NoteMe

Opera Mini 3 is finaly here:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 28.11.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
And here it is. The browser that has probably revolutionized the web the most this decade has reached version 3. With lots of new features, and soon even more users , this might soon really kick off.

I have been using it for a long time already, and it has become invaluable to me (only wish I managed to make it work with my Norwegian subscription too). And could say lots of nice things about it. But it is better to head over to Opera.com and try it for your self. There is plenty of tutorials there, and even a emulator of it if you don`t want to use your cell phones credit to test it out.

As a last note, I tested it on my web page too now, and it works, well, not too bad.

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I should probably do something with it, but it won`t be high on my priority list, witch seems to be the trend for the Opera browser. Sorry about that.

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Krugle your way to help:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 15.06.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
I bet many does it the same way as me. We stumble over a new programming problem, an undocumented function, or some code that doesn`t work on all platforms or in all browsers.

So what do you do. Well more and more often, people use google or their favorite forum to search for it. But what do you end up doing? Well looking through pages and more pages without finding the help you need.

Wouldn`t it be much better if your search engine only gave you relevant coding snippets and hints. Well that is what Krugle is trying to solve now. They are out in their second beta testing stage. And is more or less ready to go live. I tested it, and I am surprised. It idea is really working. It is nearly as sitting with a big code library in a big company with a sweet user interface, and find only relevant snippets of code, in more or less any language you need.

Just have a look at one of my searches. HLSL With tabs and easy to understand user interface, I get relevant code right in my browser, with no spam or the like. By clicking into one of the code snippets I get syntax colored code right in my browser, and a right pane where I can have a look at the other files in the same project. What more can you ask for.

I am really looking forward to see this go live. I can imagine it taking some load away from Google when it comes to developer. That`s for sure.
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Spam on MSN, no thanks:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 12.06.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
I have heard about others getting this before. But untill now I didn`t think it was that widely spread. But I must have been mistaken. Came into work today, and had left MSN on after using it here on sunday afternoon. And two new persons had tried to contact me.

They where not on my list, and I got a pop up dialog asking me if I wanted to allow messages from everyone that where not on my Block list, or non of them. Where was the "allow only one time" option?

Well, since I was curious. I allowed them to talk to me. And what could I expect in stead of just spam ? And more spam ?

Well guess I can conclude with that you are not safe from spam in any way. Tv, radio, cell phones, flyers handed out to you on the street, and now also MSN. Whats up next?
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Auto Search in Firefox:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 06.06.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
For those who you who are so brave that you have tested the upcoming Firefox 2, you might have seen that they have added a new feature called "Search Discovery". It has already been added to the upcoming IE 7 too, so this more or less proves that if open standards are good enough. They will get through to the big companies too.

After reading a blog entry about it`s appearance in Fx, I decided to add it to my web page too. And here it is. If you are now using one of the latest builds of Fx (2.0 something) you will see that the magnifying glass in the upper right corner is turning red on this web page.

If you now click on this magnifying glass, you can see you have the option to add my web page to the search feature in Fx. If you add it, it will be added just like google and all the other searches you have in your quick search. And you can search my home page whenever you want.

Not that I think many will do that on my web page. But it is more for passing out the word, and make it known, so maybe bigger sites where it is actually useful will add the functionality. There is lots of pages I can see how useful it is. So hope they will pick up on it soon.

If you want to do it on your own web page, you can find easy instructions here , that even I managed to follow after some small directions.
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Scandoo with Google? Spamfree Google?:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 29.05.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
With phis-hing and untrusted web sites becoming a bigger and bigger problem for the daily surfer, lots of effort have been done both from browser vendors and 3rd party security companies.

But the way users are surfing the web has changed dramatically the last few years. Earlier most or nearly all entries to a site came from direct bookmarks or so called portals. But these days a bigger and bigger number comes from search engines it self. And it is here the problem lies. What sites do you trust, what links do you chose to click when you are just presented with a page name and a few random words.

That is what Scandoo has done something with now. It is not a new search engine. But an added security level on top of already existing search engines. You can search, Google, MSNSearch, Yahoo, and Ask from within Scandoo, and Scandoo will automatically scan the results you get in it`s world wide database, to give you an indication if the web page you are about to click is considered safe or not.

There is also a separate security setting panel, where you can set up your own preferences. As default you will be notified about sex/nudity, hate and discrimination, and illegal activities. Not bad for a tool that is still in beta. But it is yet to see if people will use it instead of going straight to the normal search engines. But absolutely worth a try.
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Is MSNSearch overtaking Google?:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 05.05.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
About a month ago, I complained about so many spam resulst returned in Google. I searched for "com port in use" and on the two first pages I got these 5 results which all lead me to the same advertisment about a Poker calculator, and had no relevance for what I was looking for at all:

  • com-port-in-use.axiome-corporation.be/
  • com-port-in-use.colitis-crohn.be/
  • com-port-in-use.gsmshock.be/
  • com-port-in-use.jhenrard.be/
  • com-port-in-use.artintro.be/

Things like this made me pretty angry with Google search in the long run. Well Matt Cutts over at Google and others have done a great job in trying to clean up a lot of this mess. But it keeps comming back. Mainly proving that those who want to trick search engines these days only care about Google since they are they one and only big search engine on the market these days.

Then at more or less the same time Google started to skip indexing a lot of my pages, and that made me even more mad. Impossible to find out why (now I think I know the reason, reason in the bottom of article). So what can ONE small person like me do about it. Well, he can always pack togheter his things and leave. And so I did. Guess Google didn`t notice, but I admitt it. I started to use MSNSearch .

It took me a while to get used to the small differneces just like when you change your browser or buying new shoes. But then after a while, I really started to like it. It has at least just as relevant serach resulsts, the pages are clean and slick, and I didn`t get these spam results every now and then.

But friends both online and at work where still not listening to me. Google is everything, for a lot of people these days. If it has the Google logo, then everyone just have to try it, and they like the resulsts as long as Google is in on it.

But is it like this. My experience had already showed that MSNSearch was just as good. It was then I came over this article where they had tested the two search engines up against each other, and thrown in Ask, Yahoo and a few others just for fun. And the resulsts show again that MSN is at least not worse, and maybe better than Google when it comes to relevance.

Now, at the same time we hear that Amazon Drops Google for Windows Live , and when Eric Schmidt, Google`s chief executive at Google tells us "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis" (which is probably why pages are not getting indexed as they should these days), then I think it is time to say that the war has really begun.

I was in a Google presentation here at CERN a couple of weeks back where the speaker, Jens Redmer director of Google Book Search Europe, more or less ended his presentation with "Microsoft have been sleeping for a long time, but they have now woken up". If buying Yahoo will be one of those awakenings will have to wait. But the war is on, no matter what.
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Windows Live Mail (Beta):

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 27.04.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
Just loged into my hotmail account forgetting that I had signed up to test Windows Mail Beta. Looks very very clean at the moment. Guess they will add more after a while. Things like ads popped up randomly too, ruining some of the clean look it now has.

Not all functionality is buildt yet though. Microsoft is learning from the Open Source release techniques (Like Google did long time ago), "Release what you have, then add the rest of the functionality when it is ready". Guess we will just see more and more of this. Google soon got the world record in holding their projects public and beta at the same time the longest time. Wondering if Google Mail will ever get out of beta, and if they ever will fix some of it`s few bugs .
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Earn money on Firefox:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 26.04.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
The battle between Firefox and Internet Explorer just reached a new level. In the old days when Netscape started to take their market share, you had to pay for your browser. But Microsoft suddenly changed that business model, and made their IE free.

Now it is totaly changed. Now you can actually earn money on helping your friends and others to make the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox .

All you need to do is download a script and add it to your homepage. Then everyone visiting your homepage with IE will get a notification telling them that they should try Firefox and why.

So where does the money come from? Well it is actualy google that gives out money to you. Which seems to be even a new way to steal market share from Microsoft, but this time Google is not the one that are winning it. But Mozilla Firefox is. Seems a bit odd to me, but then again, I also read today that Firefox is the first third party product has been featured on google’s main page! Go Firefox!!!
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IE 7 addons anyone?:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 25.04.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
I read earlier today that Internet Explorer is a dead albatross . But I am not so sure about that. First of all. Microsoft don`t tend to lose battles like this. Second of all, they have been a bit on their heels before, but managed to hit back. Just think about the Netscape era.

And I am affraid it will be like that this time too. Too many are not willing to put in enough effort to understand that there are alternatives. I have several friends and Ex Girl Friends that think Internet Explorer is the same as the internet, and don`t understand that it is just a tool to help you get online.

But there is still people who is hoping that Firefox will overtake IE in relative short time . But we can`t forget that IE is soon out in a new version. And this time they are better prepared. Well it is maybe a few more lines of code they need to beat other popular browsers both in compability and usability, but they are getting close.

But one of the things Firefox for example have been really good at lately is to build up a user group. And especially by letting their fans build extensions and themes for the popular browser. But this time IE will try to do the same. They just released the new add-On page for IE 7. By first climps it looks very promissing. But we just have to see if the IE fans will be just as creative as the Firefox fans are when it comes writing up small usefull add-ons.

When I am first on about browsers. I can also congratulate Opera with finaly comming out with a public beta of Opera. Their first Opera version that will pass the Acid 2 test.
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Firefox extension tool:

News Image - NoteMe My Tags: Technocrati Tags: Published: 31.03.2006 by Øyvind Østlund
I have for a long time wanted to do this. And now I have done it. In the simplest way possible, but at least done it. Made a small tool to pack up and unpack the extension I have been working on for a while now. It has been a lot of packing and un packing, and finaly it can be done automaticaly with a pack script and an unpack script.

At the moment it only works on Linux machines with ZIP, and Python installed. And I am not going to change that for a while I think, since I am only using Linux to develop the extension. And at the moment some of the names are hardcoded for the files, so right out of the box it will only work for this extension. But it should be easy to change the names like vbf.jar to something that you use, and vbf.xpi to what your extension is called. And if you have any problems using it, then please just give me a wink.

If you just want to have a look at the code, here is the pack script: 

Python code:


#!/usr/bin/python



import os

import sys 





os.chdir("chrome/")



os.system("zip -r vbf.jar *")

os.system("mv vbf.jar ../")

os.system("rm -r *")

os.system("mv ../vbf.jar .")



os.chdir("..")



os.system("zip vbf.xpi -r chrome install.rdf")

os.system("rm ./install.rdf")

os.system("rm -r ./chrome")



And here you have the unpack script. 

Python code:


#!/usr/bin/python



import os

import sys 





os.system("unzip ./vbf.xpi")

os.system("rm ./vbf.xpi")



os.chdir("chrome/")



os.system("unzip vbf.jar")

os.system("rm vbf.jar")




How you use them:
Unpack: Leave the vbf.xpi file in the same folder as the unpack script, run the script and it is unpacked.
Pack: Leave the script in the same folder as the "chrome" folder and the "install.rdf" file, and run it. And it is packed again.

Enjoy. And please give me feedback if you need any help what so ever to use it. And just as a note, from the next version of the vBulleting extension these scripts will be in the vbf.xpi file.

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NoteMe - Øyvind Østlund