Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 16, 2006 by CyberNet.

Opera has gotten most of the kinks worked out in Opera 9.10 so they are preparing to officially release it. As of right now it is sitting on their FTP but the download homepage has not been changed to reflect the new version. Going off of information that the Desktop Team has previously provided this should be a rough estimation of the changelog:

• New Fraud protection (disabled by default)
• Improved stability
• Fixed problem where pages showed the incorrect favicon
• Fixed problem where multimedia keyboard shortcuts would not work when Opera was focused
• Fixed bug where one could not log in to Gmail with “Accept only cookies for the site I visit” enabled
• Changed Mozilla ID string spoof to mimic Firefox
• Fixed issue where stored passwords were lost after enabling/disabling the master password
• Made IE ID string spoof as Windows on Linux/UNIX and Mac
• “Save target as” and “Save to disk” now play well together
• “Save directly to” now works
• Fixed accidental deletion of a feed when unsubscribing
• Fixed smooth scrolling on UNIX
• Flash now works on FreeBSD
• Improved error message when a dictionary isn’t installed for the spelling checker

 It is important to note that the Fraud Protection feature is disabled by default. To enable it you need to go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Security  and check the box that says Enable Fraud Protection. I really wish that this feature was enabled by default but I understand why they disabled it with their explanation: “It’s a new feature and we think users may need some time to get used to this idea, so we’ve made it an opt-in feature for now. Opera is about giving users the choice, after all.” Hopefully in the future they’ll realize how important this is to the browser and enable it by default, while offering the option to disable it.

Other than that there aren’t any large features that are new but there are several minor fixes. Opera is a truly amazing browser (those people who already use it know that) and the main feature I would like to see implemented into it next would be a remote storage solution for bookmarks. Other browsers have plenty of add-ons and toolbars available that let people manage bookmarks from a remote location but Opera is still lacking a good solution for it. I’m not sure if that would be considered a minor update or if it is something that will be pushed to version 10 but it is something I would love to see.

Here are the current download links for version 9.10 via their FTP (it should be up on the site within a few days):

Windows: Classic Installer | MSI Installer | International Version
Mac: DMG Installer

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on September 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

Making a box shot for your own software can be difficult if you’re using an image editing program. What you really need is some software that is made just for doing such a task, but the problem is finding one that is free! When I was looking for something else I came across a program called 3D Box Shot Maker, and it does everything that I would expect it to.

Here’s what I had to do to make my own box shot:

1. Set the side(left) and the Front(right) images.
2. Adjust the boxshot size, shadow and reflection.
3. Save the generated boxshot image out as image file. It supports 4 image format: BMP, JPG, PNG, and GIF.

I managed to find a cover image of Spider-Man 3 for the PS3 on the Internet, along with a nice thin snapshot that I could use for the side of the box. As you can see from the screenshot above the result wasn’t all that bad.

It takes some time getting the ratios (height, width, etc…) just right so that it’s not too distorted, and if you’re just playing around I would say that this software will be as good as any.

3D Box Shot Maker (freeware for Windows)

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on December 06, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Earlier this year a guy installed 100 Firefox extensions without any problems. Well…I decided to try and top that. I picked the nice round number of 200 for a few different reasons. First and foremost because Firefox “2″ was recently released but also because back in August Mozilla celebrated 200 million downloads of the fantastic browser! Right now they are past 263 million but this is kinda like a belated celebration.

A discussion about Firefox extensions also started over in the forum which is the whole reason I decided to do this. Hey Chris, hope you have Guinness on hold.

I don’t just have one screenshot to show you either… I have several to show you what installing all of these extensions does to your menus as well. Prepare to be amazed!

Installing the Extensions

To install the extensions I went through the Mozilla Extension page one by one, like any normal person would be doing. I went through the top Firefox extension page until I had all 200 installed. I did install repetitive extensions (such as the three versions of Forecast Fox) because I wanted to see if they affected each other, but there weren’t too many extensions that overlapped in functionality. The only ones that I really skipped were the dictionaries which there happened to be quite a few of.

After I had installed 50 of them I decided to restart the browser to see how things were going. It took about one minute to startup but everything looked like it installed correctly. Then I moved on and after about an hour I had all 200 installed and was ready to restart the browser. I didn’t think that it was going to work but to my surprise it did…

The Overall Result

Ahhh…the beauty of Firefox is in the eye of the beholder and let me say that it looks pretty sweet when running in Vista. It took 6-minutes to start Firefox with the 200 extensions installed but it worked! Not only that but there are the popup windows that you get for certain extensions right after they are installed…yeah…I received 47 of those. That also seemed to delay the initial start time but I didn’t sit there filling out information for all of the options, otherwise that would have taken me hours.

It was quite a site to see and there was a very limited viewing area for websites because of the toolbars. On my 24″ widescreen monitor I had about 2″ of viewable area at the bottom of the browser. But hey, it was still usable. Here is a screenshot of the overall result of a Google search that I performed:

Click for Full-size

It is also pretty amazing what the Google website looks like when I have all of those extensions installed. Not to mention how funny it is when you type a search in the search box and press “Enter” just to see it replicate itself amongst all of the toolbars. That was probably my favorite part about the whole experience. 😉 

Extensions That Were Installed

 The All-in-One Sidebar decided to replace the default Add-ons page in Firefox with its own sidebar module. That was fine except for the fact that it couldn’t handle all of the extensions. It didn’t show a listing of anything that I had installed and in the title it said “undefined [0].” I was a little worried at first because I wanted to show a listing of the extensions that I had installed…but have no fear because there was another menu option that listed them without any issues. Here are the several screenshots of the extensions I installed:

           
Click any of the images above to enlarge them

Using the ListZilla extension that I installed (which is the only one that I installed that isn’t in the top few hundred according to Mozilla) I also generated an HTML listing of all 200 extensions. See, some extensions do have a purpose.

Tools Menu

Many extensions will put some sort of “helpful” link in the Tools menu when you install it. Well, I can confirm that nearly all of them put something in the menu. You don’t even want to know how long it took me to find the “Options” in this disaster:

  
Click any of the images above to enlarge them

Possible Toolbars

I wanted to conserve some space so I ditched the Bookmarks toolbar that is included with Firefox. After all, it is all about the extensions, right? Here is a listing of all the toolbars that are available to choose from but I didn’t setup Weatherbug which is why it’s not shown:

Click for Fullsize

Possible Sidebars

Thank goodness that in Firefox you can’t have a bunch of sidebars open at the same time, because I would have absolutely no website viewing space! Here is a listing of the possible sidebars that could be shown:

Click for Fullsize

Other Less-Altered Things

Here are a few more screenshots of things that didn’t get hit quite so hard by the extensions hurricane…

File Menu

Click for Fullsize

New Menus

Click for Fullsize

Options Screen

Click for Fullsize

Memory Usage

Firefox is notorious for its memory leaks but it didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought. By the time Firefox would start after a few minutes it had climbed up to 145MB but it capped off around 195MB. I didn’t use it as much as I typically use a browser to see if memory leaks would really start to kick in but it was running for quite awhile. I did however find that it would become sluggish or become unresponsive pretty frequently but it only crashed once in the two-hours that I had it up and running. Here is a screenshot of the memory usage at the end of that two-hours:

Click for Fullsize

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed this because I know that I sure found it interesting. I thought about uploading my profile to a file-sharing site but it would have taken way too long since it is over 120MB in size. It was definitely an experience and I was thinking about naming this the “Firefox 200!”

What are you still doing here? Go download some extensions.

You should also stop by the forum and share what extensions you are currently using.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on December 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Dell has announced that they are now shipping Ubuntu computers running the latest 7.10 release. On the Dell blog they said that it took so long because they wanted to do extensive testing first, but I would say that it was a rather fast turnaround considering that it was such a big upgrade.

Dell also managed to solve one of the most vocal complaints that I’ve heard with Ubuntu, and it’s that there is no way to play commercial DVD’s out-of-the-box. Dell wanted it to be as simple as putting the DVD in and hitting the play button, and so that’s what they did. Also on the computer you’ll find that Flash is pre-installed…that’s one less thing you have to fuss with when trying to go online!

There was also a 13-minute interview between Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Ubuntu, and the manager of the Linux team at Dell (it’s embedded below). In the interview Shuttleworth was asked where he thought Linux market adoption was heading, and I think he made a valid point when he said “I think what we’ll see is that Linux is in everyone’s pockets before it’s on everyone’s desktops.” Because of the Linux’s compact size I do believe that it will be the backbone of many portable devices, and we’re already starting to see that happen. As time goes on the popularity may also start to work its way over to the desktop market, which is exactly what Shuttleworth is predicting.

I give Dell a lot of credit for releasing an Ubuntu lineup, especially when a bulk of the community never really expected Dell to fulfill their promise in the first place. There are only a handful of computer manufacturers that sell Ubuntu-powered laptops, and only one that is brave enough to offer them in Flamingo Pink!

If you’ve got about 13 minutes to kill this is a rather good interview with Mark Shuttleworth:

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This article was written on March 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

OpenOffice 2.2 was just released after about a month’s worth of delays. The official announcement has yet to be made on the homepage, but the downloads for OpenOffice 2.2 are currently available on their FTP.

This version actually fixes three highly critical vulnerabilities that were recently found. One of them only applies to a  Linux/Solaris system, but the other two apply to all distributions:

• WordPerfect Import Vulnerability – If a user opens an untrusted WordPerfect file his or her system may be compromised.
• StarCalc Vulnerability – If a user opens an untrusted StarCalc document it can potentially run arbitrary code supplied in the file.
• URL Handling Security Vulnerability (Linux/Solaris) – If a user running OpenOffice.org from a shell terminal in Linux or Solaris opens an untrusted URL, malicious code could be arbitrarily executed on the user’s computer.

Besides for the vulnerabilities being fixed, there are also some new things that are worth mentioning:

• Improved text display throughout the entire office suite.
• Enhanced PDF export functionality that supports user-definable form fields and bookmark creation.
• Cosmetic changes in Vista (example: New File dialogue box).
• Apple Mac Intel has several stability improvements.
• OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet has received additional enhancements to its support for Microsoft file formats, including improved support for Pivot Tables and some specialized trigonometric functions.
• OpenOffice Base, the database component, has improved SQL editing functionality as well as a new “Queries within Queries” feature.
• OpenOffice Impress, the presentations component, offers improvements in the handling of hidden slides which has been made more intuitive.

Here is the What’s New page for the last release candidate of OpenOffice 2.2, which also happens to be what got released as the final product. There’s quite a bit of information on there though, and most of you probably won’t want to sift through it.

I briefly flipped through the OpenOffice forum to see what user’s first impressions were of the new release. One of the last comments on the forum says:

No new features that I have noticed with my daily use of Writer and Calc. I have reverted back to the 2.0.4 Novell Edition and actually ‘gained’ many new features.
…
I used to look forward to new releases of OOo with more enthusiasm. But lately there hasn’t been a whole lot to look forward to. In all honesty, the Novell Edition has been a pleasant surprise on Windows for me.

I actually feel the same way as that user. New versions of OpenOffice are being released every few months, but where are those awesome features that will help set it apart? I did find the page for the Novell version of OpenOffice that the person mentioned in the forum, and here are the special features that it is supposed to have:

• Enhancements to Writer
• Enhanced Support for Microsoft Office File Formats
• E-Mail as Microsoft Office Document
• Excel VBA Macro Interoperability
• Improved Data Pilot Support
• Enhanced Fonts
• ODMA Integration
• Multimedia Support in Presentations

I haven’t tried the Novell edition myself because the regular version of OpenOffice has always done just fine for me. However, I do a lot of work with Excel VBA Macros and for that reason I think I will give it a shot. It will take a little while for me to download the whopping 440MB ISO image though.

The next release of OpenOffice is planned for June 5. They are typically on a 3–month schedule, but they have decided to change things up a bit by making every other release dedicated purely for bug fixes. That would mean the June 5 release will not have anything new included and will only be bug fixes. Then after that makes it out the door their focus will be on version OpenOffice 2.3 which is expected around September 4.

OpenOffice Homepage
Download OpenOffice 2.2 directly from an FTP server
Direct link to English OpenOffice 2.2 for Windows

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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