Livin' the life...

Probably this would go well on Twitter, but for now...

Right now, I'm downloading Firefox 3.0!

Etymology of A Distro..

"On the flipside of things, there is a whole different world of OS names, some are funny, some are insightful, some are romantic, others are cute, some are too small to fill their creators’ huge egos, and finally some are like their proprietary rivals, just boring. So if you ever wondered what your favorite Linux distro means, you will probably find the explanation here. (or BSD, I know they are not the same but I decided to add to the diversity of this article.)" (Ref)

Great article. I have used Ubuntu and Red Hat. What about you?

"Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station." (Ref)

Congrats!! (Let's try not to focus too much on unique downloads though folks!)

As it seems that every other person has a Gmail account, but few know its real 'power', I find this article quite appropriate and useful!

Check out the 11 Power Tips for Gmail!

Doing this should be really simple but MS, for some reason has chosen to integrate it with Windows Internet Explorer thus making additions of new feeds counter-intuitive at best. Anyway, to get it loading your feeds of choice, browse to the Windows Sidebar and gadgets (overview) page and scroll down to "How does Feed Headlines work?". After a few steps you'll be up-and-running! Enjoy!

PS. Don't forget to add my blog to your Feed list!!

I blogged about this a little while back but unfortunately this was one of the posts that was lost. So.. here is the article again on how to view Postscript files on a pc. (Main programs being Ghostscript and GSview.)

Also, in a comment, Matt had suggested IrfanView as an alternative, so you can check that out as well - http://www.irfanview.com/.

Here's some cause for concern - When You Mix Firefox And IE, You Risk A Critical Zero-Day Flaw. This applies to web people such as myself and especially developers, that have to have Firefox and IE installed to test web sites/apps for compatibility issues. The article is a bit on the techie side but, it's interesting..

Google Earth's is undoubtedly one of the best FREE, MAP products on the market today. When I was heading to Uni in UK, dad and I used it to find the Uni, determine how far Uni was from my accommodation, plot out routes from my flat to town, friend's houses etc.! Truly, Google Earth is just plain COOL! (That's not only the techie in me talking... .. .)

So.. considering all of the above, my suggested article today is How Google Earth Works from the renowned Howstuffworks.com. It goes through some basic functions of the program, some fun stuff and also shows you how to customise it. I recommend this article for anyone planning on taking a trip (even within Barbados!) or just someone who's interested in Cities, technology or maps. One feature that just blows me away is the 3-D Views.. that you MUST check out! The only concern I have though is.. the amount of free information which is now so easily placed in the hands of .. "bad people".. :\ Mazal Tov to us all!

Heys! As you would remember, I had some problems with my PC lately so I had to reinstall a lot of my programs. In continuing with those installations, today I headed to the Mozilla site to reinstall Firebug (.. helps a lot in my JS debugging).

As I browsed though the listing of Add-ons searching for Firebug, I stumbled upon what I consider a pretty cool addition to the FF list of beauties i.e. Cooliris Previews.

I could ramble a bit about it here as I do with most programs however I think that I'll let the official site handle that job. I really don't think I'd do it justice.

Anyway, it has my full recommendation! (until I find something amis ..) Well done Cooliris Team!

Wait... as I read a bit more on the Cooliris site, I noticed the following statement, "We are about to release the IE7 version for Previews." (Ref) ! IE users, be happy! (Darn.. this IE thing messes up the topic of this post.. oh well.. ) 

Well, I've been looking around for my usual 'Monday Morning Funny' but thus far I've been able to get a vid/pic/story which fits the requirements.. I'll keep checking for a bit more though, so noooo need to worry!

This weekend (that just passed) I was head first into getting an old and very limited VB 6 IRC client I found working on the .NET (2.0/3.0) platform. So far progress has been pretty ok, but I definitely admit its going to take serious time to built a worthy client! First, one thing I'll have to do is understand the IRC protocol after that, I'll start to pick apart this code and see exactly how things are handled then... I'll move from there.. This is IRC client is going to be my... 'pet project' for a while. Look forward to more updates! I think it shall roCk!

And no sooner than I was back on IRC guess what...

*** autokilled for [AKILL ID:1165524776K-a] Due to abuse from this host, you are no longer welcome on DALnet. See http://kline.dal.net/exploits/akills.htm for more information. (2006/12/07)

And I don't remember doing anyyyythingg wrong.

Btw, Antonio, that reply was cheeky! :@ .. kicking a man when he's down.. how uncool! You should be ashamed of yourself!

From the beginning I've had some fascination with IRC so since there seems to be interest by others to revive the bajan channel #sponger, my goal was to get me a good IRC client to participate in the madness.

Now, as I consider myself a thoroughly 'legit' user, downloading mIRC (the most popular IRC client) wasn't really an option because after the 30 day evaluation period, the trial version 'expires' and you're _supposed_ to register and pay $20 USD. (A fee I don't intend on paying.)

What were my other options? Well, to find out I headed over to download.com. There I found lots of clients buttt, none that matched what I wanted. I was more looking for a lightweight client that just had the basics, you know.. allowed me to chat in multiple channels easily, do !ping, *slap someone with a large trout (*haha), etc.. So with that source as a bust, I headed this time to my 'pal', google. This source didn't prove too good either as I just found a bunch of suspicious looking proggies... (however... I did find a good open source VB 6 client, if only I could've gotten it converted successfully to VB.NET! )

Cutting to the chase... I happened to mention what I was looking for to a pal of mine - enter Antonio. As a Linux-variant user... his first suggestion was (the Windows version of) B*tchX - the most popular IRC client for Linux users. So me, the trustful guy I am, headed over to the ftp site and 'copped myself' a version. After some initial struggles with the command line interface, I got it to work and now I'm set! Its similar to mIRC but just pure command line.. If you're looking for a free IRC client without all the bells and whistles, I recommend you check it out! Here's the URL and here's the FTP site.

Now this is something I've always wondered about - Can one access GMail/Yahoo! mail via an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird (a free mail client from Mozilla). To be honest, in doing my own little research in the POP & Forwarding section of Yahoo! mail, I thought it was not possible unless one had the paid service eg. Yahoo! Mail Plus. 

This morning that topic came up again whilst I was chatting with a friend and he indicated to me that it is actually quite possible (thanks Andre!) using Thunderbird! So when I logged on to my pc, I immediately googled it and found what seems to be a really nice article on how to set it up. Admittedly though, I haven't tried it yet but it does seem pretty do-able.

Anyway, here's the article and you can use this link to get Thunderbird. Enjoy!

Sometimes, I really, reallllllly like Open Source... They really hit the nail on its head at times. Two great examples being development of PostgreSQL (an alternative dbms to MySQL) and who can forget, The Red, Fiery Fox.

Interesting, almost all the "IT savvy" folks I know use FF. Also, I remember during my last stint at uni, using FF was the norm (that's right not IE - that was IE 6 though).

Ah Open Source..., I wonder what shall become of you.

So both of the "big guns" in browsers have released new editions. Who's better? Who's worse? What's worth getting? What's worth leaving on the download server? CNET gives its take and what I consider a pretty OK review. Check the link below for more.

CNET PRIZEFIGHT: Internet Explorer 7 vs. Firefox 2

PS. Hopefully soon I'll be linking to another review that's more "close to home" (ie from someone local and who I know is pretty practical) as I'm trying to get Antonio at Tech-Barbados to give his take on both browsers as well.

This morning I came across a rather strange occurrence with Firefox (FF) and I thought I'd share just in case either of you had the same problem. Basically, what was occurring was that whenever I loaded FF 6 tabs would open linking to sites I had opened sometime yesterday. I mean, even if I shut all 6 tabs, one by one, and closed the browser and reopened it, the same 6 tabs would open!

Hoping for a solution, I went though all the settings and even IM-ed a couple of buddies online, everyone, including me was clueless! So by now, I'm getting a bit frantic as to what's going on... so something tells me to just press the Home button. When I did this, I recogised that another 6 of the same tabs (with the sites) loaded again! HMM, soo by mathematical deduction I noticed something must be up with the Home button... because also, when Firefox loads, it opens the 'home page'.

After studying this a bit more I recognised that somehow I had set the Home Page to MANY pages i.e. the 6 URLs that kept loading! Now, I didn't even know that you could set a Home Page, to more than one page, interesting concept really... just may be useful... So just in case this problem ever happens to you, you now know how to fiX it!

OH, by the way, to get a Home Page as more than one page in FF, use "|" as a separator... i.e.: http://www.jasonnurse.com/blog|http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial

NB. I tried this in IE 6, doesn't work. Probably if it does have this functionality at all, it doesn't use that separator.. OR, probably it'll magically appear in IE 7...

Just got a nice IM from SimplyDBee, reminding me how "cool" and accurate Google Earth can be. As a result, I took her lead and loaded the program and after about 2mins found my house (as one can see circled on the left - sky view & vertical layout).

Then it hit me, this will be excellent to give directions! So the next time some one wants to come by, they will be getting a screen shot! In the left there you can see my house with as good a quality as Google Earth currently supports.

If you're among the 10% of Internet users in the world without this prog, I suggest you get it, it's quite innovative and FREE.

In working with asp2 lately, I've made it my business to make sure that I test sites with both Internet Explorer (IE), the world's leading browser and Firefox (FF), what I consider, the fastest growing browser with reference to use. Sad to say, this just gives me headaches. Most of the people who've tried to develop a cross-browser sites would know what I mean.

Now I mean, I understand that different companies may want to render content in what way suits them best but if this is the case what's the purpose of the W3C ?!? Is it not to develop and encourage a clear standards track by which companies can develop programs (or in this case browsers) that all render/deal with content in the same manner?

Also, I thought the difference was between IE and FF only, however, I checked out Opera lately and that too renders a bit differently. Now I mean, all 3 can't be following the standards, two must be playing around, even if only at least a little... I sympathise with Web developers greatly who have to deal with this problem, because I've had to stomach it for a couple days now and I just .