A new Netscape Browser prototype has been released, based on the Firefox 0.9.3 code. Alex Bishop of MozillaZine has a lengthy, in-depth review of this new browser, with screenshots of almost every important aspect of the app. It should keep you busy for a while. :)

I haven't downloaded it myself, but judging just from the screenshots, I doubt I'm going to like it very much. The UI looks rather cluttered and the teal-green (or whatever color that is) is a real eyesore. It does have some nice new features though. One of the most notable things about it is the ability to switch between Firefox's Gecko rendering engine, and IE's Trident engine on-the-fly. You could be using the IE engine for one tab (while using Windows Update, for example) and the Gecko engine in another tab. There are also some other little bits and features that could come in handy.

I still prefer the approach Firefox has taken though - make a small, fast browser with just the bare essentials, and leave the rest of the specialized functionality up to Extensions. It's a nice, modular approach that works well for everybody. It's almost like creating your own browser just to suit your own needs. :)

New item on the menu.
Just a way to see what search results link to this site, and a way to automatically link back (at least temporarily) to other blogs that send visitors my way. :)

Scoble points out:

Hmmm, did anyone notice that MSN is the only engine of the three biggies to display in XHTML strict? Do a view source. Interesting.

Well, it's not quite XHTML 1.0 Strict yet, but it's pretty damn close with just 4 errors. Now look at the comments. I noticed that several people, quite obviously people with strong anti-Microsoft sentiments, scoffed at the post and were quick to point out that it doesn't validate. Quite sad. I personally think the MSN team really does deserve appreciation for taking the time and care to write good code. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a start, and it's almost there. I did like one of the comments that made me aware of something quite surprising and amusing:

Google Search - 40 validation errors
Yahoo Search - 264 validation errors
SpreadFirefox.com - 21 validation errors

If you think about it, MSN's 4 errors are not a big deal, especially when you look at SpreadFirefox's less than impressive 21. A few months ago, Microsoft.com moved to a more standards-oriented design. Even more hope that the IE team might be working on fixing its issues? That would definitely be nice. :)

According to sources close to Microsoft, recent release schedules that have popped up on the internet regarding Longhorn are inaccurate and outdated. Today Windows Client Codename 'Longhorn' hit the milestone of M8-2. The next and final milestone before a beta is released is M9 which is currently due on 16th March 2005. Beta 1 of the much anticipated OS is due within May 2005. These new dates paint a picture of Beta 1 being released at this years WinHEC 2005 (late April) if it's indeed ready.

Source: Neowin.net

I'm planning to remove the Friends section of the site sometime soon. No, I don't hate you all. :P I'm just going to change it over to a general Blogroll that will looks something like the current Links page, excluding any descriptions.

What's the reason for this? It's because over the months, I have come across several interesting blogs that belong to people I don't really know, and I feel they're worth checking out as well. So not to worry - all of you will still have a place in the new section, along with other blogs that are hopefully new to you and that you will find interesting too. :)

As an added bonus, I might include little RSS icon links next to them (if the blogs provide them, like all good blogs should), since we all know that feeds are the future. :)

Check your access logs. If the MSNbot hasn't appeared and indexed your site already, you might want to go ahead and submit your site. Seems like I've already been getting regular visits for a while (it's been a mad race between the Googlebot and the MSNbot :P), so that's a good sign.

Have a nice Thanksgiving weekend!

Ok, I turned the old box on today to check that it actually works, and to see what the specs are. Turns out it has:

- AMD K6-2 500MHz (5.0 x 100MHz)
- 128MB PC100 SDRAM (it had 64, I added an old 64MB DIMM)
- 6.8GB Samsung 5400rpm HDD
- A floppy and CD-ROM drive
- Onboard audio, graphics
- Serial and parallel ports
- PCI USB expansion card (not sure if it's 2.0)
- PCI NIC
- 56k modem

Not too shabby...better than I expected, at least. Funny thing is it had XP Pro installed on it (yes, a K6-2 with 64MB, imagine that). It should run a *nix distro pretty decently though. Only one problem - the motherboard has the old-style connector for the keyboard, so any moderately recent keyboard doesn't plug in. I also had a really old serial mouse lying around, which worked, but I can't do a thing without a keyboard. Will have to see how I can solve that. I just might have one of those PS/2 adapters lying around. I'm almost sure I've seen one somewhere in the house (always wondered why I kept such a useless thing), but I can't seem to find it right when I need it. :P

Now this is interesting. Dave posted this today, just as I got an old box to play with too. :D

My (new) roommate (details about that later) had this old machine that was left to him by his old roommate. Now he already has an iMac and a notebook, so he really has no use (and space) for this thing. Neither do I really, but my belief is that you can never have too many computers. So now it's mine. :)

Since he hasn't even turned it on since he got it, I have no idea if it works, and what the specs are. Will have to look into that later tomorrow. I'm still not sure what I want to do with it. It's got a 6.8GB Samsung HDD - that's not a lot, but it's not small enough to be useless either. I'm thinking of installing Slack without X - just a plain, minimal command-line install. I'd use Arch, but this is definitely not an i686-class machine. :P Will probably then set it up as a headless Samba/SSH server and hook it up to the old wired D-Link router to use as a file server and secondary dev/test box.

More about this later... ;)

Just noticed this. If you're lucky, you can grab that 2005FPW for $564 shipped. Looks like you can get a 25% off LCDs coupon from the Dellf promotion (I posted this here a couple of days ago). You can also watch this thread for coupons that people aren't using. Then use code BNV0GB8?VWLFTC to get an additional $35 off. And free shipping is standard.

Damn.

Wow...


Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW:
- Size: 20.1" viewable
- Dot pitch (lower = better): 0.255 mm pixel pitch
- Max/Native Res: 1680x1050
- Brightness (higher = better): 300 cd/m2
- Contrast Ratio (higher = better): 600:1
- Response time (lower = better): 12 ms
- Connections: DVI, VGA, S-Video, 4 USB 2.0 ports
- Price: $799. (before rebates)

Compare that to:

Apple 20" Display:
- Size: 20" viewable
- Dot pitch (smaller = better): 0.258 mm pixel pitch
- Max/Native Res: 1680x1050
- Brightness (higher = better): 250 cd/m2
- Contrast Ratio (higher = better): 400:1
- Response time (lower = better): 16 ms
- Connections: DVI, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 2 Firewire 400 ports
- Price: $1,299. WTF?

Jeff Raikes was working at Apple Computer in the early 1980s when a guy named Steve Ballmer called and asked him to interview for a product-management job at a small software outfit in the Seattle area.

At the time, Raikes didn't really want to move to Seattle, but his sister lived on Queen Anne, so he considered the interview a good way to get a free trip to see her. However, once Raikes arrived and saw what was going on at Microsoft, he became fascinated and decided to take the job.

Apple's Steve Jobs wasn't pleased. Taking the job was risky, Jobs told Raikes, because Microsoft was going to go out of business.

That was one of the anecdotes told by Raikes last week during a speech to students from Seattle University's Albers School of Business. Raikes, now a top executive at the world's largest software company, used the appearance to share a series of business lessons, explaining each using inside stories from his more than two decades at Microsoft.

Read More: SeattlePI.com

Hahaha. Think Again™
(Besides the comic value of that one line, I suggest reading the whole article. It's actually quite informative)

...me, after trying to get this damn Python program working. I'm usually a very, very patient person when it comes to debugging code, but there is a limit, and I think I just reached it after spending the past few days working only on this. Argh...

Ah, and just wanted to wish Omar a Happy Birthday once again. Hope your day was better than mine. =P

UPDATE: Heh, I thought this was rather amusing. Look at the title of this post and the previous two. Walk Into the Sun, Spread the fire, Burnt out.
Purely coincidental, I assure you, and not a symptom of pyromania. :D

What better way to evangelize your favorite browser than to use these beautiful avatars? Now when you send an instant message to one of your non-techie friends, they're bound to ask you what this Firefox-thing is, and then you'll have your chance to help them see the light. :)

Anyone else heard this new song by Dirty Vegas? In case you've never heard of them (shocking!), they're the British House (yes, the genre) trio who composed "Days Go By," the music that appeared in the famous Mitsubishi car ad.

I loved their first album, and judging from this song, "Walk Into the Sun", the new album, "One" should be sweet too. Go listen to it, and if you haven't heard their first album, I highly recommend that too. :)

Dell customers can upgrade from Microsoft Windows XP to the Media Center operating system for half the price as part of a promotion running from now until Nov. 22.

The Round Rock, Texas, PC maker will offer customers the Media Center upgrade for $19 when they purchase all but one of the company's Dimension desktop models. Dell says it hopes the offer will get more customers thinking about using PCs to access multimedia files.

Media Center's main feature is a special graphical interface designed to allow users to access and view photos, videos and other multimedia files more easily than on a standard Windows XP PCs. Media Center PCs can also operate via a remote control and--with a TV tuner card installed--can show and record television programs. Dell packages a tuner and a remote together for $110.

Read More: c|net News.com

Good deal.
If you're getting a desktop with a TV tuner card, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't get yourself a copy of MCE 2005 installed. It's everything there is in XP and more.

...and it includes built-in Live Bookmarks integration! A few days ago, I posted a link to an extension that made this possible on earlier versions of Sage. Nice to see that the new version removes the need of yet another extension. :)

Go check it out: Sage 1.3

Been spending pretty much most of the day (excluding lunch, dinner, classes and sleep time) at the library lately. It's a really great place to go to when I need to get lots of work done, especially during crunch periods.

So yeah, just having a busy week...not much to talk about. Oh yeah...we had a rather disastrous, yet mildly amusing accident in the Co-Op this morning. Some non-thinking wisenut decided to hang his clothes on the sprinkler in his room. Don't know what exactly happened after that, but it seems like the pipes cracked, literally causing a flash-flood on the second floor of the building. Luckily, the water didn't get to my room. There was this "waterfall" crashing down to the quadrangle at the center of the building from all four sides for almost an hour. Heck, it even started dripping from the ceiling in the front-office! They had to call the fire department to get things sorted. Madness. =P

Well, I took the plunge and decided to sign up yesterday. If it doesn't work, so be it. Nothing to lose. Besides, like the FreeiPods site, several people seem to have received their gifts already, so I'm pretty sure it should go through. Completed the free Stamps.com trial offer, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was credited for the offer today. That was really quick.

Now comes the hard part - finding 5 other people to sign up and complete an offer. It'll take forever if I try getting my referrals through one of the many conga lines, since all of them are way too long already. So I'm going to have to try and get people I know to sign up.

So if you live in the U.S., and you're interested, go sign up.
I'd recommend the Stamps.com offer or the Blockbusters one. They should both go through quickly.

Let's see if this thing really works.

Get it here.

Has anyone watched this yet? I've been hearing nothing but good things about it. Some people even claim it's the best Pixar has ever come up with. I'm sure I'll be watching it at some point. Just curious to know what you all thought of it. :)

Like most other Firefox users, I love the idea of the Live Bookmarks feature, but it's a little lacking in features for me.

For example, you can't import or export feeds to the standard OPML format. This is important to me since I tend to try out different RSS readers all the time, and I need to be able to move my feed list easily. But my biggest gripe about Live Bookmarks is the lack of what is usually called the newspaper view - this is the page that displays all the items in the current RSS feed along with short excerpts of the articles. With Live Bookmarks, you can see just the headlines, but not the content. For these reasons, and a couple of others, I've been using Sage with Firefox.

But the nicest part about Live Bookmarks is the auto-discovery feature - when a feed is detected, you get the nice little satellite icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Sage supports auto-discovery too, but it's a multi-step process: you hit Alt+S, then click the discovery button, then click OK to add the feed to your list. How about if we could combine the simplicity of Live Bookmarks' auto-discovery feature with the feature-completeness of Sage?

This is Firefox, people. Someone is always creating a new extension for it. Soon there will be extensions to wash your clothes and do the dishes. Ahem. So yeah, LiveLines is the answer to my prayers. I can now click the nice orange satellite, and have my feeds added directly to my Sage RSS bookmarks folder. And if you're a BlogLines user, it'll work with that too.
It's the little things that make Firefox a joy to use everyday.

Check out Omar's huge update on Halo 2.
Damn you, man. You just made my wait until January even more difficult. :P

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned. Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.

Winamp's abandonment comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January. The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn't long until the two ideologies collided.

Read More: BetaNews

Now although this isn't really something that's going to affect me, it is pretty sad news. Remember the time when Winamp was THE media player of all media players? Yeah, it was a long time ago for me, but Winamp was, as the article calls it, a ubiquitous player at one time. It was like the Google of media players. Quite obviously, the merger with AOL was not a very wise move, and here we have the consequences.

So I guess the battle continues between Windows Media Player and iTunes then. :)

Sometimes you unknowingly help yourself when you help someone else. There was a forum thread a few days ago asking for a good, free RSS reader. NewsGator, as I have mentioned before, is an excellent product, but it's not for everyone - firstly, it's not free software, and secondly, you'd only really use it if you were an Outlook-junkie.

So I remembered that I used to like Sage, the RSS reader extension for Firefox, before I tried NewsGator, and that's what I recommended in the thread. But Sage had some limitations when I had it, so I decided to go and see if there were any improvements since then. Sure enough, it's become so much better.

It now supports auto-discovery of feeds, so you don't need to manually add URLs anymore. It can now read feeds that it had problems with earlier (this was a big reason why I stopped using it). And of course, like before, it's really customizable if you like to hack jar files and change stylesheets. It also feels more natural to have a RSS reader built into my browser rather than my mail client.

So go check it out here, and also take a look at John Hicks' tutorial that makes it look so much nicer. :)

When you sit back and think about the progress that's been made since the Phoenix days (Firefox was originally called Phoenix and then Firebird, for those of you who didn't know), it really blows your mind. The Mozilla Suite was the flagship product at the time, and Phoenix was just this small offshoot project that aimed to create a fast, light, extensible browser. Most people were still using the Mozilla Suite. Phoenix was just this toy for the enthusiasts.

Look at where we are today - Firefox 1.0. It's making headlines. It's a major driving force that's prompting Microsoft to give the IE team a much-needed revival. It's even managed to steal the limelight from big-brother Mozilla.

Huge props to the Firefox dev team. I think this project could be considered open-source at its finest. Enough talk. You know what to do...

I used to be a die-hard iTunes fan...until WMP10 came along and did almost everything iTunes could and more (see my previous posts here, here and here). The one feature I really missed when I moved over was built-in LAN sharing of the media library.

So I was browsing through wmplugins.com (WMP uses must check this out), and found this free plugin called On2Share that claimed to make LAN sharing possible using UPnP. I thought to myself - it can't be as good as Rendezvous sharing in iTunes, right? Wrong. It works just as well, with zero configuration necessary. Even better - it will continue to play a song that you selected even after the other person disconnects from the network.

Definitely something to check out:
WMPlugins.com - On2Share plugin

The missing piece in the puzzle. Slick.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - First-day sales of Microsoft Corp.'s MSFT.O new video game "Halo 2" will reach $100 million, a senior Microsoft games executive said on Tuesday.

"I'm calling a $100 million day on 'Halo' today," Peter Moore, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's games division, said at a Harris Nesbitt investment conference in New York.

The game, in which a super-soldier called "Master Chief" must save the earth from aliens, went on sale around the world on Tuesday, with thousands of stores opening their doors to eager customers just after midnight last night.

In addition to 1.5 million pre-sold units, Moore said one retailer sold 8,500 units in the first 11 minutes of sales, while another sold 200,000 units by daybreak Tuesday.

Analysts expect "Halo 2" to sell a total of about 10 million units, with some projecting up to half of those sales coming in November. The original "Halo" sold 5 million units and remains the best seller on the Xbox to date.

Source: Reuters

Good God! That's freaking insane.
My brother just got his copy today. They're probably going to be glued to the Xbox all night. :D

Longhorn is the code name for the next version of the Windows operating system. As part of the Windows design effort, the Wireless Networking & Devices teams want to better understand your needs in order to build wireless diagnostic features into the design of the Longhorn product. We want to know what wireless diagnostic features are most important to you.

The following survey is intended to help Microsoft prioritize your needs for Wireless Networking Diagnostics. When answering each question, please respond with your initial reaction as an end user.

Give Microsoft your input, especially if you use a wireless connection on a daily basis. Complete the survey here. :)

The machine began life as a research project in 2000, is presently the world's fastest supercomputer, and has only four publicly announced customers. But as IBM earlier promised would happen, the design has now become a comparatively ordinary product sold by IBM's server group under the brand name eServer Blue Gene.

The Blue Gene is available immediately with a starting price of $1.5 million, IBM plans to announce on Monday, the opening day of the SC2004 supercomputing show in Pittsburgh.

IBM is selling it in configurations ranging from one to 64 racks; each rack has 1,024 processors. A 16-rack configuration is the world record holder, able to perform 70.7 trillion calculations per second, or 70.7 teraflops, according to a convenient if imperfect speed test called Linpack.

Read more: c|net News.com

Forget the Xeons, the Opterons, the Itaniums, the G5s. Get a Blue Gene for 1.5 million bucks. :D

Another quality skin for WMP10 from The Skins Factory. Must see for Halo fans! The effects are very cool, and the skin even includes screenshots and information about the game. :)

Halo 2 and Firefox 1.0 - both out on the same date.
You know, it would have been the perfect day if it weren't for the blasted EE2 (read: most boring class ever) midterm that's coming up too. :P

And speaking of Firefox, go get the RC2 build that was just released yesterday...that's if you're like me and can't wait for another 5 days before the final build. :D

This is some kind of joke, right?
Or are they seriously selling $29 socks for iPods?

What's next? $49 iBook diapers?