Original ExistDifferently.com Weblog of David, a Christian Network and Systems Manager, with topics ranging from Apologetics to Worldview, and some crypto, open source, programming, opinion, and daily life thrown in between.

Tue, 2006-10-24 (Oct 24)

Firefox 2.0 is out

Yep. Mozilla Firefox version 2.0 was released today.ร‚ย  I’ve been running it since yesterday.ร‚ย  I agree with Martin McKeay about tabs resizing vs. scrolling I think, I’m not sure yet.ร‚ย  I probably won’t try the Tabbrowser Preferences plugin he mentions yet, I’ll try and get used to the new way for a while first.ร‚ย  The spell check in form fields is nice, although writing this post is the first time I’ve seen it in practice.

One thing I missed at first was the del.icio.us plugin which wasn’t updated for Firefox 2.0 when I installed it, although I just checked and they appear to have released version 1.2 today with updated compatibility.ร‚ย  Firefox refuses to install it however, perhaps the old version is cached?ร‚ย  I’ll have to play with it, but the fact that they updated it makes me happy!

My favorite thing about 2.0? The look of the tabs and buttons look much more polished. The search function is improved, spell check I mentioned, phishing protection is good but I haven’t seen it in action yet (not likely to see it unintentionally!), RSS support slightly improved, and maybe something else I forgot.ร‚ย  Oh yeah, they seem to duplicate IE7’s new features and look in nearly every important way. Which is good, in my opinion…I tried IE7 the day it came out (last week), too, and although I’m sticking with Firefox, IE7 is much improved over IE6 and compared to Firefox 1.5, I was a tad jealous!

Fri, 2006-06-30 (Jun 30)

Firefox, MSI’s and the Enterprise

Filed under: Mozilla,Open Source,Software — David @ 23:28

Well, I was going to post this as a comment over on Robert Accettura’s Fun With Wordage blog. It’s really long. So now it’s here, with a link :-) (Since I remembered my password to this blog and have a bit of time…I suppose I’ll have to post some more now, it’s been a while!)

Read this post first as this is a reply (originally written as a comment on his site, addressed to Robert directly, and moved directly here due to length):

Interesting post, given that I spent a decent chunk of time investigating similar solutions for the church where I’m the Network and Systems Manager! I found some good info, not relating to updates necessarily, but on MSI installs in particular since I want to deploy with Active Directory.

It took me some Googling, but I ended up at a really useful page called Firefox:2.0 Institutional Deployment. I tried implementing nearly all of the MSI-related options on this page today to some extent. The documentation of details (an FAQ) for each solution is pretty sparse in general so I had to test to see it in action.

The most fully developed solution for deployment seems to come from Front Motion, with their two releases, Mozilla Firefox MSI, which is an AD-deployable MSI of the straight Firefox install (just a repackage), although it has some really nice features, such as (pulled from their site): (more…)

Tue, 2005-03-29 (Mar 29)

Words, Words, and Few for You!

Talking is cool. Both online and in person. For me, when I get enough talking one-on-one, apparently I can’t come up with anything worthwhile to post to the general public here (and by “general public” I mean, the two or three people that read this regularly and anyone else that stumbles through from Google or something :-)

Not that that’s a bad thing. Unless you want to read more stuff here. But hey, it’s my blog, so you’ll just have to live. I do respond to comments occasionally, especially from commenters that aren’t, um, regulars :-) Or I would, if there were more than three such comments on the whole site. And one of those is from someone I know in person.

Of course, if I posted more interesting stuff here that was actually worth commenting on, I suppose I might then expect more comments. Catch-22 really. Or maybe the most important things I have to say right now aren’t meant for you to hear. Or you. Or you. Safe bet: if you don’t know if it’s you or not, it’s not you :-) On the other hand, if you do know what I’m talking about, feel free to ignore what I’m talking about, it doesn’t apply to you :-)

Do I get a prize? You know, for least content in three paragraphs? I should at least get runner-up for this one :-) What do you know, I did want to talk. Just not about anything you’re probably interested in, here at least :-) If you’re feeling left out, give it time (sure for this post to sink in or something (like it ever will…ha! Like the blonde that died in the shower when the shampoo bottle said “lather, rinse, repeat” ;-), but what I mean is come back later and perhaps eventually I’ll be able to post something more interesting in such a public forum :-)

Um…”Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2″:http://www.getfirefox.com/ is out. It’s cool. Get it. Um…[looks at multitude of tabs open for something interesting to post]…I found a site called “LinkedIn”:https://www.linkedin.com/ the other day that I hadn’t seen before. Interesting stuff, but I haven’t signed up yet. Still, the tab remains open since I’m curious about it :-)

Also, “Magix music products”:http://site.magix.net/index.php?id=471&no_cache=1 are good stuff…try the demos sometime. Music Studio 2005 is really good and at less than $100 is very powerful, the main limitation I run into is not being able to edit the audio while recording at the same time, which you can do in their premiere “Samplitude”:http://site.magix.net/index.php?id=15648&type=2 product (although it’s $1,000 more expensive :-)

If you have an extra $79 laying around (and who doesn’t?), “Amazon Prime”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/subs/primeclub/signup/main.html/002-2086300-3510456 is a nice program to get into if you like Amazon.com and want to get fast, free shipping (or faster, cheaper shipping). Details are right there on the site, I think you can read it without me :-) Free two-day shipping on over 1 million items, overnight for $3.99, for a year. Yep, I told you anyway! Get over it!

Ran into an interesting site while searching for something (I don’t remember what, a how-to on something) the other day. It’s a computer help site called “Bleeping Computer”:http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/. I get a kick out of the name and wish I’d gotten to that domain…like I need more than the 30+ I have :-)

If you’re looking to buy something computer related, first check out “eCost”:http://www.ecost.com/ because they have a lot of good deals. LCDs and camera memory cards are some of their best and most often discounted items. But they have lots of stuff. Also, for general, daily updated deals (lots of Dell deals that link directly to Dell, sometimes with coupon codes, but plenty of non-Dell, and some non-computer related, like “Overstock.com”:http://www.overstock.com selling down comforters and bedsheets really cheap) are awesome over at “GotApex”:http://www.gotapex.com/. I watch that site several days out of the week to spot good stuff. Not that I buy that often, or I’d be much poorer than I am (although they’re one of the reasons I’m as poor as I am already :-)

For example, GotApex is listing right now that Amazon.com has a “Canon PowerShot SD110 Digital Elph 3 megapixel 2X zoom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001G6U9I/ref%3Dnosim/gotapex/002-2086300-3510456 camera for just $159! If I had the spare cash I’d jump on it, the Elphs are awesome because they’re so darn tiny while still be high quality. And usually high priced. But I don’t :-)

And, my last item for this post is “my Flickr page”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/ which, if you’re not on my friends or family list, still has a lot of pictures that I spent all night last Friday night (until 8am Saturday morning) tagging with metadata and making public. I have over 3,200 images uploaded to Flickr, and am nowhere near getting them all sorted (probably never will be) but I like the ones I have available now :-)

Goodnight!

Update: I do find it somewhat ironic how long this post ended up being, and how much info I included, given the title. So much for intent! :-) But aren’t you glad I got around to some actually useful information after all that stuff at the top?

Sat, 2004-12-18 (Dec 18)

Christmas Break from Work

Filed under: Blog,Mozilla,Personal — David @ 01:58

Well, my Christmas vacation has started. I stayed up ’till 5am last night (I’ve started referring to “night” as the time before I go to bed, and “day” as the time after I get up, since midnight really isn’t a good divider for me on many days (and nights) and can make things confusing), and slept ’till 7pm today. I don’t know if I’m going to stay up all night or not. I have Saturday off as well, but I have to be at church early on Sunday since we’re on our third week of promoting the release of our live “You Are Freedom”:http://www.lakeviewworship.com/albums.php album and we have to have all kinds of things set up like cash registers, tables, signs, and things like that. I don’t do all of that but I help, and I have to get the CD faces printed that we duplicate for selling the sermon recordings, and make sure the Resource Center is ready to open, and get the nursery check-in station up and running…Sunday is my busiest day of the week and these three so far in December, due to the album release, have been about five times busier than most! It’s really exiting though, and I wouldn’t miss it. It does mean I have to figure out some way to not sleep all day tomorrow so I won’t be able to sleep tomorrow night and be really tired on Sunday morning…did that last week (and too many other Sundays to count) and I think I’ll skip that experience this time. Particularly because I have all next week to do the screwed-up sleeping thing if I want, while it won’t affect Sunday.

Then again, maybe I’ll try just sleeping a little later on vacation, so I don’t feel like I missed most of my days off. What a novel concept. I’ll keep you apprised :-)

I’ve been reading a couple of good books lately, and I’ve been so busy reading them I haven’t had time to post about them. If you want to keep up to date with mine or other blogs, or even news sites’ news feeds in RSS format, check out “Bloglines”:http://bloglines.com for a nice, completely free, web-based newsreader that can track all the latest posts on your fav feeds. I personally enjoy using the News & Blogs feature of “Mozilla Thunderbird”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ (now in their 1.0 release and worth checking out…I haven’t mentioned it here as much as I should have!) to read the blogs I stay in touch with, but Bloglines is a helpful second source to be able to check from anywhere, not just my home-base computer(s).

I’m still wide awake, so I think I’ll go do some reading for a while.

Thu, 2004-12-16 (Dec 16)

Firefox Ad Hits New York Times!

Filed under: Blog,Mozilla,Open Source,Tech (General),World News — David @ 03:35

This may be one of the few times I can agree with something in the New York Times…figures it would be an ad :-) Anyway, over at “spreadfirefox.com”:http://www.spreadfirefox.com they’ve posted the “announcment about the ad”:http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/8769 and of course “Robert Accettura beat me to posting”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2004/12/15/firefox-ad-is-out-2-full-pages/ about it becuase I wasn’t at the computer to catch the post!

Check it out though, my name’s in the ad somewhere! Also…a nice surprise is that the ad is two pages in size instead of the promised/expected single page!

Update: I found my name in the PDF…it’s down to the right of the light “x” in Firefox at the bottom of the first page. About a third of the way above the center of the “x” and over a little ways to the right (not touching the “x” and separated by some names). The names are alphabetical, and my last name starts with “Sz”. So far I’m not directly giving it away on this blog though…some of my readers know me though :-) (If you do, please don’t post it in the comments…thanks.)

Tue, 2004-12-14 (Dec 14)

Firefox’s Google homepage…a ’suggest’ion?

Now that “Google Suggest Beta”:http://labs.google.com/suggest has been released, and seems to work really well…why not add it to the “Mozilla Firefox Start Page”:http://www.google.com/firefox that Google hosts? Then I wouldn’t have to choose between leaving the nice Firefox start page (my current choice) and Google Suggest set as my home page. Google can go ahead and add the Suggest technology to its main homepage, too, as far as I’m concerned!

Now if they would just listen to me…

Sat, 2004-11-13 (Nov 13)

Now I’ve Got A Good Template!

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News,Mozilla — David @ 05:18

Thanks to Neil’s Weblog Templates for the awesome template I’ve switched to! No more default WordPress template for me!

He’s got a good Mozilla Category going at his site as well…pretty cool! He’s got some good comments about the 1 million downloads mark being reached for Firefox 1.0 in 24 hours after launch! Look, ma, another exclamation point!

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