Just Me

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, whats new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spellcheck as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later.

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over.

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it.

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on.

I saw this today and I had to blog it. Doug Engelbart is one of the great visionaries of our era. His idea’s and discoveries set the tone for decades of computer research. It is no understatement to say that without his inventions the world we live in today would be very different, for gods sake the man invented the mouse! that alone is worth a place in history but on top of that lets see hyperlinks were his invention & Arpanet (the precursor to the internet) never would have happened without his contributions.

I had heard of Doug in passing many times over my life but it wasn’t until I read Howard Rheingold’s “Tools for thought” that his contribution became clear. If you read even the first paragraph of the “tools” link above it becomes clear what he has already accomplished in his lifetime.

Today, Hyperscope was launched and in this modern age of beta releases to avoid support obligations its refreshing to see a version 1.0 This is an attempt to rebuild parts of Engelbarts NLS/Augment system on the Web, many of the new web 2.0 tools and languages have been used to accomplish this.

This NLS system is what Engelbart was demonstrating at what many people call “The mother of all demo’s” which thanks to modern technology you can watch most of here all be it in low quality. Keep in mind that this was 1968! He’s got a keyboard the worlds first mouse and a shortcut keypad and even the odd “demo demon” :). This was a huge moment in the history of man as significant as the moon landings imho. (If you hadn’t worked it out he’s one of my hero’s)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing where Hyperscope can take us and considering the human race has done with his discoveries already I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Okay, I wan’t to thank a few people for helping me out over the last few days to get this blog up and running.

Ed, thanks for pushing me in the right direction when wordpress was frustrating me.

Tony, who with a few simple sentences crystalised the difference between HTML code and PHP code for me.:D

To be honest I may not be able to explain it as simply myself but at least I know how to get the 2 to work together now, and as a result I can see where all my readers are accesing from, with a little help from Google Analytics.

That and my Sweeties help with understanding the power of CSS and there are gonna be some changes round here just as soon as I get some time to make them