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We finally have a date, its 17th June 2008. All you have to do is download firefox on that day and help firefox set a Guinness world record for most downloads of a software in 24 hours. 1,226,933 people from all over the world have pledged to download firefox on the download day. I see only 22, 045 pledges from India. On the fun side, Host a party or find one nearby and enjoy on the download day. As of now there are 537 parties and 3137 party goers.
Add-ons support in firefox 3 is getting better day by day, I hope to see all my favorite add-ons in FF3 by this month end.

Go ahead and fill up the pledge form to get reminders & results of the record attempt.

Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, download, firefox3

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I’ve got more time than ever before to blog now, simple reason behind it being, I’ve got Internet connection at home in Bangalore. Its an Airtel unlimited 256 Kbps plan for Rs. 799. I’m happy with the speed (net) they offer as well as their service.
Unlike others, I had no hassles in getting the connection.
* Just called up the airtel customer care number (080-41112345, for Bangalore) and placed a request.
* Technician calls up next day morning & gives information about the documents I need to submit.
* I submit the document in the evening & paid Rs. 500 (Rs. 1000 were waived off, some corporate tie up).
* Voila! Next day morning the airtel guys come and setup the connection in a couple of hours.

I’m not yet started on the goof up I did last Friday. Ok, so here we go. I use thunderbird as my default client for e-mail & calendar. I saw one small x on the left side of the thunderbird (above the folder’s section) window. Click on the close button & Boom goes my folder structure.

I spent the next 2-3 hours figuring out how to get the folder structure back. Preferences pane, options menu, config menu, I tried every possible option to restore the folder structure. Tried knocking on #thunderbird , searched thunderbird knowledge base, queried every search engine, but all went in vain.
After about an hours struggle I made up my mind that I would do something on my own rather than searching for answers on the net.
I ended up creating a new thunderbird profile and then imported my calendar data & other add-ons. As the thunderbird punch line says, I reclaimed my inbox. Everything is working as before but still I have no clue about what went wrong that day.

Today morning I was running through the list of add-ons I’m using on thunderbird, and there goes the culprit. I use this add-on called ‘maximize message pane‘ and the close (x) button is an option provided by this add-on. I am using this add-on (and others) ever since I’m using thunderbird, so this feeling is always there that its a default close button provided by thunderbird.
These are the add-ons I use on thunderbird

• Lightning - Calendar extension
• Maximize Message Pane - Read messages in larger area
• Remove Duplicate Messages - The name says it all
• Import/Export message filters - very useful while migrating the mailbox

I have listed the firefox extensions I use in a previous post. Some recent additions to the list are Colorzilla, Unplug, User Agent Switcher and Tamper Data.

Technorati Tags: mozilla, thunderbird, close, button, goofup, add-ons, firefox

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The formal explanation of what this whole glue thing is about. Well, Glue is the latest offering in the the search field by Yahoo!.

In Glue, the search results page has a classic search results section and a lot of visual information collected from various sites (not just Yahoo! sites) over the web. The results page has got information flowing in from everywhere (I am not listing the various Y! services here), player biography from cricinfo, google blog search results, lastfm music tracks, youtube videos, job results from monster, gaming information from various sites, information from howstuffworks.com, wikipedia & the list goes on and on. The more you search the more you will discover. I think they are fetching relevant information form all sources, be it cricinfo or for that matter google. The information displayed in search results page is highly relevant irrespective of its source. The complex search queries wont have a glue page, but the most common queries will have one.

I was amazed to see the content on the glue page for call of duty 4, there was a nice description along with the quick facts of the game from wikipedia, some youtube videos(which play inline), images (which link to various gaming sites), latest news about the game from gaming sites & this one surprised me the most, a set of images which link directly to the product page (not the lame search results page) on ebay. WOW! this is simply amazing.

Search results: The Classic search results are displayed on the left side of the page & all the rich information is in the right side of the page. The ‘related pages’ link on the top nav gives links to glue pages which are related to the search query. A tab on top of the page allows easy switching between the classic search results page & glue page.

After having a look at all the rich content on the page I was curious to know the yslow grade of the page. It scored  98 (Grade A) for the results page, I expected something like a ‘B’ for a page with so many images. Looks like a lot of effort has been put in improving the performance of the page.

They have a provision wherein you can request to put your website on the glue page. I have already submitted mine.

If given a chance to rename this product, I would call this ‘Open Search’

Technorati Tags: yahoo!, india, search, glue, social

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The hunt was on for quite some time until I finally found this wonderful free software for blogging in Mac. Its called Qumana. Its got all the features one would expect from a blog editor, don’t expect something cool & feature rich like the Windows Live Editor. This one has support for all the major blogging platforms (16 as of now). A nice looking (and working as well) image uploader tool.

The blog editor puts some promotion in the footer of the page, but there is a simple way to get rid of the promotion footer.
Just do the following:
PC: Edit > Preferences > Editor tab > uncheck Insert Qumana tagline in new posts
Mac: Qumana > Preferences > Editor tab > uncheck Insert Qumana tagline in new posts

All looks good till now, Lets see if it screws up anything after hitting the ‘Publish post’ button.

[Update] Yay! All went well (tags as well) & looks like Qumana is going to be my default blogging tool from now on.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Editor, Free, Mac, OS X

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Komodo edit is a free text editor with support for a wide range of languages like php, perl, python, Ruby, Tcl & more. There are a lot of poerful features in komodo edit, I have a couple of favorites like remote editing & snippets.
Remote editing works like a breeze with support for a wide range of protocols like SCP, FTP, SFTP & more. Saving a file is not something which would cost you a minute or so, trust me it takes just 4-6 secs (worst case) to save a remote file.
The second feature which I like about this editor is the support for snippets. Snippets make komodo edit as powerful as textmate(mac only), and creating snippets is no rocket science, you’ll get going in just a couple of minutes.
Other features are the same like auto complete, code folding and syntax highlighting for more than 60(yes 60) languages.

I would suggest this editor to anyone who is lookign out for a multipurpose free editor which works on Window, Mac and Linux. Go get it!

I’ve put up a small screencast explaining some useful features of komodo edit like snippets, remote editing & auto complete.

Screencast - View the screencast on full screen mode with HD on for best quality.

Technorati Tags: edit, editor, free, komodo, mozilla, php

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• Jun 15 : Firefox Download Day ‘08
• Jun 3 : Thunderbird Goof up
• May 7 : Yahoo! India launches Glue
• May 3 : Blogging software for mac
• May 2 : Komodo Edit - A powerful free editor