’ history on my technology situation. I’m just really particular about this stuff, and even if none of you care, it’ll be fun for me to read this in 10 years when kids haven’t even heard of “Facebook” or “RSS”.

Desperately trying to keep the blog alive.
It comes in fits and starts, you know?

Today’s song is a Mountain Goats song that I wish I had found a year ago. The past year has been hell of turbulent, and it’s a pretty solid anthem to getting through a rough spot. Kinda despondent without being mopey, if that makes any sense.

I’ve been doing a lot of pretty serious thinking about the ol’ blog, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t post more often. Bygone are the novel-length entries of days of old. That hurdle is gone. But why now? Honestly, my favorite part is the biggest hangup. Uploading the song is a pain in the ass, and some days I just want to say something that doesn’t have to do with a song.

And you know what, it’s my blog. I’ll do what I want. We try things here, and they work for a while, and then they get dull or boring or whatever. I also honestly think it’s just because I’ve gotten a lot busier in the past couple of years. I used to be a self-prescribed “internet person,” sitting for hours at the computer just digesting Wikipedia, or reading conspiracy theories or watching bootleg anime or whatever.

I basically do that never, anymore. I realized this last semester when I would go entire days without touching the computer, an unspeakable and entirely unlikely occurrence when I was in high school. So that’s something kindof unavoidable. I’m committed to the blog, no question, but it’s just hard to stay current with it when there’s no reason to do it except “because.” It’s pretty easy for it to be the first thing on the chopping block when it’s something you do only for yourself.

As always, every entry promises to be THE ENTRY, the one that gets me back on track. So maybe we’re here? Certainly in the coming weeks, I’ll have plenty to write about. I’m headed off to Boston in just under a week to do physics research at Boston College. You’ll be able to follow that in all its gory detail at the Truman State REU Blog, under the category “Boston College” or just look for my name.

That’s where all the sciency stuff will be for sure; I haven’t decided whether to simulcast the social entries, or just have that be entirely separate. The completist in me hates to have any of my work strewn across multiple blogs, but that’s already something I’m going to have to forgo, with not only the REU Blog, but our Game Development Blog as well, which I suppose also merits a mention.

Around the end of Fall Semester, Joey brought to Ian’s and my attention the existence of a program called RPG Maker. It’s a piece of software that is an engine for a pretty simplistic (think: Super Nintendo) role playing game. You work within that construct and can make up the characters, their sprites (which is a pain in the ass for me, given my lack of prowess with art stuff), their weapons, the enemies they fight, the towns they visit, the things they say, and so on. I’ve been working with this since the end of… WELL I DON’T KNOW BECAUSE I NEVER DATE THE ENTRIES IN MY GAME-DEVELOPMENT NOTEBOOK. Arg.

So that’s coming along. I mention it today of all days becuase I’m coming up on having a demo ready for quasi-public consumption, which I’m getting pretty pumped about. I don’t know why I’m so invested in this silly game; given the means which I’m utilizing to make it, it’ll never be that good of a game; forever doomed to the heaps and heaps of these crappy little games that get produced with RPG Maker (no offense, RPGM people), I don’t think it’ll be that special. The better ones even have a totally custom graphics set, distinct from the default one provided, and I’ll never be at that level.

I’m not complaining, just musing. If even the full realization of my goal will garner little recognition, why bother? I suppose because this is something I’ve always wanted to do. If seven or eight people also happen to enjoy it, that’s fine. For me, the real emphasis, as is with anything I’ve written, is not about imagery, but plot. My focus is on the evolution of events, and how the characters react to those developments, and what emotions are the resultant. To tell that story, the default stuff works just fine for me. Thus, I’m trying to make a good game in terms of story and the depth of a world.

It’s exciting becuase I feel like I’m doing that.

This next thing is random, but awesome:
I have figured out that if you have two Firefox windows open, but not full-sized, and you put them roughly next to each other, you can drag a tab from one window to the other, which was something I did on a wing and prayer, and it worked, causing me to pen the following:

Dear Firefox,

Honey, I’m glad there’s still some mystery in the relationship.

Love you always,

-Tom

Today I downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0.
It’s very exciting! Once again, the good folks at Mozilla have beat the pants off of Microsoft’s latest offering: IE 8 (still in Beta testing). Firefox 3 was released on… Tuesday, I believe. I downloaded it just a few days ago and I’m pretty impressed with it.

The design was polished up a little bit, and it runs a lot faster than it has in the past, which is nice. It probably runs even better on people with cutting-edge machines, but even on my little ol’ 2.8 ghz Pentium 4, it’s not terribly shabby. However, I had a few gripes that I wanted to tweak with it:

1.) Minimize to Tray Didn’t Work-
OK, so maybe I’m crazy. In fact, I’m fairly positive I’m nuts in my love (need?) of this tiny little extension. All it does is when you click the [X] box to close the window, instead of quitting the program, it goes to live in the little system tray with the clock!

See it there? Now it’s out of the task bar (the bit in the middle where minimized things go), but it isn’t off. My biggest gripe about Firefox is that it takes a while to load up, and this fixes that becuase I never have to shut it off, but I can get it out of the way! As you can see, I have the same extension installed for Thunderbird, and there’s even similar functionality built into iTunes!

The problem is, this little tool doesn’t work with Firefox 3 becuase for whatever reason, the developers haven’t updated it. In truth, it still works, as in functions, but the application won’t let you install it, because there’s a built-in limit to the highest version it could be installed on! This is put there so that they can maintain control over which versions you use it with, so that people don’t install it in unsupported versions and whine when it doesn’t function like it should.

However, that’s exactly what I wanted to do! Since this extension has such a small, simple function, I’m not really worried about it breaking, so the only problem was to remove the version limitation. This is amazingly easy.

1. Download WinRar.
2. Downlaod the .XPI file for Minimize to Tray. If you try to use Firefox to do this, it will not work, becuase Firefox recognizes the file type. It either tries to install it right away (on a compatible version) or will not give you access (on a non-compatible version). So guess what? Crack open IE7, and go to the add-on’s page, listed above. View->Page Source. Search that document for ‘,xpi’ to find the correct link location to the .XPI file. Feed that into the address bar of IE7, and it will ask you what to do then, becuase it doesn’t understand what the hell an .XPI file is! Tell it to save the file to your desktop.
3. Open the .xpi file with WinRar.
4. Edit the ‘instal.rdf’ file so that the 2.0.0.* line of code actually reads 3.0.0.*. Or you could be a little silly, like me, and have yours be compatible up through version 14 of Firefox. It doesn’t matter, so long as you feed it a number larger or equal to the version you want to install!

I usually only need this hack for Minimize to Tray, but theoretically you can use this for anything. However, do so at your own risk, becuase on more sophisticated add-ons you are less likely to be able to get away with using an antiquated program with newer version.

2.) Tab Mix Plus Didn’t Work-
One of the most popular add-ons for Firefox, somehow, didn’t get updated for the version switch. You can download a developer build from their website which works just fine. No clue as to why this isn’t the version available in the add-on repository…

3.) I Don’t Like That Stupid Star-
Supposedly the little star makes it easier to bookmark things. Personally, I’m not really huge on bookmarks any more. I use them not for things I frequently visit, but for sites I infrequently visit, but don’t want to forget about. Thus, having that little star in the bar all the time is a little irritating to me. It’s pretty easy to get rid of though, so that’s good.

1. Find your ‘chrome’ folder. If you just search your computer for the word ‘chrome’, eventually you’ll find it, as I can’t imagine anybody has too many things with such a name. It’s located in your root directory (the one with WINDOWS, Desktop, Documents and Settings; that junk). From there it’s: \UserName\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\crazy-alphanumberic-combo\chrome. Though that’s just where it is on mine; for more help, check out the Mozilla article on profiles. Suffice to say, that’s where your ‘chrome’ folder lives.

2. Open up the chrome folder. Right-click userChrome-example.css and open it with Notepad. Once you’re in there, paste the following:

   
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #star-button {
display: none !important;
}


3. Save the file as userChrome.css

When you’ve restarted Firefox, that stupid little button should be gone! Hooray!

4.) Secure Websites Aren’t Yellow Anymore-
I actually stumbled across this while researching something for this entry: they changed the code from FF2 that made the address bar yellow for a secure (encrypted) website. I actually kindof liked that, thinking back on it, and so I went ahead with the fix. As above, it’s just a simple edit to your Chrome file. Paste the following into your userChrome.css file:


#urlbar[level] .autocomplete-textbox-container {
background-color: #FFFFB7 !important; }


Save, and that’s that!

5.) The Smart Location Bar Irritates Me-
I don’t like it. It’s big, and it’s ugly, and it uses a creepy algorithm that finds websites I looked at like… years ago… and slaps them up in this giant green nasty font. I’m sure it’s cool for some people, but if I want to search, I use Google. It’s my homepage. Done. I don’t use the browser itself to execute a search function. Thus, when I type in the address bar, I know exactly where I’m going, and these gigantic green suggestions do not help me in the slightest.

There’s two options for fixing this:

• Edit the config file. Detailed instructions are available, but I just didn’t feel like it today. You can, if you’re ambitious and computer-savvy.

• I opted to just download an extension that makes it function like the Firefox 2 bar did. Easy, clean, and more similar to what I know.

I’ve said it time and time again: “I’m like an elderly person. I like things they way I like them.” My browser is no exception; in fact it is the quintessential embodiment of this principal. So yeah, I spent the past two days whipping my browser back into shape, and at the end of it all, I’m really pleased about it.

A new feature I’m using is the “search for text when I type” feature. I don’t honestly know if it’s knew or not, but it is to me: Options->Advanced->General is where you can find this. On any given page full of text, if you’re not clicked inside a form (box for typing) and you start typing, it activates a tiny little QuickSearch bar to find what you typed. Click the page, and it disappears! I thought this was so cool, since I’d been using the old ‘CTRL+F’ shortcut to bring up the ‘Find’ toolbar for years now.

But that’s basically what I’ve got to say about Firefox 3. It’s open source and amazing. The browser I’ve come to love and take great, great pride in these past few years continues to improve and get better. The real beauty of it is that you can hack it to pieces and build it back up to make it JUST the way you want it, and I couldn’t be more pleased!

At the bottom here, a few more updates:
Sadly, there’ll be no radio show this summer! The equipment is all deconstructed and in the process of being moved, so I won’t be back on the air until August! Oh well. Maybe this give me time to finally get the archives up-to-date, and work on that much-lauded podcast. We shall see.

I will probably be working that into what I’m temporarily dubbing our 2.5 version.
Features, as mentioned before:

-Smaller-bandwidth navigation images (plus I need to get rid of the border that appears around them when clicked… thanks for that, Firefox 3)
-New banner set
-Feeds that display the date
-Radio page will have podcast capabilities (hopefully iTunes compatible)
-SnapShots? I still can’t decide on these things. I make up my mind to hate them, and then I come across some website where they’re really useful. Probably not, but maybe.

That should be about it. My other tech-related endeavor is getting Thunderbird set up as an RSS reader, a la Google Reader, which Ethan continually lauds. I want to see if open-source can compete with similar functionality. News on that later though.

[One final thing, becuase this just made me laugh so hard... Have you ever heard of the 'uncanny valley'?]

So I’ve been sitting on some pretty crazy stuff since I last blogged.
In truth, it’s just a bunch of random (pretty funny) things that have happened in the past few days, with actual news at the bottom. So here we go:

I’m a big fan of the Nintendo DS platform… or at least as much as I can be without actually owning one. Lizz has one, and on it she has one of the ‘Nintendogs’ games. These are pretty fun, becuase you kinda take care of stuff and so if you’re into nurturing or whatever, it’s a game for that.

There’ve been several spin-offs for horses, cats, whatever.
But this just crosses the line (CAUTION: The noises on that site are really loud; I had headphones on and nearly went deaf).
But for real: how messed up is that? Virtual Child-Rearing? From the looks of it, you feed them, wash them, change them, dress them, and so on. I just don’t see the market for such a game. Also: The babies all have E.T. faces.

You also seem them naked at one point, only to find that they are simply anatomically incorrect, described by this IGN review as akin to a naked Barbie Doll.

So yeah. All kinds of strange.

Speaking of strange, I’m going to drop the quote of the week on you guys:

The application is called Spark, and its with the Social Profile thing. Actually I think this random girl from high school was number two [...]. Facebook wants me to play for the other team, how embarrassing! Anyway.

First: ‘Play for the other team’ is the BEST euphemism for being gay I have ever heard.
Second: This ‘spark’ application intrigued me, so I gave it a spin on the ol’ Facebook.

It is TERRIBLE.
The statistical run down says it all:

“Would you date Tom?”
YES 2 votes 28%
NO 5 votes 71%
Total 7 votes

You are more desirable
than 76.16% of people
Another 189,423 people are at your level
Your global desirability ranking is 14,445 out of 26,401,177 people
Last week: You were viewed 2 times and no people expressed interested in you

Wow. That has to be one of the more disgusting ideas I’ve ever come across. An application custom tailored to make you feel better/worse about yourself based entirely on how many clicks you get from these (pardon me if I’m talking about you…) sick people who have nothing better to do than to sit around and think to themselves, “I would/would not hit that!” and click the corresponding link.

That’s just… wow. Also, the numbers are staggering to look at. With 28% positive, I am more desirable than 76% of the other people? That’s insane. Especially when you consider the fact that people see THIS:

I mean… wow.
What a world we live in.

Speaking of Facebook, in an effort to get more people over here reading the ol’ blog, I’ve installed a little application called Wordbook on both Facebook and WordPress. This just syndicates all blog posts here on my Facebook page, and hopefully people see it in the news feed as well.

I’m not really into Facebook or whatever, but a lot of people are super-into it, and on it all the time, so I figured I’d take a little stab at publicity and see if we can’t get more people stopping by the blog. This new syndication outlet is part of what you could call a small ‘Point Release’ of Schödinger’s Blog. Version 2.1 includes now not only this Wordbook outlet, but I also upgraded to the brand-spanking-new WordPress 2.5. It’s pretty fancy. They overhauled the interface, added a lot of new media features (which I used to insert the images in this post; I’m not sure if I’ll use it for everything from now on or not though), and made it more secure.

I also decided that Schödinger’s Blog is probably due for a major upgrade in the coming months. I’m shooting for this summer (before or around our two-year mark in August) as a good time to make some changes for what I’m tentatively calling Version 2.5. Feature list right now is short, but like I said, I’m still in the formative stages:

• Fixing the Feeds-
  They still don’t show the date like they used to, and I’m pretty sure I can fix that.

• New Design-
  I have some cool ideas for how to update the button console, but it’s going to mean exporting this job. I’ve finally come to grips with my graphic-deisgn incapability, so I’m probably going to come up with a concept, and have a real art-person put together some templates for me that I can tinker with, but are still way better than anything I could’ve thrown together on my own. That’s the plan anyways.

• Rooftop Update-
  I haven’t been keeping this that current, and so it could probably use some work. Additionally, I want to get the videos that are there uploaded to YouTube, and condense that down to fewer pages for people to view more easily.

So those are the ideas I have right now.
We’ll see how well they pan out in the next few months.

On a final computer/upgrade note I downloaded the fourth beat release of Firefox 3. It was pretty cool. They’ve tinkered with the interface a bit, and made it quite a bit faster. However, none of my extensions worked that well with it, and I use those a lot more than I thought I did, so I downgraded back to 2.0.0.13. While I was doing that though, I got some new extensions, which I can recommend:

-FireFTP, which lets you run FTP from a plain old tab
-Download Status Bar, which gets that pesky download manager condensed into a little progress bar at the bottom of the screen

I dunno. I’m into webrowsers.
What can I say.

There’s actually more things to talk about, but I figured, why not leave them for next week.
It’ll give the illusion that I’m posting more consistently.

On one final note, I had some time tonight, and so I also posted our second radio show.
If you missed parts or all of either, please check out radio.schrodingersblog.com and get caught up!

[The show still lacks a name. I need to get on that!]

I am so angry with Microsoft.
It’s been literally one thing after another.

Tonight I wanted to use the ‘helper CD’ that came with my calculus text book. I downloaded whatever crap software it wanted (it’s uninstalling right now), and opened the excessive little splash screen with silly sounds and graphics. Whatever. I click through and find the thing I want, and I go to actually see it, and it opens up in Firefox with an error.

This program was created to work as a proprietary with Internet Explorer! And of course I can’t just tell it to open in IE, I’ve got to change IE to the default browser so the stupid CD knows to use that instead of Firefox. It doesn’t work. So I restart… and I was so proud! Even though I’d gone and told IE to be my default internet application, Firefox refused to yield that spot. It just wouldn’t give it up.

So I say to hell with the CD. I’m now just trying make sure IE wouldn’t constantly be trying to unseat Firefox for top browser. I go in to the settings to turn off the ‘default’ option, and I see something… it says “Manage IE Add-Ons”. Excuse me?

What’s new in IE7? Tabbed Browsing. Excuse me?
What’s new in IE7? RSS Feeds. Excuse Me!?

That has gone too far. I can’t believe they’d be so barefaced. IE7 basically took everything that was good and pure about Firefox, all the reasons it was kicking the pants of IE6 (believe me, there were plenty) and STOLE THEM. Outright, it just copied them and stuck ‘em in IE7.

Come on. They don’t even try and put their own spin on it. Now the only difference between the two is IE7 just looks like a bad skin of Firefox that runs slower. This is absolutely pathetic. I have a really hard time believing that Microsoft, with all the money it makes, can’t pay their developers enough to actually motivate them to innovate.

At least Apple has the courtesy to rename the things it copies. (Finder, Safari, etc.)

So I’m all steamed up and I’m going to let the Big M know how I feel. I pull up microsoft.com and start looking around for a feedback form. There aren’t many. At all.

I FINALLY find one. I click it, and get ready to rant;

“Use Windows Live ID to sign in to MSN Messenger, MSN Hotmail, MSN Music, and other sites and services! Windows Live ID works with Passport Network sites.
It’s free to access Windows Live ID. After you sign up and create credentials, you can sign in on any site that displays Microsoft Passport Network or Windows Live ID.”

Screw that.
I’m done, Microsoft.

I was on the fence for a few reasons as to whether or not I’d ask for a MacBook for Christmas. This sealed the deal. I’m going to get a Mac, and I’m going to enjoy it. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: Windows makes for a pretty amazing OS. I like it a lot. I’m comfortable with it, and I know all the ins-and-outs for the most part. In that vein, the Office Suite isn’t bad either.

But every other Microsoft product I’ve EVER used has sucked to a nearly incomprehensible degree. Microsoft: please stop making dumpy software. Feel free to start any time… no one will complain. I promise.

Sidenote to Apple: Stop calling them MacBooks. Call them ‘MacTops’ instead. I like the sound of it better, and it seems like something you’d buy at a convenience store in either A) the future, or B) 1986.