Firefox Extension for Bloggers

If you’re a blogger like me, then you will often blog about something you’ve read on the net. Often, I will copy and paste a quote from someone, a proper name (so I don’t misspell it), a list of the features in a new software program, etc, etc. However, a direct copy-and-paste will copy the formatting as well (at least it does in Typepad) — the font, the size, the style, the color — all stuff I don’t need. That’s why I love this Firefox extension: Copy Plain Text. Now when you highlight text in Firefox and right-click it,  you will see the option to "Copy Plain Text." Perfect! Not only that, but for the non-mousers, you can set the options to make this the default action for the "Ctrl + C" shortcut.

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Ack! Did you see this? Google’s original logo? Bleh. We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? The website with the old logo is from the Web Archive. It’s way cool. It has links to pictures and details on the developers (you know - Larry and Sergey?) and pictures of the old hardware: 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers with 512MB of RAM,  9 9G drives between the two machines. That’s a lot of RAM for 1997, isn’t it? (Btw, I found this story via Digg.com, my new favorite tech news website.)

If a company is only as good as its employees, then Microsoft is probably getting worried. More than 100 former Microsoft employees have defected to Google to date, and others have gone elsewhere. Lenn Pryor, director of platform evangelism, left for Skype Technologies. Stephen Walli, who worked in the unit set up to parry the open-source threat, split for an open-source consulting firm. Joe Bedaand Gary Burd, respected engineers, left and helped set up Google Talk. Mark Lucovsky, who had been named one of Microsoft’s 16 Distinguished Engineers, defected to Google last November. (Btw, their names are links to fascinating personal blog entries regarding their departures.)

Why so many departures? From Business Week: Many Microsoft employees have been getting increasingly fed-up with the way the company is run. They’re frustrated with the increasing bureaucracy, including the many procedures and meetings Chief Executive Ballmer has put in place to motivate them. They feel trapped in an organization whose past successes seem to stifle current creativity. "There’s a distinct lack of passion," says one engineer, who would talk only on condition of anonymity. "We’re missing some spunk," he says.

This spring two MS researchers sent Chairman William H. Gates III a memo in which they wrote: "Everyone sees a crisis is imminent" and suggested "Ten Crazy Ideas to Shake Up Microsoft." I’ve Googled that memo, but no details about what those 10 ideas are have made it to the web. I even used, gasp!, other search engines, but found nothing. (Which proves my theory, if Google doesn’t have it, it doesn’t exist). I’m very curious. Anyone with the inside scoop, please comment here!

News stories about these Microsoft departures have been all over the web lately. Specifically, the one story (as those links show) that’s getting a lot of attention is that of a computer scientist named Kai-Fu Lee who left Microsoft in July to head Google’s Chinese research and development center. Microsoft sued to stop Lee from working for Google, citing his noncompete agreement. However, on Sept. 13, Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez ruled that Lee could work for Google, provided that he does not recruit any former Microsoft colleagues nor will he be able to work on projects he previously led at Microsoft. In court, Lee detailed how the 20+ Microsoft-led Chinese product-development centers  tripped over one another, duplicating efforts and even fighting over the same job candidate. He called Microsoft "incompetent." After the judge’s ruling, he praised Google, noting, "the culture is very supportive, collaborative, innovative, and Internet-like — and that’s bottoms-up innovation rather than top-down direction."

The tide is turning. Sometimes I wonder if we will looking back to these days, these months, as the time when Microsoft was still king, before Google took over the world. (On that note, here’s a link to an 8-minute video from the year 2014 about how Google did just that.) Other times, I remind myself that as amazing as Google is, is still needs to run on an OS…..or does it? Some, like Jason Kotte of Kotte.org, speculate about the future where there is a GooOS…a Web OS based on the distributed platform that is the Google empire. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

I’m more than halfway through my 4-year lease of an ‘03 Jetta, and I’ve always planned on getting right back into a VW when the lease was over. So when I read this announcement that VW would be offering USB/iPod ports in their new models, I began counting the days until that lease was up! (For the record, 18 months remaining.) The announcement stated that Volkswagen would begin offering a stereo component that will let motorists plug in all kinds of mp3 players, iPods included, so that drivers could manage their tunes and podcasts on a dashboard display. The only downaide is that you have to choose whether you want the iPod connection or a USB connection - you don’t get both. This feature will be offered on the Golf, Golf Plus and Toureg models in December, and on remaining models (Jettas!) next year.

With Yahoo!’s acquisition of Konfabulator, the program has now gone from $20 to free. What is Konfabulator? It’s widgets. Lots and lots of widgets. I think their site explains it best: "Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather".

This is pretty much the BEST. THING. EVER. Konfabulator’s advanced graphics allow the Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop with no window borders. They are amazing. They are beautiful. There are thousands of widgets to choose from in their gallery, and, apparently, it’s easy to make your own. You know you have a hit on your hands when a non-geek (ie. my husband) thinks it’s cool after hearing that there are tons of widgets (including football schedules) they can download.

In the picture with this post (click to enlarge) there are a few of the default widgets on my desktop. The picture frame widget can show either pictures in a folder on your computer or it can show pictures from your flickr account. Cool. Konfabulator works with Windows (XP or 2000) and Mac, though OS X users may have no use for it, since the Dashboard does widgets.

For those of you who read the last post and rolled your eyes, thinking "who uses IE anymore?!", this post is for you. Unfortunately, we ALL have to use IE sometimes for those pages that don’t render properly in Firefox. To make this transition a little less painful, there is a Firefox extension called IE View that will open a page into the IE browser with just one click. In addition, you have the option to select "always view this page in IE," for those pages you frequent that never render properly in Firefox. Hopefully, there will be a day when everything is coded to work in both browsers. Until then, IE View is a great tool to use as a workaround.

So, you’re still clicking on that blue "e" on your desktop, are you? And you’re wondering why everyone is talking about this "Firefox" thing.  Never fear. I’m here to help. To clarify, Firefox is a web browser and it’s better than Internet Explorer (IE) for many reasons. But if you’re not willing to make the switch, at least get yourself a little Microsoft-flavored taste of what Firefox users have been enjoying for some time. Get the MSN Search Tool for IE. It’s a free download. In addition to the obvious installation of a search box toolbar, this tool will offer you the tabbed browsing experience, similar to what’s available in Firefox. Tabbed browsing lets you open new pages in tabs across the top of the same IE window, instead of having to open a new window. Love it, use it, and wonder how you managed to live without it. And maybe then you will start to get curious about all the other wonderful things Firefox has to offer, if this was only one of them.

I was going to copy my Madonna tunes to my iPod when I ran into a problem. (Don’t laugh, you know you love a little Madonna every now and then. Immaculate Collection. A classic.) Well, the first problem, of course, is that iTunes can’t convert DRM-protected files to import them into your iTunes library. So, the first thing that had to be done was burn a CD with the DRM-protected WMA files.

However, after I loaded the burn list into Windows Media Player, I got a message upon starting the burn that "an error occurred." Oh, thank you! Can you be more specific please? I’m prompted to right-click on the song, go to Properties, then the license tab. Hmmm. License tab is blank. That could be a problem. I double-click the song to try to play it and a window pops up saying that Windows Media Player cannot find the license for this file and if I don’t have one ("You thief!" it implies), I could purchase one now. Alternately, I can log in to my Buy.com account to acquire the license. Well, I don’t know what happened over at Buy.com from a year ago to now because I’ve been on the same PC, the same Windows installation, etc. the whole time, but apparently my licenses went MIA. 

I googled my Gmail and found my receipt, and thankfully, what email address I had used a year ago to purchase the darn tunes. I entered that email address and password to my Buy.com account in the blanks and clicked "login." Bingo. License acquired. And then you know what I had to do? I had to type in that email address, password, and click "login" for EACH and EVERY song on that blessed CD! My friends, that is SEVENTEEN songs. Tedious.

Look, I’m all for purchasing music legally, but if I’ve said it once…IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS DIFFICULT. For me, sure, I managed to only waste a few minutes of my time typing logins and passwords…but what about your average user? DRM really expects people to jump through hoops just to have access to bought-and-paid-for music, doesn’t it? All the online retailers of tunes need to get together, decide on one standard, support it in their media players, support it in their portable players, and basically get over themselves and how superior their precious proprietary way of doing things is.

There, I feel better now. My affiliate link to Buy.com has been removed. And Madonna finally made it the iPod. Whew.

Vint Cerf, aka "the father of the internet," was just hired by Google. The monikor refers to the fact that he co-authored the TCP/IP protocol, which connected independent networks of computers together to form the internet. Cerf’s position at Google will entail him helping the company "develop new architectures, systems and standards for a next generation of applications that would likely run across the Internet." Some recent comments he’s made, as referenced in a CNet article, imply he is interested in the geographically indexed data, such as what’s provided by Google Earth and Google Maps. Perhaps he will be writing a new protocol to take the data provided by these services and provide it to mobile devices?

It seems Google has been investing in a communications infrastructure for some time now (maybe this is why they needed to go public and then raise another 4.2 million recently?) The company has been buying up dark fiber. Also, they invested in Current Communications, a company providing internet access over power lines.They have partnered with a company called Feeva in an effort to test the delivery of advertising over Wi-Fi networks. And this year, Google acquired Android, a start-up rumored to be working on an operating system for mobile devices. Reading between the lines here, I’m wondering if Google is up to something BIG. A Google ISP could be on the horizon!

Firefox version 1.5 is now available in beta as a free download at the Mozilla website. There will be 2 or 3 more beta releases before the final version is released in November or December of this year. The new version offers tons of features:  faster Web site navigation; improved tabbed-browsing - you can now rearrange pages by dragging and dropping the tabs (this one I’m really looking forward to using); better pop-up blocking; improved Live Bookmarks feature - Firefox’s ability to detect the presence of feeds on Web sites has been sharpened, and now an icon in the URL bar will flash if the site being visited offers a feed or feeds. For the security-conscious, in the new version, it will be easier for you to clear private data from the browser’s Web site
history log, cache, saved forms, cookies, authenticated sessions, and
saved passwords.

Also new is an automated update feature that makes it easier to keep Firefox current with the latest enhancements and patches available. FINALLY! I hate having to close Firefox and install a whole new version for every update.  Now the updates will be downloaded in the background in bits and pieces, while you are still surfing the web, and you will be prompted to install them once the patch has been completely downloaded. 

Am I using it? Not yet. I downloaded it and played around, but until my preferred theme (Noia 2.0 eXtreme) is updated to work with 1.5, I’ll just wait. I’m very loyal to my theme.