BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

I’ve been running the latest alpha builds (read, don’t try this at home unless you are really sure you can risk stability on your browser) of the upcoming FireFox2 (due out in September code named “Bon Echo”) for the last few weeks. There are a few things I would like to mention about it, and then compare it to the latest beta of Internet Explorer 7 for those who are interested.

The new Firefox2 has brought improved stability, and compatibility to my browser when playing media files (both in Linux and Windows). Which is amazing considering it is in the alpha phase of development. Also, it improves the search bar located in the upper right corner, by adding the suggesting searches as you type. I’m not sure how this is accomplished but it is particularly cool.

Also, my favorite feature is the new spell checking that is built into all text boxes on a page, so right now while writing this blog, I’m getting little red squiggly lines under my typos and misspellings.

All in all it feels just a little quicker, a little faster to load, and has some very subtle changes in the look of it to make it interesting, and like IE7 they are trying to add better anti-phising filters into it.

Now, IE7 promises tabs, and some stupid feature where you can look at all the tabs as mini-thumbnails, and the new anti-phising stuff. It is somewhat slow, it looks a lot different (the moved the “File” other menus to the left under the address bar), and while it is an improvement over IE6, it fails to address many of the failures of IE6 to properly render webpages. Fortunately it does support PNG transparency which is a god-send for people who like their webpages to look good, and have some transparency effects.

I believe that when firefox 2 comes out it is going to be a bigger improvement than anyone originally anticipated, and with firefox 3 in simultaneous development I believe that IE7 isn’t going to see a major reclaiming of the browser market-share it lost to firefox. I think spell-checking text-boxes is brilliant, and eliminates much of the need for client software for posting LJ or other blog entries, and it actually works even better than gmail’s AJAX equivalent for writing emails.

If you want to check out this project and maybe download it for yourself take a gander at this link
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/

Beta 1 is due out early next month if you want to wait for a little more polished code.

Well, the transition is mostly complete. I have Ubuntu Linux installed, and it is running, and I have all the nice eye-candy (from an add-on called XGL and Compiz) that you can add to Linux (makes windows vista look silly by comparison).

I’m still working on getting my printer working and shared over the network. This would be trivial except I can’t find a printer driver for it. Also, I haven’t set up file-sharing in general. I will hopefully work on that in the near future. Also, I plan to set up VMware to run Windows just in case I need something.

But GAIM (IM client), firefox, VLC and MPlayer (for watching videos) and all of those kinds of things are working.

All of this was mostly simple. I could help anyone do it. It isn’t too late to join my summer of Linux project! Come one, come all….put away your microsoft ways and join me in the fun of Linux and OpenOffice. Firefox was the free sample…why don’t you all just dive the rest of the way in.

Anyway, sooner or later I’ll take a few screenshots for you all, so you can see the cool-factors that increase my computer productivity.

In most things I tend to get annoyed with hype (except for movies and video games…but here I’m referring to science and politics). Global-warming is one of those things. It isn’t that I don’t think that there could be, or possibly is some kind of global warming phenomenon going on, it is just that I really hate that it is driven more by hype than science.

Which is why I found this article interesting. (but by no means do I think it is unbaised or definitive)

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm

It seems like in life there are loud-mouthed people who stir things up. They are almost always in the minority, and sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. But them speaking up, sometimes gets people thinking that group A believes X, when that isn’t true, and sometimes they get a large portion of people believing Y when actually there is no evidence of Y and sometimes it is absurd (I’m thinking of people who believe that the Da Vinci Code really uncovers a dark conspiracy in the Catholic church).

That is why I don’t like hype, and I hold fast to a little line I learned from Rob or Seth (I can’t remember which one).

Correlation is not Causation.

When in doubt on issues of science, default to this statement and it will get you far in terms of understanding and applying scientific method. And that is the one I’m hanging onto until I see way more evidence about global warming.

I read a tech (read “geek”) new site called Slashdot every day, many times a day. Have been reading it since late 2001 early 2002-ish.

The whole time I’ve been reading this site it has looked the same. Recently they did an overhaul and had a contest for some to do a re-design. Now, it looks good, and more modern, but I feel a little weird every time I go there. I think this is what it would feel like if I saw my Mom get a face-lift. Not bad…just eerily different.

Current Mood:  stressed

Well, we are in our brand new house. Big thanks to everyone who helped, and to those that ended small group early to help (thanks Barny!) even though we didn’t end up needing the extra people.

It has been a crazy week for me. My boss took off this morning for his annual trip to Taiwan. So Tuesday I started prepping to cover some of the stuff that was upcoming that he would normally handle (everyone does a little). No biggie, except I wan only in for a half-day on tuesday so I could leave and close on the house. Well apparently, at about 5:30 on tuesday our server blue-screened (that is windows admin lingo for took a collosal shit).
( week of crazy )