Another rant on betas and Opera.

If you're going to bash Firefox, at least know what you're talking about.
by AC - permalink

For whatever reason, nearly every unofficial Opera blog I see seems to think that bashing other browsers (specifically Firefox, even though IE is still dominating the market) is as good a way as any to promote their personal favorite. I just don't understand this. There's a blog called 30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover that I keep bookmarked for its fairly comprehensive rundown of Opera 8's features, and last Friday they took a misguided shot at Firefox 1.5 beta 1 for not yet being compatible with most 1.0.x extensions. Here's a tiny bit of it:

Well, Firefox was in “beta” for ages and of course “beta” is increasingly meaningless.

When talking about Firefox, “beta” means very little. Not as little as GMail, perhaps, but still, it has spent 90% of its life in beta.

If you want to go all the way back to the Phoenix/Firebird days, then sure, Firefox was in beta for a long while. But Phoenix was never meant to be a widely-used, mainstream browser, not until Firefox 1.0 was released last November. Since then, six finalized versions have been released to fix security flaws (this is a good thing). Because Fx is open-source software - and therefore a collaborative effort - all six were openly beta-tested, generally for about 48 hours. Firefox 1.5 is based on a new branch of the Gecko rendering engine, and has taken significantly longer to test.

But the point is, just because there's a beta of a new version of Fx being tested, it doesn't mean there isn't still a stable, official release available. There is, and there has been for ten months now.

I think the problem the die-hard Opera users are having comes from not fully understaning how open-source software like Firefox is created. Every single new build (and there's a new one literally every day) is made available to anyone who wants it. New versions aren't tested in-house for a while before a beta is made public, shortly followed by a final build.

This isn't Opera, it's OSS. If you're not beta-testing, don't use a beta. I don't know how I can say this more clearly.

And by the way, I'm not bashing Opera itself. I'm writing this post in Opera, and I use it almost daily. I think what the Firefox-bashing Opera users need to realize is that as one browser gets better, they all have to get better. Do you think it's a coincidence that Microsoft, after years of letting Internet Explorer stagnate, is suddenly crashing development of IE7 now that Mozilla has released a better browser and is steadily taking away market share a few ticks of a percent at a time? Opera's market share has not made as big a dent, but Opera, like Firefox, is vastly superior to IE, and that has to be another reason that IE7's target release date has been moved up by over a year.

So why don't we try to stop slamming each other's perferred browsers just to make our own look superior, and focus on the real enemies: terrorists, reality television, and J-Lo's self-branded mini marketing empire.

I'm not testing that.

Know what you're getting yourself into.
by AC - permalink

As much as I like to help out the Mozilla Foundation by beta-testing their new releases, I've just had too many problems with Deer Park to install Firefox 1.5 beta 1. More than 5,000 bugs have already been squashed in this branch, and it looks like there are still some impressive ones hanging around. Thunderbird 1.5 beta 1 hasn't had as many problems, and I'll probably test the second beta.

I worry sometimes about the distribution of pre-final Firefox builds. I noticed that the candidate builds for 1.5 beta 1 were posted at the BetaNews FileForum. Unless you're actively involved in bug-squashing for Mozilla, keep in mind that you should steer clear of anything called a release candidate, a pre-beta, or an alpha. Mozilla final releases are as thoroughly vetted and tested as any software anywhere, and you should stick with those unless you're aware of the risks inherent to beta-testing.

Anyway. I finally got around to picking up a copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon this weekend. I've never actually owned my own copy, and I've been meaning to finally get one since seeing them on perform for Live 8 from London. They were as good as they've ever been, which is astonishing. I also grabbed a two-disc compilation of Pearl Jam b-sides called Lost Dogs. All I really wanted was "Last Kiss" and "Hard to Imagine," and now I've got those plus 28 other slightly obscure, somewhat esoteric songs. "Bee Girl" is just plain weird. And "Sweet Lew" is about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If you're wondering why Pearl Jam recorded a song about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so am I. Can't imagine why it never made it onto an album.

Microsoft doesn't like you.

But Blake does. And so does The Onion.
by AC - permalink

In an interview with Tom's Hardware posted yesterday, Firefox co-creator Blake Ross was asked what he thinks is the biggest difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer:

Microsoft is here to win. That's great if you're a shareholder, but how many users appreciated that attitude when spyware and pop-ups filled their screens four years ago, and Microsoft, having crushed Netscape, abandoned the market? The company is back now that competition has arisen, but where will it be in four more years?

The Mozilla Foundation isn't fighting a war on competition; it's fighting a war on complexity. Our users are our shareholders, and as long as the Internet is frustrating, we'll be here.

Ross also mentioned something interesting that I hadn't heard before. Seems the growing market share of all the standards-compliant web browsers (i.e. everything but IE) is starting to put a dent in the Explorer-only internet and intranet applications market:

We used to have a full evangelism team that worked with IE-only companies to support Web standards. Fortunately, we've reached the tipping point in terms of market share where companies are now forced to open up or risk losing 10% of their clientele. So while we still make evangelism efforts, these kinds of problems are beginning to disappear naturally.

The rest of the short interview isn't all that interesting, but may be worth a look.

Turning from Tom's Hardware to My Hardware, I installed a new hard drive in my PC this weekend. (Do not question my segueing abilities!) The 10GB Quantum HD in my mom's old Compaq started making nasty clicking noises, which pretty much means it's dead and gone forever. So I formatted the 30GB Western Digital I use as a backup from NTFS to FAT32 and stuck it in her PC, and installed Win98 SE on it. Then I replaced it in my box with a shiny, new (but cheap) Maxtor 100GB, 7800 RPM drive. I still only have a total of 140GB of storage here, but it's still more than I need. I don't even have a DVD burner or broadband, and it took me six months to effectively fill up the 70GB I had before.

Something else I've been meaning to post for a while now: The Onion has completely opened up its news archives. This is probably the biggest source of comedy on the damned web now, and I've been trolling through it for a few days. This goes along with a redesign of the front page and a total overhaul of The A.V. Club. Good times.

Oh, and I added Blogger's image/word verification feature to the comments. Hopefully this will stop the comment spambots that started to pop up here this week.

Opera 8.02 reviewed.

Opera 8.02 ranks among the browser elite, but is it better than Firefox?
by AC - permalink

It's been one week now since I got my greedy little fingers on a registered, ad-free edition of Opera 8.02. I've been splitting time between Opera, Firefox, and Avant Browser, and I've collected a few notes. First, the good news.

Lots of bugs appear to have been fixed since the Opera 8 beta I last tested. The browser hasn't crashed or locked once, though it did hang for nearly a minute once when I tried to close the Feeds tab while another site loaded in a background tab. No idea why. I've noticed a few other fixes here and there, like the Blogger preview function works now.

The overall UI still takes some getting used to. The navigation controls and URL bar are still tied into the currently active tab, so that closing all tabs leaves you with nothing but the Personal bar. It's a little weird. I had to do some customizing to the default layout. I removed the search fields from the Personal bar - they were both commercial, I believe - and dragged all my bookmark folders there instead. I left the Google search field on the Navigation bar, added a Panels toggle, and replaced the back and forward buttons with ones with drop-down arrows. I also had to lose the "fast-forward" and "rewind" buttons. This can all be done by drag-and-drop from the customize toolbars dialog, just like Firefox. There's also a Main bar, active by default, that seems totally useless in day-to-day browsing.

Page rendering in Opera is good, but can be a little wonky, mostly in the interpretation of font settings. The wrong one might be used, or it will be slightly too small or too large (as compared to the same site rendered by Gecko or Explorer). Big picture, though, Opera is just as standards-compliant as Firefox, and of course moreso than IE6.

In-dialog skins browsing via an Opera-hosted web server is much simpler than searching for themes across multiple sites, like virtually every other skinnable app ever. Unfortunately, Opera's servers have been wavering between slow-as-hell and completely-dead all day. Could be added traffic from the free-for-a-day promotion. In any case, there are some extremely good skins available, and they can be changed on-the-fly, unlike (to my knowledge) every Gecko-based browser.

The tab UI is generally good, a little slicker maybe than Firefox's, and provides a close button on each tab by default, something I love that can be done in Fx with an extention called Tab Mix Plus. Tab Mix also lets you reorder tabs by dragging them, another native Opera feature. But Opera's variable-width tabs based on length of the title of each web page is annoying.

Now for the not-great news. Opera has a useful array of sidebars, called panels, but to access them you need the Panels toolbar, which is a big fat vertical toolbar on the left edge of the screen. The Panels bar is just a list of the different panels, and can be moved, but the sidebar itself apparently cannot be displayed without it there, even though the sidebar's header contains a drop-down menu listing the panels. It's redundant UI that eats up screen space for no real reason.

Anyway, the panels include Bookmarks (lets you manage bookmarks in the sidebar, identical to Fx); Notes (really handy little widget that basically lets you keep a list of notes, displayed in the bottom half of the sidebar below the list); Transfers (the download manager, but it works best in its own tab, where it lives by default anyway). The History panel is a disappointment. The history is displayed as one massive list and seems almost useless compared to Firefox, which gives you five options for sorting the history. The Links panel is better, it simply collates all the links on the active page and lists 'em for you; haven't found a use for it yet, but someday I might. You also get a page Info panel.

If you've set up Opera's email client, you'll also get an email panel. I don't recommend it. The panel is simply Opera's mail client crammed into the sidebar. The problem, however, is the client itself. Opera calls it "revolutionary," and it's definitely small and fast. But it's also dated and lacking in features. Thunderbird is a far superior email client. Hell, I'd rather use webmail.

The other major problem is that Opera's RSS interface is tied into its mail client. Without an email account set up, the Feeds interface is actually pretty good. It's fast and intuitive and better than Fx's LiveBookmarks. You can set each feed to check for updates at a different interval, ranging from once every five minutes to once a week. Only basic content is shown in the feed viewer; it doesn't render the actual web page like Thunderbird, which is either good or bad, depending on personal taste, and you can always open the feed in a new tab with a click. You do have to delete the feeds yourself or they'll just keep piling up; they don't auto-update like with LiveBookmarks or the Wizz RSS reader Fx extension.

Unfortunately, with the mail client active, new RSS items are treated just like mail, and it becomes overly complicated dealing with more than just one or two feeds, especially if you get a lot of mail. This is probably the biggest problem I have with Opera's email client - it makes browsing RSS feeds a pain in the ass.

I also have a problem with the way Opera handles cookies. The default cookie manager is decent, better than many browsers. But there doesn't seem to a way to create a cookie blacklist, a killer Firefox feature. And I had another issue: I use an exclusion cookie when reading this blog, so that my hits don't register when I'm looking at the site traffic. The cookie works in Firefox and Avant, but Opera seems to be ignoring it.

The biggest deal-breaker for most of us, particularly Firefox users, is Opera's lack of adblocking. As Nitin Bhargava put it, "Where's my adblock?" AdBlock Plus is the essential Fx extension, and even little Avant Browser now has native adblocking, arguably even better than Fx's. Adblocking is actually possible in Opera. There are several methods, but the easiest is by creating a file called filter.ini in the profile directory, then altering opera6.ini to refer to it. If you have a long blacklist in AdBlock for Firefox, you can export the list to a textfile and just alter that. Unfortunately, there's a bug in Opera (or is it a feature?) that seems to make the browser arbitrarily ignore blacklisted URLs, so that many ads will appear anyway, and iframes always seem to get through.

There's also the little matter of the big, attention-grabbing ad banners at the top of the browser window itself in the free version of Opera. The reason I've been playing with Opera for as long as a week is that I was lucky enough to get a free registration code during the ten-year-anniversary promotion last week. But if you weren't so lucky, the big question is simple: Is Opera 8.02 good enough to use despite the annoying ads, or even good enough to drop $39 U.S. for a registered version? It might be, if you've got the disposable income. If you run at a high screen-res (1280 or above), you might be able to put up with the ad banners (though I never could). 8.02 is clearly the best Opera so far, much, much better than 7.x.

All I can really tell you is that I'm going to keep using it, probably more than I use Avant, K-Meleon, or the Mozilla Suite. But Firefox 1.0.6 will remain the default browser on my system, and it won't be replaced until Firefox 1.5 is released shortly. Firefox still offers the best total package in the best interface, with the best extendibility. But for registered users, Opera has claimed second-place.

Cheap Greatest Hits and In Event of An Emergency

No big deals in my shopping this weekend, but I did pick up a few of the new PS2 Greatest Hits games, which Circuit City has on sale this week 2 for $30. I picked up Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Jak 3, and Hot Shots Golf: Fore! Fortunately, I found them all in their original packaging, and not the ugly, red bar Greatest Hits packaging. I have to go back to work tomorrow after my nice long vacation, but that's all right. I had a nice rest, and I'm ready to get back to it.

To me, the scariest thing about what happened in New Orleans is the attempt by the federal government to shift the blame for the tragedy on the local authorities in New Orleans and Louisiana, and the realization that we can't rely on the federal government to help us out in the case of disaster. It's probably not well known outside of here, but here in Memphis we're sitting near the New Madrid fault line, which is, as any geologist would tell you, overdue for a major, 8.0 plus earthquake in the next several years. If that were to happen here, I hope the city of Memphis and Shelby County is prepared to handle all disaster relief and recovery efforts alone, because based on what we've seen in the last several days from FEMA, we can't rely on anyone else for help.

More Opera Soon, and an Update on New Orleans

I've been doing some pretty serious tinkering with Opera 8.02 for a few days now, and I'm sporadically compiling a fairly in-depth review of it. I've been typing in a few notes in the Notes field of Opera's panels bar, which is a nice little feature. There are quite a lot of things I need to say about it. Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is now a week away, but I won't be testing it; based on my experiences with Deer Park, it's probably going to be more trouble that it's worth for someone not directly involved with beta testing for the Mozilla Foundation. So I have plenty of time to kill writing up something decent on Opera.

In case you haven't seen it yet, there's an incredible blog being maintained from inside the hell that New Orleans has become called The Interdictor. It's run by the crisis manager for a company called DirecNIC. He and his crew are holding down a highrise and are making it a priority to make sure everyone knows what's going on down there. The most interesting thing is the right-turn in perspective they're giving us. If you're watching the news, you know already that every elected politician in the country seems to be doing everything they can to point out that things are not nearly as dire as the mainstream media are making it seem with their coverage. This guy, however, is pointing out that everyone he talks to is pissed as hell that the media is making things look much, much better than they actually are.

So a question organically appears here: Who has the incentive to lie, or to decieve themselves into believing one perspective or the other? The people on the ground dealing with the flooding, looting, crime, and lack of external support, or the VIPs who have to answer to the people in the voting booths?

Anyway, the blog is also worth checking out for this guy's masterful ability to come up with simple quotes that sum up an entire tragedy. "It takes a spectacular kind of asshole to set a fire in this environment." "It's hot as hell down there in the sun. Crime is absolutely rampant: rapes, murders, rape-murder combinations." "It is a zoo out there... it's the wild kingdom. It's Lord of the Flies. That doesn't mean there's murder on every street corner. But what it does mean is that the rule of law has collapsed, that there is no order... Anyone who is on the streets is in immediate danger of being robbed and killed. It's that bad."

Tragedy in the Big Easy

I'm sitting here watching the video and images from Hurricane Katrina on the Weather Channel, and I just can't believe what I'm seeing and hearing. The cities of New Orleans and Gulfport are basically gone. I've been to both cities, and I just can't believe the magnitude and power of this storm. I feel for everyone affected by this, and hope everyone will be able to bounce back. I mean, 80% of New Orleans is underwater-- I just don't see how they will be able to come back from this.

Katrina was one powerful storm-- powerful enough to affect us here in Memphis. It was still a tropical storm when it passed through here knocking out power to 74,000 customers, including me. Thankfully, the utility company seemed to be prepared, as we got back power yesterday evening, about 18 hours after we lost it.

I'm on vacation this week, and I've spent most of my time on the internet and working on editing my video from my Disney vacation. I was inspired into video editing by Robb and Elissa Alvey over at Theme Park Review, who turn out some great theme park videos, many of which you can download from their website or buy on DVD. If you're a theme park junkie like me, their DVDs are well worth the money.

I'm going out grocery shopping tomorrow, so I will probably hit up a couple of Targets and whatnot on a lookout for bargain games. I'll report back here if I find anything good.

All Firefox, All the Time

Lots of Firefox stuff to cover tonight. Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is now officially scheduled for a Sept. 9 release. Lockdown on the code will be at midnight on the 7th. Fx developers have also decided to add a second beta before 1.5 is finalized, pushing that release back somewhat. If you've been testing Deer Park, you know why. There have been some major bugs in the new Gecko branch, and it will definitely take some time to iron them all flat. In the end, all the extra testing and feedback will be worth it, though.

Lockergnome's web developers RSS channel started adding a daily Firefox item about a week ago. Nothing earth-shattering has appeared so far, but there have been a couple of interesting posts.

First, there's BackupFox, a small app that will make a backup of all your extensions, bookmarks, preferences, history, etc., in .zip format. It works with Firefox as well as Thunderbird. Should be useful if a nightly build should happen to irreparably corrupt your userChrome files.

Lockergnome also mentioned an article on I-Hacked.com called Firefox Browser Hacking. While there are some good ideas here, and links to some useful extensions, there's very little hacking going on. It's sort of a quick 'n dirty guide to customizing Fx for hackers, which doesn't make a lot of sense, as most of them have been using it for a year now.

Finally, according to this Slashdot post, there's a "plug-in" available now that attempts to turn Internet Explorer into Firefox by adding tabs, a search box, and a small firewall that should cover most of the IE security holes plugged by the Gecko rendering engine. Right now I don't know if this is actual software or wishful thinking, as the site referred to, getfoxie.com, appears to have been slashdotted and is unavailable. I suppose I could troll the comments, but I don't do that. It's always more aggravating than enlightening. But I will quote the first-poster, fembots: "What I need is a Firefox-plugin that looks exactly like IE (including the lack of tabs and search box) while still providing the same level of security."

Opera Almost Figures It Out

Something very unusual to going on today. Opera is finally offering free registration for their browser. Problem is, it's just for today. In case anyone's interested, go to this page and submit an email address and you'll be given a registration code. Then you can download the browser, register it, and those ad banners go "poof." Thanks to Nitin for pointing this out.

This is celebration of Opera's ten-year anniversary, and I think it's a great idea. Adware sucks and everyone hates it, so most people don't even give Opera a chance. Unfortunately, the ones who do generally decide that it just ain't worth forty bucks. But we all love free stuff, so don't be surprised if Opera hits a record for new users today. Maybe it'll finally wake them up to a simple fact that's been staring them in the face for years: Netscape was crushed by Microsoft in part because they started charging for Communicator Gold. The free, stripped down Netscape browser was the most dominant piece of software the internet had yet seen, but bloating it up and slapping on a price tag neatly killed it.

As soon as Opera figures this out, the better off they'll be. I don't know what their business model is, but making the product free would push their market share back up (it's been declining for months), meaning a bigger audience, and leading to improvements in the software. Suddenly Mozilla is looking back over their shoulder, and all the browsers get better.

But this won't happen. Opera is still too pricey, and the UI is still way to cluttered and confusing. Right now, your best bet remains Firefox, but I figure if it's free and the ads are gone, I'll give Opera another shot.

Thirteen Essential Firefox Extensions

So here's the comprehensive list of Firefox extensions I use that I've been wanting to post for months. You can download these extensions from the links provided. A couple of these have been updated from the version noted, but I'm only listing the versions I'm using as of this evening. This way you know that I've tested them in Fx 1.0.6, under Win XP Pro. I'm going in alphabetical order.

• AdBlock Plus 0.5.9 - One of my favorite browser enhancements ever, it inspired native ad blocking in a number of browsers, including Avant, the best IE shell.


• Delicious Delicacies 0.4.1 - The definition of a useless extension, it simply replaces the definition of "cookie" in the advanced prefwindow pane with the jokey temporary one that lived there for several months before Firefox became a household name. I love it.


• Download Manager Tweak 0.6.6 - Most useful feature is moving the download manager into its own tab, Opera-style. This view gives you info you normally wouldn't have in Fx, including file URL and target location.


• FlatStyle 0.9.1.3 - Creates MS Office-style context menus and, more importantly, lets you drop the dropdown arrows on the back/forward buttons (right-click for menus). This looks great but makes a number of custom themes jumpy, so I disable it from time to time.


• Image Zoom 0.1.7.1 - Gives you a bunch of context menu-based options for zooming into and out of images. Should really be a standard Fx feature. Highly customizable.


• LiveBookmarkThis 0.2 - Another feature that should be standard, lets you add RSS or Atom feeds to your LiveBookmarks with a right-click.


• MenuX 0.2.2.15 - Adds no less than thirty additional toolbar buttons to pick and choose from, including buttons for the extension and theme managers. Also allows you to hide the menubar. Highly recommended.


• Save Image in Folder 0.5.1 - Adds a customizable option to the context menu that shows up when you right click an image. You can quickly drop a bmp, png, gif, or jpg into any folder that you add to the list. Convenient as hell.


• Save Text Area 0.2 - Right-click in a text area to get the option of loading a text file's contents into it. Very useful if you're worried about writing a lengthy post, only to have a remote server crap out and lose your data. I'm using it to write this post.


• Show Image 0.3 - An old IE feature, lets you right-click on an image placeholder for a graphic that didn't load (or if you hit Stop before the images loaded) to force it to load. I use it every day.


• Tab Mix Plus 0.2.4 - Unquestionably the best tab extension for Fx. Gives you every option you could need, including tab focusing and appearance tweaks like putting a close button on every tab (Opera's best feature). Can be buggy on install, but absolutely worth the trouble.


• WellRounded 0.41 - An aesthetic extension, it creates rounded ends for the URL bar, search bar, and history and bookmarks sidebar searches. Doesn't work with a lot of custom themes, but makes many, including the default theme and Qute, look fantastic.


• Wizz RSS News Reader 1.1.2 - Easily the best RSS reader/aggregator I've come across so far. Integrates fairly well into Fx, though the interface isn't particularly intuitive. But given a chance, it becomes addictive. It has to compete with Fx's native LiveBookmarks, and I think which one is better is a matter of personal preference, but if you want to sort through a couple dozen or more feeds daily, like I do, Wizz RSS wins out.

If there's a Fx extension that you can't live without that I haven't listed here, post it in the comments. I already know that Garrett has a BugMeNot extension that I haven't been able to find, so I'm waiting for that link. I've put off listing my Thunderbird extensions until I have more than four installed. I just don't get that much email, I'm afraid.

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.

Hulk Smash

If you're looking for a great action game, one of the best I've played in a long, long time, go out right now and pick up The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube. Yes, I know-- licensed games are usually crap, the last Hulk game sucked, I don't care about the Hulk, yadda yadda yadda-- if you enjoy action games, at least give this one a rent. I've been playing it nonstop for almost two days, and it's damn fun. If you're still not convinced, read this review at Gamespy. This game just came out of nowhere, and has to be one of the biggest surprises of the year.

Other than that I've picked up more cheapass games at Target. I love Target for their red-sticker clearance sales, where you can find games for 5 bucks, or sometimes even less. The best internet reasource for cheap games is Cheap Ass Gamer. I visit their message board almost every day to get the latest on great game deals. This site is how I acquire so many games-- most of them I pad less that 20 bucks for, and a lot of those, less than ten bucks.

Puppies and Hedgehogs

I write about how I haven't bought a new Gamecube game in months, then I turn around and buy one a few days later. I picked up Sonic Gems Collection a couple of days ago. My verdict: unless you're a diehard Sonic fan like myself, it's not really worth your $29.99. Sonic CD is the highlight of the collection, and even then I think it's overrated-- it's a good game, but gameplay-wise it's easily topped by both Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Sonic the Fighters is nice to have in a collection, as it never saw a home release, but it's pretty much a dummied down version of Virtua Fighter. And despite what many critics have said, I actually enjoy Sonic R, but it hasn't held up very well. (Except for the fabulously cheesy soundtrack.) The six Game Gear games in the collection are worthless; why the hell would I want to play a Game Gear game blown up to huge proportions on my television? It looks awful. Vectorman and Vectorman 2 round out the collection, and are actually two of the better games on the disc. What pisses me off the most about Sonic Gems Collection is that Sega of America actually removed three of the games from the Japanese version (Streets of Rage 1, 2, and 3), supposedly so the game wouldn't get a Teen rating. What utter bull.

Faring better in my new game purchases is Nintendogs, which, despite being mind-numbingly cute, is actually a pretty neat use of the Nintendo DS's capabilities. So far I have a chocolate lab puppy named Mario, and I've taught him how to sit, lie down, roll over, and shake. I'm trying to teach him to chase his tail next. Yes, this sounds utterly goofy, and it is, but it's pretty fun all the same.

In my earlier rant about EA and Madden, I forgot to say something about Blitz: The League. I might consider picking this one up. Basically, Midway, having lost the NFL license, decided to make Blitz into the most over-the-top football game imaginable. Apparently, they hired the writer for Playmakers (the ESPN football drama forced off the air by the NFL) to write the storyline. I'm intrigued, and the Blitz games have always been pretty fun. I'll be waiting to see how this turns out.

Oh yeah, and I'm officially on vacation now. I have two weeks left to take before the end of October, and next week will be the first one. Of course, I'm not going anywhere... but if someone walked up to me and handed me a thousand bucks, I'd be off to Walt Disney World in a heartbeat. However, I don't see that happening, so I'm basically going to sit around for a week, watch movies, and play video games. On second thought, that's a vacation enough for me.

Site Search is Live

And it actually works. I ditched the Google SiteSearch and put up a modified Yahoo! search form I found on another site. I suppose eventually this blog will get indexed by Google, but we're already on Yahoo, so the hell with it. While I was looking for the code, I found out that Yahoo does still make a small search form available as a part of their "media relations," but apparently you just have to hack it to limit the search to one indexed URL. So anyway, it works, and it's freakin' sweet.

Site Update

I just added a search form to this blog's sidebar (index only). I wanted an easy way to search through all the previous posts. Unfortunately, it isn't working. I think it's because we haven't been added to the Google index yet. I did hack it just the slightest bit, but only in appearance and layout. The web search works, anyway. If I still can't search this blog with it in a couple weeks, I'll just take it back off.

Update, 9:40 PM: Well, Google may not have us indexed, but Yahoo does. So the question is, how do I add a Yahoo search form to the template? I can remember being able to add a Yahoo web search form to any site way back when Yahoo was just an upstart directory listing, but if they still offer this (and the ability to wild-card it within a particular domain), I can't find any mention of it at Yahoo Help. Any ideas?

Mississippi is Boring

Back from Greenville. There can't possibly be a more uninteresting drive in the US than the one down hwy 61 through the Mississippi River floodplain. "Oh look, its another cotton field. Where's the camera?" At least I got away from the 96 degree Memphis heat for a few days; in Greenville it was 99, and more humid.

Anyway, the Firemonger Project has been updated to CD version 1.04c. This updates to Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6. Apparently the next version of the Firemonger CD will be 2.0, with a completely revamped interface and bug fixes, as well as new extensions.

And speaking of, a one-off version of Tab Mix called Tab Mix Plus showed up at Mozilla Update this week. I had no problems installing it on the bare-bones Fx 1.0.6 under my WinXP guest account (the only other extension installed there is AdBlock). But after uninstalling Tab Mix and installing Plus, then restarting Fx, the extensions window continually hung and crashed the browser. Same result with older versions of Tab Mix. I finally intalled Tabbrowser Preferences, which is nowhere near as good as Tab Mix, then disabled it (without uninstalling) and installed Tab Mix Plus. Now it works.

I'm not sure, but I think the problem might have been caused by the install method I was using: I downloaded the .jar file and dragged it onto the extensions window the first few tries. The last time, I just installed it directly from the web site. I don't know why this would be an issue, but there you are.

I think it's time to post a new list of the Firefox and Thunderbird extensions I'm using now, along with brief descriptions as well as links. I'm using over a dozen in Fx now and four or five in Tbird. Look for it in the next day or three.

Football Monopoly

This will be the first year in about 6 years that I probably won't buy any new football games. Why? If you follow these things, you already know the answer-- EA, EA, EA. I've been a fan of Sega/Visual Concepts' NFL 2K football series since its original incarnation on the Sega Dreamcast. I've given the Madden series a try, but, time and again, I keep returning to the 2K games. Unfortunately, as hard as Sega tried, they just couldn't cut into the sales numbers of the unstoppable Madden games. So, last year, they took a drastic step-- they released ESPN NFL 2K5 for the PS2 and Xbox at an unbelievably low $19.99 price point-- undercutting the price of the new Madden game by thirty dollars. This was further compunded by the fact that most gaming magazines and websites said that 2K5 was brilliant gaming-- on par with or even better than Madden.

Although 2K5 didn't cut into Madden's sales last year, Sega did sell millions and millions of copies of 2K5, enticing many die hard Madden fans to try the series due to the low price point. Many of these fans became believers in the 2K series due to this. Things were looking up for Sega.

Then, EA, running scared, took care of things in one fell swoop. Earlier this year, they persuaded the NFL to sign an exclusive licensing deal, eliminating any possibility of competition. Goodbye, 2K series. Goodbye, NFL Blitz. Goodbye, NFL Gameday (although, those games sucked.) EA couldn't outdo Sega fair and square, so they settled on using the power of their vast capital creating a monopoly.

Now, EA has the exclusive rights to both the NFL and the NCAA, as well as ESPN. This gives them free reign to do whatever they want, a bad thing for gamers. As we all learned in economics class, competition is good. EA was forced to push their dev teams to make Madden as great as possible because they had the looming threat of other football video games. Now that EA has the exclusive license, they can ease off and offer not much more than a few roster upgrades and rehash the same tired engine year after year. And, not surprisingly, it seems like that's exactly what they're doing. Then newly released Madden 06 is getting some of the lowest ratings I've seen for the series. The consensus being-- the game is good, but it hasn't advanced. Wonder why.

So this will be the first year for me without a new football game. I used to buy EA's NCAA Football game each year (a game I feel is superior to Madden) as well as Sega's 2K game. However, this year if I want a football fix, I'll just turn back to my copy of ESPN NFL 2K5 and be left to wonder what advances and gameplay innovations may have made in a 2K6 version-- if EA hadn't created a football monopoly.

Happy Birthday to 100hc

Believe it or not, today marks the first anniversary of AC's first post on 100hc. What started as an idle hobby has turned into a full-fledged blog, complete with a second contributer (me) and an actual focus on certain topics. It also represented an opportunity to reconnect with AC after being out of touch for a while. So that was pretty nice.

Since this blog was pretty much founded on Harry Potter, I have to disclose that I'm a huge HP fan myself. I work for a major mall-based book chain (guess which) and I've been present for the releases of the last three books. I devoured the latest book, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, in about 10 hours, and now I really can't wait for the next book.

So. Anyway. In gaming news, Microsoft announced the pricing structure for the Xbox 360. My first reaction is that the only reason they're selling the $299 package (no hard drive, wired controller) is to that they can say they are launching at $299. Only a complete moron would buy it in favor of the $399 package (hard drive, wireless controller and headset, remote control) since the added value over the cheaper package is over $200.

Given these prices, along with the prospect of $60 games, it's looking more and more like I'm sitting the 360's launch out for now, and will probably take the next-gen plunge late next year. I've got too damn many Xbox, Ps2, and Cube games to play until then.

Gone

Later this morning I'm getting out of Memphis for a few days. I have one of those huge traditional weddings to attend in storied central Mississippi, and I won't be back until late Sunday. I'm actually taking a little DVD player with me, because I rented Sin City on Tuesday and I really feel like I need to watch it two or three more times. I think the perfect way to prepare for a wedding is to watch as much gratuitous violence and evisceration as possible. In any case, 100hc probably won't be totally inactive, now that we've got Garrett onboard.

I'll leave with an article from this week's The Onion that is either really funny or absolutely terrifying, I can't decide which. I give you "Intelligent Falling."

Zelda Delayed

News came yesterday that Nintendo is delaying The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube to around March 2006. This comes as a big blow to Nintendo fans, and it leaves Nintendo without a major release this year to combat Sony's large PS2 lineup and the launch of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

The delay is unfortunate, and pretty unexpected, especially because rumors had been circulating for a few months that the game was basically done and Nintendo was sitting on it until the holidays. Obviously that's not true. I know, the usual applies-- the delay will give them time to make it even better, yadda yadda yadda-- the same thing all developers say when they delay their games.

It's pretty disappointing to me that the Gamecube has suffered the way it has-- I love the system, and it was my number two system as far as play time-- behind the Xbox and ahead of the PS2. However, due to the extreme lack of new Cube games (it's been months since I bought a new one), it has slipped to third, behind PS2. Nintendo really has an uphill battle to fight now. The only area which Nintendo isn't suffering is, predictably, the handhelds. The Nintendo DS continues to sell well (especially in Japan) and has a great lineup of games for the rest of this year. They're doing much better than Sony with the PSP, which everyone predicted was going to come in and crush Nintendo. That didn't happen-- the PSP launch was something of a disappointment, and the game lineup for the PSP looks pretty bleak.

Oh, and in completely unrelated news, I finally saw Kung Fu Hustle the other day. I was really looking forward to it, especially after enjoying Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer so much. I was a little let down. Sure, Kung Fu Hustle is pretty funny in spots, and has some good action sequences, but the storyline is completely incoherent. I'm in the minority here, but I greatly preferred Shaolin Soccer. Darn. Good thing is, I have Sin City arriving from Netflix today. Yay!

Oh well. I'm off to play my Xbox.

Of Mice and Market Share

This week has seen a lot of dire-sounding tech news postings proclaiming a drop in Firefox's overall share of the browser market. Most of them have titles like "Firefox suffers dip in marketshare" (see also "Fx Market Share Slips in July" and "Fx Share Slipped in July for the First Time.") So far, I've pretty much ignored the whole browser market thing. There are just too many sources and too many variables to put a ton of faith into any of the numbers. But just this once, let's have a look at 'em.

According to NetApplications.com, in July, usage of IE grew from 86.56% to 87.2%, while usage of Fx fell from 8.71% to 8.07%. Safari also jumped slightly, from 1.93% to 2.13%. So here's my question: Why the hell are we all talking about this? A drop in Firefox's share of 0.64% merits headline news? I can only assume it's because Fx usage has grown every single month since the official release of 1.0 last November, because the numbers are entirely unremarkable.

And you don't have to take my word for it. In fact, I wouldn't if I were you, because I'm clearly a fan of the software and the Mozilla Foundation (I'm writing this in Mozilla Suite). But Robert Accettura has posted a detailed look at the numbers and the probable reasons behind them. I think the main point is the impending (and late) release of Firefox 1.5, formerly known as Firefox 1.1. Incremental security updates of 1.0 just aren't sexy, and don't pull in the new users like major releases with mainstream press coverage. In any case, I just nodded off, and it's time to change the subject.

IBM is donating software to Mozilla to help create accessibility options in future versions of Firefox. Expected features include auto-narration and keystroke navigation (which can be done now through extensions). There's also a nice little surprise buried in this article:

IBM would also donate technology to enhance the DHTML capabilities of the browser. Big Blue said its moves are to support its work for the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, as well as strengthen its commitment to standards and open source.

In other words, IBM, who has already committed to using Fx in-house, has realized that it's in their own interest to help the browser pass Acid2 and become fully standards compliant (which only Safari has accomplished so far).

The free version of WindowBlinds has been updated to 4.6. As far as I can tell, the only significant feature change is a nice little glowy effect on some mouseovers. Whether that's worth a 9MB download is up to you.

And finally, about those mice. We got some here at the house. A few weeks ago I spotted one, and saw another a few days later. Cute little tiny brown mice. Well, in the last 48 hours sightings have increased to roughly one every ninety minutes, and they seem to be living somewhere inside the gas oven. The dogs haven't managed to catch any of 'em yet; Lucy, who's half terrier, has cornered a couple, but they slipped by her. I'm afraid I'll have to start poisoning the little fuckers. Oh, well.

Allow Me To Introduce Myself

I'm Garrett, and I'll be your co-blogger this afternoon.

My old blog, Gaming is Life, basically sat for several months while I did nothing with it, so AC was nice enough to invite me onto his. I don't know exactly what I'll be writing about, but it'll mostly be about gaming, with occasional stuff on movies. I'll leave all the OSS stuff to AC... that's his area of expertise. I might write about some movie stuff, too. I really don't know where all of this will lead, but it'll be really interesting to find out.

So I'll start things off by talking about one of my obsessions lately. Beats of Rage is a game created as a tribute to Sega's classic Streets of Rage series for the Sega Genesis. BOR is available for may different platforms, including PC, Dreamcast, and Xbox, and it really brings back the feel of Streets of Rage 2, probably the best of the series. This would be great just in and of itself, but the developers, Senile Team, have developed the game so that modding would be possible. This has led to many, many different BOR mods, with beat-em up games inspired by Street Fighter, Final Fight, Mega Man, Mortal Kombat, and many other games. Some are better than others, but most of them are pretty entertaining.

Anyway, I'll post more later, and see where all this leads....

Best Blog Ever

100hc takes another step towards being the bestest blog in the civilized world this week as we've added Garrett to the staff. I noticed he hadn't done much with his own blog in a while, so I asked him to start putting up the occasional post here. He didn't want to do it, so I'm afraid I had to steal his cat lock it up in the garage with my rottweiler until he changed his mind. He didn't have to though, the cat's fine. Stupid cowardly rottweiler. Anyway, I don't care what Garrett writes about, because its gotta be better than what I've been doing. Seriously, I got nothing.

The Mozilla Store has been relaunched with a better interface and a few new items, with more coming soon. The Firefox and Thunderbird guidebooks have been combined, and you can order one with Fx and Tbird on CD-ROMs for $14. Nice gift for any friends or relatives that are still in the habit of clicking on any big blue E's they happen to see.

OhmyNews International (what?) has posted a pretty decent interview with Blake Ross. At one point Blake mentions that Firefox has been downloaded "nearly forty million times," so they've apparently been sitting on this for a while before publishing it, because Fx has been downloaded nearly eighty million times. I know this because my super nifty Firefox Download Counter Konfabulator widget tells me so. I've been playing around with Konfabulator lately, and I do like it better than ObjectDock, but it still isn't all that useful, at least for me. Except for the Battleship widget, of course. It's freakin' Battleship, man. How awesome is that?

Netscape Browser 8.0.3.3 has been released, in case anyone's interested. This is a security update incorporating fixes from "Mozilla 1.0.7," according to its FileForum entry. God only know what that means. Mozilla Suite is on 1.7.10, and 1.0.6 is the latest stable Fx build. If doesn't matter anyway. There's no reason for anyone to use Netscape Browser for anything ever.

Mozilla Turns a Profit

The Mozilla Foundation has created a wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiary called the Mozilla Corporation to aid in distributing and marketing Firefox and other software. There's been some confusion as to how exactly this will affect the future development of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc., so Daniel Glazman, and Mike Connor have posted some clarifications. Mozilla has also written up a MozCo FAQ. From an end-user standpoint, nothing should really change at all.

Yesterday IBM published on its developerWorks site a comprehensive article on migrating apps from IE to Mozilla browsers (via The Inquirer. Here's the summary:

Ever have trouble getting your Internet Explorer-specific Web applications to work with Mozilla? This article covers common issues associated with migrating applications to the open source Mozilla-based browser. You'll first learn basic cross-browser development techniques, and then develop strategies for overcoming the differences between Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

Score one for the good guys.

And I thought this was interesting. Microsoft is attempting to cash in on Google's perosnalized homepage idea by putting up a beta of a pretty shameless knock-off under its start.com domain. RSS feeds are displayed in non-popup popup windows, which is interesting and only a little annoying, but really, that's what tabbed browsers are for.

Finally, Ars Techica has reviewed that flashy new Apple mouse, which apparently really is called "Mighty Mouse." Turns out it's pretty much just another mouse.

Boycotting IE7

A tech journalist named Paul Thurrott (who, I'll admit, I don't think I've ever heard of), is calling for a boycott of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 after key developers admitted that IE7, in its final form, still won't pass the Acid2 CSS standards test put forward by the Web Standards Project. From his article:

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.

BetaNews has also posted a detailed article on the matter, with a number of quotes from the IEBlog. Firefox and Opera have yet to pass Acid2, but Safari has, and the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software are dedicated to passing and are getting closer with each milestone release.

Personally, I don't think a widespread boycott of IE7 is remotely possible. Power users stopped using IE for daily browsing long ago, and aren't likely to switch after becoming so comfortable with Firefox or Opera or Netscape or whatever the hell they're using now. And the average surfer has no idea what CSS compliance standards are and couldn't care less. They just want to read their horoscopes and play some games and get on with their lives. They don't really even care about security. If most users did, IE6 wouldn't still control nearly 90% of the browser market.

So it's a nice idea, but ultimately it's litte more than holding up a big sign in a pitch black room. Microsoft just doesn't have to listen to anyone anymore.

Evil Firefox Extensions

Just a quick post about a couple of Firefox extensions I had some problems with. The first one is SessionSaver, which I mentioned just the other day. Don't use it. Twice in two days Firefox crashed on startup when trying to restore the previous session. To the author's credit, it can detect a crash and will give you the option of ignoring the last save point, letting the browser start normally. Still, it seems to make the extension pretty much useless, doesn't it?

I also want to warn you about trying to install the version of AdBlock stored at Mozilla Update. It won't work with Fx 1.0.6. It doesn't generate any errors, but after installing it and restarting Firefox, the extension just isn't there. You can, however, use AdBlock Plus 0.5.9 as found at the AdBlock Plus homepage. Even if you uninstalled AdBlock at some point, all of your blacklisted URLs should be restored after installing 0.5.9. And thank god, because I have well over 200 blocked, wild-carded addresses.

Alt Browser Updates and Fx Extensions

For those of us who use IE shells from time to time, Maxthon has been updated to 1.3.3, with a few feature and security updates. I haven't tried a Maxthon build since ver. 1.1.120, when I decided that Avant Browser was the best IE shell browser. I might try this new release, but I'm comfortable with Avant now, in terms of its UI (which is closer to K-Meleon than IE), and Avant has clearer security controls (easy toggling of ActivX, Java, etc.). Of course, Avant is currently on its seventeenth build of version 10.1. Just call it 10.2, already.

Also, Mozilla Suite 1.7.11 has been released. It fixes a couple of regressions (extensions that stopped working) introduced by 1.7.10. I have just three extensions installed in Moz 1.7.10, and they all work, so the hell with it.

And speaking of extensions, I plugged Wizz RSS News Reader and SessionSaver into Firefox 1.0.6 this weekend, and I highly recommend both. Wizz RSS is a simple sidebar-based feed aggregator that nicely supplements Fx's native LiveBookmarks. It isn't all that intuitive, but there's a good amount of documentation online, with links built into the extension's UI. SessionSaver does just what you'd expect it to do, and does it pretty well. Give it a try.

In other news, things have kind of sucked lately. There's this huge, gnarly old tree standing in the far northwest corner of the back yard, it must be over a hundred years old, and last night just before 1:00 AM an enormous limb, bigger than most trees around here, fell off it with a huge shuddering crash. It's bisected the yard, reaching all the way to the gate at the southeast corner, and when it fell it nearly crushed Maggie, our rottweiler. Scared the bejeezus out of her. Fortunately, a couple of branches impaled the roof of the garage and lodged there, and a few shingles were sheared off the corner, so the homeowners' insurance will cover the removal of the whole mess, as well as repairs to the garage. But it's still a pain in the ass.

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.

Mo(dem)zilla

Finally got myself a nice shiny new name-brand modem to replace that old USRobotics POS I've been dealing with since I got this PC. Took three minutes to install and a couple more to update the default Windows drivers. Little things make me happy. Unlike the christening I have to go to tomorrow for my cousin's baby. The way I see it, if you didn't actually witness the birth, you shouldn't have to drive to another state to watch the kid get named and dropped into a dunk tank or whatever the hell Catholics do to their babies.

I'm writing this update in Mozilla 1.7.10, which was released yesterday. It's a security update to keep the suite in line with the 1.0.6 releases of Firefox and Thunderbird. Like last time, I only downloaded the browser component of the Mozilla Suite. It may be my imagination, but it seems faster and somehow more solid than the last few releases I tried. I'll replace it once the first relatively stable SeaMonkey it out. I like having as many browsers as possible, because there's always something I find works best in one browser or another (except for Opera, which I've sworn off forever because it's so bad at absolutely everything).

There's been a realignment of the Firefox official release numbering scheme. Firefox 1.1 has been pushed back a bit and renamed Firefox 1.5 to better reflect the magnitude of the update. The next major milestone after than will still be Fx 2.0.

More Mozilla Stuff and Potter 6

Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6 are out. These are quick-fix releases that correct some API changes in the 1.0.5 code that ended up breaking some extensions.

For the Mac people, Camino Browser 0.9 alpha 2 has been released. I've thought about buying a new Mac, maybe a Mini or iMac, just to be able to use Camino, but then I remember: I don't have a thousand dollars to blow. Oh well.

Asa pointed out a project at mozdev called Searchsidebar. It's a Firefox extension that creates a more advanced Mozilla Suite-style search in, obviously, the sidebar. I haven't tried it yet myself. Probably should have before writing about it. What if it's totally useless and breaks Firefox? Too late now.

Somebody at ZDNet UK really, really likes Firefox. Go read some Mozilla-flavored feature articles: Firefox: The alternative history, Mozilla: From obscurity to opportunity, Firefox: Doing it for love, and Behind the scenes at Mozilla HQ. Oh, and make sure Adblock is active. The whole site is just crawling with banners and flash ads.

I got hold of the new Harry Potter book just after it was released, and finished it within a day and a half (some minor spoilers are coming up here). I have to say that it depressed the hell out of me. The first third of the book is much funnier and lighter than book 5, Order of the Phoenix, but the plot is much less complex than any of the previous books, including the first one. We all knew someone was going to die in this one, and we already lost a major character in Phoenix, but this time it was just much more brutal. I can't imagine how little kids are going to deal with this. The last chapter in particular is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction I've ever read, period. But, like I said, it's really rough on the long-time Potter fans, particularly the last few paragraphs. It almost makes me dread the next (and presumably last) book, but of course I'll have to read it.

T-Bird Times Two

Two new Thunderbird builds were released today. Thunderbird 1.0.5 is the latest official build. If you're wondering why T-Bird jumped directly from version 1.0.1 to 1.0.5, mozillaZine has the answer. There are no new GUI updates, but lots and lots of security fixes.

Also, release candidates for the second Thunderbird 1.1 alpha are now available to testers. If you want to test it, feel free. But I wouldn't recommend it unless you really know what you're doing. I didn't test the first alpha, so obviously I'm passing on an RC for the second.

I've been playing around with MenuX, a Firefox extension that gives you a bunch of new toolbar buttons with functions ranging from totally pointless (duplicate window controls, a second downloads button) to extremely useful (view source in tab, extension/theme manager buttons). I particularly like toggling off extraneous toolbars, including the menubar. This brings my total extension count to nine, ten if you count Delicious Delicacies.

The Probe dumped oil all over the driveway this afternoon. A mechanic friend of a neighbor discovered that the fuel pressure sensor was slowly disintegrating and letting out oil under high pressure, which explains why the pressure gauge on the dash never showed a problem even though it's likely been leaking for days. So I went and got a new sensor and new synth oil and a filter and it's good as new. Until the next part wears out. The Probe is now seven-and-a-half years old, about the time when modern cars just start to wear out.

Oh, and I've picked a new blog template again, obviously. I think this is the seventh or eighth one I've gone through in eleven months. I just get bored quickly.

MozMania

Lots to cover tonight. I'll start with the release of Firefox 1.0.5. Here are the release notes and the updated MoFo security advisories page. Fx 1.0.5 fixes fully a dozen vulnerabilities and improves stability. Once again, if you don't want to fuck up your extensions, you should uninstall Fx 1.0.4 via Add/Remove Programs, then run the installer immediately (Windows XP/98). Always works for me.

Less important, but still noteworthy, is the release of the second Deer Park Alpha. The official release notes show some interesting GUI changes over Firefox 1.0+, like dragable tabs and much faster cached Back/Forward functionality (both Opera features from a while back). Popup blocking is better now, as well. And of course Deer Park sports that much improved prefwindow. If you want to test it, take a long look at the known issues first, because this is pre-beta, after all, and it still isn't very stable. I managed to create some impressive crashes in no time at all.

One last bit of Mozilla news: Yahoo has added Thunderbird support to its Desktop Search beta (via mozillaZine). Does anyone out there use this? Or Google Desktop Search? I'm wondering if I'd have any use for an indexed search client. WinXP's native indexing service (disabled by default, naturally), is pretty awful, at least in terms of the UI. It doesn't seem to work particularly well, either.

Anyway. I replaced all my desktop icons with ObjectDock the other day. Not for any particular reason, I just think it looks nice. I don't have a ton of 2D memory, though, so windows get draggy when moved over the dock's operational area. But whatever. I haven't looked into any spiffy custom docklets or icons yet, other than a nifty gamepad icon I'm using as a shortcut to Dega, a Master System emulator I'm currently enamoured with. I'm finally getting to try all the crappy games I really wanted when I was eleven years old. Rastan and Psycho Fox and Zillion! Hooray!

Post Slacker

So obviously I've gotten a little lackadaisical with the updates lately. The only reason I can think of is that I've been a little preoccupied with how horribly out of shape I seem to have gotten. I've been putting in a good 30 to 60 minutes a day shooting around the basketball goal I screwed into the front of the garage last month, and after a week or so I pulled just about every muscle I have. I kept at it and finally seem to have beaten my body back into fighting form. And by "fighting form" I mean I've stopped walking with a severe limp and I can actually lift my right arm without wincing now.

TechSpot posted a Firefox Tweak Guide last week. There's little to nothing here that can't be found in the official Firefox Online Help guide, but I suppose it's the thought that counts.

The SeaMonkey project is finally official. So for the four or five people out there who were devastated when the Mozilla Application Suite was retired, put down those razor blades, you have a new reason to live. I've always rather liked the Mozilla Suite, as it valiantly attempted to carry on the spirit of Netscape Communicator, but Firefox and Thunderbird have made it essentially obsolete. Still, once an "official" build or two of SeaMonkey have been released, I'll take a look at it. It has to be better than the last couple Opera releases.

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.

Webmail Without the Web

A nice little app called FreePOPs was listed on BetaNews yesterday. It's a freeware program that acts as a proxy for third-party email clients to access webmail services. I've managed to keep my Gmail account completely spam-free, but I have two Yahoo! Mail accounts that pull in a couple dozen spam messages a day. Thunderbird's junk filters are much better at filtering spam than Yahoo's, and now with FreePOPs I can bypass that horrible UI unless I want to send a message from a Yahoo address. Unfortunately, it also halves my connection speeds when active, so I don't recommend running it unless you only want to grab all your messages in one go.

A site called XPThemes.com has something I've been looking for for a while now: a frequently updated archive of WindowBlinds themes. One of my favorite WB themers from the old days, Essorant, has a ridiculously huge theme archive at XPThemes here.

And finally, an editorial by Joshua Micah Marshall called "Four More Years?" was published in last week's Memphis Flyer. I recommend you read it.

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

Thunderbird 1.1 and Virtual Firefox

A developers' pre-build of Thunderbird 1.1 has been released, and again, you shouldn't use it. I'm too possessive of my mail to try this one out, but the good news is that an improved UI is on the way, along with features like the ability to strip messages of attachments before opening them, in-line spell-checking, and Firefox's new pref window.

The Rumbling Edge has begun posting detailed changelogs for Thunderbird, starting with this one for 1.1 Alpha 1. A quick glance shows this will be the most significant Thunderbird update by far.

In Firefox news, this Slashdot article says that Second Life will be getting Firefox support soon. I'm not sure whether it will be Firefox-branded in-world web browsing or whether the Gecko rendering engine will actually be integrated with the game, but it's significant either way. I've never tried it myself, but I know that Second Life has a nice little subculture going. I suppose this is analogous to Pizza Hut's Everquest II deal, but less greasy and weird.

Doom Still Kicks Ass

I was wandering around FilePlanet the other day when I stumbled upon Doomsday, a frontend for the jDoom Win32 port of Doom. This is the port I've been looking for. Unlike ZDoom and numerous others, the entire engine is re-rendered in full 3D in OpenGL, so mouselooking on the y-axis is no more warped than looking around on the x-plane. It also incorporates all manner of real-time lighting effects and can enhance any Doom .wad with 3D model packs. And the packaged launcher, Kickstart, is at least as good as the old Doom95. Absolutely the only way to play Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom on a Win32 platform.

The entire classic Doom package can be had for ten bucks at any Walmart, and any of you kids who don't know what all the hoohah is about should pick it up. With a nice port like jDoom, the entire series is still a huge amount of fun and stands up to any shooter released in the last ten years.

Deer Park Alpha 1 was released tonight. This is the first developer preview for Firefox 1.1, and I don't recommend it for anyone but Firefox hackers and people who don't mind using a browser that doesn't actually work most of the time.

Deer Park and Netscape

Just a word of warning: the latest nightly builds of Deer Park (Firefox 1.1 alpha build candidates) are extremely unstable. Unless you're a developer, give 'em a pass until a release candidate appears.

Netscape Browser 8 is rubbish. Don't bother with it. I know it's getting decent reviews, but only in comparison tests with Internet Explorer, Opera 8, etc. Netscape 8 is a big, bloated, unwieldy mess of a user interface slapped on top of Firefox 1.0.3. It's sort of like Mozilla Suite, only with a lot less class and a lot more suck. It's much more stable than the Netscape Browser release candidate and follow-up beta, but it seems all those UI issues were actually "features." Thanks anyway, AOL.

I finally got around to renting The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Sideways last week. I really liked Aquatic, it's my favortite Wes Anderson film so far. Just the right amount of originality and accesibility (it's damned hard to get into The Royal Tenenbaums, however brilliant it might be). As for Sideways, I think I appreciated it more than I actually enjoyed watching it. Paul Giamatti is a genious and we all know it, but the movie just wasn't two tons of fun. On the other hand, the rest of the DVD was terrific. The ridiculously well-hidden easter eggs and the Giamatti/Thomas Haden Church commentary are hilarious, and suggest that making the movie was a lot more fun than sitting through it.

The Last Opera Headache

This morning I read about a third-party freeware app designed to block ad banners and pop-ups in Opera called OperaAdFilter. The inability to selectively blacklist ad banners is the No. 2 reason that I don't use Opera for daily web browsing (right behind No. 1, "awful user interface"), so I decided to give it a try.

The OperaAdFilter (or OAF) site says it works with all current versions of Opera including the version 8 betas. So I assumed it would work with the final version of Opera 8. And I was wrong. The OAF installation wizard tells you that you will need to find your Opera 7.5 opera.ini file. A browse window then appears, titled, "Locate your Opera 6 opera.ini." And the best part is that Opera 8 contains nothing even remotely resembling a file called opera.ini. I picked what looked like it could possibly be something like what OAF was asking me for, and finished the install. And then Opera refused to even attempt to resolve any URL whatsoever.

Obviously, it was the botched OAF install that fucked Opera 8 up, but I uninstalled them both anyway. Firefox has an extension called AdBlock that works flawlessly every time. I'm done with Opera. I tried, and tried, and tried, but version 8 is the last build any hard drive of mine will ever see.

News for Nerds

First, we have an InformationWeek article about whether Thunderbird is ready for prime-time. The short answer is "yes." It's super neat-o and you don't really need an integrated calander anyway.

Also, Firefox 1.0.4 has gone public. It's a quick fix for the JavaScript security hole that was discovered all of four days ago. If you're the paranoid type, download it. Otherwise, wait for the 1.1 betas like the rest of us.

Finally, Saturn's "wavemaker" moon has been found. Cassini snapped a nice candid of it on the 2nd. Somewhere, Asa Dotzler is doing a backflip.

musikCube Update and the End of The Simpsons

musikCube 0.92.3 was released tonight. It's another incremental update, bug fixes mostly. Here's the changelog, but you really should just go download it.

Tonight's episode of The Simpsons was just horrible. They long ago stopped making excuses for the gratuitous celebrity cameos, and in certain cases, like the trip-to-England episode featuring spot-work by Sir Ian McKellan, J.K. Rowling, and even Tony Blair, it worked. But tonight's show was a 22-minute commercial for Fox's American Idol, strategically aired at the low-point of the show's entire run. It even had what seemed like a six-and-a-half-hour solo by Fantasia Burrino. What the hell? Personally, I think the entire production team just gave up after Fox canceled Futurama, then gave two shows to arch-nemesis Seth McFarlane. Sure, they're still under contract, but that doesn't mean they have to give a shit anymore.

There's an article at Ars Technica this week called A History of the GUI. I'll just say this about it: Forget everything you think you know about Douglas Englebart, man, because you don't know jack shit.

America Online Thinks You're Stupid

A new "minor" update to AIM 5.9 comes bundled with AOL's anti-spyware app, SpyZapper, and a full install of a new AOL browser. No, it isn't the Firefox-based AOL Browser, it's a new product based on Internet Explorer, brilliantly named AOL Explorer. From this BetaNews article:

AOL Explorer does not automatically replace the user's default browser, but can be invoked independently through the Start Menu and adopted as the primary Web browsing application. Users are not given a choice to opt out of an installation while installing AIM...

AOL's SpyZapper anti-spyware security software is also turned on by default in the beta release. After AIM is invoked, two instances of AOLHostService.exe will run to load AOL Explorer and some other peripherals, increasing AIM's footprint on system resources.

This is absolutely the most cynical, insulting marketing tactic since xXx: State of the Union was greenlighted (thanks, Sony!). Apparently adding a function like "tear-off tags" is enough to justify forcing yet another AOL-branded edition of IE into unsuspecting users' systems (how many PC's came straight from the factory with AOL-specific versions of IE5 in the last five or six years?). And once AOL Browser goes final, countless AOL and AIM users will suddenly find themselves with at least three different browsers -- AOL Explorer, AOL Browser, and IE6 -- that they did not intentionally install.

This is why browsers like Firefox and Opera are rightfully proud of their distribution numbers (maybe a bit too proud in Opera's case). This point has been hammered on before, but users had to consciously choose to go out and find, download, and install these browsers, and the same can be said for a number of other small-market-share alternative browsers like K-Meleon and Camino. If you make a quality product, people will find it.