Tried Google Chrome yet?

Google has revolutionized search, and made the email client seem rather unwieldy and unnecessary, but there they have been wide of the mark on a few things.

Google Desktop wasn't very good in the early days. It started out seeming a bit slow and a bit intrusive, both in terms of system resource usage and privacy.

However, I downloaded the latest enterprise version at my workplace, with a private encrypted index and support for Lotus Notes search and I was very impressed. Admittedly, the index got corrupted once and had to be rebuilt, but it has made things easy to find. This is very important when you have one hand on the phone and only one on the keyboard ;-)



So, I approached Google Chrome with some interest. I say some, because I'm not really in the market for a new browser. I love both Firefox and Opera and I can't see how much improvement can be made in this area. However, Google claimed that their browser would have a small memory footprint and wouldn't leak memory either. This sounded tempting because Firefox 3 has only improved on Firefox's tendency to hemorrhage tens of megabytes of lovely memory by a small amount. Opera leaks too, but less so. In addition to this, Google claimed that their new browser was going to be optimized for web applications, especially for gmail. This sounded good, so I decided to give it a whirl.

I was whelmed.

It's not all that special from what I've seen so far. It doesn't suck, but it doesn't blow me away, either. I've used gmail in it - it's OK I suppose, but it hardly seems all that "optimized". What's the difference between it's layout in web application mode than just hitting F11 in FF, Opera or IE? It loads quickly, sure, but then so does FF3 with no plugins. So does IE7 for that matter, but that's a steaming puddle of horse pish. The history search is nice, as you'd expect from Google, but searching your bookmarks and history in FF works well enough for me.

Remember Seamonkey? I still use it quite a bit, mainly because it reminds me of classic Mozilla - my second browser love, after Netscape. Flock has a Photobucket edition, but that's no big deal. Most people have never used Flock or Seamonkey, and never will. Chrome will have to really stand out to have any chance of making a dent in the established browser user base* - the trouble is, I'm still just not sure what makes Chrome so special.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Read this superb review at InfoQ

* I saw a BBC News report this week that stated that IE still holds 80% of the browser market

Looking for iTunes alternatives

Found one alternative - aTunes - available for Linux and Windows, but would like to know about more:
http://www.linuxalt.com/linux-software/aTunes.html

The main requirement would be full podcast support, and should be opensource (free for corporate use, at least).
Why not use iTunes? Well, I just don't like it. There's Quicktime Alternative - that solves one problem.
As far as I could find tell, the podcast plugin for Winamp doesn't work.

If you know of any other alternatives, please comment.

Forgot what a valuable resource this site is

Just had cause to visit:
http://dougknox.com/

For those who haven't been here yet, it's a collection of VB Script files that will perform tweaks for Windows systems. Just have a look through the left hand menu and try something out. Back up first, etc.

Just goes to show how many problems boil down to the PSU

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http://discussions.hardwarecentral.com/showthread.php?t=180313

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CMS News

http://cmsreport.com/taxonomy/term/381

http://cmsreport.com/node/1717

http://cmsreport.com/node/1665

http://cmsreport.com/node/1554

http://cmsreport.com/node/1089

http://cmsreport.com/node/731

Coding Resources

http://www.investintech.com/articles/coderesources/

Is Autocheck.exe playing up on your PC?

Problem: Spybot-SD Resident scanner pop-up requires confirmation every time Windows starts. Clicking "Remember this decision" won't help...

The pop-up is to alert you that the Session manager registry key in the CurrentControlSet is being changed.

Cause: Autocheck.exe is corrupt.

Solution: Run checkdisk on the next boot by clicking Start > run and typing chkdsk /r. You'll see a message saying the volume is currently in use and would you like checkdisk to run on the next reboot - type Y. Reboot at your leisure and make yourself a cup of tea, because this is going to take a while.

It should fix the problem, however, so that's alright then.

pchelptech

Could this spell the end of the sticky post?

That is, if Knol - Google's latest offering to the world of web authoring - has anything to do with it.

Make long links short with shortlinks.js

I got sick of looking at links I posted with long URLs that spilled off the page, making things look untidy.
After looking around for a way to neatly wrap links without breaking them, I found this.

Now I can post links as long as I like, and this little piece of JavaScript will truncate the link text and preserve the URL. All you need is a little script in the head of your page:

<head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="shortlinks.js"> </script>

</head>

Onload, the script will execute and rewrite the link as specified in shortlink.js:

// the maximum length of the links<br /> var mustlength=30;
... rewriting the link using the following function:
var newt=t.substr(0,mustlength/2)
+connector+
t.substr(t.length-mustlength/2-connector.length,t.length);

There are a load of other useful tools on both onlinetools.org and the author's site.

QA Testers needed, job satisfaction guaranteed

http://dilbert.com/fast/1996-07-01/

Do you hate the new Dilbert site too?

There have been many solutions posed for this one.

One of the more elaborate ones involves downloading a greasemonkey script that strips away the horrible flash from around the daily strip you want to read.

This is a classic case of over-engineering that Dlbert himself would be proud of.

However, it's only unnecessary if you subscribe to daily feeds and are therefore stuck with the flash version.

All the time, http://dilbert.com/fast was sitting there, waiting for someone to find it.

Generic JVM Argument -Xnoclassgc must not be used with the IBM 1.4.2 SDK... EVER

...especially if any classes in your application use serialization or refection.

Does your Java application appear to suffer from memory leaking? If it does, check to see if you have the parameter -Xnoclassgc enabled.
In fact, you should check even if you haven't noticed any memory leaking, and disable it anyway :P

http://www.performancewiki.com/was-tuning.html

http://java.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/java-l/memory-leak-issue-1458060?cv=expanded#

http://www.flester.com/blog/2008/03/24/javas-xnoclassgc-considered-harmful

and finally, one from the horse's mouth:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg1PK63384

It's hard to believe that people bother arguing over this one - it's been common knowledge for over 2 years now.

Set up LAMP on the Hardy Heron

No, it's not a clue from a cryptic crossword, but rather Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP - all ready to go as one of the install options on Ubuntu 8.04.

It's worth doing, because by doing it this way, you'll save time on setting them up separately and trying to get them to work together. Read more here.

DVDVideoSoft News

New software coming soon… Posted: 04 Jul 2008 10:06 AM CDT Dear All, I’d like to inform you that we are working hard at new programs and this month you should expect several new titles from DVDVideoSoft. These are: - Free Audio Converter; - Free Video to DVD Converter; - Free Disc Burner; - Free DVD Video Burner; - Free Audio CD Burner. Also we will update our existing ones. For example Free Video to Flash Converter will offer new advanced player skins with more controls, like the BIG play button on the video, rewind and fast forward buttons, volume control, auto load enable/disable and full screen mode preview. Keep up watching our news!

Special thanks and some more interesting free software Posted: 04 Jul 2008 10:05 AM CDT Recently we had a problem with html coding on our forum. And John Conners the author of the John’s Adventures blog suggested us a smart solution. Visiting his blog I found that he is a professional developer and I was amazed to find several free programs he had written. I’d like to recommend you to try John's Background Switcher and John's Image Converter. The first program sits in your system tray and periodically changes the wallpaper on your computer. It can take photos from your computer or even from the WEB (Flickr, Picasa web albums, Facebook, Yahoo…). The second program is a small and easy-to-use image converter. It will help you to make your photos smaller before sending via email or putting them to the WEB. It will save your time! I hope you will like these programs too.

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DO NOT download Tor Button

Here's an amusing post on Privoxy and Tor

But seriously, I've just discovered that the tiny Tor Button add-on stops Google Talk Gadget from loading in the sidebar... Bizarro!

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (of power tools)

Nod profusely as you read through Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.

You'll see Notepad2, many offerings from SysInternals and the most powerful Firefox add-on ever, Firebug. If you've ever used them, even just a little, you'd have expected to see them in his list, but I was pleased to see a few things I've never tried, such as FolderShare, WinSnap and Ultramon.

Can't wait to get 'round to sampling them all.

Also, SysInternals have created a live share space for their utilities, so you don't have to have them downloaded in advance before you run them - handy if you're on the road, with a customer and you've forgotten your pen drive. From the readme.txt in the root directory:

What is this?

This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities. This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file.

Blogger trouble

This is what I see when I try to access my last few posts via Firefox live bookmarks (or even pasting in the same url directly into the address bar).

We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application

This has happened before, but usually stops after a few minutes - but this time I've been getting this message all afternoon.

Getting this kind of message, and the dreaded internal Blogger error "bX-vjhbsj", pictured below, is the very thing that has driven many bloggers into the attractive, user-friendly and stable bosom of Wordpress (and will continue to do so).




Sort it out Google... I mean Blogger, or Bloogle or whatever. Blogtards.
:-P

DVDVideoSoft News

DVDVideoSoft moved to new server and prepares new software Posted: 03 Jun 2008 04:52 PM CDT We would like to inform you that in May DVDVideoSoft moved to the new server! Now the Internet connection comes to Gigabit (1000 Mbps), that is much more faster than it was (100 Mbps). Such an improvement allows to increase the downloading speed of our free software and speeds up the work of our forum. And in the view of the fact that we are preparing next new huge update of free software, this Gigabit connection is for the good of both us and you. Now our server network usage is only about 10%. Let's boost it up, when the new versions of our free tools are available. Keep watching our news! We also thank those users who have sent us their translations of our programs and their comments and corrections. We will try to include all of them in our new versions. If you want to be famous on our web site, you are welcome to inform us about it and send us you websites and blogs addresses. Get in touch with us at support@dvdvideosoft.com. We will write about you in our blog. P.S. Now you can leave comments on our blog immediately and without any registration.

Add free YouTube download service to your site or blog Posted: 03 Jun 2008 04:52 PM CDT We are glad to offer you our new service called free online YouTube video download script for your site or blog! From now on any owner of a website or a blog may add there a YouTube and Google videos downloading service. This service allows visitors of a site to download videos from YouTube and Google right away to their PC without any other site, software or service. The only thing you should do is just to copy a small script from our website to your web page. Here there is a detailed and comprehensive instruction of how to do it.

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How the software giants do it these days

http://dilbert.com/fast/2008-05-10/

Still the best, at least for now

While Digsby remains tied to Windows and non-portable (at least, not truly portable and self contained).

I need portable. I need multi-platform. I need meanwhile (Sametime) support, in addition to jabber (google talk), icq, irc, yahoo and msn.
Pidgin is still the only IM that offers me all these things, with an attractive, easy to use interface, and all for free (unlike Trillian).

PidginPortable is presently at version 2.4. This may or may not be better than previous versions - but assuming you have or will download that version and what to fix the one known bug that matters, or get it working with Sametime, then this is how you can do it.

Buddy List Search Bug:
This is bothersome. You have a huge list of buddies, spread across multiple groups and multiple IM protocols, and you can't be bothered scrolling through the list, expanding groups and visually searching for buddies until your eyes bleed.
Up until PidginPortable 2.4 (true for non-portable flavour too), you just started typing the first few letters of the contacts name and pidgin did the rest. However, since the inclusion of the latest GTK+ libraries, this doesn't work - and pidgin just stops the search after you type the first letter. Downer.

Solution:
Download GTK+ 2.12.6 and copy bin/libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll into PidginPortabl/App/GTK/bin (replacing the one that's already there).
Restart PidginPortable and the problem will be solved.

Sametime support:
So you work for a large blue corporation or some company that buys their IM/collaboration solution from them.
Older versions of Pidgin (Gaim) didn't support Sametime out of the box - you had to install the meanwhile library first. Now, meanwhile is included, but Sametime 7.5 will check your client version and reject Pidgin because it looks like an old Sametime version (3.x).

Here's how to fool Sametime:
Look for accounts.xml (for PidginPortable it's in Data/settings/.purple)
Look the following settings:

<settings>
<setting name='client_major' type='int'>30</setting>
<setting name='server' type='string'>messaging.yourcompany.com</setting>
<setting name='fake_client_id' type='bool'>1</setting>
<setting name='port' type='int'>1533</setting>
<setting name='client_minor' type='int'>6511</setting>
<setting name='force_login' type='bool'>1</setting>
<setting name='client_id_val' type='int'>4098</setting>
</settings>

The 'server' and 'port' lines will be there already from when you added the account, but you'll have to add the 'client_major', 'client_minor' and 'client_id_val' lines.
These three lines will tell the Sametime server what it wants to hear when it queries the pidgin client.
Another problem solved.

Thanks to khaytsus for raising the ticket for the Buddy List Search GTK+ bug and thanks to datallah who took ownership and of course witmaster who posted the downgrade workaround solution.
Thanks to jno and siege for the Sametime workaround.

Kudos to all who work on Pidgin to make it better and keep it relevant, despite stiff competition from the likes of Miranda and Digsby.