everyday

Just a little tip for ensuring that Gmail (you are using Gmail aren’t you?) is as secure as possible.

Instead of going to http://www.gmail.com, go to https://www.gmail.com. It is that simple! What’s the difference? Note the super letter “S” in “https://”, this denotes a secure HTTP session, thus securing your email, I mean “Gmail”.

On a side note, a new Firefox update was recently release. The program should update it self, but if it hasn’t, or if you are unsure do the following:

1. open Firefox
2. Click on “Help”
3. Clink on “Check for Updates”

One of the neat little features I noticed is the difference in the address bar when you are in a HTTPS session, the address bar turns yellow and there is a little padlock icon on the right. This was probably done in response to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 having the same functionality, the difference is that Firefox came out with this enhancement in a couple of weeks compared to Microsoft’s five year lag between major versions.

via: digg

The site http://www.obleek.com/iraq/, apart from being completely depressing, shows the power of multimedia representations of data over raw numbers. I have heard figures about the number of fatalities in the war, but I think raw numbers lack in impact. When watching the animation from the above site, it seems to put the severity and scope of the fatalities in an entirely new perspective.

via: digg

According to a survey by the W3Counter, Firefox has reached 25% marketshare! What is Firefox you ask? Well, it is quite simply the finest we browser available (at least on the Microsoft Windows platform). This is an enormous achievement considering the opposition. Not at all unlike a David and Goliath story. Microsoft was able to dethrone Netscape Navigator with relative ease, but how will they fare against Firefox? Only time, and the popularity of the new Internet Explorer 7 will tell.

Recently I have been working on an internet filter for my work. I work for a school district, so you can imagine that we take internet filtering rather seriously. What I have come across is an unintended side effect of filtering that is causing some rather large sites to be all but useless! I initially encountered this problem with Yahoo!’s image search. The search results are cached on Yahoo!’s own servers, so if a youngster were to search for “bikini” they would be presented with pictures of bikinis being served from Yahoo!’s servers whose original source could be something relatively safe, or something completely inappropriate. While these images are only thumbnails, they can be extremely inappropriate. The only way for me to ensure that these images are not displayed is to block all images from www.yimg.com (Yahoo!’s image server), this wouldn’t be so terribly bad if Yahoo! didn’t use this domain to serve ALL of it’s images and even it’s CSS! The second problem I ran across is sites serving content from a third source. I ran into this when someone complained that the menu images from Walmart.com weren’t showing up. After a bit of investigation, it turns out that Walmart serves it’s menu images from akamai.net, which we block because Akamai hosts everything imaginable. So, my advice to everyone is to not serve content from an untrustworthy source, and to host everything from your own domain, lest ye be blocked.

As many of you know, I work in the IT field. The shop that I am in is all Microsoft, from the servers to the workstations. I recently became a Mac OSX convert as a result of my work with Ruby on Rails. I reached digital nirvana this evening when I was able to rather easily connect to my work’s network via our Cisco VPN and then remotely administer one of Windows servers using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection for Mac OSX. This means that I don’t ever, ever, ever, ever need a Windows machine! Yay! (screenshot provided for the naysayers)

The Mozilla Foundation have finally released the second version of their widely acclaimed web browser, Firefox 2.0! This release includes many a new feature, but none more desired by me than the little red “x” on each and every tab. This will cut down on my mouse mileage by at least half.

What’s New in Firefox 2

• Visual Refresh: Firefox 2’s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.
• Built-in phishing protection: Phishing Protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated when the Phishing Protection feature is enabled.
• Enhanced search capabilities: Search term suggestions will now appear as users type in the integrated search box when using the Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com search engines. A new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and re-order search engines, and users will be alerted when Firefox encounters a website that offers new search engines that the user may wish to install.
• Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.
• Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.
• Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds: Users can decide how to handle Web feeds (like this one), either subscribing to them via a Web service or in a standalone RSS reader, or adding them as Live Bookmarks. My Yahoo!, Bloglines and Google Reader come pre-loaded as Web service options, but users can add any Web service that handles RSS feeds.
• Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a separate application.
• Live Titles: When a website offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a “Live Title”. Compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated with the latest information. There are several websites that can be bookmarked with Live Titles, and even more add-ons to generate Live Titles for other popular websites.
• Improved Add-ons manager: The new Add-ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, combining them both in a single tool.
• JavaScript 1.7: JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features such as generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignments. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.
• Extended search plugin format: The Firefox search engine format now supports search engine plugins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats and allows search engines to provide search term suggestions.
• Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.
• Client-side session and persistent storage: New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.
• SVG text: Support for the svg:textpath specification enables SVG text to follow a curve or shape.
• New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.

The hive mind at Google has been busy working on Google Reader. I have been using Google Reader for a while to manage the reading of various weblogs and websites that I visit frequently. If you are unfamiliar with Google Reader, it is an RSS feed aggregator, meaning that it takes the individual posts from a number of different weblogs and display them all on one neat and tidy page. The update to Google Reader is pretty big, some pretty new GUI eye candy and Web 2.0 java-scriptalicious tricks have been put into play. I can’t yet comment on how much easier this will make reading the various weblogs I read each and every day, but it is prettier!

I recently helped someone create an eBay login so they could bid on something and I came across a very intelligent little piece of HTML goodness. As with most sites, eBay requires a valid e-mail address, but what eBay does a little differently is that when you reach the page that says “Please check your e-mail for verification” they actually provide a button that opens up your email, assuming that is that you use a web based e-mail client like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc… Very nice! Perhaps all of the “major” e-commerce sites do this, I haven’t created a new Amazon.com account in years so I can’t say if eBay is alone in this or not.

via: Slahdot

According to a survey by Onestat, Firefox usage has reached an all time high of close to 13%. While nowhere near the market share of Microsoft’s aged Internet Explorer 6, the open source browser from the Mozilla Project is close to reaching the tipping point, if it hasn’t already. What this means for you, the internet community, is that Microsoft will have to sit up straight and pay attention to web standards. As more websites code for Firefox and other standards compliant browsers they will move away from coding for specific IE anomolies leaving the site broken in IE, which is a bad thing for IE’s continued dominance in the browser market. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change with the imminent release of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.

Here is a link to a Google Map that shows my own personal annotation! This is really cool! I can imagine doing a road trip photo album on a map! Or a hiking trip album on a map, the possibilites are limitless (well, not really, but you know…).

More information on how this can be done can be found here. This really is quite easy, all it takes is Google Earth, a little HTML and some publicaly accesible server space somewhere to host the resultant KML file. I am sure that there are some free services available that will host the file for you if you don’t have your own server (you do have your own server, don’t you?).