Flock jumps a fraction.

Too bad about the site, though.
by AC - permalink

You'll have to forgive me for not delivering the promised Avant Browser 11.5 review, because Flock was updated the day of my last post, and frankly, it's better. The last stable Flock release was 0.7, but apparently the new version was close enough to the target for 1.0 that a skip in version nomenclature was warranted. The beta, 0.8.99, had some notable bugs, most of which have been ironed out for the Flock 0.9 release.

From what I can see, the new release appears to be based on Firefox 2, giving it a number of new features its Firefox 1.5-based predecessor didn't have. The new theme is the most obvious improvement, along with much more comprehensive customization options. In addition, you can now place folders on the bookmarks toolbar, an old Firefox feature that was oddly missing in Flock until now. The range of toolbar buttons has expanded and encompasses all of Flock's custom features, but isn't completely overwhelming as in Netscape. The default toolbar layout is fairly cluttered, though. Click the image below for the slightly modified layout I've settled on.


The integrated blog editor is much better now. I've only used it in conjunction with this Blgger account, so mileage may vary and all, but in my case it now features nearly every Blogger posting feature, including images, tags, and most formatting options (no justify options, though), as well as source editing and preview functions. The new Web Clipboard is similar to Opera's, but with more functionality, and it's directly accessible within the blog editor window.

Bookmark management is also vastly improved, this time using Firefox 2's native UI, much better than the previous Flock's overly complicated and somewhat unintuitive in-tab manager. The RSS viewer, already the best in-browser feed reader I've ever used, is slightly better as well. A major new feature is My World, a browser-generated portal, intended as a homepage, that lists new RSS articles, media subscriptions, and recently accessed bookmarks, along with a search bar and some feature quicklinks. Looking closely into it, the My World page is ultimately redundant, and it doesn't help that it takes a curiously long time for the feed list to fill out.

A few other things still need to be addressed before 1.0. In less than a week's worth of use, I've come across a few bugs that should be fixed ASAP, including a couple from the beta that I didn't think could possibly persist to the stable release. There's still only one theme available, and there are only a handful of extensions. A new official site was launched along with 0.9, and unfortunately it's ugly and weird compared to the old one. Flock is still an open-source project, but you'll have to dig around for a while to find any sort of information about getting involved in its development, or to even find the source at all.

Still, the positives dominate the problems with the new release, and of all the major browsers on the market, Flock may well be at the top of the list now. Not bad for a product that hasn't even hit version 1.

Blogged with Flock

Linux eludes me.

It's not me, it's the computer that's stupid.
by AC - permalink

I'm been dicking around with VirtualBox for a couple of days now in an attempt to get Ubuntu 7.04 running as a virtual machine. I've never used any form of Linux in any way before, and it's not working, and I'm not sure why. One thing I am sure of is how much easier VirtualBox is to use than the merciless chasm of an app called Virtual PC. The documentation is also worlds better, but that's not so surprising, considering it comes mainly from the community. In any case, I downloaded the AMD64-flavored ISO, verified its integrity, and burned it to CD. I should mention that an hour into the download I realized I should probably have gone with the 32-bit i386 version, because I doubted my 32-bit version of Windows would be able to deal with a 64-bit VM. But whatever, it was almost downloaded, and in the meantime I couldn't find anything one way or another in the docs. So I created the VM, gave it a partition, mounted the drive, and successfully started Ubuntu. And it told me I needed the other version.

So OK, fuck it, live and learn. I dumped the VM and started downloading the i386 version. To pass the time I drove way the hell out Kirby/Whitten to pick up the lawnmower from the shop. So that was fun. I had Definitive Swim in the CD player.

The next time, didn't burn the ISO, I just mounted it as a virtual virtual drive or whatever, and again it started up fine and didn't even give me an error message. It didn't do anything at all, in fact, which is actually worse. I get the Ubuntu splash and the boot menu, but when I select "Start or install Ubuntu" or "Boot from first hard disk" or anything else, it shows me the "Starting the Linux kernel" dialog, and then a blank screen with an underscore in the corner. And it just sits there, indefinitely. I dunno what the hell is up, and I'm only slightly inclined to try to figure it out.

I suppose I can always take my shiny new Ubuntu CD and set up a dual-boot situation with it, but I've never done that before either, and frankly I don't have any idea how. I'm sure I could figure it out, but do I want to?

Anyway. Both DirectX and Catalyst have been updated in the past week, and I haven't installed either. I'm in one of those rare windows where all of my games and software seem to be completely free of glitches, crashes, and bugs, and I'm not about to tempt the Gods of Fucking Shit Up by updating anything that doesn't seem to need it. Source engine games are always iffy, of course, but I've been so frustrated by how buggy they are now after, if I've counted accurately, 6.7 million unnecessary patches that I don't even try to play them anymore. Those goddamn games have produced the most spectacular system crashes I've ever experienced, and I would just write it off and move on if they hadn't once run so beautifully before Valve started screwing with them.

But whatever. IFC played Kill Bill Vol. 1 tonight, and Vol. 2 is on tomorrow night. I'm just looking forward to that right now. The hell with Valve and their Orange Box clusterfuck.

Mozilla and Valve have been busy.

Unlike me.
by AC - permalink

Yesterday Firefox was updated to version 1.5.0.5. It's another incremental security/stability update, fixing several flaws rated critical. As always,

If you already have Firefox 1.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu within at any time.

And this morning, the corresponding update to Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 was released. The auto-upgrade patch for both apps is around 500K. All of my extensions carried over without any problems.

And speaking of Firefox extensions, if you happen to have one called "Numbered Links 0.9," you might want to look into better anti-virus software because it might be a trojan horse. This isn't an extension sneaking a virus into your system via Firefox. It's actually installed into the browser by Downloader-AXM as a delivery vehicle for a virus known as FormSpy or, to the cool kids, Troj/FireSpy-A. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the extension system of Firefox (or Thunderbird, or Moz Suite) has been used to install malware. The doom squad has been predicting that this could be a problem since day one, and it's always been an inevitability. But this particular horse doesn't look to be much of an issue, and Firefox's extensibility is still nowhere near as vulnerable as, say, ActiveX.

Valve has been busy as well, churning out update after update for Steam games and Steam itself. There have been a total of four updates and four new Steam games released in the past week, plus the availability of the Sin Episodes: Emergence SDK. That last bit is good news for anyone who might like to try actually making an interesting Sin episode. Anyway, among the updates is a major content package for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. At the same time, it was announced that RO: Ostfront will be available for free via Steam for five days, beginning August 2nd.

I've thought about getting this game, after tinkering with the original RO mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. A major issue with that mod was the dimwitted bot AI, which makes playing it offline not much of an option. RO: Ostfront is supposed to have the same problem, and that makes it hard for me to put down the money. Making things worse, for some reason the game is $25 via Steam but $30 at retail, at least where I've seen it. I know that with Steam acting as download manager, I can actually incrementally download something the size of Ostfront, even with dial-up. I did manage to download Lost Coast and several demos and massive patches. And you can back up games purchased over Steam onto blank CDs or DVDs. But I just like buying games in boxes. The problem with Ostfront is, I don't want to pay five bucks for that box.

And I'm still having all kinds of problems with Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. I left this game alone for a while, and now I remember why. It's just a massively unpolished release. Thanks again, EA. I'm still troubleshooting and figuring this shit out, and if I can get it going smoothly, I'll write a post on it. The game was just twenty bucks when I bought it, and so far it's hasn't been worth ten.

Orca Browser first impressions.

Could be the best new browser since Firefox 1.0.
by AC - permalink

First things first: Orca 1.0 RC3 is incredibly stable for what it is - Avant Browser's UI grafted onto the Gecko engine. That's especially impressive considering this is basically being coded by one guy, and testing has been limited to a single forum thread. A few other notes and thoughts:

Big chunks of code seem to have been lifted directly from Avant Browser, including the bookmarks system. Orca imports Internet Explorer favorites and Links (analogous to Firefox's Bookmarks toolbar items), and uses AB's manager. Which means it can't import bookmarks from Fx, Opera, or anything else except IE. Big problem there.

With minor tweaks, the preferences interface is identical to AB's as well. Hopefully this will be overhauled in the future, as the prefwindow has always been one of Avant's weakest points. It's cluttered and haphazardly organized.

Orca uses AB's kickass little customizable tab controls toolbar. It's one of my all-time favorite browser UI elements, but it still can't be placed on the tab bar itself.

The integrated RSS viewer is solid. Much better than Opera's mail-based reader, but not yet as good as the Sage extension for Firefox.

Built-in adblocking is iffy. There's a solid wildcarded blacklist in place, but AB's context-menu option for adding an image/address to the blacklist is missing. Not a deal-killer, but irritating.

The various toolbars can be rearranged and resized as easily as IE's, but they tend to be jumpy and don't always hold position when the window is maximized/restored. Still a lot more stable than Maxthon, but not as solid as Firefox in that respect. At this early stage in Orca's development, it's the price paid for all that layout flexibility.

Orca is a cool name. And the artwork is nice - but not as good as SeaMonkey's. You can't fight the awesome power of the brine shrimp, Anderson. I'm sorry, but it just can't be done. Hopefully that reads somewhat ironic.

Orca Browser 1.0 RC3

Where the hell did this come from?
by AC - permalink

I stumbled onto something surprising this morning. Apparently Anderson Che - the Avant Browser guy - has been working on a new web browser called Orca Browser for nearly a year now. He actually announced this and started open testing in September, but somehow I just never heard about it. In any case, unlike Avant, which is an IE shell, Orca is based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine (like K-Meleon, Netscape, SeaMonkey, etc.). The first Orca alpha seems to have been based on the Firefox 1.0.x branch. I'm not sure yet about this morning's release, 1.0 release candidate 3.

First impression: Orca is virtually indistinguishable from Avant, at least from a UI and design perspective. In fact, it seems to refer to itself as Avant Browser way too often for this to be a release candidate. The installer itself is on the bloated side at 6409K, but new Gecko releases are always pretty huge before the code is pared down. I'll play around with Orca Browser some more and tell you how I think it stacks up against Firefox, Opera, and of course Avant.

SeaMonkey has a face.

Brine shrimp are neat.
by AC - permalink

The SeaMonkey logo design contest announced at the end of July has finally ended. The new logo and artwork is now official, and it looks pretty good. Now we just need a solid browser to back it up. The early SeaMonkey alpha I tested was an improvement on the Mozilla Suite it was based on, but still too bulky and too buggy. The most confusing and frustrating aspect of MozSuite for me was the fact that it was extensible, but had no extension UI. It was easy enough to install an extension, but a pain in the ass to uninstall one that no longer works with an updated build of the browser. I hope the SM developers can do something about that.

I installed Firefox 1.5 on an old Celeron-based computer at work a few days ago. Friday night I went in for a few hours and found my boss using it, and repeatedly wondering out loud how it could be so much faster than IE6. I'll let him digest it for a while before showing him how to use Adblock and Tab Mix Plus.

PCWorld.com tagged Mozilla Firefox the Product of the Year in their list of the 100 Best Products of 2005, just ahead of Gmail and Mac OS X Tiger. Thunderbird ranked 28th, behind Sony's PSP (19th) but ahead of Photoshop CS2 (32nd), iTunes (34th), and Half-Life 2 (38th). Opera 8 shows up 88th, which seems a little low to me. It falls behind Trillian at 61st and the Mac Mini (75th), which was pretty much a flop.

And on a final, selfish note, the Memphis Grizzlies, after three straight 20+ point wins, suddenly have the third-best record in the NBA, thanks to the league's best defense (86.2 ppg allowed) and what might be the best backcourt around. Only Detroit and San Antonio, last year's NBA championship finalists, have a better record after the first full month of the season. And nobody's talking about Memphis. Anywhere. This happened two years ago, when the Griz snuck up on teams all year and walked away with fifty wins and a playoff berth. Well, they aren't paying attention this season, either, and this team is better than the 2004 squad. If one or two execution/coaching issues I've noticed get cleared up, and barring significant injuries, Memphis could, potentially, have one of the league's elite teams this year. We'll see.

I heart OSS.

OSS means Open-Source Software. Learning is fun!
by AC - permalink

Lots of OSS news to get to this morning. First, after something like fifty-seven years of beta testing, OpenOffice 2.0 was released, uh, four days ago. Not sure how I missed that exactly. I still haven't even tried it though, because it's a 75MB installer for Windows, and my dial-up ISP won't let me finish a download like that without an executive order signed and sealed by President Nixon. And he's been dead for years.

Slashdot reports that a new OSS operating system called MINIX 3 is out. It uses an insanely tiny kernel, divides the user-mode into modules, and is just generally awesome:

...each device driver runs as a separate user-mode process so a bug in a driver (by far the biggest source of bugs in any operating system), cannot bring down the entire OS. In fact, most of the time when a driver crashes it is automatically replaced without requiring any user intervention, without requiring rebooting, and without affecting running programs.

MINIX 3 is available for download as a compressed CD image, and can be run directly from the CD-ROM. If you want to install it, you need a partition no larger than a Gigabyte. It's only 10 to 13MB, so give it a shot.

musikCube has jumped past the anticipated 0.93 version to a release candidate for 1.0. If you still haven't tried it, musikCube is an OSS mp3 player/collator with a simple, powerful interface, fantastic playback quality, plug-in support, and an infinitely customizable playlist generator. Yes, it's yet another mp3 player, but in only in the way that the sun is yet another star in the sky.

Finally, any minute now we should see the code freeze for Firefox 1.5 RC1. My last few holdout extensions auto-updated themselves yesterday and now work in Fx 1.5 beta 2, which is a good sign in itself. I think the really beautiful thing about 1.5 is that you can't immediately tell that it's any different from 1.0.7, but as you come across the changes, they're universally good. It works from a technical and end-user standpoint, something it seems like you never see in non-OSS software updates.

Portable Mozilla and Fiona's third LP.

Extraordinary Machine was worth the wait.
by AC - permalink

Asa brings to our attention tonight a 2GB Memorex USB stick that comes preloaded with Thunderbird. It's meant to be a travel companion and includes Tbird as an easy way to access third-party email on the road. Remember, the more people exposed to Thunderbird, the more people will begin to realize that Outlook is a load of shit.

For whatever reason, Slashdot ran a post/link for the Firemonger Project today. This isn't a bad thing, of course. Firemonger is a sort of unofficial guerilla marketing campaign for Firefox and Thunderbird, and the more exposure it gets, the better. Firemonger is essentially a burnable CD image consisting of Firefox 1.0.7, Thunderbird 1.0.7, and a long list of plug-ins, extensions, and themes, along with documentation to help new users make the switch from IE and Outlook.

I've been preoccupied with Fiona Apple's new album Extraordinary Machine lately, and haven't thought about much else lately besides, of course, Ghost Recon, which I'm also obsessed with. I read Josh Modell's review of Machine at the AV Club, and within five minutes my copy was on order from Amazon along with a copy of Fiona's first album, Tidal, a CD I used to have two of, but somehow over the years I ended up with none of. Machine is clearly Fiona's and Fiona's alone, meaning there's just no way to categorize it, except to place it alongside Tidal and When the Pawn... My copy came as a dual-disc. The DVD side has live performances of a few songs from the new record and two from When the Pawn..., plus the video for Not About Love, which is as funny as it is awesome. It also has the DVD-audio version of the album, and it sounds so ridiculously good that there's just no reason whatsoever to flip the disc over to the CD side.

The GIMP is Ugly

Slashdot is reporting today that open-source graphic app The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) signed up with OpenUsability to help improve its UI. And it's about goddamn time. I love the GIMP, but it's just a huge pain in the ass to get anything done with it, especially if you're a non-*nix guy who cut his IMP teeth with Photoshop (Photoshop 3 for Win 3.1, actually).

In even better news, G4, the mess that morphed out of TechTV, is bringing back Call for Help, and Leo Laporte is back to host (no Cat Schwartz, though). I'd be a bit happier if AOTS brought back Patrick Norton and Megan Morrone, but I'll take what I can get.

Last week Yahoo News published three articles to introduce the average user to open-source software. Is Open Source for You? is your standard encyclopedia-esque intro to OSS and OS web projects. Open-Source for All is basically a FAQ for anyone who still doesn't get it, and The Open-Source PC is a rundown of a few of the major OSS options you have (Firefox, Thunderbird, Celestia, OpenOffice, etc.). No mention of musikCube, though.

And lastly I'll mention that FireTune 1.0.6 is out. This is a standalone app (no installer) that is, essentially, a wizard for making a few performance tweaks to Firefox's about:config. I've used it before, but only once. I wouldn't bother with it.

Fx, Sm, YQ, Op, and Saturn

The first non-beta release of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox was released this week. I'm not real sure who would need the features this thing has, but it's nice to see more third-party add-ons for Firefox anyway, especially from established names like Yahoo. Speaking of which, I forgot to mention the Y!Q Beta search plug-in for Fx I came across months ago. It's actually reasonably useful, though I still use the Wikipedia search plug-in a lot more.

The SeaMonkey Council (which has the best name for anything ever) is looking for better artwork for its namesake browser suite. Apparently the current logo sucks. I haven't tried a SeaMonkey nightly yet, because I know I'd have to uninstall Mozilla 1.7.10 first, and I don't wanna. Incidentally, installing a Deer Park alpha will screw with your current Fx install.

Opera 8.02 is out. I haven't lifted my self-imposed moratorium on installing new versions of Opera because of two features that are conspicuously absent from the changelog: "Overhauled ungodly UI" and "Removed $40 price tag." I actually felt kind of bad about cheap shots I've taken at Opera in the past, until I read this blog. It's not a bad blog either, probably much better than mine, but I wish they could promote Opera in a better way than pointing out every little problem the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit, has ever had.

Finally, if you've always wanted to know what the planet Saturn sounds like, and who hasn't really, here's your chance. Turns out Saturn sounds like the original score from a bad Vincent Price movie, run through a few dozen effects boxes and remixed by Portishead. Weird would be the adjective I'd go with.

Thunderbird Gets Even Better

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an app called FreePOPs that allows email clients like Thunderbird to access web-based email accounts. Well, forget about that. Yesterday I decided to take a look at Blogzilla, "a weblog about Mozilla," for the first time in several months to see if a new post had finally appeared (the last update was in early December). Sure enough, Jonathan had written back on April 10th about a Thunderbird extension imaginatively called Web-Mail that does the same thing as FreePOPs, only much faster and completely transparently. Plug in the Web-Mail extension along with an auxiliary extension for your web-based service (currently limited to Hotmail, Yahoo, Lycos, and Mail.com), and you can retrieve mail as easily as you can from any other POP3 service.

Now that I'm using Thunderbird for my Yahoo Mail accounts as well as my Gmail account, I've decided to remove my RSS feeds and go back to using Firefox's LiveBookmarks. So for quick browsing (without waiting for all the feeds to load), I'm reverting to K-Meleon 0.9 (Gecko-based) and Avant Browser 10.1 beta (IE-based).

By the way, I've finally started using a few Thunderbird extensions, aside from Web-Mail. The Delete Junk Context Menu is absolutely indespensible for me (faster and easier than having Thunderbird automatically move spam to the junk folder, then deleting them from there), and the Contacts Sidebar is a basic feature of Outlook Express that, for whatever reason, Thunderbird doesn't have.

Oh, one more thing. I noticed a few days ago that it's 2005, so I finally got an optical mouse. To avoid a potentially fatal shock to my nervous system, I did not buy the Logitech dual-laser gaming mouse glaring seductively at me from the top shelf. Instead, I went with a basic, but comfortable, IBM optical wheel-mouse. So now I'm faced with a new problem: what to do with my vast collection of ball-mice and mousepads.

Assorted Geekish Mutterings

Really tired right now. Stayed up too late yesterday finishing off The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clark. Earlier this month I read 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three. I'll probably go to a library this weekend looking for 3001.

Mac People have something to be excited about as Camino v0.9 alpha 1 was released tonight. You can read the absurdly long release notes here if you've got twenty or thirty minutes. And speaking of MoFo alphas, test builds of Firefox 1.0.5 are available for anyone brave enough to try it, according to the second post at the new Mozilla Quality Blog.

Over the past few days I've been playing around with DivX 6, Nero Recode 2, and ratDVD, looking for a high-quality and fast way to decode some of my movies to save HD space. DivX was just monstrously slow and produced a noticeably desaturated picture. Plus, in my experience anyway, it produced just a 35 to 40% compression rate. No thanks. ratDVD crashed almost right away the only time I've used it so far, and I haven't done much with Decode 2 yet. I'll let you know if anything blows me away.

My old bargain-basement keyboard that I found in front of an abandoned house stopped working last week, finally giving me the chance to go all-out on a new one. So I dropped nearly ten big-boys on a generic 112-keyer. That's right, you heard me. It's got "power," "sleep," and "wake" keys that don't do anything, and it didn't come with any software. It's only the most rad keyboard ever.

I have to go watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force now.

Internet Explorer Still Sucks

Microsoft triggered a massive blitz of idiotic, unintelligible forum posts this week by releasing an MSN toolbar that brings tabbed browsing to IE6+. Apparently the plan was to upgrade the worst web browser currently in existence by adding a simple UI feature invented roughly sixty years ago. Unfortunately, said toolbar is probably the worst browser patch ever created. Thanks to Asa for helping us keep the web right-side up.

Looks like a Simpsons movie is actually going to happen (via Slashdot). If I wasn't so sure that creative control of this film will be entirely in the hands of a labyrinthine hierarchy of Fox studio suits, I'd think this was long-overdue good news. But we all know that Fox can't let a potential money-maker like this one get out the door without shunting it through a few focus groups to make sure it properly plugs their prime-time lineup and shamelessly panders to the designated demographic. Again, I hope I'm proved wrong, because I love The Simpsons. But I won't be.

Our favorite mp3 player/playlist manager has been updated again. musikCube 0.92.5 can be downloaded here. All the bug fixes and UI changes are in the changelog