Sunday, October 29, 2006

Firefox 2.0, Options

As many probably already know, Firefox 2 came out the other day. It has some improvements, but takes a step back in some ways too. Luckily for us, it is very configurable. To change settings beyond the most basic, navigate to about:config. To search for a specific key type the first part of its name in the filter box on the top of the page. To get you started, you can look at this Lifehacker article, but there may be some other changes you want to make as well. For example, there have been some privacy concerns recently about the phishing filter, which you can disable by making browser.safebrowsing.enabled false.
If you are curious about what an option does, you can look it up in the MozillaZine knowledge base (or usually just google it)

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Googlebombing

As many are probably already aware it is possible to manipulate google's search index to promote a particular site. Their algorithm counts the number of other sites linking a site to try to determine its importance, the more links the higher it is in the search results. Apparently, this trick is becoming political. Now that it has been brought up, I thought I'd point out that this isn't new; all we need is another miserable failure in the government. Of course, us Americans can't be given all the credit for bad politics, looks like the UK gets the liars. To be fair, I guess you can be both a miserable failure and a great president. Want to pick on your own countries leader? Check out this Wikipedia article (near the bottom) for some more fun searches ;-)

Monday, October 23, 2006

Flash 9 Beta For Linux! (and others)

It has been too long since Adobe/Macromedia has released an update to Flash for Linux. Many sites require version 8, but only seven existed, until very recently. It turns out that Adobe has a publicly available beta of Flash 9 for Linux available here. I can't think of any sites that specifically require >=flash 8 off the top of my head, but the new version does seem to work quite well with google video and the like.

Not a Linux user? Still want to try out the latest and greatest? There are also versions for Windows and Mac at the same site.

Friday, October 20, 2006

DRM

DRM or Digital Rights Management has gotten a bad reputation lately, and rightfully so. Music/Movie/Game companies putting unreasonable restrictions on their products such that they become unusable to the rightful purchaser. Technology such as FairPlay which serves only to annoy legitimate purchasers, but doesn't actually stop determined people from copying music (see PlayFair, now QTFairUse) .

Anyway, the real point of this post is to point out a particularly creative approach to DRM, education. Weird Al's "Don't Download This Song".



Of course, If you haven't already, some of his other songs are good too.

Happy Watching /Listening, and Remember: No Stealing Music!

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Beagles!

No, I'm not talking about one of these.

As seen on Slashdot, Charles Darwin's works have been scanned and put on the web (if only I had the time to read them). Anyway, if you are interested, you can find them here, both the scans and the (easier to read) text. You can also check out the Slashdot page for some "discussion" of Darwin's theories.

(If you're wondering about the title, Darwin's ship was called the HMS Beagle, when he went exploring to learn about some finches and other animals, see the wikipedia article)

IE7

If anyone is keeping track of Microsoft, it is worth noting that they released the final (if it can be called that) version of IE7 to the public. I have only used the version incorporated into Vista, but it is a vast improvement over IE6 (came out during the Win98 era after all). IE7 does most of the things Mozilla and Opera have been doing for years; the most significant? tabbed browsing. It also handles RSS and keeps track of some phishing sites. So, if you must use IE, I would go get IE7 here. If not, check out Firefox or Opera, or SeaMonkey, or any of the many other good browsers, and ditch IE6.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Blogger Beta

I've been seeing traffic from beta.blogger.com lately and I got curious (I usually post by email) so I logged into blogger and found out a little about the new program. The big feature they added is the ability to label or categorize your posts, which I am going to try to start doing, though I'm not sure if I will be able to do it over email or not yet. If you want to upgrade to the beta version (assuming you have a blogger blog) you will need or need to get a google account (you have one if you use gmail, or can get on during the conversion process). Then you log into blogger and there should be a banner on the right side of the page to do the conversion and tie your blogger account to your google account. After that you post from beta.blogger.com, not much too it. The new beta version seems to work very well so far, so I would go for it (I particularly like the new spell checker).

Eudora

If you use Microsoft Outlook for email, you should probably look into some of the alternatives. Because most people use Outlook, it is quite often attacked and has a reputation for security flaws. Other clients also have some more/better features. One popular client is Eudora, which currently is free with either limited features or advertisements but is going open source.  Hopefully  the new open source version will continue to support the old mailbox files, since it is apparently a complete rewrite based on the Thunderbird codebase. Thunderbird its self is a good client with a number of available plugins and good built in spam filtering.

If you are a current Eudora user, Wired has some further commentary and Qualcomm has an official announcement on their site.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Online Board Games

I may have posted about this before, but its cool so I'll do it again.

Hasbro (the UK branch) has an online version of the board game Monopoly using taxi drivers in London as the game pieces. They also (as of recently) have a version of Clue, which I haven't tried, but may also be interesting.  Well, if you have the time, give both a try (Monopoly  Clue), I thought the Monopoly idea was a good one, though not the most exciting game to play. Someone else will have to comment about Clue, since I have other things I have to do.

Enjoy your afternoon (just thought I'd mention this since they emailed me about the new game)

Friday, October 06, 2006

XFire

Xfire is (besides being a name for the technology ATI uses for Multi-GPU setups) another instant messenger which has the interesting feature of keeping track of many common games. It allows you to see what games and what servers your friends are playing on in addition to providing normal IM and VoIP services. It also tracks game patches and does a few other nifty things. That being said, if you, like me, happen to be a Linux user with friends that seem to use Xfire almost exclusively for instant messaging you may be interested to know that there is a gaim plugin. The plugin, called Gfire can be found here, and integrates Xfire's instant messaging into gaim and displays what your friend is playing and on what server if you hover your mouse over their name. If you just don't like the Xfire client, there is also a build for the Windows version of gaim.

Just what the world needs, another IM protocol, but the gaim plugin is handy if you need it. Get it here.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Distributed Computing

As seen around the web over the last couple hours, Folding@home has released a client to model proteins using your ATI graphics processor (X1900). Unfortunately, it seems like its only a very early release, requiring a specific driver version and sub-version of directx 9.0c. This is a great idea though, whatever the implementation problems, since the GPU is a very powerful math processor that sits largely unused unless you are playing games.  AnandTech has a good summary of the Folding@home project and the new GPU project if you want to read more, but basically the idea is that the more complex proteins (very long chains of peptides) bunch up or "fold" into very complex shapes due to the interaction of the atoms ( hydrogen bonds, etc). If you put the protein under an environmental stress (change its temperature, ph, etc) the interaction of these forces will change and the protein will "unfold". Depending on the protein, it may or may not "fold" again when its environment returns to normal (some may also require interaction with other molecules to fold). Since many (most?) of the human body's functions require on proteins (particularly enzymes) the hope is that with some study and modeling scientists will be able to figure out exactly how some common proteins work and prevent or cure problems.

Anyway, enough bio,  if you want to help out and have an ATI X9100 take a look at the ATI FAQ here.If you don't have an ATI video board (NVidia has better Linux support), you can get a client for your CPU here (be sure to run two copies if you have a dual core processor). Once running, you shouldn't really notice the client since it runs at a low processor priority.

If you don't like Folding@home, there are plenty of other options if you are looking to put your CPU to work, among the more well known ones:

SETI@home (find aliens)
ChessBrain
Electric Sheep (Screensaver Generator)
GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search)
University of Oxford "Screensaver Lifesaver"

Some more can be found on this list

Happy Computing,

(and feel free to correct me if I've forgotten too much Bio already)

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Dosbox

Do you have some old dos software you wish you could still use, but no computer with dos (the Windows XP command prompt doesn't count)? I find that some of the old dos games are still some of the best (as far as play goes, maybe not graphics). To solve this problem, and use your old software you can use a handy emulator called dosbox. Dosbox comes with many Linux distributions, but for people who don't already have it installed, you can get it here.The Windows version puts a icon on the start menu, people using other OSes can run "dosbox" from the command line. Once you get it running, you will need to mount a drive to place your files on. Make a directory and within dosbox run "mount c /path/to/dir" or (for windows users) "mount c drive:\path" (substitute with the actual path). Then you can change directory to your newly mounted drive (cd c:) and start installing software. You may want to unzip and place setup files in the directory you are using for dosbox from your main OS to make things easier.

Once you get your software installed, if it behaves slowly try pressing control+F12 to increase the amount of cpu given to dosbox or control+f8 to decrease it. When you find the optimal settings for your system you can setup a config file with the z:\config.com utility within dosbox and then run dosbox with the -conf flag (see the readme). Note that you will need a reasonably fast computer to even get the speed of a 486 in dosbox, since it emulates the entire system. It also supports CD drive emulation and some other things, so you might want to check out the readme.

I find that dosbox runs the old (great) Apogee/3DRealms games very well. There is also a list of other games on the dosbox site.