Delicious toolbar for Firefox 3.5... Works

I'm a fan of Delicious.

Now when Fedora 11 came along, I upgraded to it and along with it came Firefox 3.5 Beta. At this time, I knew that the Delicious toolbar wasn't compatible so I didn't care since Firefox was still in Beta.

Since the release of Firefox 3.5 final came around I just checked again and it looks like it's still NOT compatible... That was before I did some more searching.

Now the official web site page links to version 2.1.015 of the toolbar. That version is incompatible...

I found that a particular forum page links to another version 2.1.041 of the toolbar on Mozilla's Add-Ons for Firefox site. Indeed that version works fine.

This is quite frustrating. How hard is it to keep your versions synchronized? Why would I check on Mozilla's page before I checked the actual web site of Delicious? Yahoo owns Delicious and yes, Yahoo is stupid. I'm sure many others will be bothered by this oversight.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 Beta on an Asus EEE 1000HA

For work purposes I now have an Asus EEE 1000HA at my disposal. The earliest netbooks had very small hard drives that were solid state. The man difference in the netbook is that you could call it a 2nd generation one. The main spec differences are it has been upgraded to 2GB of RAM and it has a 160 GB hard disk drive.

Last night I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 Beta via a USB flash drive.

I must say I'm very impressed. The main differences I see with the stock Ubuntu distribution is that things work 'out of the box' such as the Atheros wireless card, sound, webcam, fancy touch pad, etc... It also has a slick navigation/environment that's designed specifically for Netbooks with smaller screens. All in all, it works really well.

For example, there's a feature of the Elantech touchpad which allows you to scroll up and down by using 2 of your fingers. Impressively that works out of the box with Ubuntu. It's really handy when browsing the web since the keyboard requires the Fn key to Page Up and Page Down. Another thing to note is that this behavior is consistent in Ubuntu. Under Windows, the touchpad scrolling does not work under Firefox but works under Internet Explorer... That's really annoying.

Windows XP Home is the OS that the netbook came with. It comes with a proprietary Asus app called "Eee Super Hybrid Engine" which does a good job power management. Microsoft didn't produce a special environment for the netbooks but Windows XP was released back in 2001 when screens were smaller... So it tends to work fine.

I made some changes to give myself some more screen real estate:

• Enable Auto-Hide of the task bar
• Use small icons in the Navigation toolbar of Firefox
• Disable the Bookmarks toolbar of Firefox

... A few bugs/peeves with the UNR install that I should mention:

• It resizes your NTFS partition really aggressively. For example, it shrank my NTFS partition down to 12 GB. There's no options to resize it differently... I mean, can I allocate 40 GB to Windows?
• There is no progress indication that the resize of the NTFS partition is in progress. The graffic just hangs at 0%. I had to fire up a terminal to see that the ntfsresize process was running... I'm thinking this could potentially hose someone's system if they restarted their PC in the middle of this process. UPDATE: I think this is the VERY old Bug 14100
  
• I experienced this bug too: 347916

Mercurial - Recap

Back in August 2005, I wrote about liking Mercurial...

I wish I could buy stock in that project because since then its popularity has soared and it has become a fully fledged project.

In terms of distributed version control, people tend to mention either Mercurial or Git.

Both project use roughly the same commands but Git has a crap load more binaries. More than 150, is that correct?

So the main pro's I see for Mercurial:

• Lack of dependence on Unix concepts (ie. Good Windows support)
• Simplicity (you'll find the code base is a lot smaller)

If cross-platform support is important to your project, then choose Mercurial over Git.

Also, check out Bryan O'Sullivan's book, Mercurial: The Definitive Guide.

Web 2.0 = Die

Google recently announced that they were closing down some services. By closing down, it means that they won't be allocating resources to them any more.

... It just seems all too fickle.

Like data and what we produce means nothing.

Maybe I'm thinking of things like Twitter and another blog post I recently read.

But it seems like the the whole 'Web 2.0' formula was/is:

• Make a site
• Get users
• ?
• Profit

But what if the users never come. By 'users' we mean a crap load of users to be viable.

Perhaps then you shut up shop? I mean it goes like this:

• Launch: June 2007
• Open to public: 2008
• Shut up shop: December 15, 2008

What happens to your users? Couldn't you have just transitioned/merged the service over to your new owners? If it's so cheap to set up a Web 2.0 site, can't you just keep it running?

Our Facebooks our fickle lives.

Playing Grid with the Logitech Driving Force GT Racing Wheel

I bought a Logitech Driving Force GT Racing Wheel which came in last week. At first it was pretty difficult to use but once you get used to it, the game really feels intense.

I main gripe is that it seems like you can only play with the "bumper" view. When I played with the standard controller, I'd play it in "chase" view.

I'm using the wheel with the PS3 game Grid. I don't think I can justify buying Gran Turismo 5 Prologue because it generally feels like it's a cut down version of a full game. I'm wondering if the wheel will feel any different running Gran Turismo 5 Prologue vs. Grid.

Another thing is that the default force feedback settings are all at 50%. I'd recommend setting it at 0% to start off with and then bumping up the settings slowly if you're having difficulty. Another tip is to start off with the slower cars such as the muscle cars. They tend to have heavy steering as well.

Just bought a PS3 80 Gb Metal Gear Solid 4 Pack

I just bought my first game console which should be arriving in a few days... I'm pretty excited.

A couple of things for my dog

I hate it when you have a dog and then you go into a pet store to get some basic things like toothpaste and all they have is this small tube which costs 8 bucks. Or you want to get poo bags and they're like 40 for 7 bucks. It makes you think twice about picking up their poo.

So here's 2 items I buy online instead.

Some computer books I've bought

Free Software CEO's vs. Open Source CEO's

Free Software CEO's have more to say.


Open Source CEO's throw the term around like they're promoting a conference or something. With all that open source, open source content, open source hardware, open source startups and open source trends, it's enough to make you forget what the term open source actually means... Oh yeah, it means nothing.

Now give the drummer some

I swear it's a Keith Moon drum solo.