Praveen P.N » Internet

Firefox Download Day ‘08

Praveen — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:13:09 +0000

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.

[tags]mozilla, firefox, download, firefox3 [/tags]

Thunderbird Goof up

Praveen — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:45:48 +0000

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.

[tags]mozilla, thunderbird, close, button, goofup, add-ons, firefox[/tags]

Which Browser?

Praveen — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:47:15 +0000

This is one question I keep asking other people and vice-versa. The most common answers I get (as you might have guessed already) are IE 6, IE 7. There’s a very small group of people who say Firefox. They either know why they are using it or just because somebody has told them ‘Firefox is a real good browser’.
The first thing I do when I find anybody (whom I know) with a laptop is ask him ‘which browser?’. If his reply starts with IE, the next I do is request him to install Firefox.

So what is that I use when it comes to browsing. I personally prefer using Flock. Cant recall when I really started using it, but I remember my friend blogged about it.
So its like, I use Flock for my browsing activities and Firefox for development. The only reason behind not using a common browser for development & browsing is Addons, Plugins (whatever you’d like to call it). Adding plugins slows down the browser, and its not just one plugin .. I have a bunch of them installed on my firefox browser.
Some of the must have ones are:

Firebug (+ySlow?) – for everything to do with JavaScript
Web Developer – A very useful one (lot of features)
Cache Status – a much simpler way of clearing browser cache
JS View – Lists the JS & CSS files from a page (a real neat one)
Live HTTP headers – for some useful information
Chatzilla – IRC ??
FireFTP – For some FTP stuff

Note: In case you want to check them out, A simple web search should get you there.

The very reason I use flock other than any other browser is, Flock has got it all which a person would require. Its got a Photo uploader(my personal favorite), blog editor, web clips, rss reader and the latest is the Media bar and peoples bar.
Media bar and People bar have a bunch of services which work very neatly. Services supported are facebook, flickr, twitter, delicious, photobucket, youtube, and many more.
The Orange dot near the web search bar (see pic. above) tells me that I have some new activity which has happened in my active services. In this case it should be a notification for new photos added by friends in Flickr or a poke/message in facebook.
If you are a heavy user of facebook and don’t like refreshing the browser to check for recent-activity, go for flock. Did I mention that flock is very fast compared to Firefox (with addons). Its free, with active development happening.

I like just about everything about Flock (except a few things), which I will mention some other time. Keep flocking.

Technorati Tags: flock,browser,mozilla,firefox

Facebook gets rid of ‘is’ from status updates

Praveen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:22:30 +0000

Finally, Facebook has removed the ‘is’ from status updates. Not really sure if the same is under testing. No updates yet on the Facebook Blog.

Flock was experimenting on removing the ‘is’ from status updates using their People Sidebar.

Want to turn off Facebook beaconing? Click here.

Technorati Tags: facebook,status,updates,flock,social