Some new FireFox extensions that I’ve discovered recently:
A while ago Alex pointed me to this site about how to make your own cute pixel objects. I messed around a bit and came up with this:
Hey, it’s a start! It also came to me that you could write code to do this for you. Some kind of php module with methods like:
pixelcube(dim_x,dim_y,colour);
You could have a pixel objects graphics library with all the basic primitives like cube, sphere etc. Hrm.
So, after my marathon post below about new search engine features, A9 have come out with a new Yellow Pages function. They went around some of the major cities in the US taking photos of all the shop fronts on either side of the streets. Then, when you search for a business you get an actual picture of the shop frontage. You can even ‘walk’ down the street by flicking along the pictures. All very cool.
Some has hacked it already (of course) so you can grab a view of an entire street. Nice.
And then a9 pay to get a shamelss plug into the OC, someone actually uses the phrase “a9.com-ed”. Doesn’t quite work aswell as “googled” 🙂
All the companies playing catchup to Google have recently brought out new interfaces to their engines. Google have been a staunch follower of the simplistic design approach with a minimalist front page and adverts that are incredibly unobtrusive when compared to their competitors. The competitors have obviously taken note that users maybe actually like looking at nice things and not some mess of animated red/black/purple blinking/scrolling/fading in 20 boxes all packed together on the page.
So, they did indeed buy LiveJournal as everyone was speculating. Reading around the Six Apart website I began to think I was a little harsh on them with my hatred towards the mess they made of the Moveable Type licensing. They do seem to be a jolly nice company with nice people working there. I’ve no intention of moving back to MT or going side-ways to Type Pad though, WordPress does everything quickly, cleanly and oh so smoothly for me.
Six Apart, the company behind MoveableType and TypePad are rumoured to be be buying the teen-angst ‘blogging’ emoticon filled pit of despair that is LiveJournal. I gave up on MoveableType when they started the whole world-domination thing and were so obviously neglecting MT in order to work on their pay for use blogging tools. I can almost hear all the livejournals screaming with drama…
Firefox have at last released verion one of their fantastic browser. They also raised the funds to have a full page, full colour ad in the New York Times basically telling people that IE is rubbish and that they should switch. I like their style. Go! Download it now!
I got a mobile bill for £103 yesterday.
Apparently I was “on an old tariff” and was getting charged more than double the data rate than normal. Numpties…
Well, I got the access logs from my parent hosting company (who were vey helpful) and it seems the first accesses all came from IP addresses assigned to Romanian ISPs. Pesky Romanians…. I’ve googled around a bit for this ‘zloboz’ name and came up with one of their scam emails here. It’s based off a different site but it looks like the same kind of scam, they must have hacked quite a few sites to base their pages at. It also looks like they didn’t have everything configured properly as there are lots of errors in the logs about php scripts being unable to write to local files. The numpties didn’t setup the file permissions properly! So, any information they did harvest from the silly people who filled in their details is lost in the void 🙂
Our new flat has a phone line but it has never been activated. This means we have to get BT to ‘install’ a line before we can get it even activated. Ben called them up and they can’t send an engineer until the 5th of November. BT really do suck. So, no phone line for at least three weeks, then we’ll have to wait for it to appear on the ADSL register, and then we have the wait to get ADSL installed and then activated from force9. For the moment I’m surviving with brief doses of GPRS ‘net via my phone and bluetooth to my PC. Wonderful thing technology.
Urge to kill rising…….
Some little toe-rag had hacked into my site and was hosting some kinda ebay-credit-card scamming pages! Godamn! I was browsing my access logs (as you do) and noticed some strange hits to a directory called ‘zloboz’. Strange, don’t remember uploading anything called that. Uh-oh… I immediately deleted the files, which was really stupid thinking back as I could have seen what he was up to with the data. Anyway, I’ve since changed my passwords and checked the email accounts, aliases, databases, cron, redirects, everything. Just in case he’d left some sneaky stuff anywhere else.
Anyway, I’ve got the site backup from yesterday downloaded and I’m going to extract his naughty files and have a look at what he was upto. I’ll report my findings.
Woo! It’s FireFox update day! I’m lovin’ the new features in 1.0PR like the rss integration, tweaked theme, faster UI, etc. It’s just so much better than Internet Explorer I don’t know where to start. If you haven’t switched, do so now.
If you’re looking for an Outlook alternative there is also FireFox’s sister project Thunderbird . This became my preferred news client after Outlook drove me up the wall with its incessant crashing and generally being lame and un-responsive.
Not to jump on the bandwagon with this no-www thing, but I’ve not been using the ‘www’ bit of my domain for years. It always did seem a bit silly. My browser browses the World Wide Web, why should I have to put www in front of every domain name? Chopping the ‘www’ off makes sense. I remember back in the day when a few sites obviously discovered the magic of dns suddently had ‘www2‘ in their domain. We were amazed! “Is this the second, secret internet??”.
Firefox is the best browser out at the moment. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, stop, now. Browsing around their site yesterday I found they had a new release out which fixes a couple of bugs. They don’t seem to announce the 0.0.1 releases which is strange. It’s now on 0.9.2 and has nicely funked up icons. Whilst I was there I noticed the increasing selection of Extensions. Extensions are a genius feature where developers can extend the functionality without reinventing the wheel. I’ve now get a spellchecker installed and the very useful Web Developer plugin.
Messing around with amazon’s xml-soap interface:
http://cyber-junky.co.uk/projects/amazon/test.php?keyword=banana
replace keyword with whatever you want to search for.
Stupid hard disc has gone screwy again! ARG!!1!!11
olly smash!
I bought a cheapo red transparent case for my t610 a few weeks ago from the US. It was something silly like $8 which at todays exchange rate is pretty cheap. Anyhoo, it arrived yesterday and I set about dissecting my phone with some help from howardsforums. Took be about thirty minutes just to get one particularly cunning part off but I got ithe new fascia installed in the end and its very bling bling:
Ok, I admit, it looks a little tacky. But its mainly to stop me scratching the original nice shiny metal cover with my keys etc.
Huzzah! With some faffing around with the courier I finally got my new phone. Unfortuantely they ran out of red ones, so I got the ordinary shiny one. Still verrrry nice. Packaging is very cute aswell, I like sony/ercisson’s latest stuff, they’ve got style:
Anyhoo, the phone works fine and I’ve got the bluetooth all hooked up to my pc through some very nifty software called Float’s Mobile Agent. When someone calls me or txts me I get a little pop-up in windows, with their name and picture! So cool!
Attempted to order a new t610 off the o2 website last week sometime and I didn’t hear anything after the order confirmation email. I emailed their support about and after about 2 days I finally got a straight answer, they had sent some credit check email to my o2 (web only) email account……
MORANS
So, I resubmitted my order and got this mystical email and so sent off pictures of a gas bill etc…and then got back that they have to to dispatch to the billing address of my credit card. They don’t have a ‘delivery address’ on their website….
MORANS
So, I thought: screw that for a barrel of laughs. Went on the carphonewarehouse website this morning and got a t610 in RED on vodafone 100 for free and its been dispatched already…..credit check all done on the web….no email delays….delivered to my Edinburgh address and billed to my home address. Vodafone win.
