The Blog of G

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, what’s 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 spell-check 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.

OMG! Words cannot describe how impressed I am with an application I just downloaded and installed. :O

“Huh, this is Musical monday whatrye talking about an application for?”

Well if your reading this then you’re probably on a computer with reasonable internet connection and have some interest in music. Then this is every bit as vital an application for you as Pandora is a bookmark.

The application I am talking about is called Songbird and without getting into to much detail it’s a media player based on firefox. It’s opened my eyes to a part of the internet and the blogosphere that I barely new existed. Up hands who has heard of MP3 blogs? OK so maybe I’m late to the party but this is one superb app and I can’t begin to explain it properly so I’m simply gonna wait here while you head off to hear and watch the screencast. I’ll wait for you.

Now it is a very early release at this point but it’s a helluva place to start from, it already does what it set’s out to do, “play the web”

I have barely scratched the surface and I’m completely taken with this so thank you Wired and to you reading “why haven’t you downloaded it already?”

*edit* I just noticed that it is a tad on the resource hungry side, granted my Media centre isn’t the most current (Athlon XP 2000, 512mb ram) but it’s swallowing more than half the resources available still it’s worth it.

Howdy all, we gotta temporary new look ’round here, while I get ta fixen the IE problems with the regular look and makin one or 2 improvements.

In the meantime, my apologies if things ain’t in all the right places, but we’ll be back to normal in no time, so hang in there

I wish

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.