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Archive for the ‘Technology and Computing’ Category

Firefox 6 Released – Are Mozilla finally getting it right?

17 Aug

Well for those not in the know, Firefox Version 6 was released this morning from Mozilla. This follows a new trend of Firefox releasing regular new versions to keep up with competing browsers like Chrome. Unlike Firefox 4 which was a total abortion and Firefox 5 which I just avoided completely, I decided to give Mozilla a chance to redeem themselves and downloaded Firefox 6 to try out.

It’s been several hours since I installed it and it’s certainly appearing to be less sluggish than Firefox 3 or 4 were but granted it’s only been a few hours. After installation I had several plugins that were disabled due to incompatibility but found updated versions for all of them except one but I have the most important ones I need and they all work so far, most importantly my tabbed browsing plugin (Tree Style Tab) works perfectly which is more than I can say for Chrome with their childs rendition of tree style tabs.

It’s still worrying that Mozilla are caught up in a version number war with the likes of Chrome. In the past Mozilla maintained a reputation of releasing stable versions and fixes to those versions but this year alone we’ve seen them jump in just 5 or 6 months from ver 4, to ver 5 and now to ver 6. As mentioned already Firefox 6 does appear to be stable and running smoothly so far, Firefox 4 took a mere hour to become sluggish before I killed it and went back to 3.6. Either way I’m still a loyal Firefox user, I tried new versions of Chrome recently after not touching it for well over 18 months and really not much has changed and it honestly still lacks a lot of features when it comes to plugins like Tree Style and NoScript, it seems just about everything that Google creates is permanently a BETA piece of software but it’s not to say they won’t eventually get it right. If you’re wanting to try out Firefox 6 you should go ahead and try it out, back up your existing profile and the setup file for your current version so that you can go back anytime you like in case you are not happy. I hope to see myself sticking with version 6 and I guess I’ll know for sure by days end if it’s staying or going, so far it looks like its sticking around.

 

 
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Mozilla Firefox going from bad to worse

19 Jul

I’ve been a Firefox user since it was first ever released and have come to rely on it so much as the only truly reliable browser. Sometime in the last year however a lot of problems started to develop on Firefox and to this day many problems still remain. It seem the Mozilla development have really lost focus and have spent too much of their time in the last year fiddling with introducing a bunch of un-needed crap into the browser while almost ignoring stability issues. Firefox 3.6 introduced a number of bugs to the browser and it took until around ver 3.6.15 for them to get it right but since then they have released another 5 updates to 3.6 bringing it up to version 3.6.19 and once again it seems a number of new bugs have been introduced, the worst of all is the browser now crashing daily. In the interim Mozilla released Firefox 4.0 which was a total disaster and merely 3 months after that they released Firefox 5.0. Clearly not even Mozilla had ANY faith in Firefox 4 and decided to ditch it and try a fresh start with Firefox 5.0.

I personally hold back on any new versions because they always come with problems and so was the case with Firefox 4 which worldwide gained itself a really bad reputation in just a few weeks. I tried it myself for a mere hour or two and immediately went back to ver 3.6. I have not yet tried version 5 as I am hesitant but I’ll give it a go sometime, perhaps when they reach 5.10 or thereabout. The big problem right now is that 3.6 seems to once again have started its problems so I guess a downgrade to 3.6.15 is in order for a while.

I just wish the Mozilla team would keep focus on the absolute basics of browsers like speed and stability and once they have that right then they should worry about introducing things like Personas which to me are features for people who have nothing better to do with their lives than make their browser look pretty.

Google has the right approach with Chrome giving it a very lightweight interface but sadly Chrome after all this time is just one big piece of Google BETA software and lacks a lot of necessary plugins/features like side tabs and a no-script plugin. There are ways to enable side-tabs in Chrome but they look awful, like a 3 year old designed them and the equivalent of Noscript from the Google Chrome Plugins called “NotScript” leaves much to be desired. So after a few hours of trying Chrome again the other day I am straight back to Firefox, even with its bugs and will wait another year before I try Chrome again. Hopefully before then the Mozilla team pull their fingers out and get back on track.

 

 
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Kalahari Ebooks .acsm .epub – Using Adobe DRM – Talk about the Dark Ages

29 Jun

I’ve always been a loyal supporter of Kalahari.net. Not only do they always have the books I’m looking for but their prices and delivery times are top notch. Tonight however for the first time I bought an Ebook from them and I’m rather disappointed. First of all they advertise the book as an Epub when you click Add to Basket. At this point of the order they say diddly squat about it only working on products that support Adobe’s stupid Digital Rights Managed (DRM), they say nothing other than the book is in EPUB format.

Stupidly thinking that Kalahari was well into the digital age, I thought nothing more and purchased the book. Upon completion of the order I then went to download the book and all I received was a small file in .acsm format. After a bit of Googling I discovered that the .acsm file is merely a download ticket for receiving the full book. The .acsm file needs to be opened using Adobe’s Digital Editions Reader, Kalahari’s “BETA” reader software or other Ebook readers that Kalahari is trying to sell into the SA marketplace.

After already losing faith in Kalahari who failed to disclose from the start that they were not selling me a simple EPUB book, I chose to download it using Adobe’s Digital Editions reader and to avoid any BETA software from Kalahari. What DRM / Adobe Digital Editions does is lock the book to be read on only one device and at this point in time it’s locked to my laptop, so if I want to read the R140 book I just purchased I have to sit and read it on a laptop ….. how stupid.

I wonder what dark age Kalahari is living in? Their Ebook format cannot be read on a Kindle without first removing the DRM and converting the book which most people won’t know how to do. Kalahari seem to rather want you to buy one of their Ebook readers but sorry to say, nothing comes close to a Kindle and never will. So for now stick to buying your kindle books from Amazon and be aware that your Kalahari books won’t work on a Kindle without some tampering.

Instead of buying any more Ebooks from Kalahari I’ll rather pressure authors to release their Books on Kindle’s store, they’ll sell much more anyway than they ever could through local book sites like Kalahari. I’ll keep supporting Kalahari when I need printed books but they’ve lost me for good as an Ebook purchaser.

 
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How your Blackberry is Tracking Your Every Move (ALT+LGLG) – Event Log

11 Jun

As consumers most people are pretty dumb. You buy a product off the shelf and you trust that it’s safe to use, and why wouldn’t you, you paid good money for it didn’t you? Well in these days of high technology the use of mobile devices is certainly not safe by any means.

Mobile Device manufacturers like RIM (Blackberry), Apple (Iphone, Ipad) and others are not much different to buying poisoned apples (excuse the pun) at your local food market. The reason is that your mobile device tracks every single move you make, every key you press, every web site you visit, every call you made or received, it even tracks where you were at the time. What’s most disturbing is how these vendors who take your money in exchange for their product simply try to keep this information under wraps.

Well, thanks to the large community of users, these “secrets” are always discovered and exposed to the masses and as such I am helping to expose the hidden Event Log of a Blackberry phone. Sure the information is out there if you search for it but the more web sites that reference this, the better.

First off to see all the information that is currently logged on your Blackberry right now, do the following:

Hold down the ALT key and keep it down …. now press LGLG and then let go of the ALT Key. Whoa baby, you’re looking at your event log. For interest sake go to some of the entries like “a net.rim.browser” and look through some of the entries by clicking on them one at a time, you’ll see every web page you visited, the full url, date time etc. Interesting stuff isn’t it?

Now click the Blackberry button and choose “CLEAR LOG” and it wipes the entire log.

Now there are numerous privacy issues here but another big problem with this event log is how it slows down your phone. Have you ever found that when you’re doing a lot of browsing on your blackberry how your phone keeps getting slower and slower? Sure you have. Well due to the insane amount of logging going on it’s no wonder your phone slows down and it also makes you wonder WHY you spent good money buying the latest mobile device which promised to be faster when it’s actually slower due to all the privacy invasion going on.

So now you ask, how do I turn this logging off? Well YOU CAN’T !!! Simple as that. RIM have hardcoded it into the Blackberry Shell Operating System and you cannot turn it off. But you can automate your phone to clear the log every hour.

A software author going by the name of Phrehnck from Los Angeles in the US created an application called “LogMaid” and has made this available for free to all Blackberry users.

You can download LogMaid from this link. You’ll need to create an account in order to download the application but the actual application is FREE. The application auto clears your event log every hour on the hour, it does this as long as your phone is idle (backlight off) when the time comes to clear the logs. LogMaid also invokes Blackberry’s built in memory cleaner, kick starts the Java Garbage Collector and Logs an Event letting you know the logs were cleared.

What’s amazing is after clearing your logs, let your phone operate as normal and after 15 minutes open the log file again (ALT+LGLG) and see just how much information has been logged inside of 15 minutes.

It’s time consumers start to challenge the creators of these products who violate our privacy without even mentioning it to us, it makes you wonder exactly what else they are doing that they are not telling us about. Are they downloading these logs at any point? Nobody seems to know, but there are indeed ways of finding this out. If they want to know our every move, they should be handing these devices out for free and not charging money for it.

One thing is for certain … every year BIG BROTHER tightens the noose around our necks and takes away more and more of our freedoms.

 
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OK so Firefox 4 (aka Friedfox) SUCKS !!!

20 Apr

Mozilla Corporation continually seem to be going backwards when it comes to development of the popular Firefox Web Browser.

Firefox 3.6 introduced a number of bugs that took almost 16 versions to iron out but all the while the Mozilla Team were spending more time developing Firefox 4 and making promises that FF4 would be the bees knees.

I resisted trying any of the Beta’s or Release Candidates of Firefox 4 until final code was pushed out. I then downloaded the final version of Firefox 4 released a week or two ago and only got around to trying it out yesterday.

Initially the new browser looked ok, a bit cleaner looking than Firefox 3 but within minutes the problems started to rear their heads.

First of all whenever I open my Firefox I have about 15 tabs of web sites I go to daily. In Firefox 3 the browser opens in about 5 seconds and all tabs load in under a minute. In Firefox 4 the browser opens in the same time (5 seconds) but then all tabs load up and one by one off they go refreshing until each and every tab has been refreshed. This process takes Firefox 4 about 3-5 minutes longer to load up all tabs compared to Firefox 3 …… so immediately THUMBS DOWN to Firefox 4. There is also no menu option or setting to prevent Firefox from doing this.

Secondly, Firefox 4 is much more sluggish than Firefox 3.6.16. It seems fast for a short while but then starts slowing down as you start your work day until eventually it’s so sluggish that you have to close it down and re-open it to get it to speed up again. Another THUMBS DOWN because I only ever open Firefox once a day in the morning and only ever close it at night when I shut down at the rate FF4 got sluggish I would have to kill and reopen it about 20 times a day.

Lastly, it’s a memory HOG. This morning with 25 tabs open Firefox 4 was using over 1GB of memory and became as sluggish as hell. I dumped Firefox 4 immediately, copied FF 3.6.16 back to my applications folder fired it up and immediately the same 25 tabs were using only 346 Mb of memory, so another big THUMBS DOWN to Firefox 4.

I’ll stick with 3.6.16 for now as it works and is finally a stable version. I’ll only relook at Firefox 4 once it reaches 4.0.16 or somewhere around there. I would advise others to stick with Firefox 3 and resist the temptation to move to Firefox 4.

Sorry Mozilla but Firefox 4 really SUCKS !!!

 

Firefox 3.6.16 is still available at this link – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

and older versions of Firefox can be found here

 
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Microsoft Office (duh) 2011 for Mac OSX – Fails to Import .PST (Microsoft Format) Files (duh)

10 Jan

I often wonder if Microsoft Software engineers even talk to each other or if they’re shoved into cubicles and lashed every hour to spew out code fast and sloppily?

Microsoft first released Office for Mac in 2008 which made familiar applications available to “switchers”. The development team went to all the effort to make Word, Excel and Powerpoint available to Mac Osx users BUT then failed to create a Mac version of Outlook and instead introduced a rather klunky and backward piece of software called Entourage. The initial release of Office 2008 for Mac had NO ABILITY to import a .pst file from Outlook so this made switching from Windows a nightmare, or shall I say, an impossibility. That was until someone at Microsoft wrote a .pst import tool for Office 2008 for Mac which imported a .pst file perfectly.

3 years later and Microsoft has now release Office for Mac 2011 which now has a version of Outlook, goodbye and good riddance to Entourage. In their advertising for Office 2011 for Mac, Microsoft says “Now you can migrate to Outlook for Mac from Windows. Just bring your .PST and use the simple import tool. It’s that easy.” … not it’s NOT you dumbasses !!!

Well this is easier said than done. Importing a pst (a microsoft file format) into another “Microsoft created” product seems to be too much brainpower for the engineers who wrote Office 2011 for Mac. It keeps failing on importing .pst files and OF COURSE in true Microsoft style there’s a 110mb update which claims to fix the problem.

Well right now I’m downloading the update which is taking for ages because today all of Vodacom’s software engineers got back to work and started fiddling on the network which has dropped speeds from 6mb/s down to 56kb/s so this download will take me at least and hour and a half.

I’m sceptical as to whether or not the update will fix anything or just introduce more bugs but I’m still astounded that one could import pst files into Entourage but now a product which claims to “actually” be able to import pst files cannot do it out of the box.

Absolutely sterling programming work I must say. We’ve come a long way NOT in the software world.

 
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Pathfinder for Mac OSX – Finder Replacement

08 Jan

Having been a Windows user since before Windows even existed, I found MacOS / OSX on my Macbook to be full of a number of irritations or things just completely missing from the operating system.

As a Windows user I find certain things in OSX to be a bit backward, but considering that Microsoft originally stole the Windows idea from Apple, who in turn stole it from someone else it’s hard to say who has what backwards.

The biggest irritation for me in OSX is the Finder application. It is the most unimaginative useless archaic and crap piece of software I’ve ever seen.

Microsoft and the Linux world at least seem capable of producing decent file managers but Apple seems stuck on releasing new versions of their OS and never making any changes or enhancements to their file manager and I often wonder what thinking processes (if any) take place in the minds of Apple’s software engineers when it comes to the Finder.

Search Google and you’ll find thousands of people bitching about Finder because it can’t do this or can’t do that but as experience has shown, Apple much like other software giants (Adobe, Microsoft etc) pay very little attention to what users want or need and instead focus on telling the users what they need.

Now OSX is about to enter it’s 8th version and I can pretty much guarantee that Apple will spend it’s time (as usual) on Eye Candy improvements and version 10.7 (Lion), expected to be released in Summer 2011, will see users once again faced with the same crappy Finder application.

So what do you do?

You search for replacements to Finder and find a bunch of different paid solutions all promising their’s is best but after trying them all I found only one that rules the roost and is everything that Finder should be, could be and more.

The application I am talking about is called Pathfinder and is produced by a company called CocoaTech. Their web site is at http://www.cocoatech.com and they have a fully functioning 30 day trial of the product.

The purchase prices is $39.95 which is an absolute steal and it’s something every Mac user should BUY. Don’t download free hacked or cracked versions of Pathfinder, buy the damn thing and help the author to keep developing and improving the product.

Pathfinder is simply amazing and this one single application has restored my faith in OSX. It’s hardly a matter of asking what Pathfinder can do but instead asking what can’t it do and for me there’s nothing it cannot do. It’s highly customisable, has a dual pane system, supports tabs, enhanced file info and file properties, built in stuffit archive manager and soooo much more.

If you want some good solid advice on an improvement to your OSX experience it’s BUY PATHFINDER TODAY and be gone with those irritations.

Kudo’s to Cocoatech (www.cocoatech.com) for an incredible product and I hope to see it grow well into the future.

I must make it clear I do not work for and have no affiliation with Cocoatech, hell I don’t even get any commission or referral bonus for this, I just love the product and believe other OSX users should know about it. The more people that buy it, the more the developer is able to enhance the product and keep it alive.

 
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My Windows 7 Woes Resolved (ObjectDock)

03 Aug

I’ve put up with the one single thing annoying me in Windows 7 for far too long now. Yesterday I just lost it and started searching for a solution to my problem.

The problem is that the Windows 7 taskbar does some annoying new things which you are stuck with because somewhere between one of the release candidates of Windows 7 and the final code, some bright spark at Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to force everyone into using the new taskbar without being able to turn off the annoying features as you could do in the past and also in past flavours of Windows.

There are suggested solutions for stopping taskbar thumbnail previews none of which work, there is a setting in the group policy editor that Microsoft included but changing the setting does not work on all version of Windows 7 least of all in Windows 7 Ultimate X64. Then I came across a taskbar tweak utility for Windows 7 which kinda works but depending on a how a piece of software is written it can quickly make it not work. These thumbnails are definitely something written into each piece of software and few if any developers give you an option to disable that annoying feature. Mozilla Firefox is one that does it occasionally, it depends on the version of Firefox which changes rapidly.Older versions of software do not do it.

Ok so none of these fixes produced the desired result. I then decided to switch Windows 7 to a non-aero theme thereby disabling all the niceties of Windows 7 turning it back to an almost XP style look. BORING !!!! Why have Windows 7 and an awesome graphics cards if you’re not going to run Aero???

This afternoon I decided to try ObjectDock from Stardock which is a complete replacement taskbar for Windows operating systems. Boy was I surprised after I installed it and I wonder where has this been all my life. Okay, let me be honest, I’ve always know about Objectdock but I never tried it as I thought it was simply some flashy add on for Windows and we tend to think how can people do better than Microsoft. Well I can say one thing this new taskbar replacement kicks some royal Windows 7 @ss.

It has the ability to hide the windows taskbar altogether YAY !!!
It has ONE icon for a running program regardless of how many windows that program has open YAY !!!
It’s lightweight – currently using less than 3MB of Ram YAY !!!
It’s much nicer looking, like the OSx menubar
AND
It obeys my commands.

I have Aero back and a great looking and functioning taskbar.

If you’ve had enough of the annoying Windows 7 taskbar try Objectdock, the free version is more than adequate. You’ll be surprised.

PS – I don’t work for them :D

 
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WordPress 3.0 still has some pretty shoddy mysql coding

02 Aug

I love WordPress, been using it since version 1 and it sure has come a long way, unfortunately even version 3 still has some pretty poor mysql coding. I have a particular blog on which I sent 13000+ articles to the trash. I then asked WordPress “nicely” to empty the trash and it’s been going for  almost 4 hours and it’s still not done. Why can I drop those 13000 records within 1-5 minutes using a simple mysql statement and WordPress cannot? Seems there is some rather messy mysql coding still lurking around on WordPress. Oh well … back to doing stuff like that manually, thank goodness for phpmyadmin :)

 
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Taskbar Thumbnails – The biggest annoyance of Microsoft Windows 7 and it’s not possible to turn it off.

02 Aug

I love Windows 7, it’s by far the fastest and most stable version of Windows ever. I’ve been running it for over 18 months without a single glitch. There is however one major annoyance of Windows 7 and that is Taskbar Thumbnails. No doubt the feature was added to boost productivity but it actually does the opposite and one wonders where Microsoft does their product testing or how they arrive at these silly software additions.

First of all in Windows 7 32-bit you can disable this feature but the same setting used to disable it in the 32-bit version of the Operating system does not work for the 64-bit version, so much for shared code across both platforms, hmmm. There is a workaround for the 64-bit version which is to extend the MouseHoverTime but really this is an incredibly stupid workaround. Why Microsoft does not allow users of their software to simply disable new additions is beyond me. It’s just as easy to code an ON as well as an OFF option at the time of programming but fixes like this get stifled in red tape after the product has launched …. it’s doubtful any service pack (as history has shown) will address such a bug and yes it IS A BUG. Past service packs for all Microsoft OS’s seldom address changes like this and users have to hope that Windows 8 will allow us to turn it off. I’m not holding my breath though. I’m hoping for a third party utility that can properly address it.

I’ve been a Microsoft user since before Windows, since Dos 1.0 days, and every version of Windows has had the ability to turn off all the annoying new features and strip it down to the old way users like to do things. But no …. with Windows 7 Microsoft has decided they will not allow us to do that. Unless of course we decide to completely turn off Windows Aero which is responsible for this incredibly stupid behaviour. That kind of solution kind of defeats even having any of the niceties of Windows 7.

I wish Microsoft would learn to respect users of their software who have been around since day one, users who have helped shape their software over all these years. Not being able to turn off these features is annoying to power users and these features waste more time than the time they were designed to help save.

 
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